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Frida Kahlo: Sun and LifeBUT IN WILD PLACES
Against the mountains the clouds go
slowly, but without hesitation:
cirrus like manes of heaven’s horses,
cumulus with its anvil of ice crystals.
In the dark lake, the mournful weeds
wave their long green arms.
This is the place where he was born —
someone who’d kept me waiting.
He shot himself last July.
No, that was years ago.
But in wild places of my mind
I am still waiting.
I cast his name into the air.
Now he wavers everywhere,
transparent flame
between the slender trees.
Why should we think of the dead
as shadows moving through shadow,
rather than light through light?
I want him to exist again
so he can embrace the fire
and die only of life —
I hated him
with unforgiving love.
~ Oriana
*
HEMINGWAY’S RIVER COUNTRY: THE POWER OF THE UNSAID
~ When I was a youngster struggling to reconcile a life split between a great community of learning in the Midwest and a log cabin in Montana, my father gave me Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” to read. The story came as a revelation. My parents hailed from Montana, where we spent our summers, and they both worked at the University of Chicago, my father as a professor of English and my mother as an administrator for the university’s medical center.
Hemingway’s tale evoked the core activity of our life in Montana: trout fishing. It put you hip-deep in a river with Nick Adams, Hemingway’s literary twin, a cold current throbbing against your thighs. You tasted the humidity in the air above the river, a second stream thick with insect life and a sweet musk smell from the enclosing brush. The story virtually put the rod in your hand to fight a big fish. Best of all for me, it bridged the gap between my two worlds and brought trout fishing to life through literature.
Hemingway, too, was young and living in contrasting worlds when he wrote “Big Two-Hearted River.” He was just twenty-five when he sat down in a Paris café to work on a story based on a fishing trip a few years earlier to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—the UP—with two friends, Jack Pentecost and Al Walker. It was a heady time for the young, unproven writer, who had joined writers and artists of what came to be called the Lost Generation, along with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray, as well as older artists like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, who became his surrogate parents.
His personal life, too, was packed with challenge and adventure. He had been wounded only a few years earlier as a Red Cross volunteer in Italy during the Great War, recuperated and returned home, gone fishing in the UP, married and moved to Paris with his new wife, Hadley Richardson, followed quickly by the birth of a son, Jack (or “Bumby”), and discovered a passion for bullfighting.
Hemingway wrote in cafés for the quiet. The fishing story he started with three handwritten pages—in a large, almost flowery script on typewriter stock—grew in halting stages, interrupted by other work and a trip to Spain for the bullfighting. As the drafts progressed, the two buddies disappeared and instead Nick Adams set off on a solo pilgrimage to ease a troubled mind with a fly rod.
The exact timing for when he wrote each part is hard to pin down—Hemingway couldn’t recall it himself, and the drafts aren’t dated—but from accounts by him and others, it appears he completed part 1 and was well into part 2 by late spring of 1924 before he headed to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. “The story was interrupted you know just when I was going good,” he complained in a letter that fall.
When he got back to it in late summer or early fall, he’d lost the flow. In the new draft, Hemingway veered from the solo fishing trip in the UP into a long, rambling discourse on writing, writers, bullfighting in Pamplona—and vaulting personal ambition: “He wanted to become a great writer,” he wrote. “He was pretty sure he would be.” By the fall of 1924, Hemingway had completed a manuscript, titled it “Big Two-Hearted River,” and sent it off to a publisher for inclusion in his first real book, In Our Time.
He showed the manuscript to Stein, who said of the discourse on writing, “Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” Jolted back to his old self, he reread the section at issue and called it “crap” and worse in letters to her and others. “I got a hell of a shock when I realized how bad it was,” he wrote one correspondent. He ditched the almost ten-page section and had a new ending in the hands of his publisher before the presses rolled. It was a lucky catch: critics would not have been kind. The redone story first appeared in May 1925 in This Quarter, a Paris literary journal, and then in October as the anchor story for In Our Time. Despite complaints that “nothing happens” in the narrative, perceptive readers such as Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald hailed it as a masterpiece, albeit a short one.
*
A century on, “Big Two-Hearted River” has helped shape language and literature in America and around the world, and its magnetic pull continues to draw readers, writers, and critics. It’s the best early example of Hemingway’s now-familiar writing style: short sentences, punchy nouns and verbs, few adjectives or adverbs, and a seductive cadence. Easy to imitate, difficult to match. The subject matter of the story has inspired generations of writers to believe that fly fishing can be literature, with mixed results.
More than any of his stories, it depends on his “iceberg theory” of literature, the notion that leaving essential parts of a story unsaid adds to its power. Taken in context with his other work, it marks Hemingway’s passage from boyish writer to accomplished author: nothing big came before it, novels and stories poured out after it.
After my dad gave me the story to read in the 1950s, we sat down together to analyze it. We were both deeply pleased that fishing and literature could be successfully combined, and in future decades we would strive to do the same thing as writers. But we stumbled over the meanings of the dark metaphors that begin and end the story. “Big Two-Hearted River” is not simply a luminous fishing tale; it’s also an unsolved mystery.
Like the title, the story has two sides, an outdoor adventure and the never-explained metaphors that accompany it, which have kept critics arguing ever since. As the narrative opens, Nick Adams steps off a train and discovers to his surprise that the old logging town of Seney has been burned over. Just what the scorched earth stands for is never stated, but it’s not utter destruction. “It could not all be burned,” Nick reflects as he hikes beyond the fire’s black footprint into a meadow carpeted with sweet ferns and marked by hillocks with still-standing pines.
The great fires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries burned across the north woods, supercharged by the wasteful logging practices of the day. Huge swaths of white pine were clear-cut and towns built on foundations of sawdust, perfect beds for the flames that followed, which indeed gutted several towns. Stumps from the logging remain visible to this day, poking up among the ferns. Several smaller fires burned around Seney just before Hemingway’s 1919 trip, and he almost certainly walked through their black footprints.
In the story, as Nick shoulders his pack and sets off, he struggles with unnamed but troubling thoughts, hiking longer than necessary to deaden his mind and make sleep come more easily. He becomes absorbed in details of the moment as he makes camp, catches and loses fish, and explores his surroundings. As he watches trout rise, his spirit rises with them. He’s repeatedly described as being happy, as though that, too, were a surprise.
Then, after a day of fishing that includes a battle with the biggest trout he’s ever seen, Nick faces a cedar swamp with deep swirling currents, a dark place similar to the burned landscape where the story began. “The fishing would be tragic,” he tells himself, and repeats the thought: “In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure.” Nick has been on a journey of the spirit, however, and if the swamp holds unnamed terrors, they can be overcome. The story ends on another optimistic note: “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.”
When my father and I tried to make sense of the metaphors, we turned to other Nick Adams stories for clues. Hemingway wrote three stories about Nick having love affairs that end badly, all based on real events around the time of the 1919 fishing trip to the UP. “A Very Short Story” deals, in barely over a page, with a romance between a Nick-like character, who is never named, and an only slightly fictionalized Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse.
She and Hemingway got together when she nursed him after he was wounded by shrapnel in his first days in Italy, delivering chocolate and other comforts by bicycle to soldiers at the front. After Hemingway returned home, Kurowsky wrote him a Dear Ernest letter to inform him she’d become engaged to an Italian nobleman. She was dumped, in turn, when the nobleman’s family decided she was too common for their son. The story roughly follows these events and ends on a caustic note.
The other stories, “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow,” describe a romance with a Michigan girl called Marge and Marjorie that reverses the roles: this time Nick is named, he does the dumping, and the stories get longer. Hemingway met the real-life Marjorie, a teenaged redhead with freckles, when she had a summer job as a waitress at a restaurant on Walloon Lake, where his family had a cabin. The handsome young war hero and the pretty local girl both loved fishing and good times, and they hit it off.
In explaining to the fictional Marjorie in “The End of Something” why he’s breaking up with her, Nick hints at an inner darkness: “I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside me.” Sounds like a clue. The third story, “The Three-Day Blow,” is a conversation loosened by drink between Nick and a buddy named Bill, at a cottage in Michigan, about Nick’s decision to break up with Marjorie. The use of her first name made Marjorie Bump a target of gossip in small-town Michigan (her actual last name didn’t help her cause) and she eventually moved away. Although she and Hemingway were occasionally in touch in later years, the portrayal always bothered her and she burned their correspondence. But she also exchanged 250 letters about Hemingway with a determined researcher, and those survive.
My dad and I noted the breakups, but surely Nick had been trying to recover from more than a couple of youthful romances. Nonetheless, we virtually adopted the story into our family, we memorized lines from it, and both our writing styles owe Hemingway a debt. When my father published his first book, A River Runs through It, at the age of seventy-three, he was called a “garrulous Hemingway.”
I went on to work as a newspaperman, as Hemingway did, and as a cub reporter in Chicago with short vacations, I drove to the UP and fished the Big Two-Hearted River, an easier reach than Montana. True, the actual Hemingway trip was on the Fox River or a branch or two, but I chose the Big Two-Hearted for the same reason Hemingway made it the title of his story, for the poetry.
My career took me away from the Midwest, and I did not read Hemingway again for many decades. I returned to him when I wrote Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, which describes his influence on my father and me, only to find that we had missed the big shift in interpretation of “Big Two-Hearted River.” I was invited to give a talk on Home Waters to The Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho, which acts as custodian of the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House, on the edge of town.
In preparation, I reread “Big Two-Hearted River,” which is mentioned in the book, and checked the modern commentary. It quickly became apparent that my dad and I had missed the likely solution to the metaphors. The Nick Adams Stories, published in 1972, for the first time placed the stories in chronological order for Nick. Several war stories written after “Big Two-Hearted River” now preceded it and offered an explanation for his troubled state of mind. One in particular, “A Way You’ll Never Be,” relates how Nick returned to the Italian front after being wounded and suffered a vividly described post-traumatic stress event. On top of that, in A Moveable Feast and in letters and an essay, Hemingway said the story was about a boy coming home troubled from the war.
His best explanation is in “The Art of the Short Story,” a preface for a book of his stories commissioned by Charles Scribner, his publisher, who ultimately dropped the project. “Big Two-Hearted River,” he said, “is about a boy coming home beat to the wide from a war. Beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had it were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted. The river was the Fox River, by Seney, Michigan, not the Big Two-Hearted. The change of name was made purposely, not from ignorance or carelessness but because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry.”
The Nick Adams Stories, however, also contains the deleted section titled “On Writing,” which prompted a heated, occasionally nasty debate among critics. Hemingway’s latter-day efforts to make it a war story were just lies piled on other lies to buff his macho image, it was said. The story wasn’t about the war at all; it was about Nick’s raging desire to become a great writer. With that section deleted, the story came down to “No war, just the fishing,” one critic remarked. The burned landscape and the desolate swamp in that case could stand for a writer’s creative unconscious, forbidding but desirable.
The drafts are remarkable, too, for the fluidity of the writing. The story grows longer and different versions are tried, but a near-final draft goes on for dozens of handwritten pages with hardly a later change. The story’s power comes not just from mysterious metaphors but from inspired prose. Hemingway loved fishing from the time he was old enough to use a rod.
In Paris, he was an ocean and more away from his home waters in Michigan.
The separation intensified the writing. While he worked on the story, he kept a map of northern Michigan posted in his apartment, with blue marks for significant locations. In succeeding drafts, he stripped the story down to one disturbed person moving through a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory landscape of distorted reality. Brown grasshoppers evolve to black in the fire’s footprint, a physical impossibility in the time between flames and green-up.
Swamps are not known for being deep and full of swift currents; they are still and often shallow—the many swamps I saw around Seney certainly are. Words repeat, the rhythm pulses, and the prose becomes an incantation. In the following example, the words sun, hot, trout, stream, shadow, and trees appear again and again in short sentences, capped at the end by one long sentence that repeats nearly all those words, with hypnotic effect.
~ It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck.
Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout. Now the stream was shallow and wide. There were trees along both banks. The trees of the left bank made short shadows on the current in the forenoon sun. Nick knew there were trout in each shadow. In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills, the trout would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream. ~
Hemingway slightly varies this technique in one very long sentence, by his standards: an academic study found that the average length of a sentence in part 1 is twelve words, the average paragraph 105 words (minus three brief declarations by Nick that would skew the latter count). That’s short by any standard.
In the next example, the action could not be simpler: a large trout leaves shelter, breaks water, and returns to its place. It could be described in a few words, though the author adds a kingfisher to give the anecdote an edge: Will the kingfisher skewer the trout? Yet the effect of the sentence, capped off by two short sentences, is not of overwriting and a dramatic tease—the kingfisher leaves the trout unmolested—but of a lingering lyric. The final sentence defines in six short words the underlying theme of the story, the restoration of the spirit by fishing. Try reading it aloud and pause at each comma.
~ As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened, facing up into the current.
Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. ~
An early draft had Nick feel “all the old thrill,” a near cliché that would have restricted the meaning to fishing. The revised version raises the possibility that Nick has regained a lost ability to feel as he once did. ~
https://lithub.com/the-power-of-the-unsaid-john-n-maclean-on-ernest-hemingways-big-two-hearted-river/?fbclid=IwAR3-xcwora740DnD73ZwUON7tQe7ayH7Et5vV3A9ZLDvGrPL9x9scjwFcBA
*
“Hemingway shot himself yesterday morning. There was a great man. I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers and the smell of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by scout-masters and others who made it seem a fraud.
He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There was never, in my time, anyone to compare with him.” ~ John Cheever, from his Journals 1946-1981
Leonard Kress: ~ “His language and his art in general are class-determined; his horizon is narrow, although he has traveled so widely. Wherever he went, he saw many notable things, but all he ever noted in them was their courtly and knightly aspect.”
I’m wondering if our current age is similarly limited in scope by seeing and focusing solely on issues of gender, race, and class….. (I'm "guilty" of this when teaching, and what a struggle I have, for example, raving over what I consider a sublime passage in Sophocles.)
The quote is from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: Representations of Reality in Western Literature, writing about the medieval chronicler Antoine de la Sale, a Provençal knight, soldier, court official, tutor, and authority on heraldry and tournaments (1390–1461). ~
Joseph Milosch:
I’m wondering if our current age is similarly limited in scope by seeing and focusing solely on issues of gender, race, and class….. (I'm "guilty" of this when teaching, and what a struggle I have, for example, raving over what I consider a sublime passage in Sophocles.)
Reading a statement like Auerbach's, my first thought is that the writer is a Republican or a Republican sympathizer. He structures his argument in the form typically used by the conservatives in my family. The first part of the argument is to compare the group or individual to an ideal. For example, Auerbach compares all contemporary writers to Sophocles, one of the three great playwrights of Greek Tragedy.
Using the vague term contemporary writers, he provides deniability about using the term as a euphemism for African-American or LGBTQ writers. Furthermore, he assumes that his audience never read plays by Sophocles or knows no more about his plays than their college literature professor presented in a lecture. Second, he makes a statement that indicates Sophocles never concerned himself with two of the primary universal themes in Western Literature: gender and class.
Sophocles’s play Antigone is one tragedy in his tetralogy and is considered his best play. These plays take place in Ancient Greece and are about the family of Oedipus. From this series, we have the common phrase Oedipus Complex. The play derives its title from the main character’s name, Antigone. She is a daughter and a sister who breaks social tradition by disobeying her father’s command and giving her brother a proper burial. Thus, she demonstrates the strength of women in the face of male dominance.
A theme secondary to gender is racism. Antigone actions question the importance of citizenship as it relates to the power of the privileged as defined by male authority. Protecting the powerful is an ancient theme and is a tenet of racism. In the United States, Republicans protect their privileged by not funding public education and limiting the ability of minorities to obtain a college education. Defunding public schools indeed affects poor white students, but that shows racism is a component of classism.
By burying her brother, Antigone loses her social status. The Oedipus family was from an upper-class family, and Antigone lived among the privileged families until she disobeyed her uncle, the new king. Then she dropped to the ordinary. In the play, Antigone loses her social standing by committing an act of love. Thus, Sophocles wrote about gender, race, and class. His themes are the ones that Erich Auerbach said limit the scope of today’s writers.
Oriana:
For me, it’s all about magic, regardless of themes. The magic — the art — either is there, or isn’t. Now, part of the magic is the marriage of beauty and wisdom. Hemingway could dazzle with his style while falling short on wisdom. Whatever wisdom may be, it isn’t macho masochism. Or macho anything, for that matter. Macho is close to hubris, which is the fatal flaw of most ancient tragic heroes.
Drinking is also “macho,” and that was ultimately Hemingway’s downfall. The need to show off as a “good drunk.” And bullfights, ah, the ugliness of macho blood sports.
Whether he has enough wisdom to qualify as a great writer is another question. A student of mine once wrote (I’m not making this up): “Hemingway’s meanings are embedded deep in the outer surface.” There’s something to that.
*
~ It is important and poignant to recall the hard life of Mary Ball Washington, who struggled – mostly alone – to raise our Founding Father. Historians have left us with inaccurate and mostly unpleasant accounts of her long and laborious years.
After George Washington’s death, historians canonized him and his mother, too.
But unlike George’s enduring sainthood, praise for Mary was short-lived. In the late 19th century, George’s biographers began interpreting the few shreds of evidence about Mary – almost all of it from George – to mean that she was overprotective, possessive and greedy.
By the 1950s she had become, in the word of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, a termagant, an ill-tempered shrew. The author, James Flexner, created a portrait of Mary as a woman insatiably hungry for money that she didn’t need, and intent on keeping George by her side.
Other nasty myths still circulate alongside these: hat she was illiterate, pipe-smoking, uncouth and slovenly.
These poisonous portraits bear little resemblance to the industrious, worried, frugal, devoted and self-reliant woman who emerges from my research as a professor of history and women’s studies. I wrote a book about Mary Washington. In my research, I found that Mary’s challenging life was very different from the myths that grew up around her.
GEORGE WASHINGTON’S MOTHER, DAUGHTER OF A SERVANT
Mary was born in either 1708 or 1709; there are no records. Her father was an elderly, slave-owning planter and her mother was probably an indentured servant. By 12, she had lost her father, stepfather, mother and half-brother to death in the disease-ridden Chesapeake region.
From these terrible losses Mary acquired two parcels of land, a good horse and saddle, and three enslaved boys. She stayed in what had been her mother’s house, living with her older half-sister. There the shocked girl worked diligently to help manage the household and make herself indispensable.
She also grew into her role of slave-owner, and learned to extort work out of people who were enslaved. She began assuming the habits of Anglican piety in this mournful time, trying to subdue her feelings and resign herself to God’s mysterious will.
When she was about 22, she married Augustine Washington, a wealthy widower with two sons in Great Britain and a daughter in Virginia. Mary traded her duties on a small farm and the companionship of her affectionate half-sister for more expansive tasks as the mistress of a large plantation and marital obligations to an acquisitive, restless planter.
The couple had five surviving children: George, born in 1732; Elizabeth, Samuel, John Augustine, and Charles. The growing family and many of their enslaved people moved three times, eventually settling across the Rappahannock River from the growing town of Fredericksburg.
Augustine died suddenly in 1743 when he was about 49 years old. George, the eldest, was 11, and the youngest was 4. Augustine left his best properties to his eldest sons by his first marriage, Lawrence and Augustine. Mary was allowed to stay in the Fredericksburg house but was to turn it over to George when he came of age at 21.
She received the same number of enslaved people she had brought to the marriage. If she wanted more, they were to come from those allotted to her other children – setting their desires at odds with hers. If she remarried, the executors could demand security to be sure her children would receive their full inheritances at 21. Failing that she would lose custody of them. She remained a widow all her years.
SINGLE MOTHERHOOD WAS HARD
With her income and resources seriously diminished because of the dispersal of Augustine’s properties, Mary set about making sure that her daughter and four sons had such education and polish as she could provide. Elizabeth learned the arts of serving tea, managing a household and decorative handwork.
Mary kept the young men in proper clothes and wigs. These could be expensive, costing as much as 3 pounds. That could have been about US$2,400 in today’s dollars, assuming the American pound was valued the same as the British pound at the time. The wigs had to be de-liced by enslaved people who would otherwise be doing field work.
Mary dissuaded George from going into the British Navy at 14 but failed to convince him not to join General Edward Braddock’s disastrous 1755 campaign. She nursed George back to health after the illness he suffered succeeding this battle and several other serious sicknesses, including smallpox.
She tried to imbue in her children her extensive practical and religious wisdom. She had some success, especially with George and Elizabeth, but none of her children became frugal. Despite the family’s straitened circumstances, Mary saw all of her offspring marry up. George married Martha Dandridge Custis, the richest woman in Virginia.
MARY AFTER THE REVOLUTION
In the years before the Revolution, Mary, like almost all small farmers at the time, was poorer than ever and sometimes asked her extremely wealthy eldest son for small amounts of money. As he slid deeply into debt himself from his extravagances and expanding ambitions, he begrudged her the insignificant bits of cash she needed and insisted she could not be in want – a claim he repeated throughout her life.
George wrote in 1782, having not seen or been in touch with his mother for seven years, “confident I am that she has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real [emphasis in the original] distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me … in fact she has ample income of her own.”
Mary lived through the long years of the revolution alone. In her last years, she struggled like all small farmers against debt and bad harvests. She, too, suffered from high taxes, severe shortages of corn and salt and the threat of smallpox. Her overseer, exploiting the vulnerability of an elderly woman, cheated Mary throughout the war.
Mary Washington's final house in Fredericksburg, bought for her by GeorgeMary lived to see the revolution won and her son elected the nation’s first president. As George said, praising her in Fredericksburg at the end of the revolution, she led him to manhood in the absence of a father. Always sparing in her praise of worldly achievements, she gave him the compliment he probably most valued: that he had always been a good son. She died of breast cancer in August 1789 months after George became the nations’ first president.
GEORGE SHARED MANY OF HIS MOTHER’S TRAITS
After some years of reflected hagiography, Mary‘s reputation began a precipitous decline in the late 19th century. Ideas about biography and psychology began changing. Nurture began competing with an earlier idea of people being born with an essential character that needed to unfold. Mothers, who in the antebellum period were described as self-sacrificing vessels of virtue holding the new nation together, began to be held responsible for facilitating – or not – their sons’ ambitions.
Male writers then saw evidence of Mary’s love for George – such as keeping him out of the British Navy – as possessiveness and interference with his glorious military destiny. They saw her requests for money as her irrational greediness, not his stinginess.
Male historians, even now, have never doubted that his exasperation with his mother was justified, nor have they tried to find out more about her circumstances. Instead, they agree that he desperately needed to free himself from her efforts to limit him before he could father our nation.
But mother and son were much alike in physical strength, in superb horsemanship, in irascibility, in penny-pinching, in the capacity for extraordinary persistence and in their strenuous, lifelong efforts to maintain a measure of equilibrium. I believe that without Mary’s brave, enduring and self-denying mothering, we would not have had the brave, enduring and self-denying man who led both the revolution and the optimistic experiment in governing that resulted. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/mary-ball-washington-george-s-single-mother-often-gets-overlooked-but-she-s-well-worth-saluting?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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PUTIN AS THE PRODUCT OF THE RUSSIAN MENTALITY AND CULTURE
~ He is the product of what I call the “core Russian” mindset (aka ‘true Russian’, as labeled by a fellow Quoran).
Core Russians do not value freedom, cooperation, prosperity and rule of law. They believe in raw strength, hierarchy and domination. And this mindset is shared by an overwhelming majority of Russians.
This mindset is not very well known to foreigners, who mainly interact with the westernized educated minority. Some borderline people may have features of both, i.e. in some respect, they behave like the core Russians, in other — more civilized.
This mindset is most typical for the low-educated common people, who live outside the capital cities and do not aspire to rise above their primitive lives (see why — below). But not always. A common farmer may have their own judgement and even think critically, while a professor of philosophy may not only share these destructive beliefs, but even form a pseudo-scientific foundation for them, and ingrain these ideas into the minds of his students.
This mindset is also called: chauvinistic, imperialistic, traditionalist, soviet. I prefer not to use the term ‘conservative’, because it has nothing in common with the Western conservatives. Completely different values and morality.
This set of beliefs is frequently mockingly marked homo soveticus. There is a story behind it: USSR had claimed to develop a new, better species of a human being, devoid of greed and selfishness. The label reflects that they indeed grew a new species, but with completely different traits. Whether it was the intention, is another matter.
Being a core Russian has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. It is upbringing and indoctrination with a certain imperialist ideology.
A core Russian is not necessarily stupid. Such a mindset can be combined with a cunning brain, searching for opportunities to steal, or attack. Core Russians become great career criminals.
Is it created by propaganda? It is twofold: propaganda instills these ideals into a human being, but people with such a mindset are more receptive to propaganda. Those with critical thinking are a fringe minority, as it is now.
So, what defines the core Russian mindset:
Moral relativism. There is no good and no evil. There is ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. What is good for ‘Us’, is good. “Us” is usually ‘Russia’, but can be narrowed further down.
Collectivism. A single life means nothing. An individual must conform or is an enemy. Hence, core Russians always say ‘we’, even if there is no crowd to back them.
Logical relativism. Kind of a logical Schrödinger’s cat: the same statement is both true and false (or multiple mutually exclusive statements are all true), it depends on the circumstances, who is speaking and to whom it is addressed, and what is the motive.
A consequence of the previous one: there is no truth, as it cannot be objectively established. There are only points of view.
An obvious consequence: lack of critical thinking. It is a key core Russian trait, sometimes mentioned separately. Obviously, if one accepts contradictions, making logic unworkable, one cannot debunk false statements.
Another consequence: sociology does not work. When a core Russian is asked a question by someone they think as important, they always try to guess the “correct” answer that will satisfy the one who is asking. To get true answers, the interviewer must choose questions carefully, like at a criminal investigation. However, it should not deceive you: they sincerely approve the war in Ukraine, as it fits their values.
Willful ignorance. A core Russian does not want to hear any opinions or facts that contradict their established beliefs. Education is viewed as a hindrance. A core Russian saying sounds like: “Oi, ain’t you the cleverest one?”. Don’t get misguided, this particular phrase is a direct insult.
Magical thinking. A lot of core Russians personalize natural or society phenomena. They believe that everything is caused by a will of some very powerful person or entity. It is not necessarily a religious belief in God, but some mystical power, rituals, superstitions that a person automatically follows without any explanation or even internal rationalization.
This is sometimes reflected in irrational behavior. Such as a man repeatedly fails to achieve something, but instead of analyzing the mistakes and reconsidering the strategy, he repeats exactly the same steps, hoping to be lucky next time. Or, having won in a game of chance, believes he is lucky and plays again, until he loses everything.
Such people are susceptible to superstitions and conspiracy theories.
Zero-sum game assumption. Core Russians do not believe in a mutual benefit. If someone offers them a deal which looks profitable for both sides, they still look for a catch, and try to cheat, so that their partner loses. Even if the partner’s loss eventually backfires on them. If such a person is caught cheating and is brought to court, he sincerely replies: Because I wanted to win, not to lose!
Example: Russia does not want Ukraine to become free and prosperous, because by doing so, they believe that they will lose competition and be out of trade. And this opinion is shared by the majority of their population.
Misunderstanding competition. Core Russians always treat the western concept of competition as a hostility at best, ruthless fight till death at worst. This is reflected in their movies and stories about the West. As a result, in Russian business, such culture of competition is in place. They fight till they have no competitors, often relying on corrupt officials to drive competitors out of business. An ideal achievement for a core Russian is monopoly. Total domination of a market.
Such misunderstanding comes probably as a side effect of misunderstanding cooperation, and from Soviet culture, which described competition in such a way.
This approach applies to all spheres: business, sport, even pop culture. Only in Russia, garage bands spoil each other’s equipment and tear off posters.
Fatalism. Everything is pre-determined. A person cannot change their fate. We are little people and nothing depends on us. This is sometimes labelled as “acquired helplessness syndrome”.
Might is right. Core Russians only respect strength. Raw strength. This is why there are so much casual manslaughter, caused by a drunken brawl gone badly, including father-son debates. Any formal agreement (such as ‘law’), is only respected if there is some enforcement directly behind it, and punishment for violation is severe.
Crime does not exist. (derived from moral relativism). Everybody steals. If they are successful, they are lucky. If not, too bad for them. But stealing from me is a crime, and I will kill for that!
Killing is bad, they say, but a core Russian will kill, either when they gather as a mob, or when they are given sanction.
This is why exposing corruption of their elites, while very revealing for the western audience, has no effect on the core population. They simply do not see it as bad. Their typical response is: “Would you, having such opportunities, not steal?”
Militarism. A core Russian man usually becomes very sentimental, when he is remembering his military service. Although the details are frequently obscured and covered by phrases like “you don’t know, you were not there”. In reality, the service is typically some drills and idle talks. But it develops subordination and kills whatever remains of critical thinking — an order must be always fulfilled, even if it is impossible, stupid or in breach with the law. Core Russians despise anyone who have not served in the army, although their own service has little to do with proper army training.
Core Russians adore military style, they always dress up in camo trousers and coat, even if they do not plan a hunting expedition. They like to show off replicas of Soviet or Russian tanks, warships, planes, etc.
The army is usually the only social elevator a core Russian can catch. The other one is organized crime.
Cult of crime. Although not shared by all core Russians, nevertheless, it is favored by a significant subset of them. Not all of them have connections with the criminal world, but they still copy their manners, wear gangsta style clothes, etc. The criminal subculture is very trendy in Russian pop media, and many pop stars deliberately romanticize the ‘bad guys’.
Prison life, cry over the misspent youth, ‘mama, please forgive your wayward son’, bravado and contempt towards the non-criminal people — these are the motives of ‘blatnyak’, aka ‘chanson de russe’ — the pop subgenre that romanticizes and glorifies thug life. “Blatnyak” motives are very prominent in the mainstream Russian pop culture.
Russian police are also severely influenced by this subculture, in a way you can’t tell a thug from a cop by jargon.
The core Russian youth prefer the Russian gangsta rap, emerged in late 2000s, which openly glorifies murder with sadistic tendencies.
Cult of WWII. Militarism is further enhanced by the WWII cargo cult (rus. pobedob’esie, победобесие — a term used by non-core Russians, meaning “unholy victory”), slowly developed since Soviet times to a new quasi-religion. They are taught that Russia single-handedly defeated the greatest evil in the world — Hitler. WWII is labelled “Great Patriotic War” (GPW): 1941–45. This was done to hide the facts that USSR collaborated with Nazi Germany before 1941, and occupied other countries in the same fashion.
Russia glorifies the militaryThe history of WWII/GPW is interpreted in the same Us/Them paradigm: everything USSR did was right, if you disagree — you are the enemy and side with Hitler.
This is why they label Ukrainian resistance fighters, both of WWII and now, as Nazis.
Contempt for the weak/lack of empathy. Since early childhood, most Russian boys bully one another, until some sort of social hierarchy establishes. Then they usually concentrate their bullying on one or two smaller ones who cannot fight back and quickly become an outcast.
If you ask a bully — why do you behave like this, they say “Because I can”. Meaning that they do not get a punch back in their face.
The core Russian youths are labeled gopniki. A gopnik is a member of a delinquent subculture in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and in other former Soviet republics—a young man (or a woman, a gopnitsa) of working-class background who usually lives in suburban areas and comes from a family of poor education and income. They share this attitude and attack anyone they can, to rob or just for the fun of it. [The golden era of the gopnik is supposed to be over by now.]
This explains the attack on Crimea in 2014. They did it simply because they were ready, and knew that Ukraine was unprepared to fight back, just after the Revolution of Dignity.
Love of grandeur. A core Russian likes to show off, when they believe their neighbors won’t harm them for doing so, and/or their wealth comes ‘from above’, i.e. granted by the Tsar or his subordinates. They build palaces, buy huge yachts, extremely large and useless limousines, etc. They decorate everything with gold and precious stones. They hoard huge amounts of cash in their vaults (also because they do not believe in investment). This is also due to the fact that they know that their wealth may come and go any moment.
They also like to hire servants, even if they do not really need them, just to be able to show their higher standing over them. Domination is everything.
A Russian can be either rich or poor. Rich is considered ‘lucky’, or ‘granted by the Tsar’. Poor is the norm, how people are supposed to live. Anyone who tries to rise up from the poverty is frowned upon.
Once a Russian is rich, he starts resenting his former poor friends, calling them names and separating from them.
Resentment of achievement and merit. If an active person manages to achieve certain wealth or status, he is resented, if not openly hated, by the majority of core Russians. You can hear the usual leftist-style retorts, such as: ‘no wealth can be obtained in an honest way’, ‘he has cheated all of us’, ‘he must share his wealth with the common decent folk’, ‘he is a Jewish, that is why he is so rich’, etc. Having an opportunity not to be caught, these people will try to harm the successful one, even if it means to kill him.
This is also why they resent the West.
But this does not apply to the Tsar or his boyars (see above).
Paternalism. A core Russian depends on a strong father figure, represented by the national leader (Tsar), to feed them, to provide them with everything.
The state is not just an arbitrator who sets the rules and enforces them, but the ultimate master. A core Russian is born to serve his master. When a leader is not a tyrant, he is despised by his subject as ‘weak’.
Atomization. As a consequence of paternalism, Russian society is very atomized, to the point there is no society as such: only a crowd of individuals. People do not establish horizontal connections easily. Having some work to do, they always rely on someone to tell them what to do, instead of doing it themselves.
Lack of initiative/responsibility. Following the logical chain above, we see that a person who tries to take responsibility beyond their immediate family is frowned upon. If they ask someone “could you please do that”, they may respond with an angry “you are not my boss to tell me”. If an initiative is successful, people say ‘we did it’, or even ‘it is done’ forgetting the one who suggested it, or even did most of the work. But if it fails, the initiator is the one who failed, even if others directly sabotaged it.
Xenophobia/supremacy cult/psychopatriotism. Core Russians believe they are a supreme race, who inherited the empire from the Romans (the “Third Rome” concept). All other nations are considered inferior, and are called vile names. This applies both to non-Russian ethnic groups who live in Russia (who, in turn, despise everyone except themselves), and foreign nations. Also, smaller nations are despised more than the bigger ones.
As a consequence of this and resentment of merit, the provincial core Russians usually hate residents of Moscow and St. Peterburg. They believe their wealth is gained at their expense, because someone above distributes it unfairly (i.e. unevenly). The hate goes both ways: once a provincial core Russian settles in a big city, he start hating provincials — he believes they are after his job and home.
‘Historical rights’ concept. One of justifications of their expansionism is that Russia owned something in the past. No matter how exactly did they part ways with that land or property, they want it back simply because they previously owned it.
Compare it to a guy who sold you a house, then, after a long while, gets drunk and tries to kick you out, because he used to own it in the past, and he is very sentimental about it. Even if he sold it many years ago.
Male chauvinism. A woman has no say, she’d better watch the children — that defines it all. In this text, I sometimes intentionally use ‘he’, because women usually keep to themselves, letting their men speak. But they, too, are part of this mindset, and bring up children in it.
Not giving a damn. This is a typical reply of a core Russian, when someone tries to persuade them to think of the consequences of their poor decisions, or else. Eg: Putin is leaving your country without a future — I do not give a damn about it.
This is the explanation of their disregard for their own life, not only someone else. This attitude leads to reckless driving and behavior in general, many fires, accidents, disasters costing lives.
Update: The following traits are kindly contributed by Susanna Vijanen
Contempt for creativity, innovation and the arts.
Russia has always been technologically backward and relied on espionage rather than innovation. Russian design is ugly and uninspiring. Russians have always admired the works of artists, but held the artists themselves in contempt as effete weaklings.
My bandmate was once stopped by the police walking home late in Moscow, on suspicion of drug abuse (all right, he had had a couple of drinks after a gig). The usual cop intimidation small-talk:
So, the long hair? What do you do for a living?
I am a musician. Play in a band.
Got it, unemployed junkie.
He was finally released, after some more questions like this. And he does not do drugs at all.
Alcoholism and drug abuse. How do they drink vodka in northern lands? In Sweden: with water. In Finland: without water. In Russia: like water. Getting blasted is a survival mechanism in a hostile society.
Russian drinking culture can be mathematically expressed in a formula: maximum raw alcohol per ruble. They drink everything that burns, if it is cheap. And millions die from alcohol-related problems, including surrogate poisoning and even alcohol OD. Such disregard for own life is the “I do not give a damn” attitude. No surprise they have the same disregard for others.
Russian language has most number of synonyms for two words: drunk/getting drunk, and a fool.
In some parts of Russian society, it is a norm to be constantly drunk. It is generally tolerated and even rationalized: eg. he is an artist, he needs inspiration.
Alcoholics in Russia
“If
I fall asleep, wake up 100 years later and somebody asks me, ‘what is
going on in Russia,’ my immediate answer will be: ‘drinking and
stealing.’” ~ Saltikov-Tshedrin, writer
A stalled new Armata tank is being towed by an older tank during the rehearsal to Victory Day parade.Living in the moment and disregarding the future
*Core Russians never plan anything in the long run: they essentially live in this moment. They never invest on anything, but instead favor conspicuous consumption.
This is why Russian oligarchs spend money on yachts and prostitutes, instead of ambitious life goals, such as a space flight or cure for cancer. Also, because they do not give a damn.
Preferring petty short term gains instead of plentiful long term benefits.
The war in Ukraine “to prevent Ukraine from joining the EU and the NATO” is a hallmark of sacrificing long term benefits (peace, prosperity, respect, reputation, wealth) for short term gains (plundering Ukraine)
Generally, core Russians prefer to have a small, but regular pay, to an ambitious well-paid job that requires more effort, such as additional training. Or even coming to your boss and saying “I want to do that!”. In the extreme, it results in people preferring one-time jobs to permanent employment: why bother with the interviews, if you can unload that truck and get the money right away, and get drunk immediately afterwards.
Preferring having enemies instead of having friends. For the Core Russians, having enemies means being feared and being respected. Having friends means being suspicious and vulnerable.
Core Russian small talk is usually a lengthy and boastful description of the brawls a man has participated in, with gruesome details, and the number of enemies he had defeated grows with each shot/glass of vodka downed. A core Russian is always ready to fight, but does not give a damn for a reason to start one. “I do not like you” is usually more than enough.
PS. This was mainly written before the news of Russian war crimes in Ukraine came out (although I suspected something of a kind happening on occupied territories), which only confirms the statement. Putin did not order rape and random killing of civilians for fun. The Russian soldiers did it only because :
1. They were armed, while the civilians were not.
2. They were given a license to do anything, including killing, without criminal persecution.
PPS. Note for professional anti-fascists, humanists and their kind. These are mostly first hand observation. I am not calling to action here, but sharing these observations to study the phenomena or to try to explain it. We cannot afford to keep ignoring reality, even if we do not like it or it does not fit our set of beliefs. Discussion of this mindset in Ukraine is becoming mainstream now, although started long ago.
For Russian readers (including professionals): I was born in Moscow, Russia, and lived there for a large part of my life. This text is based on my personal observations and partially inspired by the works of dear friend Gorky Look. Before trying to accuse me of being an undercover CIA agent or a deranged Harvard professor of Russophobia, please try to open your mind and compare this set of traits to a drunk next door. Or to your boss. Or to someone else you do not like. And then think if you also behave like that, in whole or in part.
Dear Russian friend,— sings Orest Lyuty,— kill the Moskal in yourself! The heaven and earth beg you!
* Moskal here is a Ukrainian synonym for a core Russian. The song was created before 2014.
~ Timofey Vorobyov (lives in Lviv, Ukraine), Quora
https://www.quora.com/Is-Putin-a-product-of-the-Russian-mentality-and-culture/answer/Timofey-Vorobyov-1?ch=17&oid=345658745&share=dfdf7c9a&srid=uwQ9fO&target_type=answer
Mark Smit:
What an impressive list, and how sad that my personal experience with Russian culture confirms it.
I personally moved from the Netherlands to Sweden in 2013 and am finding the Swedish mindset almost the orthogonal opposite of the Russian one. I was discussing this with a Russian friend this morning (he’s about to apply for asylum in the EU), which led me to write down my personal impressions.
We both are unsurprised that Sweden is often ridiculed in Russian media and state propaganda, as well as by the European and American far right. Swedish society is an example showing and proving that liberalism and progressivism can actually lead to success and that Russian-style cynicism fosters mediocrity at best. ~
Leonid Rachman:
Had to read your story one more time. No wonder Trump was enamored with Putin and Russians. He and some of his followers poses similar traits. Very, very sad.
Jamie:
I've been writing about Russian culture for my nearly decade-long journey on Quora, and what you wrote parallels what I wrote about it. However, American culture under the Trump mindset with a new wave of right wing populism spreading like wildfire is strikingly similar. This is why you will almost never see Trump supporters write on these types of threads nor criticize Putin. The authoritarian mindset appears to be universal. Even if there are some differences, where it counts the most is similar: power, rigid masculinity, lacking empathy, worshiping a central figure, etc.
Tony Quirke:
They sound like a people who have raised the values of the school bully to iconic status.
Roberto Muehlenkamp:
Some years ago, my wife and I were on a train in Italy and there was an elderly Russian lady in our compartment. She had emigrated in the 1990s when things were bad after the fall of Communism (quite a feat at her age), and she spoke Italian fluently, a lot better than me. The conversation was friendly until she started talking about how things were better under Stalin and that she thought Stalin had not ordered the Katyn massacre, but Beria had falsified his signature on the order document. When I told her that Stalin was certainly not stupid and Beria certainly not suicidal, she immediately broke off the conversation. I think this is one of the key problems of what you call «core Russians», intolerance of differing opinions. There is no such thing as cordial disagreement in their mentality. You either agree with them or they will at best ignore you.
A similar trait I learned about from a German colleague of mine who is married to a Russian woman. He told me that Russians consider neutrality a character weakness — you are always expected to take sides. When a couple you are friends with divorces, you must make up your mind about continuing to be friends with one or the other. Remaining friends with both is considered a contemptible attitude. I never met the wife personally and therefore cannot tell is she had other «core Russian» attitudes, but I guess this was one of them.
Jack Claxon:
You just about described the core “Sub-Saharan Africa” mindset as well.
The results are similar — except that Russia did rather better, overall.
Timofey Vorobyov:
Some scholars claim that it is simply an archaic mindset. In this case, it may be correct to compare it to other traditional, pre-industrial minded societies.
Russia did better mainly because at some point (18 century onwards) they decided that they can borrow or steal from the best and have an advantage.
Anton Danylchenko:
More traits:
— cheating (both in education and in life)
— piracy (if something can be received for free but illegally they will follow this way)
— plagiarizing (both in education, in scientific pseudo-work and in life — ”intellectual property” means nothing)
— stealing and cultural appropriation (huge number of Soviet and Russian pre-Soviet literature, songs, music, games, movies, cars and even food are stolen from the West and slightly changed to fit Russian reality)
Nashenas Nashenasan:
How frightening to see most of these traits shared by Mullah regime thugs and regime supporters of Iran. No wonder they support Russia and try to act as Russian puppets.
But they are a small minority, still ruthless with too much power.
They too believe in might makes right, moral relativity, logical relativity, and magical thinking. Paternalism (“supreme” leader), xenophobia, resentment of achievement and creativity, and xenophobia are other “symptoms” of a professional regime apologist.
Mary:
On the Russian mentality and culture — it seems so degraded, so thuggish, as described, the culture of bullies, liars, drunks and thieves. It seems also pitiable, a terrible shame that lives are reduced to this kind of brutal reality, the only aspirations to steal successfully, to have brute power, and to obliterate consciousness as much as possible by getting and staying drunk.
It feels to me like a tragedy...a terrible waste of potentials and possibilities that cripples and distorts human qualities in a particularly thorough and powerful way. There are certainly many parallels with the Trump crowd, that constant anger, the bullying seen as strength, the chauvinism, the criminality. And as much as I know the dangers these folks present, as dishonorable and terrible as I find their acts and opinions, I still see the tragedy in the very curtailment of their humanity, the brutality of lives lived in this stew of anger, resentment and fear.
Oriana:
What seems very telling to me is that the best and brightest tend to leave the country. But even in the 19th century, quite a few Russian writers and other "creatives" preferred to live abroad. Even the Russian climate, in the simple physical sense of frequent cloudy skies, seems oppressive.
As various commentators noted, the traits described here are not confined to the Russian working class — or let us call this social layer the “uneducated Russians.” Of course they have some education — illiteracy is gone by now — but they don’t have any kind of intellectual bent, the wide curiosity, or the enlarged mental horizons that comes from the immersion in great literature or from sheer, persistent intellectual effort of any sort. I see real education as a revelation of another world, full of beautiful complexity and unanswered questions. You might call real education the opposite of propaganda.
Real education makes a person less susceptible to propaganda — for one thing, the truly educated person knows that everything is more complex than it looks. It’s enough to listen to a person speak — sometimes even if it’s small talk between neighbors — to get that sense of subtlety of the speaker’s mind.
Once I read an essay on the Nazi ideal of education. I think it was authored by Goebbels. The main thesis is that the best education for a future Nazi should be a limited one. “Not too much education!” the essay warns. It could make a man less manly, too open to the feminine sphere of feelings. It could also make him “think too much.” Neither feeling nor thinking are desirable in a soldier — unless the feeling of patriotism and hatred for the enemy.
Not that everything described here is the result of indoctrination as opposed to real education. There are also the deformations that result from living under an oppressive, chauvinistic regime that’s also morally corrupt, built on the assumption that everyone steals and lies, so that must be OK. “A fish rots from its head down” — the behavior of high officials tends to corrupt ordinary people. In the absence of dissent (due to the threat of prison or other forms of persecution), lies go unchallenged.
And the deformations of poverty. These are really the traits of lower working class versus the aspirations of the middle class, which prizes having goals for the future and seeks "self-improvement." Russian conscripts are drawn from the poorest strata of society. Hence the resentment of those who live what is perceived as the “beautiful life.” Hence the sign scribbled by a Russian soldier on the wall of a Ukrainian apartment: “Who gave you the permission to live so beautifully?”
Of course it takes both the right circumstances and the constant effort of maintenance to live beautifully. And that effort comes naturally and doesn't feel like a burden if since childhood one has been praised for working hard and being neat.
This article seemed to be filled with echoes of various articles I've read before, for instance on the differences between Israeli Jews and Arabs, or the differences in the use of the tenses according to one's social class — the use of the future tense is supposedly one of the markers of the middle class, rare in the rest of society. So ultimately it's about social class, and not just the mores of the working-class Russians.
Arguably, one particularly Russian feature here is the feeling of superiority over other nations. Somehow I don't think Estonians, say, or Hungarians or Italians, feel that kind of national superiority — pride in their country, yes, but nothing comparable in size to the Russian superiority complex. For it to develop, one needs to be a part of a large country, preferably militarized (note the recent Russian boasting of how quickly they could wipe out the UK — the capture of Kiev was supposed to take three days, while London would take just seven minutes), and heavy on the lies of nationalist propaganda.
But a regime that is built on lies is bound to collapse. Truth beats against it like surf against a cliff. Still, as we've seen in case of the Soviet Union, that collapse may take a long time and a lot of suffering.
Mary:
On the Russian mentality and culture — it seems so degraded, so thuggish, as described — the culture of bullies, liars, drunks and thieves. It seems also pitiable, a terrible shame that lives are reduced to this kind of brutal reality, the only aspirations to steal successfully, to have brute power, and to obliterate consciousness as much as possible by getting and staying drunk.
It feels to me like a tragedy...a terrible waste of potentials and possibilities that cripples and distorts human qualities in a particularly thorough and powerful way. There are certainly many parallels with the Trump crowd, that constant anger, the bullying seen as strength, the chauvinism, the criminality. And as much as I know the dangers these folks present, as dishonorable and terrible as I find their acts and opinions, I still see the tragedy in the very curtailment of their humanity, the brutality of lives lived in this stew of anger, resentment and fear.
Winter in Moscow lasts 5 months
*
ABSOLUTE MONARCHIES VERSUS STALINIST DICTATORSHIPS
~ Absolute monarchies exercised much less control over their people than even democracies. Frequently, even bad rulers still did much better for their people than supposed “good” rulers under socialism or democracy.
Because of Stalin, there were massive food shortages, famine, a total lack of consumer goods. The Soviet economy was ruined because while he industrialized, it was only for the military industry, not consumer goods for the average person. These military industries were not converted to civilian ones after the war either. Because of Stalin the Soviet people would not see an improvement in living standards but rather a decrease below that of Tzarist Russia in 1913.
Tzar Nicolas is portrayed as a poor leader, but he did legitimately care for his people. Under him Russia was the leading exporter of food in Europe. Russia was the 4th most industrial nation in the world (ahead of France and Italy while roughly tied with Austria Hungary), and peasants began to amass wealth; these peasants would later be called kulaks by the Soviets. ~ Logan Sill, Quora
*
HOW TROTSKY CREATED THE RED ARMY
Rather than trying to create something entirely new and untested, Trotsky decided to recreate the Tsarist Army. The Red Army was superficially different (its ranks were named differently, for example), but it was fundamentally the same old Tsarist Army. That approach allowed Trotsky to liberally use the Tsarist-era officers in key positions and to significantly narrow the experience gap between the Red Army and the White Army leadership.
In order to keep the Red Army officers in line, Trotsky introduced the Communist commissars. They were tasked with overseeing the officers and spreading the Party ideas among the troops.
Trotsky was a very hands-on leader. During the Russian Civil War, he constantly traveled in his personal train (actually, two trains — Trotsky had a huge entourage). He kept in touch with the primary commanders, delivered fiery speeches before the soldiers and made ruthless decisions on the spot. Because the system was new and rather unreliable, Trotsky’s personal presence was essential to solve a myriad of the day-to-day problems.
Lidia Fedorska:
Trotsky was traveling the country in a luxury armored train previously used by senior tsarist ministers.
Marc Falcoff:
Trotsky held the families of Tsarist officers hostage as a guarantee of their good conduct, so to speak,
The hard left wanted to have a core of Bolshevik ideologues, the Red Guards, but Trotsky realized he needed experts in military strategy so he recruited ex-Tsarist officers who he believed would fight because they felt the White CounterRevolution was supported by Reactionary Capitalists from outside Russia.
Stalin disagreed furiously and did not trust these officers and in Tsaritsyn sunk a barge full of these officers in the Volga.
Trotsky was infuriated by Stalin’s and his supporters actions in Tsaritsyn not only killing the ex-Tsarist officers but over brutal seizing of grain from the peasants fearing Stalin was ruining everything the sympathy of the peasants and the sympathy of the liberal bourgeoisie and democratic socialists against Reactionary Conservatives the Whites who wanted a return to the Tsarist Autocracy and rule by Landowners.
He telegrammed Lenin : Stalin is ruining everything by unnecessary brutality and his tactics are forcing the peasants and liberal socialists to side with the Whites.
Strip Stalin of his command and reprimand him.
Lenin approved of Stalin’s ruthless traits but Trotsky was just indispensable at that time and so reluctantly Stalin was removed.
Trotsky was also a brilliant and rousing speaker and organizer but ruthless when necessary shooting retreating soldiers who retreated without enough reason — something Stalin would adopt in WW2. Ironically this policy was adopted in Stalingrad, which was the old Tsaritsyn and is now called Volgograd.
Michael Mills:
No, he was not a military commander but rather a political leader, the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. The actual military commander of the Red Army was a Latvian called Jukums Vacietis.
Jakums Vacietis; he perished during the Great Purge of 1938
“We have nothing real, and everything is surrogate: quasi-ministers, quasi-enlightenment, quasi-society, quasi-constitution, and our whole life is only quasi. In other societies, people live, work, make money and develop. In Russia, only a few make money and live, and the majority don’t live, only survive.” ~ Vasily Klyuchevsky, historian
HOW KHRUSHCHEV GOT DEPOSED
Brezhnev pins a medal on Khrushchev
~ Khrushchev was ousted when he was on vacation in Pitsunda for 5 months in 1964. Brezhnev phoned him for an emergency meeting in Moscow, when he arrived in Vnukovo airport the KGB had surrounded the airport and KGB chief Vladmir Semichastny was waiting for him. He told Khrushchev that he was about to be deposed and told him not to resist. He was escorted to the Kremlin where Brezhnev and his clan presented to him a long list of accusations which included his unstable foreign policy, liberal reforms, agriculture failures, limited military spending, pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war and his shameful retreat from Cuba. Khrushchev responded,
“Stop, I know what you’re going to do. Today you cover me with shit. But I won’t resist. I'm old and tired. Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution. I won't put up a fight.”
Rather than letting himself be forcibly removed Khrushchev chose to resign by presenting to the Central Committee his old age and declining health as the reason for stepping down. He later wrote in his memoirs that he considers the decision to remove him and not execute him to be one of his greatest accomplishments in life. Considering the fate of people who fell from power struggles in the Soviet system before, it was living proof that Khrushchev had made a difference. ~ Jack Carver, Quora
Steve Bloxham:
And we* kept him from Disneyland (?)!! Security concerns were legitimate. Disneyland is a whole town all unto itself. Way way too many places a crazy assassin could hide and suddenly appear. … But still !!!!! All he wanted to do was go to Disneyland. *we meaning his security detail as well.
*
WHY SOME PEOPLE SAY THE SOVIET UNION WASN’T REALLY COMMUNIST
There are two groups who most often say the USSR wasn’t “really Communist”.
1. People who want to flash their familiarity with Marxism. The theory says that Communism is a destination, a stateless society somewhere in the future with insane abundance but without private property. The USSR was only heading there, therefore it was “Socialist”, not Communist.
2. Leftists who want to distance themselves from the ultimate failure of Real Socialism in Russia, China, Vietnam, and other places. [China began to prospect only after it gave up the communist project, re-privatized agriculture and allowed a kind of state-regulated capitalism.]
Not a true Scot!
Many leftists say that the Soviet Union was not correctly implementing Communism. Imagine the hard right who insist that Nazism was not a “true National Socialism.”
In a leftist’s mind, Stalin compromised an excellent concept by dismal execution.
These people typically have never taken the pain of reading the Communist Manifesto or studying Soviet history. Otherwise, they would have discovered that the Soviet Communists implemented the Manifesto as hard as they could.
Elvis has left the building
Leftists spend insane amount of each others time and online space insisting that the USSR was “fake Communism.” In many ways, their entire universe is pinned around righting the wrongs of Stalinism in some imaginary future.
Why such a burning passion?
It’s because in the post-Soviet era, the radical left has been living with a barren womb. They are infuriated by being unable to unearth a convincing new theory of societal transformation. The Soviet Communists were paragons of action and hard performers. No wonder ineffectual lefties of today try to steal their Marxist clothes saying the old owners “were wearing it the wrong way.”
Three simple truths of applied Marxism
No one can deny people dreaming about a future world of ultimate equality and unending justice. But they should at least show intellectual honesty and not pretend to be someone they are not: Communists.
Communism is unequivocally described in the Communist Manifesto. It’s based on the three sacred tenets of true Marxism:
Class struggle, always, everywhere.
Abolition of private property
The dictatorship of the proletariat led by its enlightened organized vanguard, the Communists.
That’s exactly what the USSR did.
In the photo above, a procession of National-Bolsheviks (now banned by Putin) heads down the central street of St. Petersburg a few years back.
Our National Bolshevism was essentially a hard-right rendition of Stalinism. Their red banners were reminiscent of the Nazis. But instead of a swastika, they featured either a limónka(“hand grenade”) or the sickle-and-hammer. The NazBols admired Stalin but at least had the intellectual honesty not to call themselves “Communists.” ~ Dima Vorobiev
National Bolsheviks on parade.*
WAS THE SOVIET COMMUNISM “STATE CAPITALISM”? (Dima Vorobiev)
It depends on your own ideological viewpoint.
If you believe that bureaucracy was a distinct class that owned the means of production, and exploited workers and peasants, the answer is YES.
But you may also argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a class.
It had no formal ownership rights above those of workers and farmers.
This assumed ownership, if it existed, was collective. You couldn’t go to the court or the Commission of Party Control and claim your rightful share of the property.
Bureaucrats had no personal privilege typical for social classes. They didn’t have any capital to get a rent from, no hereditary rights. If you stole from the till and were expelled from bureaucrats, you were out.
Anyone could claim his right to enter the ranks of bureaucrats. Yes, children from high-ranking families were guaranteed a position in the ranks, if they wanted (Stalin’s daughter was one, but not the single, case of those who didn’t). But given ambition and perseverance, anyone could make a bureaucratic career, as long as they didn’t mess with Soviet rule.
Update: (Jorge Aldo Gomes de Freitas Junior has pointed to another argument for the Soviet bureaucracy not being a class in its Marxist definition). During the collapse of USSR in late 1991 not a single bureaucrat took weapon or tried to prevent it in any other forceful way. Not a single movement or public action was launched to save USSR, and the old ones crumbled. This is not a typical behavior for an exploitative class about to lose its privileges. Think if someone tried to take away your car or you house.
If you agree with that, the USSR was what Communists insisted: a Socialist society with two main classes—workers and collective peasants—and one intermediary group intelligéntsiya. The Soviet poster below shows three persons representing this “2.5 classes” formula, the industrial worker obviously patronizing the collective farmer and the suit.
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NATO MEMBERSHIP FOR UKRAINE
~ As the Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake its territory from Russia gets underway, there has been a great deal of uncertainty regarding scenarios for how the war might end. There is general consensus within the NATO alliance that peace talks and a ceasefire under present circumstances will be very bad for Ukraine, leaving Russia in control of the Donbas, Crimea, and the country’s southern coast.
The deeper problem is that as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power, any “settlement” under such terms will simply provide Russia with breathing space to rearm and re-equip its forces in anticipation of a later resumption of the war. It will not bring peace but a brief respite highly beneficial to Russia.
This means that any durable settlement will need to include much stronger security guarantees for Ukraine. Mere verbal commitments from Western powers will not be sufficient. They made such commitments in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 whereby Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange promises to respect the country’s territorial integrity. These commitments were honored neither by the Russians nor by Ukraine’s Western backers. Today, nothing short of membership in NATO with its Article Five guarantee would be sufficient to deter a future Russian resumption of the current war.
Neither Russia nor the NATO allies are ready to accept Ukrainian membership at the present moment, while the largest war in Europe since 1945 is still raging on its territory. But there are conditions under which such an outcome might become possible by the end of 2023.
NATO membership will become a real possibility if the Ukrainian counter-offensive successfully reclaims a critical piece of territory. This is not the Donbas bordering Russia in the East, but the two southern oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia bordering the Black Sea coast. This region is critical to Ukraine’s bargaining position for three reasons.
First, it is hard to see how Ukraine can remain economically viable over the long run without regaining access to its ports on the Sea of Azov and the rich farmland and industrial areas around them. Ukraine was a major exporter of grain, fertilizer, and other products from this region and needs to have free access to the sea.
Second, when compared to the parts of Donbas long occupied by Russia, there are still many pro-Ukrainian people trapped in these regions. With every passing day, the Russian occupation authorities arrest dissidents, evacuate populations, and saturate residents with propaganda.
The third reason is strategic. If Ukraine can liberate the remainder of Kherson oblast, it will cut the Crimean peninsula off from resupply. It will sit atop the rail line going from Russia proper into Crimea, and will put the Kerch Strait bridge under threat from HIMARS and other long-range artillery.
In addition, the Ukrainians can once again cut the canal that originates in Nova Kakhovka that supplies fresh water to the peninsula. Russian artillery will be pushed back so that it can no longer terrorize the people of Kherson. While it will be very difficult for Ukraine to invade Crimea across its narrow isthmus, it will be relatively easy to cut it off and make the large Russian military establishment there highly vulnerable. It might actually be advantageous for Ukraine to in effect hold the entire peninsula hostage rather than trying to retake it.
Reclaiming the rest of the Donbas is a much lower strategic priority. This area shares a long border with Russia, making it easy to resupply and very hard to conquer. There are virtually no pro-Ukrainian people left in the region; even if it could be occupied militarily, reincorporating it into Ukraine would be like hugging a hornet’s nest. It might be better to hang the massive rebuilding costs for this region around Russia's neck. No Ukrainian government can be expected to formally renounce sovereignty over this region, but it could conceivably provide informal assurances that it will not try to retake this territory.
It is possible that the Ukrainian offensive will succeed in a spectacular fashion, and that Russia's weakened forces will collapse across the whole front. But a more modest and plausible scenario is for Ukraine to retake Kherson and Zaporizhzhia by late summer. If this happens, grounds for a deal will be in place. The threat of the slow strangulation of Crimea might finally give Putin an incentive to stop his attacks on Ukraine, and commit to ending its terrorist missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.
But the viability of such an agreement will fundamentally depend on Ukrainian membership in NATO. Opposition to the country’s membership in recent years was reasonable based on the fact that Ukraine has been engaged in a hot war with Russia since 2014 and membership would immediately embroil the alliance in that war.
If there is an armistice, however, and a quiet understanding that Ukraine would no longer actively seek to reclaim further territory, the task for NATO falls in line with its mission as a fundamentally defensive alliance. Obviously, fear that Ukrainian membership might provoke Russia is a thing of the past. To underline NATO’s commitment, there would have to be alliance members willing to station forces in Ukraine to act as tripwires against any future Russian resumption of the war.
A formal peace agreement under which Russia accepted NATO membership for Ukraine, and Ukraine ceded legal sovereignty over Donbas or Crimea, is hard to imagine. But an enduring, self-reinforcing armistice is conceivable. There have been other similar arrangements in the past. North and South Korea never signed a peace treaty in 1954 and are still technically in a state of war, but the Korean peninsula has been peaceful ever since then. Similarly, Turkey and Greece have never agreed to a formal peace deal on Cyprus, yet there has been peace there.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that the alliance agrees that Ukraine could join NATO once there is a peace agreement. This is a nice sentiment as far as it goes, but it gets the timing backwards. It will not be possible to arrive at an armistice and stability between Ukraine and Russia without NATO membership. Any NATO member having doubts about this needs to articulate what alternative peace deal is possible in the coming years that will not be a short-lived ceasefire allowing Russia to re-arm and rebuild.
This scenario is the only one I see as a remotely plausible path to ending the war in the coming year. It depends entirely, however, on the success of the highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. If the front lines are close to where they are now in late summer, I am afraid that Western support for Ukraine will start to erode more rapidly and the possibility of a durable armistice will decline.
We need to start thinking concretely about the conditions under which NATO will accept Ukraine and prepare ourselves actively for such an outcome. This thinking needs to begin now, because we in the West are still very far from consensus on this issue. ~
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“ENGLISH IS A DEAD LANGUAGE” — RUSSIA’S ENDGAME
~ According to the Russian government-commissioned poll only 12–15% of university students “feel pride” in Russia, with anxiety and fear prevailing as well as hopelessness. A third of respondents said they want to emigrate; at Higher School of Economics, 58% of students want to leave Russia for good.
Russian State Doom’a reacted by rubber stamping Putin’s new epochal legislature “About Threats to Spiritual and Moral Development of the Children.”
Ironically the greatest threat to children is Putin and his regime, but that aside having failed to “save” Ukrainians from independence and human dignity and youth from the Western values, Putin decided to knock himself out on the Russian children.
The state program is planned to last until 2030, after which date children take the oath in the front of The Hitler’s Cap at the Cathedral of Armed Forces, join the military, and die for the Fuhrer trying to conquer the next country in line for denazification.
It’s also a highly optimistic date that presumes that the Russian Federation would even exist by then, which is quite dubious as Putin is doing his utmost to tear it apart.
In the Soviet Union, KGB tried to ban blue jeans, bubble gum and rock’n’roll, it’s now Internet’s turn to take one for the team of retarded commies.
What Putin doesn’t realize is that any kid would sell him and his homies to the enemy for a new iPhone without blinking an eye.
North Koreans rub their hands in glee — they’re soon to be outdone in craziness by the Russians. Soon Russians too will be obligated to wipe the portrait of the dear leader with a special cloth twice a day.
Bewildered, cowed populace doesn’t evoke any positive emotions toward anyone outside the perimeter; it will sheepishly sacrifice their own children into state slavery.
And what can threaten spiritual development of the children in the country that daily bombards residential buildings in Ukraine killing women and children?
Again, this is nothing new — their grandparents were forced to love Stalin and those who deprived millions of people of their lives and freedom.
Back then it was a communal herd without personal possessions, private property, roots, languages, and values, and individuals were at least botched to glorify the state, for the common good. Today it’s for the sake of a small bunch of degenerates to retain power.
Babchenko said that Russia is soon to become Orthodox Iran with repressions and weekly public hangings but I think Putin’s readying Russians for annexation by China. That’s the ultimate goal of the pivot from common sense.
At the conference of PRC representatives, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian State Dooma demonstrated lickspittle of the highest order.
“Let’s study our national languages, languages of international communication like Chinese,” he said and added. “English is a dead language.”
Brazen lies of Putin’s lackeys who lack dignity and honor are only matched with their absolute deficiency of intellect.
Russians had waged war on national languages of the republics and peoples forcing them to communicate only in Russian for all the decades of the Soviet rule.
They deported people like Crimean Tatars and Chechens from their native lands to make them forget their roots and languages.
After doing their utmost to wipe out national languages, Volodin now claims that they’re more alive than English, the most spoken language in the world, and encourage to study them.
Wait a second, weren’t you the one who called Ukrainian an artificial language that doesn’t exist and denied Ukraine their right to self-determination and actively deport Ukrainians from the occupied territories?
Chinese, in Volodin’s opinion, is the international language of communication, not English, which is as dead as Aramaic.
Don’t you know that businessmen, tourists, students and Quorans communicate in Chinese among themselves?
Putin’s toadies have lifted the art of state-sponsored sycophancy and flattery to the dizzying heights not experienced by mankind since Roman Empire Caligula’s court. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
John Kelly:
He want’s English banned from the curriculum because that is the language that the majority of all the Internet criticism of Russia is formulated in.
He wants Russians kept in the dark while he feeds them bullshit!
Chuck Weisenberg:
Its clear that Putin’s end game now is daily survival. As an ex-spy/bureaucrat he just did the next assignment and never had to see into the future. It shows.
WHAT IF NEANDERTHALS CAME TO DOMINATE THE EARTH
~ In evolutionary terms, the human population has rocketed in seconds. The news that it has now reached 8 billion seems inexplicable when you think about our history.
For 99% of the last million years of our existence, people rarely came across other humans. There were only around 10,000 Neanderthals living at any one time. Today, there are around 800,000 people in the same space that was occupied by one Neanderthal. What’s more, since humans live in social groups, the next nearest Neanderthal group was probably well over 100km away. Finding a mate outside your own family was a challenge.
Neanderthals were more inclined to stay in their family groups and were warier of new people. If they had outcompeted our own species (Homo sapiens), the density of population would likely be far lower. It’s hard to imagine them building cities, for example, given that they were genetically disposed to being less friendly to those beyond their immediate family.
The reasons for our dramatic population growth may lie in the early days of Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago. Genetic and anatomical differences between us and extinct species such as Neanderthals made us more similar to domesticated animal species. Large herds of cows, for example, can better tolerate the stress of living in a small space together than their wild ancestors who lived in small groups, spaced apart. These genetic differences changed our attitudes to people outside our own group. We became more tolerant.
As Homo sapiens were more likely to interact with groups outside their family, they created a more diverse genetic pool which reduced health problems. Neanderthals at El Sidrón in Spain showed 17 genetic deformities in only 13 people, for example. Such mutations were virtually nonexistent in later populations of our own species.
But larger populations also increase the spread of disease. Neanderthals might have typically lived shorter lives than modern humans, but their relative isolation will have protected them from the infectious diseases that sometimes wiped out whole populations of Homo sapiens.
Our species may also have had 10%-20% faster rates of reproduction than earlier species of humans. But having more babies only increases the population if there is enough food for them to eat.
Our genetic inclination for friendliness took shape around 200,000 years ago. From this time onwards, there is archaeological evidence of the raw materials to make tools being moved around the landscape more widely.
From 100,000 years ago, we created networks along which new types of hunting weapons and jewelry such as shell beads could spread. Ideas were shared widely and there were seasonal aggregations where Homo sapiens got together for rituals and socializing. People had friends to depend on in different groups when they were short of food.
And we may have also needed more emotional contact and new types of relationship outside our human social worlds. In an alternative world where Neanderthals thrived, it may be less likely that humans would have nurtured relationships with animals through domestication.
Dramatic shift in the environment
Things might also have been different had environments not generated so many sudden shortfalls, such as steep declines in plants and animals, on many occasions. If it wasn’t for these chance changes, Neanderthals may have survived.
Sharing resources and ideas between groups allowed people to live more efficiently off the land, by distributing more effective technologies and giving each other food at times of crisis. This was probably one of the main reasons why our species thrived when the climate changed while others died. Homo sapiens were better adapted to weather variable and risky conditions. This is partly because our species could depend on networks in times of crisis.
During the height of the last ice age around 20,000 years ago, temperatures across Europe were 8-10℃ degrees lower than today, with those in Germany being more like northern Siberia is now. Most of northern Europe was covered in ice for six-to-nine months of the year.
Social connections provided the means by which inventions could spread between groups to help us adapt. These included spear throwers to make hunting more efficient, fine needles to make fitted clothing and keep people warmer, food storage, and hunting with domesticated wolves. As a result, more people survived nature’s wheel of fortune.
Homo sapiens were generally careful not to overconsume resources like deer or fish, and were likely more aware of their life cycles than much earlier species of human might have been. For example, people in British Columbia, Canada, only took males when they fished for salmon.
In some cases, however, these life cycles were hard to see. During the last ice age, animals such as mammoths, which roamed over huge territories invisible to human groups, went extinct. There are more than a hundred depictions of mammoths at Rouffignac in France dating to the time of their disappearance, which suggests people grieved this loss. But it is more likely mammoths would have survived if it wasn’t for the rise of Homo sapiens, because there would have been fewer Neanderthals to hunt them.
Our liking for each other’s company and the way spending time together fosters our creativity was the making of our species. But it came at a price.
The more technology humankind develops, the more our use of it harms the planet. Intensive farming is draining our soils of nutrients, overfishing is wrecking the seas, and the greenhouse gases we release when we produce the products we now rely on are driving extreme weather. Overexploitation wasn’t inevitable but our species was the first to do it.
We can hope that visual evidence of the destruction in our natural world will change our attitudes in time. We have changed quickly when we needed to throughout our history. There is, after all, no planet B. But if Neanderthals had survived instead of us, we would never have needed one. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/8-billion-people-how-different-the-world-would-look-if-neanderthals-had-prevailed?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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HONESTY IS A TOOL OF CONNECTION; WHY EVEN WHITE LIES ARE BAD FOR US
~ Every time you decide to lie – even if that lie is intended as a kindness – you feed the cynical side of yourself. Psychologists call this ‘deceiver’s distrust’. The reasoning goes like this: ‘If I’m lying, other people are probably lying to me too.’ You start to distrust others, ironically, because you are being dishonest.
Think back to that family dinner party. What if everyone had been honest instead? Your mind probably moves immediately to the potential negatives: an argument; hurt feelings. What good could come from it?
The US researchers Taya Cohen and Emma Levine put this to the test by asking people to spend three days focusing on being honest in all their social interactions – sharing their thoughts, feelings and opinions with others in an open and candid way, even if it was difficult. The people taking part in the study found it to be more enjoyable than they predicted. Whereas people expected honesty to cause relational harm, they instead were surprised to find it to be socially connecting. If we could all dare to be honest more often, we might form more realistic expectations about the potential costs and benefits of honesty.
In contrast with the advantages of honesty, other research suggests that secrets and lies result in less social connection, and a sense of alienation from others. Michael Slepian and his colleagues found that keeping secrets was associated with a sense of feeling ‘alone’ with the information.
Similarly, our own research suggests that people who tell more lies also report feeling more lonely – even when their lies were told for the express purpose of saving relationships. Think this affects only chronic liars? Think again. In a simple experiment, when we randomly assigned people to either lie or tell the truth in a ‘get to know you’ conversation with a stranger, liars felt less connected to their partners than truth-tellers. It seems the road to loneliness is paved with lies born of good intentions.
Viewed from this perspective, the question of choosing deception or honesty is not one of ethics, but of wellbeing and the integrity of our social fabric. Each time someone chooses to lie, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential, a thread unravels. No big reveal that deception has occurred is necessary, no treachery named, no betrayal felt, no punishment to the deceiver doled out – it is the act itself that harms.
One of the primary reasons why people are not honest is very simple: they are afraid of the other person’s reaction. And they have ample reason to be worried. People have a multitude of ways to shun, reject, threaten, litigate and punish those who are honest with them – the risk of honesty has never seemed greater. Of course, there are salient examples of celebrities who have been publicly ‘canceled’. But there is also evidence that ‘cancel culture’ is permeating more broadly. Recent studies suggest that family estrangement is on the rise, with more than a quarter of US adults reporting that they have no contact with a family member.
Joshua Coleman, who studies family estrangement, partly attributes this effect to changing conceptions of what to expect from any relationship, and the increasing sense that it’s possible to simply excise individuals from our lives if they do not meet our needs, if they have wronged us in the past, or if we perceive their presence as detrimental to our mental health. It’s not hard to see how, in such an atmosphere, even well-meaning honesty will quickly find itself stifled.
Social media therapy-talk both reflects and amplifies this effect.
There is a rapid increase in the number of individuals, with unclear credentials, who provide pithy short-form advice fueled by high-octane terms such as ‘toxicity’, ‘boundaries’, ‘gaslighting’ and ‘triggers’. More often than not, this advice aims to justify cutting off people who cause discomfort and pain. They help their followers articulate defensive reactions to real and perceived slights, including those truths that people don’t want to hear. Social media fuels fears about the potential negative consequences of any candid interaction. The irony of this ‘therapeutic’ advice is that mental illness is associated with loneliness, and honesty is one way to alleviate the pain of feeling disconnected – if people are willing to share in it.
The good news is there are steps you can take toward increasing the amount of honesty in your interactions that do not require you to either bludgeon those around you with every ‘hot take’ to ever cross your mind, or to make fervent demands of transparency from others.
The first step is to engage with others, not to avoid or cut them out. When you enter into conversations with the goal of sharing yourself – your thoughts, opinions, experiences and values – you and the other person can develop a shared understanding of each other’s perspectives. This builds trust, even if you don’t agree. Honesty is a tool for connection, not persuasion.
Decades of research on persuasion suggests that when people try to change each other’s minds about deeply held values, it is rarely successful. Rather, people become increasingly entrenched in their original views. A persuasive conversation can often end in failure. But, if your goal is simply to understand each other, success is easier to achieve. You can communicate that you want to share your perspective and understand theirs by being both open and receptive – responding with questions rather than retorts. Because conversations are often reciprocal, this will encourage others to do the same.
The second step is to show others that they can be honest with you. That is not to say that you must allow yourself to be abused and harassed, but that you also need to separate your understanding of ‘harassment’ and ‘abuse’ from someone who is speaking plainly. It means consciously moving away from feeling victimized or offended by other people’s honesty. All of us must recognize our contribution to the honesty-risk calculation and consider what we can do to change it.
Part of this is developing the ability to hear another person’s perspective, even if that perspective is about you, even if you think it is incorrect, and even if the wording is insensitive. In their book Thanks for the Feedback (2014), the legal scholars Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen encourage us to consider that we do not have a perfect view, not even of ourselves, and so part of becoming more receptive to honesty is being open to the idea that another person’s perspective has some informational value. It could even be beneficial. In her book Radical Candor (2017), the executive coach and tech leader Kim Scott describes how Sheryl Sandberg’s willingness to honestly tell her that she (Scott) appeared unsure and incompetent during presentations was a major positive turning point for her career.
More broadly, it’s incumbent on all of us to show others that we can be trusted with honesty, and that being honest will not get them canceled from our lives or public life. It’s starting to tell yourself Yes, I can handle the truth, and actively showing others that you can be trusted with it. For example, try to solicit an honest opinion from a friend on a topic (it can be a piece of news, a book, your outfit or, for the very brave, their opinion on some of your life choices), and let them share it with you safely. Even if it feels personal, attempt to receive it only as information about how they see the world.
When it comes to being more honest with others, it will mean actively trying to think of at least one possible positive outcome from being honest in a situation. For example, rather than making up an excuse, what if you chose to reveal to your friend that you are not able to come their party because you are actually tired, sad or feeling socially anxious? How might that change the relationship? How might they choose to support you?
You might not choose to be honest in every situation, but thoughtfully engaging with the potential positive outcomes of honesty will enable you to counteract the tendency to immediately think of the worst. You’ll better understand where those missed opportunities for honesty lie, and seize them when they come.
By building trust in your individual conversations, you can change your own sense of trust in others. In our daily interactions, all of us have the opportunity to create an upward spiral of trust and connection to disrupt the downward trajectory of mistrust and loneliness we have been feeding for decades. Together, let’s resolve to be more honest, and be more open to it from others. It might just change everything. ~
https://psyche.co/ideas/be-honest-little-white-lies-are-more-harmful-than-you-think
Oriana:
I'm thrilled by the concept that honesty is a tool for building trust and connection.
At the same time, it would be cruel to tell someone who's obese, "My, are you fat!" We may be wise to avoid even white lies, but it's also good to know that not everything that comes to our mind needs to be said.
Mary:
I have never been a good liar. In fact, I find it almost impossible to lie even about the smallest things. I think lying is unhealthy, for many of the reasons stated. It isolates you, and leads you to suspect others are lying to you, as you are lying to them. Human interaction becomes a shadow play, full of guesswork and suspicion. There is no worse betrayal than finding out someone has lied to you about something very important. It can shake the foundations of your world.
In the same way, as we become aware of lies told by public figures, politicians, reporters, journalists, reality itself seems to falter, grow slippery and ever more undependable. Cynicism grows..further undermining the fabric of society, those "in the know" emphasizing nothing really "can be known." It's all a game of smoke and mirrors concocted by showmen to convince us what they want us to believe. It becomes less and less possible to make clear choices and judgements when all facts are accompanied by alternate facts, when all news can be called fake news, and all you can do is choose whose lies you prefer. This is a nightmare world, and of course; here we've gone way beyond those little white lies.
Oriana:
Alas, living in an oppressed country teaches you to lie, in a special way: you tell the truth as much as you deem safe, but not the whole truth. And even that is already harmful. Again, there are of course situations where kindness tells us we don't have to say everything we know and/or think. But those cases should be the exception, not the rule. The beauty of living in the West is that you can indeed say what you honestly think without the fear of ending up in jail, or worse. This freedom needs to be jealously preserved. We mustn't let America (or any other country) turn into Russia.
One more thought: if freedom of speech prevailed in Russia, we'd see all kinds of positive change quite quickly. I saw this happen in Poland, and I think Russia is not beyond redemption. Just one person standing peacefully in Red Square, without being hauled off by the police, with a billboard that says, "Down with Putin," would ignite a world of change.
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DITCH YOUR SPADE, FORGET FERTILIZER, LISTEN TO THE WEEDS: LAID-BACK GARDENING
~ After almost 30 years of gardening, several of those at fine institutions such as the Royal Horticultural Society and Kew Gardens, I’ve realized that much of what I was taught is, if not wrong, not exactly on the mark either. All that labored effort – the weeding, the fertilizing, the digging, the tending and pruning, the selecting and conforming – it’s not working. Not for the plants, the soil or the community around them, which includes you and me.
Indigenous cultures everywhere have based their practices on observing and honoring the ecology, while we in the “developed world” wrote down our rules. Our attempt to control nature has perpetuated poor relations with all the beings in the garden, turning everything into some sort of battle, or endless regimes whether that’s mowing, hoeing, watering or attacking some critter. It is a lot of work and these days way more than I am prepared to put in. Now spring is finally unfurling, this growing season, perhaps rather than going to work in our gardens, we could all relax a little, spend more time looking and listening, waiting rather than reacting, being in the garden as much as actively gardening. Here is how it’s done.
Throw out your spade
If you are even faintly interested in gardening you will have heard of “no dig”, in which you eschew your spade and take up a hoe instead. Rather than turning the soil, a structure that has been hundreds of millions of years in the making and thus has thought long and hard about which way up it should be, you lightly hoe or “tickle” the soil to remove any unwanted weeds and leave its multitudes of microbes, fungi and insects intact, exactly where they want to be. Happy microbes make for happy plant roots, better able to take up nutrients, fight off pests and diseases and withstand drought. As you keep doing it, there will be fewer weeds to remove.
Every soil has its weed seed bank: the adage goes one year’s seed is seven years of weed, but actually it’s more like decades for several of them. They are there not to annoy you, but to act as a lifejacket to the soil. Exposed, weed-free soil is very easily damaged or eroded by the weather: the sun bakes it, the wind harries, the rain pelts it, either compacting it or if a deluge comes, causing run-off. Again, those several million years of evolution weren’t a system sitting still, but advancing to a point of self-resilience. The vast majority of weed seeds need light to germinate. The more you disturb the soil, forking it over, digging things up, the more light you let in and the more the soil has to rush to protect itself. It flushes its weed-seed bank as a protective coat to hold the system together.
Ease off weeding
Talking of weeds, it’s time we ditched the word altogether. Even the Chelsea flower show is rebranding weeds as “hero plants”. Perhaps we can talk of them as common folk or elders (they’ve been around a lot longer than us), because every weed in your garden is trying to tell you something very important.
The more one type dominates, the louder the sermon is. Dandelions are saying your soil is a little compact, low on surface nutrients, particularly calcium and potassium; nettles tell you there is too much surface nitrogen (not as good as it sounds). A flurry of annual weeds – bittercress, chickweed and mouse weeds – say your soil is dominated by bacteria, while thistles, docks, green alkanets and comfrey are another sign that the surface is a little low on nutrients and only those with long tap roots to mine the sub-soil layer can thrive.
Brambles tend to proliferate where there is excessive nitrogen, but the land has been left alone so they can take better hold. There is some evidence, though, that they have a potential role in the natural regeneration of tree seedlings: deer won’t browse in the middle of a bramble thicket and in a woodland this means the tree seedlings won’t get nibbled, while the mycorrhizal fungi will tap into the woodland network to boost the seedlings with enough growth to make it up and out of the thicket.
Once you start looking into the ecology of anything that we flippantly call a weed, you will discover that it is key in recycling nutrients, providing food in the form of nectar and pollen for all manner of insects, in all manner of weather. And not just for pollinators, but also for things such as leaf miners that turn into micro-moths, and flies that turn into food for hungry mouths reaching out of the nest, which turn into food for raptors flying high above. “I know,” I hear you cry. Of course you do, but I bet you still go out weeding when you don’t have to.
Many of these common folk arrive to help the soil out. If you ease back on the weeding (you will still have to intervene sometimes), and instead pay attention to the soil, many of the common folk will quite quickly become occasional folk instead. Annual ones are a sign that the soil has become bacterially dominated, having evolved from alluvial flood plains to meadows to fields, and thriving in the company of bacteria. They do not thrive in the fungally dominated soils of woodlands. Fungi thrive in soil rich in carbon because that is what they eat.
If you have too many annual weeds, add more carbon to your soil in the form of bulky homemade compost, cardboard (could be shredded, could be laid down as a sheet, could be added to your home composting), or brown leaves (you don’t even have to make leaf mold). You don’t have to dig it in – the worms will incorporate it all into the soil. That is, if you gave up your spade because one of the biggest threats to earthworms is our habit of plowing and digging, partly because if you are chopped in half, you don’t regrow, and because earthworm tunnels have their own beautiful architecture that supports the soil, but not if they have collapsed.
Embrace rot and death
So, we have thrown away the spade, considerably loosened up on weeding; now it is time to relinquish tidying up. We all do it, remove a yellowing or nibbled leaf, sweep up the spent leaves and pick up sticks, prune out the dead and dying. In part because the idea was that all this material would harbor slugs, other pests and diseases. It might, but one soul’s pest is another’s supper. It is true slugs rather love a pile of damp, slightly rotting leaves, but so do the beetles that hunt them.
This story is played out over and over again: if one thing proliferates in a natural system something else, sometimes many things, will come to dine on this opportunity, to restore the balance. A garden allowed to find this balance doesn’t have pest or disease problems – it has beings, who are living and dying, sometimes thriving, but rarely at the cost of the whole system. This balancing act takes time, several years or more, but I promise you this: even the slugs settle down. Rotting, disease, pests are just the Earth’s recycling system. It is not a great leap of faith to trust time. Plants have been around far longer than we have been gardening, with plenty of time to work on the nuances of reciprocity.
Stop chasing fast growth
Ever since the second world war we have been falsely worshiping nitrogen and phosphorus as kings in the fertilizer game. Synthetic fertilizers, a very bad hangover from bomb manufacturing, led us to believe we could rig the system. Using them meant farmers could turn every bit of soil into a field, for a while at least, and it trickled down into how we gardened.
There is a much wider debate about excessive fertilizer use, in particular nitrogen, in farming, but that’s largely out of our hands. The garden isn’t.
There is no need for manufactured chemicals of any kind here. First, all soils differ but synthetic fertilizers, particularly the kind sold to gardeners, take a one-size-fits-all approach. Regardless of where you are, you apply the same amount of plant food. These synthetic fertilizers don’t stay in situ; they run off. And there is evidence that over time, they can deplete soils of stored carbon, reducing fertility, even if organic matter is still added. In short, if you buy fertilizers you are paying for short-term gains. Homemade compost is free and it will build your soil, helping store carbon and feeding your plants. Even if you make it really badly.
Compost in situ
If you want an even more carefree approach, you can do most of your composting without heaving stuff around. Don’t clear away your spent crops, leave the pumpkin stems and leaves, take down the old tomato and bean plants and let everything lie on the soil. You can cover it to speed things up – market gardeners tend to use black plastic for convenience, but cardboard is plentiful, free and easy enough for a small garden. Covered or not, this allows the crop residues to go straight back to where they came from.
If you want to plant straight back into the space you just harvested or cleared, try mowing, strimming, shredding or chopping up by hand the spent crops and planting straight into that. It’s quicker, avoids hauling stuff to the compost heap and back and again and makes for wonderful, friable soil. That whole notion about hoeing and raking the soil to make a fine tilth to grow in? Turns out it’s better done by the soil system than your sweat.
I’m not suggesting we should give up compost. It is still the best way to deal with household organic matter, be that food waste, paper and cardboard, pet hair, etc. You just don’t need to bring in extra compost or manures especially for your soil, when in- and on-ground methods might get you to a richer soil with less effort and less cost. And if you do bring in compost, never, ever use peat. It is destroying precious peatland habitats that we need for carbon storage, clean water and flood management. Those that live on peat bogs don’t want to live anywhere else, so let us not destroy their home for the idiocies of gardening.
Encourage plant promiscuity
Finally, let us embrace the diverse, the slightly different, the variable in our flowers and foods. For millennia, we have been selecting and breeding plants so that they benefit us – this is our origin story. But for the longest time this was a laid-back process of letting the pollinators go to work, saving seed, growing on and noticing what worked best for the conditions where you were. It is known, technically, as creating a landrace, an ancient cultivar that is variable, often containing many alleles (forms of genes) that are not present in modern highly bred cultivars.
Landrace gardening is the opposite: akin to a plant orgy, you let all your carrot varieties, or whatever it is you are growing, cross-pollinate with each other to create a diverse breeding population. It is a survival strategy that diversifies the gene pool, making it better future-proofed than something highly bred.
The result is a beetroot or a bean or flower that is not uniform; as the different alleles play out their expression, so a landrace varies in color, size, texture and even flavor. Anyone can become a landrace gardener. It’s a fun, five-year-plus experiment that takes very little effort and will reward you with vegetables and flowers that work entirely for your system of growing and your soil. Don’t want to spend all summer watering excessively (can I remind you how hot last summer was)? Breed a leafy green that doesn’t need it. Got poor soil? Breed a potato that loves it. Want a tomato that tastes of something but doesn’t mind a late frost? It’s all possible.
Sow all the named varieties that have the characteristics you want, grow them and, with the help of bees promote promiscuity and let them cross-pollinate. Select and save seed from only the ones that do well in your soil. Start again next spring, sowing your saved seed. Up to half of it might not survive, but you’ll have oodles of seed, so it doesn’t matter. Let the pollinators at the new plants, select seeds from the ones that are working and keep going. In a couple of seasons, you can have garlic that is entirely adapted to your soil – it might take a few more years to find that perfect pumpkin or tomato.
We don’t know where we are heading as far as our future on this planet is concerned, but we might as well go there prepared with a wide gene pool, in relation with our common folk plants and their communities, in awe of our insects, fascinated by our fungal friends, with our soils and our energy replenished. And like any friendship group, that is best done by hanging out, kicking back and enjoying each other’s company.
In all of this I am not advocating giving up on gardening, but shifting the perspective on what needs doing. If the dandelion, dock or bramble isn’t in the way, leave it. If the plant goes down in an orgy of aphids, leave it for some other garden being to clear up. Let plants die in place, learn to watch and observe before you make a move. You’ll see that nature is way more willing to help than cause trouble. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/10/ditch-your-spade-forget-fertiliser-listen-to-the-weeds-alys-fowlers-guide-to-laid-back-gardening?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
*
THE JESUS EPIC AS PART OF THE HELLENISTIC CULTURE; THE “TRANSLATION” [RESURRECTION] FABLES
(review of Dr. Richard C. Miller’s Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity)
If you've ever interacted with any number of atheists online, there is a vocal contingent of them that spread a meme pointing out a number of identical events in the lives of Horus and Jesus. For example, according to the meme, Horus was born of a virgin and he was also born on December 25th. He was visited by Three Wise Men, and baptized. Likewise, he had 12 Disciples, walked on water, was "transfigured" on a mount, and was resurrected, etc.
In response, Christians do something extremely logical and straightforward (or even just other atheists who aren't as hoodwinked by conspiracy theories): they simply ask for the original quotes in the original Egyptian documents of these amazing parallels with Jesus. Of course, the quotes are never forthcoming because it is all made-up, and it illustrates that atheists are just as likely to be misled by false information as religious believes who don't research facts for themselves.
A slightly different, but very similar, phenomenon is on display when parallels between Romulus and Jesus are pointed out. Here at least there is peer-reviewed scholarship to rely upon—Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables In Classical Antiquity, by Richard C. Miller—that is published by a reputable academic journal—The Journal of Biblical Literature 129, no. 4 (2010): 759-776, Reading this article is how I personally became aware of Richard C. Miller and his scholarship.
According to Miller, there are no less than 20 separate parallels between Romulus and Jesus, including any number of the most prominent details in their respective lives, and this book—Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity—is a book-length fleshing-out of the original article seeking to make this case, although applied to many more Hellenistic figures than just Romulus. When brought to the attention of Christians, however, just as with Horus, they balk at accepting that there is any similarity between a number of them—and the reason they give is most interesting.
According to them, since the parallels are not absolutely identical in every respect, the parallels are not valid. That is (of course, in an ad hoc fashion—without any research), they argue that, in order for there to have been any mimetic copying going on, or direct influence from a common stock of ancient Hellenistic literary tropes applied to Jesus, the authors of the Gospels would have needed to have fashioned the life of Jesus in a strictly identical fashion to that of other ancient demigods such as Romulus. Since they didn't do this, there was no borrowing going on. The question is: does this assumption of the needed exactness of the borrowing stand up to scrutiny?
According to Miller, no. To quote his direct words: "One thus accurately adduces such instances of the syncretic language in early Christian theology as indicating a Christian adaptation of antique Greco-Roman forms. Could any fresh, third-party observer not immediately perceive the pattern: a Judeo-Christian version of Zeus-Jupiter, with his own storied demigod son born of a mortal woman?”
Miller goes on to argue that, although each individual instance of a heroic demigod or storied human translated to heaven had differing characteristics and varying sub-themes, the ancient Hellenistic audience would have understood the commonalities as all drawing upon a common wellspring of mythological literary tropes—and so the composers of these fables would have known what they were doing in their production of them as well.
Again, to quote his exact words, he states: "What precisely were the signature traits of the convention, and what meaning did such biographical endings impress upon their ancient readers? While the convention displayed a seemingly endless multifarity of manifestations with several linguistic permutations (signifiers) in subthemes and cultural-literary adaptations, the basic import (signified) of the 'translation fable' trope manifested a durable consistency over a thousand-year period in the ancient Hellenized world of cultural instantiation. This stability, as such, reflects the customary and ritualized use of the convention within a common semiotic grammar of Hellenistic language in antiquity…. The gallery of translation fables, therefore, not surprisingly, possesses no common, explicit thread, characteristic, or requisite set of features. Rather, one observes a cluster of various recurring formal traits or signals" (Section 2.2).
Miller then sets out 15 separate "Translation Subthemes", including a vanished/missing body, and postmortem translation. Personally, the most interesting to me is "heinous or ignoble injustice rectified by translation"—if only because I have spent the better part of my life listening to Christians say that the only way the Gospel authors would have written about a crucified savior is because it really happened. They would never have made up something so dishonorable, and so by the Criterion of Embarrassment, it is far more likely to be historically true than false.
Except now, in the "Gallery" of examples analyzed by Miller, this is a prominent subtheme—and no one bases their lives upon any of the other mythological characters translated to heaven after an injustice. To be clear, in the other cases, the "injustices" were not absolutely identical as in the case of Jesus—namely, crucifixion by the Romans—but that doesn't mean the ancients wouldn't have immediately perceived it to be another in a long line of mythological parallels–and it is long indeed. The Gallery analyzed by Miller consists of an overview of—by my count—77 separate ancient Hellenistic translation fables of both historical personages and non-historical invented characters.
Likewise, according to Miller, there was a prominent "eyewitness" tradition in many of the other cases of either emperors or generals or heroic characters translated to heaven. In fact, under Imperial Rome, the eyewitness was a crucial part of the convention of deifying emperors—so even the claims of the Christians to have "eyewitnesses" (that are not on display in either Paul or the earliest Gospel—Mark) were not unique, but rather only conforming to the general pattern of such literary tropes.
Through a detailed linguistic and literary analysis, Miller thus argues that the inclusion of so many subthemes of a general convention of translation "implied the mode of fable" rather than history (Section 2.4). Thus, drawing upon an already existing set of literary conventions for aggrandizing heroic figures, the Gospels are only the "romanticized, mythic…literary-rhetorical vehicle of the earliest Christian movement(s)" (Section 3.1) that had precious little to do with the actual historical Jesus.
Miller provides a grand summary of the implications, including a condemnation of vast swaths of scholarship that seek to somehow remove Jesus from his ancient Mediterranean context and set up brackets around him to say that he and his movement were a strictly Jewish phenomenon (including also the very idea of there being "Biblical Greek"—as though it alone were sui generis and partitioned off from the larger Greek dialects of the ancient world). I myself have been influenced by (or victimized by) this widespread scholarly point of view, as when I was in college, I took a class named "Jesus the Jew", the main thrust of which was to seek to cast Jesus and his followers as the product of an exclusively Jewish milieu.
It's amazing that it took this long, but this book by Richard C. Miller admirably corrects this mistaken view. Miller also provides an overview of a strain of evangelical scholarship that (risibly, in light of Miller's analysis) seeks to somehow claim that the shorter ending of Mark—where the body was implied to be missing or vanished—is really a truncated form of the longer version that was preserved in Matthew.
The reality is that the fact that the body was missing was precisely what would have clued the ancient reader in to the fact that it had been translated, since a body that was still visible and hanging around would have been a major impediment toward supposing it had been translated to heaven. And likewise, far from being an attempt at history, the stories that arose in the later Gospels of the New Testament concerning what happened to the body of Jesus after it went missing were merely composed in order to guide the intuitions of ancient readers into making the proper judgments about its ultimate translated fate. He ate fish, so he couldn't be a revenant ghost, he wasn't merely still alive since he could teleport through walls, etc.
It should be noted that Miller ultimately concludes that Jesus was a historical character, although he has been so thoroughly mythologized that we don't see much of him in the Gospels. Also, although himself a historicist, Miller praises mythicists for properly classifying the New Testament portrait of Jesus as one that was not even meant to be historical.
Placed in the proper perspective, the comparisons between other translation fables and the Gospels are valid, and they are extensive. The question is: if this analysis is so straightforward, why hasn't this been done before? Miller himself provides the answer by cautioning that the Gospels are one of the main foundations of what became Western Civilization and so they are formidably resistant to deconstruction. ~ Simon Albright, Amazon
From another review:
~ The gospels were written in Greek, which is a tipoff that the authors were educated and knew their Greek literature. When the gospels are studied with this background in mind, we can see what was going on. Richard C. Miller, in his book, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity, takes us on that adventure.
Skeptical Christians may naively wonder about the Ascension story, “Did that really happen?” but Miller invites readers to see where the story came from. Yes, it was penned by the gospel writers (see Acts 1 especially), and didn’t they rely on eyewitness accounts? But the better question to ask is, “What was the genre of fable that the authors drew upon?” Fable is not too harsh, because we know that Jesus didn’t float away. Miller helps us grasp what we’re dealing with.
There Was a Lot of Literary Precedent for the Jesus Epic
A substantial portion of his book is Chapter 2, “Translation Fables in Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity” (pp. 27 to 82). In this context translation means the transfer of famous (commonly deified) persons to heavenly realms: Famous people got the translation treatment.
“The translation fable as a stock epilogical decoration, therefore, developed as an elevated form of hero fabulation embroidering the exalted biography. The culture understood the embellishment as the loftiest protocol in the nomination and canonization of antiquity’s most celebrated iconic figures” (pp. 36-37). And, let it be noted, when the fables included the exaltation of the emperor, it was the custom to provide “eyewitness to the emperor’s ascension to heaven…” (p. 38).
In Chapter 2 Miller presents an impressive Gallery of 77 translation fables, citing the literary sources where they can be found. These fables vary in content and details, but we gain an appreciation of the literary genre that influenced early Christian writers as they created their accounts of what happened to Jesus.
The Romulus fable that Miller describes includes elements we recognize from the Bible:
“The legendary founding king of Rome, while mustering troops on Campus Martius, was caught up to heaven when the clouds suddenly descended and enveloped him. When the clouds had departed, he was seen no more. In the fearsome spectacle, most of his troops fled, but the remaining nobles instructed the people that Romulus had been translated to the gods.
An alternate account arose that perhaps the nobles had slain the king and invented the tale to cover up their treachery. Later, however, Julius Proculus stepped forward to testify before all the people that he had been eyewitness to the translated Romulus, having met him traveling on the Via Appia. Romulus, according to the tale, offered his nation a final great commission and again vanished” (p. 63).
In his substantial Chapter 3, “Critical Method and the Gospels,” Miller deals with the cultural and political realities that lay behind the gospel narratives and that worked against any concern with actual history:
“Volumes by numerous well-intentioned historians have dealt considerable violence to the Gospel texts, pressing and interrogating them in the hope that an authentic historical Jesus would somehow step forward and present himself” (p. 94).
“...the societies behind the early earliest Christian literary traditions appear strangely uninterested in the authentic historical person, Jesus (e.g. , consider Paul’s lack of quotation of or reference to the mundane figure and the absence of historical argumentation throughout the Gospel narratives.)” (p. 94).
There has been curiosity about the authors of the gospels, but, Miller notes: “This interest in the Gospels’ authors as the presumed loci of textual meaning, however, proves all the more useless when the best academic attempts at identifying such authors have proven futile. One simply does not know wrote them” (p. 96).
He speaks as well of how gospel studies have suffered precisely because the texts are assumed to be “sacred”— and thus, so it is assumed, aren’t tainted by association with other ancient literature; thereby “…relegating supreme interpretive powers into the hands of elite theological institutions, thus ensuring and governing the hegemony of Western ecclesiastical power” (p. 99).
A major clue as to what we’re dealing with, in the broad field of Jesus studies, can be found in one of Miller’s footnotes, Number 82, on page 145. He quotes from Burton Mack’s book, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy.
“…we need to start over with the quest for Christian origins. And the place to start is with the observation that the New Testament texts are not only inadequate for a Jesus quest, they are data for an entirely different phenomenon. They are not the mistaken and embellished memories of the historical person, but the myths of origin imagined by early Christians seriously engaged in their social experiments. They are data for early Christian myth making.”
“...the societies behind the early earliest Christian literary traditions appear strangely uninterested in the authentic historical person, Jesus (e.g. , consider Paul’s lack of quotation of or reference to the mundane figure and the absence of historical argumentation throughout the Gospel narratives.)” (p. 94).
And, for those who nurture hopes that Jesus studies will someday hit pay dirt:
“To read these texts only in the interest of the quest to know the historical Jesus has been to misread them, misuse them. They simply do not contain the secrets of the historical Jesus for which scholars have been searching. Early Christians were not interested in the historical Jesus. They were interested in something else. So the question is whether that something else can be identified.”
What Are Heroes Made of?
Miller cites the important work of Lord Raglan, published in 1936, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama: “[He] succeeded in identifying a recurring pattern in ‘hero’ narratives across times in civilizations, in this case not merely limited to distinctive ‘birth narrative’ motifs. In this significant work, Raglan set out a cluster of twenty-two features that constitute the ‘hero’ pattern…” (p. 104). Raglan proposed a long list of heroic figures who qualified, and Miller points out that another folklorist, Alan Dundes, added Jesus to the list. Jesus has a pretty high ranking, i.e., seventeen of the twenty-two features. The gospel writers were following literary precedent.
“Should one wonder that cultures universally produce superhuman projections, avatar figures who transcend the most severe and grievous limitations of the human conditions? Should one become astonished that the principal, defining features of such mythopoetic biographies contain superhuman birth and death/ translation narratives as grand, framing bookends, despite the cultures whence these arise?” (p. 106)
On pp. 108-109 Miller includes a list of more than sixty kings, queens and other heroes who had gods as fathers, with mortal women as mothers. We can see that, indeed, there is a rich tapestry of fable that provides the background for the gospels: “This same measure of complexity came to characterize the heterogeneity of the Gospel traditions, distinctly Christian amalgams of Hellenistic, Roman, Oriental, and specifically early Jewish cultural forms” (p. 119).
And here’s something we can file under Most Unnoticed Facts about the birth narrative in Matthew. Scholars have long conceded that Matthew and Luke invented the Jesus birth stories, but Miller points out (see pp. 122-129) that Matthew was imitating tales of Alexander the Great. The latter “…provided precedence for Matthew’s account, offering an additional cue for the reader, casting the protagonist as Alexander’s mimetic successor. Matthew’s Parthian sorcerers [i.e., The Wise Men], moreover, helped to expand the religio-cultural appeal of the praise-sung hero, thus reflecting the broadening program of Matthew’s community in the Levant” (p. 126).
Indeed, in Miller’s analysis of the gospels, we find this candid assessment:
“…the panoply of early Christian gospel texts appear more or less uninterested in conforming to any particular narrative of Christian origins and instead exhibit an all-but-whimsical freedom, an astonishing prose creativity in depiction and variance in the telling and ordering of scenes.”
A chapter in my own book is titled, “The Gospels Fail as History,” and this assertion is backed up by Miller’s conclusion—stated with eloquence—in common with so many Bible scholars. This is the bottom line, folks:
The gospels “…exclude the requisite signals distinguishing ancient works of historiography, that is, no visible weighing of sources, no apology for the all-too-common occurrence of the supernatural, no endeavor to distinguish such accounts and conventions from analogous fictive narratives in classical literature (including the frequent mimetic use of Homer, Euripides, and other canonized fictions of classical antiquity), no transparent sense of authorship (or even readership) or origin, the ecclesiastical distinction endeavored by Irenaeus of Lyons et alli to segregate and signify some such works as canonical, reliable histories appears wholly political and arbitrary” (p. 133).
Indeed, the canon is such a jumble because the process of selection of books was “wholly political and arbitrary”—and no amount of posturing about “guidance by the holy spirit” can disguise that fact.
One of the highlights of Miller’s Chapter 4, “Translation Fables and the Gospels” (150-184) is his discussion of the “abrupt” ending of Mark that prompted later writers to add more. But maybe Mark’s ending is exactly what the original author intended. “…the most primitive account, Mark, provided in one powerful, singular gesture, namely, a missing body, an unmistakable semiotic conclusion to the narrative: Jesus had vanished; his body had been translated” (p. 165).
Miller cites a Greek novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe: “Here, Chaereas arrives at his beloved Callirhoe’s tomb at dawn, only to discover the tomb to be empty. With florid elaboration, Chaereas quite unpretentiously interprets the missing body of his recently interred bride to mean that she had been translated to become a goddess” (p. 165).
Miller’s commitment to fair analysis of the ancient texts and contexts leaves him with little patience for amateur atheist sneering at ancient myths or evangelical adulation of the stories:
“Belief bias has all too often perverted prior comparative studies between Jesus, the most sacralized figure of Western cultural history, and various images or patterns drawn from ancient society. The deluding will to believe (or to disbelieve) has characterized perhaps most treatments of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, resulting in a malignant conflict of interest, that is, projects unduly driven by confirmation bias. Atheistic treatments have often suffered from…whimsical, often contrived associations produced by those (and for those) who seem bent on dismissing such accounts as mere banal product of ancient cultures” (p. 161).
But resurrection remains in the realm of myth—and the application of translation to Jesus could have been something of a surprise for the original readers:
“The shock of the Gospels must not then have been the presence of this standard literary trope, but the adaptation of such supreme cultural exultation to an indigent Jewish peasant, an individual otherwise marginal and obscure on the grand stage of classical antiquity” (p. 181).
Moreover, even their original readers assumed that the stories were honorific, not historical:
“…the earliest Christians comprehended the resurrection narratives of the New Testament as instances within a larger conventional rubric commonly recognized as fictive in modality. Most modern treatments have mistakenly assumed that these texts alleged to have provided a credible, albeit extraordinary account of an historic miracle…” (p. 181).
“By quarantining the New Testament resurrection stories from ancient cultural analogues, the faith-driven presentation tendentiously has sought to allow for a different, non-mythic modality, thus rendering the tale as though historically plausible.”
According to Miller, there are no less than 20 separate parallels between Romulus and Jesus, including any number of the most prominent details in their respective lives, and this book—Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity—is a book-length fleshing-out of the original article seeking to make this case, although applied to many more Hellenistic figures than just Romulus. When brought to the attention of Christians, however, just as with Horus, they balk at accepting that there is any similarity between a number of them—and the reason they give is most interesting.
According to them, since the parallels are not absolutely identical in every respect, the parallels are not valid. That is (of course, in an ad hoc fashion—without any research), they argue that, in order for there to have been any mimetic copying going on, or direct influence from a common stock of ancient Hellenistic literary tropes applied to Jesus, the authors of the Gospels would have needed to have fashioned the life of Jesus in a strictly identical fashion to that of other ancient demigods such as Romulus. Since they didn't do this, there was no borrowing going on. The question is: does this assumption of the needed exactness of the borrowing stand up to scrutiny?
According to Miller, no. To quote his direct words: "One thus accurately adduces such instances of the syncretic language in early Christian theology as indicating a Christian adaptation of antique Greco-Roman forms. Could any fresh, third-party observer not immediately perceive the pattern: a Judeo-Christian version of Zeus-Jupiter, with his own storied demigod son born of a mortal woman?" (Section 1.3; I'll give quotations in sections since I bought the Kindle version and I don't have the page numbers)
Miller goes on to argue that, although each individual instance of a heroic demigod or storied human translated to heaven had differing characteristics and varying sub-themes, the ancient Hellenistic audience would have understood the commonalities as all drawing upon a common wellspring of mythological literary tropes—and so the composers of these fables would have known what they were doing in their production of them as well. Again, to quote his exact words, he states: "What precisely were the signature traits of the convention, and what meaning did such biographical endings impress upon their ancient readers?
Miller then sets out 15 separate "Translation Subthemes", including a vanished/missing body, and postmortem translation. Personally, the most interesting to me is "heinous or ignoble injustice rectified by translation"—if only because I have spent the better part of my life listening to Christians say that the only way the Gospel authors would have written about a crucified savior is because it really happened. They would never have made up something so dishonorable, and so by the Criterion of Embarrassment, it is far more likely to be historically true than false.
Except now, in the "Gallery" of examples analyzed by Miller, this is a prominent subtheme—and no one bases their lives upon any of the other mythological characters translated to heaven after an injustice. To be clear, in the other cases, the "injustices" were not absolutely identical as in the case of Jesus—namely, crucifixion by the Romans—but that doesn't mean the ancients wouldn't have immediately perceived it to be another in a long line of mythological parallels–and it is long indeed. The Gallery analyzed by Miller consists of an overview of—by my count—77 separate ancient Hellenistic translation fables of both historical personages and non-historical invented characters.
Likewise, according to Miller, there was a prominent "eyewitness" tradition in many of the other cases of either emperors or generals or heroic characters translated to heaven. In fact, under Imperial Rome, the eyewitness was a crucial part of the convention of deifying emperors—so even the claims of the Christians to have "eyewitnesses" (that are not on display in either Paul or the earliest Gospel—Mark) were not unique, but rather only conforming to the general pattern of such literary tropes.
Through a detailed linguistic and literary analysis, Miller thus argues that the inclusion of so many subthemes of a general convention of translation "implied the mode of fable" rather than history (Section 2.4). Thus, drawing upon an already existing set of literary conventions for aggrandizing heroic figures, the Gospels are only the "romanticized, mythic…literary-rhetorical vehicle of the earliest Christian movement(s)" (Section 3.1) that had precious little to do with the actual historical Jesus.
Miller provides a grand summary of the implications, including a condemnation of vast swaths of scholarship that seek to somehow remove Jesus from his ancient Mediterranean context and set up brackets around him to say that he and his movement were a strictly Jewish phenomenon (including also the very idea of there being "Biblical Greek"—as though it alone were sui generis and partitioned off from the larger Greek dialects of the ancient world). I myself have been influenced by (or victimized by) this widespread scholarly point of view, as when I was in college, I took a class named "Jesus the Jew", the main thrust of which was to seek to cast Jesus and his followers as the product of an exclusively Jewish milieu.
It's amazing that it took this long, but this book by Richard C. Miller admirably corrects this mistaken view. Miller also provides an overview of a strain of evangelical scholarship that (risibly, in light of Miller's analysis) seeks to somehow claim that the shorter ending of Mark—where the body was implied to be missing or vanished—is really a truncated form of the longer version that was preserved in Matthew.
The reality is that the fact that the body was missing was precisely what would have clued the ancient reader in to the fact that it had been translated, since a body that was still visible and hanging around would have been a major impediment toward supposing it had been translated to heaven. And likewise, far from being an attempt at history, the stories that arose in the later Gospels of the New Testament concerning what happened to the body of Jesus after it went missing were merely composed in order to guide the intuitions of ancient readers into making the proper judgments about its ultimate translated fate. He ate fish, so he couldn't be a revenant ghost, he wasn't merely still alive since he could teleport through walls, etc.
It should be noted that Miller ultimately concludes that Jesus was a historical character, although he has been so thoroughly mythologized that we don't see much of him in the Gospels. Also, although himself a historicist, Miller praises mythicists for properly classifying the New Testament portrait of Jesus as one that was not even meant to be historical. ~ David Mason, Amazon (abbreviated)
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Miller shows how contemporaneous readers would have understood how "the resurrection" functioned in the wider context of Hellenistic culture. Spoiler: not as an historical event, but as a way to honor one's heroes. Unpacked, the resurrection narrative included missing bodies, appearances of the deceased on random roads (Damascus!), and the magical ability to appear & reappear. Sound familiar?
The honorific award of resurrection and all the ancillary elements of it was at its core (gasp!) pagan. Miller writes, "the early Christians exalted the founder of their movement through the standard literary protocols of their day, namely through the fictive, narrative embellishment of divine translation." Standard. Literary. Protocols. The historical record marshaled by Miller definitively shows exactly that. An incredible work, Miller rightly observes that his book has dispensed with the tired arguments between faith-based claims of historicity for the resurrection and those atheist claims of trickery. It's not about proving the event took place, but how such events were used to honor heroes of Hellenistic, and yes, Christian culture. ~ Zeke Piestrup, Amazon
Oriana:
First, let me insert him a link to a fascinating youtube in which Dr. Miller describes his journey away from fundamentalist Christianity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y_voqOVCsE
That done, let me share my excitement about Dr. Miller. I too left the church after becoming acquainted with Greco-Roman myths. I was liberated by a single thought about Christianity: "It's just another mythology." Other people who talked and/or wrote about their departure from faith cited the problem of evil. Since I always saw god as evil (being raised by an Auschwitz survivor may have had something to do with it), the argument "whence evil" didn't interest me. What interested me was the similarities between various mythologies, the common patterns. Now Dr. Miller comes across as a kindred mind.
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GRAY HAIR IN MEN MAY PREDICT HEART DISEASE
~ For this study, researchers conducted a survey with 545 adult men in the age bracket of 42 to 64 years. The study participants were divided in three groups based on the volume of grey hair: Pure black hair, pure white and gray. The survey revealed that 80 per cent of them presented with signs of cardiac ailments and all of them had high volumes of white hair.
Graying hair signals natural aging and unhealthy aging as well. Be it natural or unhealthy, aging entails cellular degradation, systemic inflammation, hormonal changes, and impaired DNA function. That is why, any form of aging can probably increase your vulnerability to heart diseases, scientists observe. However, further research is required to establish the association between gray hair and heart risks.
Chest pain is the most common sign of a cardiac ailment. However, there are very many surprising ways your body signals that your heart isn't in a good shape. Unfortunately, we are unaware of most of them. While it is important to watch out for the well-established signals of cardiac issues, it won't be wise to ignore the lesser known, unexpected ones.
Snoring
This is the symptom of a sleep-related issue known as sleep apnea characterized by a pause in natural breathing. This condition triggers certain physiological changes that result in high blood pressure, poor blood flow and stress on the heart.
Muscle Cramps
If you experience this frequently, it could mean that there is a plaque build-up in the arteries of your legs. In that case your heart won't be able to pump oxygen-rich blood efficiently to various parts of the body.
Dark Spots under Your Nails
An injured finger can lead to blood or bruising under your nails. However, if there are unexplained spots under your nails, you shouldn't ignore it. A growing body of research suggests that if your nails lose color or turn blue or purple, it be a sign of congenital heart disease.
Numb or Cold Limbs
Pain, paleness and numbness in your legs can stem from poor blood circulation, which trigger the formation of a clot. Impaired blood circulation, on the other hand, can be the sign of clogged and narrowed arteries, major risk factors for your heart health.
Blue Skin
Your skin turns blue despite being warm only if the oxygen level of your blood is depleted. This condition can lead to blockage of blood vessels, and increase your chance of cardiovascular ailments.
Erectile Dysfunction
A research featured in the Journal of the American Medical Association
observes that erectile dysfunction can be the signal of cardiovascular
diseases in men. In fact, many studies have claimed that it can be the
precursor of heart diseases. This is because, one of the main reasons
behind this sexual health condition is plaque build-up in the arteries, a
condition that escalates your chance of heart attack. Erectile
dysfunction, can, in fact, be one of the initial manifestations of this
arterial disorder.
https://www.thehealthsite.com/diseases-conditions/grey-hair-could-be-the-sign-of-a-troubled-heart-surprising-body-cues-to-watch-out-for-764278/
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INDIVIDUALS HAVE AN “AGEOTYPE” THAT’S SPECIFIC TO ONE ORGAN SYSTEM
~ One 50-year-old has the nimble metabolism of a teenager, while another’s is so creaky he develops type 2 diabetes—though his immune system is that of a man 25 years his junior. Or one 70-year-old has the immune system of a Gen Xer while another’s is so decrepit she can’t gin up an antibody response to flu vaccines—but her high-performing liver clears out alcohol so fast she can sip Negronis all night without getting tipsy.
Anyone over 30 knows that aging afflicts different body parts to different degrees. Yet most molecular theories of aging—telomere shortening, epigenome dysregulation, senescence-associated secreted proteins, take your pick—don’t distinguish among physiological systems and organs, instead viewing aging as systemic.
Nonsense, say scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine. In a study published on Monday in Nature Medicine, they conclude that just as people have an individual genotype, so too do they have an “ageotype,” a combination of molecular and other changes that are specific to one physiological system. These changes can be measured when the individual is healthy and relatively young, the researchers report, perhaps helping physicians to pinpoint the most important thing to target to extend healthy life.
“This really presents a new framework to think about aging,” said epidemiologist Norrina Bai Allen of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, an expert in the biology of aging who was not involved in the Stanford study. “It’s an important first step toward showing how different parts of a body in different people can age at different rates.”
Call it personalized medicine for aging. “Individuals are aging at different rates as well as potentially through different biological mechanisms,” or ageotypes, the Stanford scientists wrote.
“Of course the whole body ages,” said biologist Michael Snyder, who led the study. “But in a given individual, some systems age faster or slower than others. One person is a cardio-ager, another is a metabolic ager, another is an immune ager,” as shown by changes over time in nearly 100 key molecules that play a role in those systems. “There is quite a bit of difference in how individuals experience aging on a molecular level.”
Crucially, the molecular markers of aging do not necessarily cause clinical symptoms. The study’s “immune agers” had no immune dysfunction; “liver agers” did not have liver disease. Everyone was basically healthy.
If aging is truly personal, understanding an individual’s ageotype could lead to individualized, targeted intervention. “We think [ageotypes] can show what’s going off track the most so you can focus on that if you want to affect your aging,” Snyder said.
Cardio-agers, for instance, might benefit from tight cholesterol control, periodic EEGs, and screening for atrial fibrillation. Immune agers might benefit from diets and exercise to reduce inflammation.
Then again, they might not. The study did not follow people long enough to tell whether their aging biomarkers did them any harm, or were even harbingers of harm, let alone killed them, Feinberg’s Allen pointed out. “There needs to be a lot more work, and replication of the results,” before they can be the basis for anti-aging interventions, she said.
The short follow-up and small sample size—106 people—gave other experts pause. One said he “will not comment on it in any way” and declined to elaborate.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peoples-body-systems-age-at-different-rates/
Oriana:
All of us could benefit from lowering inflammation, not just the "immune agers." All of us would benefit from eating less and exercising more, not just the "cardio agers." Theoretically it's interesting to ponder how some people are more susceptible to cancer while others tend to have a heart attack or stroke — it's just a matter of time. The underlying mechanism of aging may differ in some respects from one person to another, but what we need most of all is more understanding of the biology of aging.
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THERE ARE AT LEAST FOUR “AGEOTYPES”
~ In the study, the researchers tracked 43 healthy adults over a two-year period, analyzing blood and other biological samples along the way to look for a variety of molecular changes.
"People are aging at different rates, but what's equally or even more important is where you see they're aging differently," said study author Michael Snyder, a professor and the chair of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
That is, where in the body is the aging process most active? They found people tend to fall into one of four biological aging pathways, or ageotypes: immune, kidney, liver or metabolic.
Snyder said that metabolic agers, for example, may be at a higher risk for type 2 diabetes as they grow older. Immune agers may generate more inflammation, and therefore be at higher risk for immune-related disease. It could be that liver and kidney ageotypes may be more prone to liver or kidney diseases, respectively. There are likely other pathways, such as cardio agers who may be more prone to heart attacks, for example, but this study was limited to four main aging pathways.
Some study participants fit multiple ageotypes, while others were found to be aging in all four categories.
"As people get older, they start to be very concerned about aging," Snyder told NBC News. In theory, if people are able to learn their personalized ageotype, as well as the rate of their aging process, they might actively work to have an impact on it.
Wu, from UC Riverside, agreed. "It will be important to further probe how lifestyle factors may or may not interact with individual biological patterns in aging to develop more effective, tailored aging interventions across adulthood.”
"Imagine you see your [aging] slope going up a lot faster than the average group of people," Snyder said. "Maybe that's a kick in the pants for you to exercise more, to take the stairs more and the elevators less." Or, perhaps, a person whose ageotype suggests rapid aging in the circulatory system might get extra imaging to look for calcium build-up in arteries.
But would such ageotype interventions translate into less disease and fewer early deaths? The science isn't far enough along to show real-life impacts.
"That's the missing link," Snyder said. However, a few study participants were able to decrease or slow aging markers, at least temporarily, when they made lifestyle changes. It's unclear what effects that could have in the long term. Other fortunate participants showed a slower-than-average aging rate throughout the study period, though researchers aren't yet able to understand what sets those people apart from others.
Technically, people all start aging before they're even born; every stage of development is part of the process. And many factors play roles, including genetics and the environment.
But the research adds to the growing body of science behind not only how we age, but also why, and potential methods of intervention.
Clinical trials aimed at targeting fundamental aging processes involved in age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's, are already underway.
"There are drugs and various kinds of dietary interventions and lifestyle interventions through which it may be possible to modulate some of these aging processes," said Dr. James Kirkland, a gerontologist and head of the Kogod Center on Aging at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
"But in order to apply those correctly," he said, "we have to know which people to apply which drugs or which dietary interventions in order to get the most bang for the buck." Kirkland was not involved with this latest study.
"It's fine to know you're going to get a problem based on blood tests, but you've got to be able to do something about it," Kirkland added.
To be sure, there are already proven ways to reduce the risk for disease and disability: not smoking, losing extra weight, getting plenty of exercise, and a healthy diet rich in vegetables and fruit.
But, very few people accomplish all of those goals. Snyder suspects people may be more likely to make necessary lifestyle adjustments if they're tailored to their personalized ageotype.
"I think the information could help," he said. "It would give people motivation when they see their own increased risks.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/there-are-least-4-different-ways-aging-scientists-say-n1112796
Oriana:
Serious build-up of calcium in the arteries? You need exercise and a lot of Vitamin K2. No, just eating spinach will not resolve this — though I don’t mean to discourage anyone from eating spinach and other leafy greens, a fantastic powerhouse of nutrients.
The idea of ageotypes is interesting, but let's see if we hear about it a few years from now.
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MAXIMUM HUMAN LIFESPAN LIMIT: 150 YEARS
~ A new study led by biotech company Gero predicts the body can only recover from stressful events for a maximum of 150 years, putting a hard limit on the human lifespan.
But it’s not all bad news: researchers believe we may be able to break through that limit.
Why it matters: Researchers across the globe are on the hunt for the proverbial fountain of youth, some way to slow or even stop aging, which would give people the opportunity to live for decades or even centuries longer than the current average.
If this new study is right, none of these efforts will be able to extend the human lifespan past 150, no matter how effective their fecal transplants and blood transfusions might be.
“If you do not target the loss of resilience, any medical intervention will fail,” the researchers argue in the study.
Charting resilience: For the study, researchers analyzed blood samples from more than 500,000 people and daily step count data from about 4,500 others.
They were specifically looking at how long it took blood cell and daily step counts to return to normal levels after a person experienced some kind of stressor, such as an illness or injury.
They found that the average healthy 40-year-old could bounce back after 2 weeks, but 80-year-olds needed six weeks on average. Even the healthiest people experienced a loss of resilience as they aged.
Max human lifespan: Based on this trend, the researchers predict a complete loss of resilience between the ages of 120 and 150 — meaning, they suggest, that no one would be able to live longer.
The cold water: The study does have its limitations, the most notable being that humans [or proto-humans] have been around for millions of years, and the data is all drawn from people living right now.
If the researchers had studied past humans — who had a much shorter average lifespan — would they have found that they, too, had an aging limit of 150? Or is that just the limit for people today, who benefit from modern medicine, less dangerous work, and a steadier food supply?
The Gero researchers seem to think the fact that maximum human lifespan isn’t increasing at the same rate as the average lifespan indicates something inherent in our biology is at play.
“The predicted loss of resilience even in the healthiest, most successfully aging individuals, might explain why we do not see an evidential increase of the maximum lifespan, while the average lifespan was steadily growing during the past decades,” the company wrote in a press release.
Looking ahead: So far, all the researchers have done is identify something holding back efforts to increase the human lifespan — a seemingly inevitable loss of resilience — but identifying a problem is the first step to solving it.
Gero now plans to study resilience in the hopes of finding ways to extend it, removing the limit on human longevity.
“What are the more nutritional and medical interventions and, eventually, what are the genetic makeup variables that may or may not influence resilience?” Gero co-founder Peter Fedichev told Inverse. “Because that would be the Holy Grail of aging.” ~
https://www.freethink.com/health/human-lifespan?fbclid=IwAR25nstjIUId03e0xYvp6yqUSnfUzZvjAzvOfem8zlfyKbNB_JyWwtK_mjA
Oriana:
One of the thing I tell people who are considering an elective surgery: don't wait until you are 80. It's much easier to recover when younger.
I’d gladly live to be 150 — simply out of curiosity. I’m curious about what’s going to happen in technology, politics (will the Russian Empire survive? will China become a world leader ahead of the U.S.? — or will the demographic collapse make such questions irrelevant?), culture (will religion survive? will marriage? will enough women want to have children?), the arts (will the novel survive? will poems get shorter and shorter?)
And there is the sheer delight in mere existence — and for most of us, the desire to continue to exist rather than a yearning for non-being, even granted that now and then anyone can feel “tired of life.” I still occasionally feel absurd when I consider the routine: brush your teeth, go to bed, in the morning get up again, have tea or coffee and on and on and on . . . Yes, there are at least moments when this feels insufferable.
But considering the alternative . . .
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ending on beauty:
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled.
. . .
But as I did their [people’s] madness so discuss
One whispered thus,
“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,
But for his bride.”
Henry Vaughan, The World
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