.jpg)
Monday, October 27, 2014
Carl Friedrich Lessing
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Hope I Die Before I Get Old
Ezekiel Emmanuel published an essay in the Atlantic last month titled Why I Hope to Die at 75 that has been getting a lot of attention. There isn't anything particularly original in Emmanuel's piece, but that only makes it a better expression of the great America fear of aging. Young Americans don't seem to spend much time worrying about death. Instead, we worry about lingering on as wasted, demented, drooling wrecks, strapped to hospital beds and hoping for a sudden stroke to end it all. A few years ago some of the men I play basketball with noticed a news story about a man who dropped dead on the basketball court at the age of 82, and they all agreed that that was the way to go. Suddenly, after a long life, but at a point when they could still do the things that make them happy. That has become the American model of a good death. Contrast that with what Emmanuel fears:
I imagine that millions of Americans feel as Emmanuel does, and in their 50s make the same sort of plan Emmanuel is making. But a lot fewer of them actually follow through. When they reach the ages that seemed so scary to them at 50, they find reasons to go on. For some this may be simple inertia, or even cowardice. But others may find that old age is just a lot happier and more fun than they feared. After all, aspiring to do less and less has its own joys.
Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.Emmanuel is am ambitious, hyperactive man from a whole family of overachievers, and much of his essay deals with the decline in creativity that sets in after 50 or so. Of course, he says, a few people remain creative into their 80s or even 90s, but we can't all be outliers. One friend of Emmanuel's told him that while he doesn't publish original work like he once did, he is still useful in other ways, especially by mentoring younger scientists. Emmanuel is not impressed:
We accommodate our physical and mental limitations. Our expectations shrink. Aware of our diminishing capacities, we choose ever more restricted activities and projects, to ensure we can fulfill them. Indeed, this constriction happens almost imperceptibly. Over time, and without our conscious choice, we transform our lives. We don’t notice that we are aspiring to and doing less and less. And so we remain content, but the canvas is now tiny.Emmanuel admits that a decline in publishing output is not an issue for most people, but, he says, we all get weaker and sicker as we age. Some doctors have written hopefully about a coming “compression of morbidity.” This is, they think that as we live longer we may also stay healthy longer, so that the trials of old age are compressed into a shorter and shorter period at the end of life. Sadly, that is not happening. Instead, as we live longer we spend more of our lives in a state of decline:
Over the past 50 years, health care hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process.So, says Emmanuel, he plans to stop seeking medical care after about 70 and hope that he dies rather than doing anything in particular to prolong his life.
I imagine that millions of Americans feel as Emmanuel does, and in their 50s make the same sort of plan Emmanuel is making. But a lot fewer of them actually follow through. When they reach the ages that seemed so scary to them at 50, they find reasons to go on. For some this may be simple inertia, or even cowardice. But others may find that old age is just a lot happier and more fun than they feared. After all, aspiring to do less and less has its own joys.
Chinese Export Silver
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Farewell to Great Falls
What the Pencil Writes
Often when I go out I
put in my coat pocket
some paper and a pen-
cil in case I want to
write something down
well there they are
wherever I go and as
my coat moves the pen-
cil writes by itself
a kind of gibberish
hieroglyphic which I
often think as I un-
dress at night & take
out those papers with
nothing written on
them but strange and
meaningless marks is
the story of my life.
--James Laughlin
put in my coat pocket
some paper and a pen-
cil in case I want to
write something down
well there they are
wherever I go and as
my coat moves the pen-
cil writes by itself
a kind of gibberish
hieroglyphic which I
often think as I un-
dress at night & take
out those papers with
nothing written on
them but strange and
meaningless marks is
the story of my life.
--James Laughlin
Eating Fall Color
Indian Nationalism
Nationalism seems to be most dangerous when it mixes intense pride with deep grievance.
Today a new generation of Indian nationalists lurches between victimhood and chauvinism, and with ominous implications. As the country appears to rise (and simultaneously fall), many ambitious members of a greatly expanded and fully global Hindu middle class feel frustrated in their demand for higher status from white Westerners.For anyone who knows the history of the twentieth century, these words indeed have an ominous ring. On the other hand India is a huge, diverse, and notoriously ill-organized place, very different from Germany or Japan. I think the victory of the Hindu parties in the last election had more to do with unemployment and Congress Party corruption than a real turn of the Indian populace toward angry nationalism. So while the Hindus are making life miserable for western scholars who want to publish the truth about India's past, and they may end up stoking more anti-Muslim riots or border clashes with Pakistan, I doubt they will lead India into Fascism or another great war. Whatever the dreams of their ideologues, I just don't think most Indians are willing to be led in that direction.
. . . . the apocalyptic Indian imagination has been enriched by the exploits of Hindu nationalists, such as the destruction in 1992 of the 16th-century Babri Masjid mosque, and the nuclear tests of 1998. Celebrating the tests in speeches in the late 1990s, including one entitled “Ek Aur Mahabharata” (One More Mahabharata), the then head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the National Volunteers Association, or R.S.S), the parent outfit of Hindu nationalists, claimed that Hindus, a “heroic, intelligent race,” had so far lacked proper weapons but were sure to prevail in the forthcoming showdown with demonic anti-Hindus, a broad category that includes Americans (who apparently best exemplify the worldwide “rise of inhumanity”).
A Harvard-trained economist called Subramanian Swamy recently demanded a public bonfire of canonical books by Indian historians — liberal and secular intellectuals who belong to what the R.S.S. chief in 2000 identified as that “class of bastards which tries to implant an alien culture in their land.” Denounced by the numerous Hindu supremacists in social media as “sickular libtards” and sepoys (the common name for Indian soldiers in British armies), these intellectuals apparently are Trojan horses of the West. They must be purged to realize Mr. Modi’s vision in which India, once known as the “golden bird,” will “rise again.”
Friday, October 24, 2014
Like They Were Dating
Out in the field today they were talking about two people we know who worked together and tried to keep their relationship secret from their colleagues. Their colleagues figured it out because, and I quote, "They started fighting like they were dating."
Roads of Ancient Arabia
No Amount of Positive Thinking Will Make You Immortal
When I saw that the Times had published an article titled, "What if Age is Nothing but a Mind-Set?" I thought, that is going to be their most viewed and emailed article all week. Sure enough.
It isn't even a stupid article. It describes the research of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who explores the connections between attitudes and health, and especially between attitudes and the health effects of aging. She has gotten famous for studies like this one:
Which is interesting, and gets at the important truth that how we think and feel (emotionally, that is) have big impacts on our physical health. Everybody knows that rich people live longer than poor people, that successful people live longer than those who perceive themselves as failures, that people who have lost their jobs are much more likely to suffer debilitating back pain than those who are still working. Elderly people with active social lives live years longer than those who feel lonely.
But here's the thing about the 1959 study: it lasted for five days. All of Langer's other studies have also been quite short term. I am perfectly willing to grant that positive thinking (and fun new experiences) can make sick or elderly people feel better for a while. It might even help them feel better for years. And if not, it certainly might help them enjoy their last years a lot more.
Eventually, though, everybody is still going to die. Mentally healthy people with positive attitudes may be less likely to get heart disease and cancer than miserable drug addicts, but very happy people still do get sick. My reaction to this article was, first, an annoyed "there they go again with the living forever thing;" then interest as I learned about Langer's experiments; and then a sort of deeper unease that people will focus too much on Langer's message about optimism and lose sight of much that is random and tragic about human existence. You may be thinking, but what harm can it do for people to feel that their health is under their own control? If optimism helps people be healthy, why not promote optimism? But I think such attitudes are very dangerous. People who really believe that they control their own destinies fall too easily into thinking that others are to blame for their own woes, and many of them become libertarians. When the Affordable Care Act was coming into place I read or heard interview after interview with healthy young people who said, "I'm healthy because I take care of myself and I shouldn't have to subsidize fools who ruin their own health with bad thinking and bad habits."
I think the illusion that we control our own health is as politically dangerous as the belief that we could all be rich if we just worked hard enough. Thinking that sick people and poor people are responsible for their own problems promotes indifference to their fates. Indifference, I think, is bad; what we need is more compassion, always more compassion.
So, by all means, get out, have fun, recapture what was best about your youth. Focus on the positive. But never forget that we live in a fallen world where dangers are everywhere, many of them completely beyond your control.
It isn't even a stupid article. It describes the research of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who explores the connections between attitudes and health, and especially between attitudes and the health effects of aging. She has gotten famous for studies like this one:
One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. . . .After five days in this environment, the men showed improved results on several tests designed to measure debility, and they felt and acted younger.
The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era, but to inhabit it — to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” she told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.
Each day, as they discussed sports (Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain) or “current” events (the first U.S. satellite launch) or dissected the movie they just watched (“Anatomy of a Murder,” with Jimmy Stewart), they spoke about these late-'50s artifacts and events in the present tense — one of Langer’s chief priming strategies. Nothing — no mirrors, no modern-day clothing, no photos except portraits of their much younger selves — spoiled the illusion that they had shaken off 22 years.
Which is interesting, and gets at the important truth that how we think and feel (emotionally, that is) have big impacts on our physical health. Everybody knows that rich people live longer than poor people, that successful people live longer than those who perceive themselves as failures, that people who have lost their jobs are much more likely to suffer debilitating back pain than those who are still working. Elderly people with active social lives live years longer than those who feel lonely.
But here's the thing about the 1959 study: it lasted for five days. All of Langer's other studies have also been quite short term. I am perfectly willing to grant that positive thinking (and fun new experiences) can make sick or elderly people feel better for a while. It might even help them feel better for years. And if not, it certainly might help them enjoy their last years a lot more.
Eventually, though, everybody is still going to die. Mentally healthy people with positive attitudes may be less likely to get heart disease and cancer than miserable drug addicts, but very happy people still do get sick. My reaction to this article was, first, an annoyed "there they go again with the living forever thing;" then interest as I learned about Langer's experiments; and then a sort of deeper unease that people will focus too much on Langer's message about optimism and lose sight of much that is random and tragic about human existence. You may be thinking, but what harm can it do for people to feel that their health is under their own control? If optimism helps people be healthy, why not promote optimism? But I think such attitudes are very dangerous. People who really believe that they control their own destinies fall too easily into thinking that others are to blame for their own woes, and many of them become libertarians. When the Affordable Care Act was coming into place I read or heard interview after interview with healthy young people who said, "I'm healthy because I take care of myself and I shouldn't have to subsidize fools who ruin their own health with bad thinking and bad habits."
I think the illusion that we control our own health is as politically dangerous as the belief that we could all be rich if we just worked hard enough. Thinking that sick people and poor people are responsible for their own problems promotes indifference to their fates. Indifference, I think, is bad; what we need is more compassion, always more compassion.
So, by all means, get out, have fun, recapture what was best about your youth. Focus on the positive. But never forget that we live in a fallen world where dangers are everywhere, many of them completely beyond your control.
The Ceilings of Persian Mosques
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Brian Catlos, Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors
Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad (2014) is a history of interactions between Muslims, Christians and Jews around the Mediterranean between about 1050 and 1200. This is the period when, some historians would say, more relaxed attitudes of earlier centuries hardened into violent religious hatred between the faiths. (Catlos disagrees, of course.) Rather than trying to write a continuous narrative he gives us a series of separate stories, each focusing on a famous episode of conflict or cooperation between members of different faiths. He begins in Spain with two tales of usurpers: Yusuf ibn Naghrilla, a Jewish minister who tried but failed to usurp the throne of a Muslim kingdom, and Rodrigo Diaz, the Cid, a Christian knight who succeeded. To understand how these events came about requires a great deal of background, dozens of pages showing how the Muslim lands came to be divided into several independent kingdoms, how they sometimes fought against Christian kingdoms but sometimes allied with them, how Jews and Muslims interacted, why Muslim kings had Jewish ministers, and so on, all of which I found fascinating. These narratives seem designed to show that things were really far too complicated to be captured by saying that Christians fought Muslims, or that Jews were oppressed. Catlos certainly does make everything seem complicated -- after some passages about byzantine intrigues, betrayals, assassination plots, ambushes, staged reconciliations, and more my head was spinning. Worse, Catlos cannot mention a person without giving his name, or say that something was done without saying who did it, and as a result these narrative sections contain hundreds of unfamiliar names. Which is too bad, because Catlos is a pretty good writer and I suspect he was hoping that his book would be assigned to a lot of undergraduates. I would not do so because most of my students would drown in this ocean of names and never figure out the point of what Catlos is saying.
Palace chapel of the Norman kings, Palermo, Sicily
Catlos then moves on to Sicily under the Norman conquerors, a fascinating epoch of cultural mixing and religious tolerance. He treats in detail the tale of how a Sicilian ruler executed one of his ministers for the crime of being secretly a Muslim, which certainly seems like a sign of rising religious tension. Catlos shows how unusual this event was, and raises plenty of suspicions about the actual motives of all the people involved.
From there Catlos moves to Egypt under the Fatimids, a dynasty of Muslim heretics who kept themselves in power partly by playing every religious and ethnic group in their domain off against the others. Here the problem of names re-emerges, and since I had read hardly anything about this period I had to flip madly back and forth to keep straight who was who. Fatimid Egypt was in Catlos' telling a very cosmopolitan place, with thriving communities of Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Coptic Christians, Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, Sudanese mercenaries, Turkish tribesmen, Jewish merchants, and more:
The peoples of Greater Cairo were conscious of the barriers that separated them from one another, but nonetheless transgressed these barriers continuously. They consciously embraced ethno-religious ambiguity and diversity by intermarrying, socializing, and dabbling in one another's rites and rituals. (196)
The Muslim-Christian divide was only one of the ways in which the people of Egypt defined themselves and the nature of their society. Every person belonged to a range of communities -- religious, local, professional, and kin-based -- and membership in any could result in that person crossing religious lines or ignoring religious affiliations. The Christians and Muslims of Egypt were deeply integrated, and it was only because the politics, ethnicities, communities and religions of Egypt were entangled that mundane rivalries could be presented or imagined as epic religious conflicts. (223)
For all the efforts of historians of the past to present the Crusades as a unified spiritual undertaking in he service of a larger calling, the fact is that Crusaders were no less riven by factional conflicts, personal agendas, and ideological inconsistencies than the people they were fighting. . . . Like Samuel ibn Naghrila, the Cid, Roger II of Sicily, and Bahram Pahlavuni (Armenian Christian minister of Fatimid Egypt), they became creatures of a diverse Mediterranean world, even as they set out to remake it. (243)It is a fascinating period of history, and Catlos' approach is entertaining and enlightening. I would caution, though, that it is not the only possible approach. I don't have any particular problem with the way Catlos presents any of his tales, but other people have told them quite differently. In fact, as Catlos admits on more than one occasion, the sources on which he draws present these tales with much more emphasis on religious conflict. It is certainly possible that the average chronicler, whether a Christian monk or a Muslim religious scholar, cared more about religious purity than the average king or minister in that conniving age. But the slant of those chronicles reminds us that some contemporaries saw the events Catlos narrates as something quite different from sordid palace intrigue. If people habitually interpreted political events in terms of religious conflict, is that not a historical fact in itself, and perhaps one of great importance? After all, we really do not know the details of these events with anything like the certainty that Catlos offers, especially when they concern backstairs intrigues in the courts of paranoid rulers. Maybe Catlos is right, but maybe the monkish writers were closer to the truth than he wants to admit. There are also numerous details that do not really fit Catlos' argument. Catlos does not even mention the finding of the "Holy Lance" during the siege of Antioch, an episode of religious fervor that some Christian chroniclers made out to be the key event of the whole enterprise. In his account of the Cid's constant side-switching Catlos mentions French knights who had come to Spain specifically to fight against Muslims on behalf of Christianity, and if they were not typical they certainly existed. Some people in the eleventh century may have been determined to get along with people of other faiths, or indifferent to the whole question, but plenty of others were belligerent and hostile.
"What can we learn," Catlos asks in his conclusion,
from the history of the Crusaders and mujahidin who fought alongside unbelievers and against their own people? Of the kings and caliphs who staffed their administrations with heretics and infidels? And of the opportunists who cloaked their avarice and ambition in piety? Perhaps what they tell us is that for all its inherent chauvinism, righteousness, and moral certitude, we cannot blame religion for the violence of the past. (324)That I can certainly agree with; after all, the violence between Christians and Muslims was only a tiny part of the violence of the Middle Ages, most of it enacted against neighbors of the same faith. But neither is religious conflict a side issue in history, and it certainly was not to many medieval people. Infidel Kings and Holy Warriors is a very fine book, but it is a book with agendas that go far beyond just trying to understand the past, and the reader should not forget this.
Boar's Head Rhyton
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
DNA from the Hungarian Plain
Interesting:
This is a graphic from the report with most of the confusing data about alleles taken out; it shows the predicted hair and eye color for the individuals studied.
The international team of scientists examined nuclear ancient DNA extracted from thirteen individuals from burials from archaeological sites located in the Great Hungarian Plain, an area known to have been at the crossroads of major cultural transformations that shaped European prehistory. The skeletons sampled date from 5,700 BC (Early Neolithic) to 800 BC (Iron Age).Using this trove of ancient DNA the investigators delved into several different questions. One of those making the news is that Hungarians showed no trace of adult lactose tolerance until the Iron Age, more than 4,000 years after they started dairying. Which is rather odd. Here's an interesting detail:
It took several years of experimentation with different bones of varying density and DNA preservation for the scientists to discover that the inner ear region of the petrous bone in the skull, which is the hardest bone and well protected from damage, is ideal for ancient DNA analysis in humans and any other mammals.
According to Professor Ron Pinhasi from the UCD Earth Institute and UCD School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, the joint senior author on the paper, "the high percentage DNA yield from the petrous bones exceeded those from other bones by up to 183-fold. This gave us anywhere between 12% and almost 90% human DNA in our samples compared to somewhere between 0% and 20% obtained from teeth, fingers and rib bones".
The Neolithic Hungarians are close to Sardinians (this has been replicated in study after study, so it's no longer a surprise when you find Neolithic Europeans that look like Sardinians). What is surprising is that one Neolithic European, designated KO1, is with the hunter-gatherers. . . . you would expect to find some hunter-gatherers in the earliest Neolithic communities in Europe as Europe wasn't empty land when the early farmers showed up. And KO1 appears one of those guys, "caught in the act" of first contact between the two groups.So this KO1 person was genetically a native hunter-gatherer, but he was laid to rest in the cemetery of an intrusive neolithic community. Turncoat! Also:
According to Professor Dan Bradley from the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, co-senior author on the paper, "our results also imply that the great changes in prehistoric technology including the adoption of farming, followed by the first use of the hard metals, bronze and then iron, were each associated with the substantial influx of new people. We can no longer believe these fundamental innovations were simply absorbed by existing populations in a sort of cultural osmosis."This is a tiny sample on which to base such sweeping claims, but we do have lots of other data now. As I have written here many times, the genetic evidence points to major population shifts throughout the past 10,000 years. No genetic study I am aware of supports the sort of very long term continuity that archaeologists insisted on in the 50 years after the Nazis made theories of invasion and conquest seem politically unacceptable.
No Confidence in Anything
A nice summary of the nation's mood:
One of the issues I follow most closely is public confidence in science, which is very shaky. This has something to do with big fights over evolution and climate change, but it is also fed by whipsawing advice about diet and health, contradictory theories about obscure entities like dark matter, decades of false promises about fusion and solar power, and so on. All the incentives are for scientists to trumpet their findings with the biggest available microphone, no matter how dubious, but every time those confident pronouncements are called into question, people's confidence in science is sapped.
Maybe this is all overblown and the numbers will turn around when the economy picks up real steam, but I worry that the decay of confidence in our democracy points in very bad directions.
Polling by Gallup shows that since June 2009, in the heyday of the new Obama presidency, public confidence in virtually every major institution of American life has fallen, including organized religion, the military, the Supreme Court, public schools, newspapers, Congress, television news, the police, the presidency, the medical system, the criminal justice system and small business.And where does that leave us? I suppose an optimist might answer, "nowhere to go but up." But I can't see why things are likely to get better soon, because all of these problems undercut each other. I think most American police forces could use major reforms, and the public is coming around to my view, but who will carry out those reforms when people have even less confidence in politicians and judges than they do in the police? Public disgust with political deadlock feeds angry cynicism, which leads to the election of angry obstructionists like Ted Cruz, which leads to yet more deadlock. I think middle class stagnation and ever increasing inequality are at the root of all of this, but I also think that only dramatic government action has a chance of reversing those trends, and I doubt our divided, cynical country will ever find the nerve for dramatic action.
The only institutions that Gallup tested that showed slight improvement from June 2009 to June 2014 were banks, organized labor, big business and health maintenance organizations. Even so, all four of them had the confidence of just roughly a quarter of the population or less.
One of the issues I follow most closely is public confidence in science, which is very shaky. This has something to do with big fights over evolution and climate change, but it is also fed by whipsawing advice about diet and health, contradictory theories about obscure entities like dark matter, decades of false promises about fusion and solar power, and so on. All the incentives are for scientists to trumpet their findings with the biggest available microphone, no matter how dubious, but every time those confident pronouncements are called into question, people's confidence in science is sapped.
Maybe this is all overblown and the numbers will turn around when the economy picks up real steam, but I worry that the decay of confidence in our democracy points in very bad directions.
Beth Moon
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
