Jane Smiley, "The Greenlanders"

Another entry from my old web site, a review of one of my favorite books:

I have long been fascinated by the Norse sagas. These great works of prose, written in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries, describe the deeds of the Vikings in their heroic age between 800 and 1050 AD. They are full of striking characters, human drama, and historical detail. I would say they are my favorite historical sources; I recommend Egil's Saga as the most accessible work of medieval literature for a student or a casual reader. And yet even I sometimes find the sagas hard to read. They were, after all, written 700 years ago, by people with very different ideas of what a story should be like, and they are strange to our ears. Their style is simple, almost spare, and events sometimes follow one after another without much reflection or explanation. The most famous sagas are those that concern the settlement of Iceland, and in these the authors flaunt their knowledge of genealogy in numbing parades of names and relationships. To read the sagas we must cross through an effort of will the barrier of time, and while that brings rewards of its own, it does not make for easy reading.

The gap between the sagas and the modern reader has now been bridged magnificently by Jane Smiley in The Greenlanders (1988). Smiley is best known as the author of books about contemporary Iowa, but though I enjoyed the first two books of hers I read that did not prepare me for the way I was swept away by this one. I have been completely absorbed in it for two weeks, and I felt great pangs of loss when I finally read to the end and had to close it and put it aside.

Smiley has adopted enough of the Sagas' rough, simple language to convey the feel of reading the originals, yet not so much as to erect any barriers between the modern reader and her story. She makes liberal use of some conventional saga phrasings, such as "People said..." and "It was the case that...." She uses some of the same scenes and literary devices as the saga writers, such as prophetic dreams, and descriptions of what characters see when they look over their own homes. Like the great sagas, her story is structured around a family and their disputes with their enemies. Yet The Greenlanders is a thoroughly modern novel. Smiley's characters have the psychological depth and the complexity of motivation that modern readers expect, and Smiley has a keen eye for the ironies of her story. With her guidance, it takes no effort at all to travel back across the long centuries.

The Greenlanders is the story of a family, the Gunnar's stead folk, and especially of a brother and sister, Gunnar Asgeirson and Margaret Asgeirsdottir. They live in Greenland near the end of the Norse settlement there; they are born in the 1350s, and the book ends not long after 1408, the date of the last written record of the Greenland settlement. Smiley weaves into the story the few events that are known to have taken place in Greenland in that time, and some of the characters have historical names. The lives of Gunnar and Margaret intersect with this historical narrative, but their story is composed mainly of family events: marriages, births, deaths, the loss of a farm field. The drama in the plot comes from a series of struggles over land and honor between neighboring families, and within the folk of Gunnar's Stead. These feuds, though, never really dominate the story, but blend in with the unending series of tragedies that define life in this harsh land: hard winters, epidemic disease, famine, isolation. In less skilled hands these hardships would be grim and depressing, but Smiley makes them seem like life as it must be, as a background against which every victory, even merely to live through the winter, stands out as a luminous wonder.

One thing Smiley adds to the standard saga narrative is the tale of two priests who come to Greenland with the last bishop, leaving behind the cathedrals and universities of Europe for a hard life ministering to the hard people of Greenland. While many of the people in the sagas are Christians, it cannot be said that the sagas' writers paid much attention to the spiritual side of life in their writing. Smiley does full justice to the role of Christianity in medieval life, and she portrays her priests and their struggles of faith with the cold eye of a great novelist. I enjoyed the doings of these priests nearly as much as the main narrative, and I think the add to the extraordinary historicity of The Greenlanders.

Surely of all humanity's experiments, the Norse settlement of Greenland is among the strangest. These Vikings lived as farmers in a land too cold to grow a single grain of barley or rye, or even a cabbage. They depended almost entirely on their cows, sheep, and goats, and on the seals and reindeer they hunted in season. In winter they walled their animals into their barns (a door would let out too much heat) and fed them such grass as they had managed to harvest from their meadows; often by the time the snow melted in the spring the animals were so weak that the men carried them out into the fields. The technology of medieval Europeans depended almost entirely on wood and iron, but Greenland offered none of either. Everything from the beams of their houses to their spoons had to be brought by ship. In return the Greenlanders offered walrus tusks, narwhal horns, white falcons, and woolen cloth, but they never had enough of these things to secure their comforts. All around them were Inuit who lived in a way well adapted to the rigors of the northlands, but the Norse had little interest in imitating their neighbors. They clung to their old ways, until, for reasons we still do not understand, they disappeared entirely from their land.

Smiley makes the harsh world of the Greenlanders entirely believable, and I found it thrilling to lose myself in that world with her. Gunnar Asgeirson and Margaret Asgeirsdottir will be among my friends now for as long as I live, and their marvelous story will be with me awalys. I am awed by this achievement, and I cannot recommend The Greenlanders highly enough. 

March 23, 2001 

The Footprints of White Sands

Big archaeological news this week: the announcement that the human footprints uncovered at White Sands, New Mexico date to as much as 26,000 years ago (NY Times; BBC). The footprints are very cool however old they turn out to be:

The footprints were first discovered in 2009 by David Bustos, the park’s resource program manager. Over the years, he has brought in an international team of scientists to help make sense of the finds.

Together, they have found thousands of human footprints across 80,000 acres of the park. One path was made by someone walking in a straight line for a mile and a half. Another shows a mother setting her baby down on the ground. Other tracks were made by children.

“The children tend to be more energetic,” said Sally Reynolds, a paleontologist at Bournemouth University in England and a co-author of the new study. “They’re a lot more playful, jumping up and down.”

Mathew Stewart, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the study, said that the evidence that humans had left the footprints was “unequivocal.”

The footprints were formed when people strode over damp, sandy ground on the margin of a lake. Later, sediments gently filled in the prints, and the ground hardened. But subsequent erosion resurfaced the prints. In some cases, the impressions are only visible when the ground is unusually wet or dry — otherwise they are invisible to the naked eye. But ground-penetrating radar can reveal their three-dimensional structure, including the heels and toes.

Mammoths, dire wolves, camels and other animals left footprints as well. One set of prints showed a giant sloth avoiding a group of people, demonstrating that they were in close company.

The footprints were dated by deposits of ditch grass seeds interbedded with the sand layers. The dating seems pretty good, but this is a weird ecosystem and a weird soil configuration, so I think a lot more work will be thrown at figuring all this out.

There are two sides to the debate about when humans reached the Americas because there is strong evidence on both sides. On the one hand, the White Sands footprints are just the latest in a long line of archaeological sites dating to more than 14,000 years ago. On the other there is the undeniably evidence for the explosive spread of the Clovis people around 13,000 years ago, which is hard to explain unless the continent was empty of people. Modern genetic studies suggest that almost all Native Americans descend from a single founder population that lived on the order of 15,000 years ago. Other evidence, such as extinctions and fire frequency, also points to the Clovis period as the first when there were appreciable numbers of people around.

So the debate will go on. And meanwhile please ignore all the stories that say the 'Clovis first' theory is some kind of old-fashioned archaeological consensus that this new evidence overturns, because it has never been accepted by all American archaeologists and for the past 30 years it has been a minority view.

Links 24 September 2021

Necklace with butterfly pendant, Greek, c. 100 BC

Scott Siskind reviews Martin Gurri's 2014 book The Revolt Of The Public, which explains the mostly leaderless, largely incoherent protests of the early 2010s (Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the indignatos in Spain, etc.) as a petulant outburst of middle class rage against the governing elite, predestined to accomplish nothing. How does all of this look in the post-Trump era?

Mass grave of slaughtered Crusaders found in Lebanon.

Fighting about solar farms in Malta. First, the Environment Minister said no solar arrays can be placed on agricultural land, and now historic preservationists object to one being placed near one of the famous megalithic temples. Finding sites for solar and wind power is now the biggest obstacle to growth.

In the NY Times, a detailed account of how Israel used a remote-controlled, AI-assisted machine gun to assassinate Iran's top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, in November 2020.

The strange case of Frederic March, actor and civil rights activist whose name was stripped from university buildings in Wisconsin because he briefly belonged to a student organization called, apparently as a joke, the KKK. Local news story, article in Bright Lights, John McWhorter in the NY Times.

Ben Pentreath's summer, with photos of the Dorset garden and a trip to the Scottish islands.

Archaeology of private life: the eighteenth-century Canadian loyalist with eight mustard jars.

The anxieties stoked in upper-class Europeans by the practice of using wet nurses.

The collapse of Chinese property developer Evergrande threatens ruin for families and small construction firms across China, triggering protests outside company headquarters and then a government crackdown on the protesters.

The threat to water supplies from illegal marijuana farms in the US west.

Here is a historical achievement of sorts: the most miserable, uniformly pessimistic take on contemporary writing and the broader culture that I have ever read.

Kevin Drum has the data to show that Millennials are the highest paid generation in US history, despite all you have read to the contrary.

Two short Tyler Cowen posts on Ireland during World War II, drawn from two new works on Irish history. (First, Second)

To make an impact as an activist, take up a cause no one else is pursuing. 

Interesting science fiction-themed graphite drawings by James Lipnickas.

The African Theater, North America's first black theater, opened in New York on September 17, 1821 and endured for about two years. (NY Times)

The street chairs of Cairo. Yes, people sit on these.

Google buys an office building in Manhattan for $2.1 billion and plans to add thousands of employees there, showing that 1) what our top companies care about is not low taxes but access to talent, and 2) that the housing crisis in our biggest cities is only going to get worse. (NY Times)

This week's music is Emylou Harris, who as a teenager performed on an outdoor stage a block from my office, an event two of my friends swear they witnessed: Goin' Back to Harlan, Wrecking Ball, Satan's Jewel Crown.

Emancipation and Freedom Monument, Richmond, Virginia

Unveiled this week. Note that this was not a response to the recent removal of Confederate statues across the city, but had been planned for more than a decade. The sculptures are by Thomas Jay Warren. Not bad, actually. I could live with statues like these replacing the Confederate heroes on Monument Avenue.

In keeping with the mood of the moment, the sculptures both depict nameless black civilians. The question of how Virginia's slaves were actually emancipated is set to the side to focus on the victims of oppression. Five people are named on the base of the central statue, all also black civilians. 

Once upon a time the story of emancipation in Richmond would have been told with a statue of Abraham Lincoln entering the city, with a crowd of grateful black folks around him. I get why that wouldn't fly today but on the other hand it seems obtuse to me to ignore the part played by the Union Army and the Federal Government in the events of 1865.

Ok, sure, Lincoln and Grant have plenty of their own monuments elsewhere. But what about the black troops who made up a large part of the force besieging the city, and were the first to enter? Couldn't we acknowledge them?

Fortunately that row of empty statue plinths along Monument Avenue offers us a chance to do right by more of the people who made emancipation happen. 

Higher Education and Political Morality

This article throws big data sets and powerful statistics at the question of whether college makes people more liberal. There answer is, that depends on what you mean by liberal. The authors note that when this debate first got going, in the 1960s, conservatives mainly complained that higher education promoted moral relativism. This is the opposite of what happens in college now (B in the graph above), with graduate students showing much less moral relativism than the less educated.

The other thing shown in the graph is moral progressivism (A), which the authors define as "a high level of concern for others and relatively low concern for traditional social order." That seems to me to be a tricky thing to measure, very sensitive to the particular issues you ask about. E.g., liberals might have a desire to defend traditional public schools, while conservatives might not be very interested in protecting that particular bit of the social order. (Unless they are high school football fans.) Business-allied conservatives support some parts of the social order but love "disruption" in the marketplace. And you can see from the graph that while moral progressivism correlates with more education, and with humanities and social science (HASS) rather than business or tech fields, the effect is weak and irregular.

To me the most interesting thing about the article was the authors' complaints about the difficulty of measuring these alleged effects. The one they found easiest to measure, relativism, turns out to have flipped ideologically since the 1960s, leaving them unsure how it relates to whether college makes students more liberal. They write about "victimhood culture," which is one of the most prominent culture war issues right now, but say nobody has been able to define it rigorously or figure out a way to measure it.

Which raises the question of to what extent these conflicts are as much about identity and personal style as they are about underlying ideology, and how deep their philosophical roots really run.

Bret Stephens touts Ritchie Torres for NY Governor

I read Bret Stephens' columns in the Times to get a sense of what the establishment, Wall Street-allied conservatives are thinking. So I was very interested in Stephens' piece praising Congressman Ritchie Torres, not AOC, as NYC's real progressive star:

The bigger mystery is why Torres hasn’t yet become a household name in the United States. On the identity-and-background scorecard, he checks every progressive box. Afro-Latino, the son of a single mom who raised three children working as a mechanic’s assistant on a minimum-wage salary of $4.25 an hour, a product of public housing and public schools, a half brother of two former prison inmates, an N.Y.U. dropout, the Bronx’s first openly gay elected official when he won a seat on the City Council in 2013 at the age of 25 and the victor over a gay-bashing Christian minister when he won his House seat last year. 

He’s dazzlingly smart. He sees himself “on a mission to radically reduce racially concentrated poverty in the Bronx and elsewhere in America.”

In other words, Torres is everything a modern-day progressive is supposed to look and be like, except in one respect: Unlike so much of the modern left (including A.O.C., who grew up as an architect’s daughter in the middle-class Westchester town of Yorktown Heights), he really is a child of the working class. He understands what working-class people want, as opposed to what so many of its self-appointed champions claim they want.

“I don’t hire ideologues or zealots,” he tells me on a walk through his district. “Most of the people in the South Bronx are practical rather than ideological. Their concerns are bread and butter, health and housing, schools and jobs.”

What this translates to is a 21st-century civil rights agenda based on pressing working-class needs for affordable housing, better schools, safer streets, good health care. The goals are progressive, but the solutions, for Torres, have to be pragmatic.

That emphatically includes giving children the option to attend “carefully regulated, not-for-profit” charter schools, which his district has in abundance, over fierce opposition from teachers’ unions. “If there are parents in my district who have concluded that the best option for their children is a charter school, then who am I to tell them otherwise?” he asks.

Stephens even suggests that Torres should run for governor. 

Which raises the question of why somebody like Stephens finds somebody like Torres appealing. I guess there is the conservative fondness for people who really raised themselves up out of poverty, rather than blaming others for their problems. Also the lack of interest in some of the issues that make white men uncomfortable, like Me Too and White Fragility. Torres has not been attacking capitalism and supports reducing the barriers to building more housing in cities. (Housing is his biggest issue.) He is skeptical of higher education as a solution for working-class woes and thinks we already send too many people to college. He doesn't hire zealots.

So here you have the sort of progressive that conservatives want to engage with: one not focused on culture war battles but on pragmatic solutions to real world problems. Some of Torres' solutions would be expensive, for example making Federal Section 8 housing vouchers an entitlement, but money can be negotiated. 

Other progressives would say that this sort of focus on "bread and butter issues" means there will never be any real change, so of course Wall Streets supports it; somebody would probably say that this column is partly an attempt to redirect attention away from the sexual politics that recently dominated the state. (Forget Cuomo, forget sexual harassment, let's talk about this working class hero.) I'm not trying to make this a feel good story about bipartisanship; if Stephens lived in most other states he would not be touting any sort of progressive for governor. But I think this is an interesting insight into what Stephens, and I think many others, really fears, and what he might accept if it meant keeping the barbarians from the gate.

Merab Abramishvili

Merab Abramishvili (1957 – 2006) was a Georgian artist I never heard of until today but loved the moment I saw one of his paintings. Which was this one, Black Panther, 2005.

Abramishvili's father was an art historian  and an expert on the traditional painting of Georgia's medieval churches. That is one of the influences I see here, along with Ottoman miniature painting. Beauty Will Save.

Some of the critics say that Abramishvili's art is essentially about paradise: our life there, our expulsion, our seeking of its echoes in our own world, and our eventual return. This is one of several painting he titled Paradise.

Abramishvili once said, "My work is about finding peace in this world." Semiramis.

Most of the work you will find online was completed late in his career, after 1999, so we lost a lot when he died before he turned 50. Pomegranate, 2003.

Silk Road, 2003, detail

Prostitute, 1997

Gabriel, 2002

Dog Rose, 2003

Terrorism and Freedom

Here's something interesting I found while going through the posts on my old web site: my response to the 9-11 attacks, written one month later. Some of it has aged well, some of it not so much. Since we just marked the 20th anniversary, that seems a good excuse to post this here. 

Since the horrible morning of September 11 I have often felt shock and anguish, and I have sometimes been angry, but I have never for a moment felt afraid. When I said this to one of my friends she called me an "optimist" in a tone of voice that made optimists sound like a particularly stupid tribe of fools. I think, on the contrary, that it is foolish to be afraid of bin Laden and his crew. I believe that the chance that I or those I love will be hurt or killed by terrorists is small, so I see little reason to be personally afraid. A simple actuarial analysis shows that automobiles and high-fat foods remain much greater threats to most of us. More important, I think the fundamentalists' campaign to overturn western civilization has no chance whatever of succeeding, so that even if I die, the ideals I hold most dear will certainly survive.

I am not an optimist in any ordinary sense. I assume that we will never eradicate terrorism, let alone "rid the world of evil," as our President vowed. I am sure there will be more terrorist attacks over the next few years. I doubt, though, that there will be another terrorist attack as savagely successful as those of September 11. I think that while the US has experienced a great tragedy, it is bin Laden who has suffered a military defeat, because he has lost at least four of his best men while we have only been strengthened.

In the days just after the attack much was made of how different these terrorists were from the half-crazy 19-year-olds we are used to see carrying out suicide bombings: older, better educated, able to blend into western society and maintain their discipline during long stays in the US, far from their bases and support systems. Able, in particular, to fly planes. Now we know that only four of the terrorists, the pilots themselves, were of this new type, and the rest were angry young men who could have stepped off the terrorist profile sheet. I suspect that while al Qaeda can probably produce hundreds or even thousands of ordinary fighters, it has few men like the pilots of September 11 willing to kill themselves in its cause. Their loss has hurt bin Laden and lessened the chance of another catastrophic attack. Yet the attacks have not weakened the US. The shock of September 11 has only strengthened the hand of the US government.

The US will not be defeated by attacks like those of September 11, nor will such attacks ever challenge our civilization. Consider, by way of comparison, what Britain endured during the Nazi bombings of 1940: more than 35,000 civilians and hundreds of pilots killed in nightly raids that went on for months, thousands of buildings destroyed, whole districts leveled. By 1945, more than 60,000 British civilians had been killed. Yet neither the blitz nor the V weapons got Hitler not an inch closer to his goal of European domination. The spirit of the British public never wavered, and their military machine grew ever stronger despite the pounding of factories and bases. We are much stronger than the Britain of 1940, and we can better afford the loss of six buildings and six thousand citizens than al Qaeda can afford the loss of 19 soldiers.

Worried westerners have long feared that fanatics could defeat rational people and democratic governments through their greater commitment to their extreme beliefs. We see ourselves as the lukewarm proponents of ideals we are too comfortable to care very much about; our own happiness and satisfaction, we worry, may make us less fierce, less determined, less willing to sacrifice. We suspect, with Yeats, that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," and we imagine moderation and reason overwhelmed by fundamentalism, extremism, and rage.

I think these fears are short-sighted and overblown. Our tradition of freedom and rational thought is now 2500 years old, and it has survived every assault thrown at it by fanatics and barbarians. The stream of free thought runs from Thucydides and Aristotle across the centuries to our own time, sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger, but never broken. The modern democratic state that institutionalizes these values is a much newer creation, but I believe it is a strong and great one. The British and American democracies are now more than 200 years old and despite strange detours and horrific conflicts the democratic spirit continues to spread across the world. The fear that we will be too weak and cowardly to defend ourselves should be assuaged by the simple fact that we have always been able to find the courage when we really needed it. The Japanese mistook American wealth and ease for cowardice, as did Sadam Hussein 50 years later. For anyone afraid that the world's rational people will lack the will to defend themselves, I recommend the memoirs of RAF pilot Richard Hillary (The Final Enemy), in which he explained that he was fighting as much as anything else to show that dissipated, irreligious, moderate men like himself could beat Nazi fanatics. He was right.

I do not feel defensive about the values of democracy: freedom remains a mighty ideal, as strong as faith, tradition, or utopian fantasy. Communism is retreating, the Soviet empire has collapsed, Slobodan Milosevic is awaiting trial in the Hague. Fundamentalism is indeed a powerful force all around the world, but I think most of its political appeal stems merely from the corruption and brutality of so many secular regimes. Consider what has happened in Iran since 1979. Khomeini's revolution succeeded spectacularly for a time, but within a decade ordinary Iranians came to realize that they did not much prefer religious tyranny to the Shah's secular savagery, and in the past few elections moderates have won the vast majority of votes. Where has a real, functioning democracy ever been overthrown by its citizens? Nowhere.

Freedom, tolerance, and self-expression are not merely the excuses of the rich or the justifications of the self-indulgent. Fundamentalists like to think that the secular majorities of democratic states believe in nothing, but they are wrong. We believe in the promise of humanity. We believe in exercising our own minds. We believe in the right to choose our own way, our own leaders, our own faith. These are ideals as powerful as any, and our belief in them is strong. The democratic system of government is not just a compromise among greedy factions, but one of humanity's greatest creations, the institutional embodiment of our noblest sentiments. The constitutions and declarations of democratic states are texts as rich in meaning as any scripture, as full of promise as any apocalypse. As the leaders of democratic revolutions have always asserted, we were born to be free, not to be the slaves of tyrants or the pupils of priests. We must not be afraid of terrorists, or of the dark attractions of fanaticism and rage. We should take our stand on the ground of free thought, free speech, and freedom to pursue our own good in our own way. Here we will never be defeated. 

October 14, 2001

Zinnias

The stars of the garden right now are the giant zinnias. One thing I love about gardening is the way the focus shifts from week to week, and year to year.

John Byam Shaw

John Byam Shaw (1872-1919) was a British painter and illustrator who did a lot of very sentimental stuff but also some more interesting work. Most of the images I have found are color illustrations for books, but however they were printed they have aged badly and few are worth reproducing. This one, though, remains clear and striking, and it has a bit of a back story. It was from The Garden of Kama, a 1901 book of love poems that were said to have been translated from the Hindi by Laurence Hope. Actually they were original works by an English poet named Adela Florence Nicolson.

Omphale, 1914

And Who Knoweth Whether He Shall Be a Wise Man or a Fool

Amor Mundi

And one more illustration, from Edgar Allen Poe's poems.

Gaming Barbarigenesis

Why, for thousands of years, did "barbarian" societies regularly conquer "civilized" societies with much greater populations and resources? Here's an abstract of a new paper in PLOS ONE:

“Barbarism” is perhaps best understood as a recurring syndrome among peripheral societies in response to the threats and opportunities presented by more developed neighbors. This article develops a mathematical model of barbarigenesis—the formation of “barbarian” societies adjacent to more complex societies—and its consequences, and applies the model to the case of Europe in the first millennium CE. A starting point is a game (developed by Hirshleifer) in which two players allocate their resources either to producing wealth or to fighting over wealth. The paradoxical result is that a richer and potentially more powerful player may lose out to a poorer player, because the opportunity cost of fighting is greater for the former. In a more elaborate spatial model with many players, the outcome is a wealth-power mismatch: central regions have comparatively more wealth than power, peripheral regions have comparatively more power than wealth. In a model of historical dynamics, a wealth-power mismatch generates a long-lasting decline in social complexity, sweeping from more to less developed regions, until wealth and power come to be more closely aligned. This article reviews how well this model fits the historical record of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe both quantitatively and qualitatively.  

Obviously you can set the parameters of a game to make it come out however you want, but I think there is something to this. In a rich, relatively peaceful society, there are many paths to a decent living, and social norms may discourage violence. (Think of Chinese or Egyptian peasants.) To create armies, these societies have to pull men away from productive work, either by compelling service or paying soldiers decent wages. People hate both compulsory military service and high taxes, so either approach generates hatred of the government and possibly unrest and rebellion. 

But in a poor society near to a rich one, the opportunity cost of becoming a soldier is much lower, and the potential rewards much greater. In such "barbarian" societies, many more men will be soldiers, even without being paid, so they can field armies as large as those of much bigger states. Soldiering will be a bigger part of their culture, and they will be trained from youth in weapons and battlefield courage, making them most likely better soldiers than the average peasant would be. And if a barbarian leader creates a successful, conquering army, it will rapidly swell as all the young men join for a chance at victory and riches. Hence, Attila or Genghis Khan. 

And you just have to love the word Barbarigenesis.

Ba'al Hammon and the Unitarian List of Suggestions

Folks: I let my old web site lapse, bensozia.com; got tired of paying for something nobody visited. I am going to repost my favorite old writing here, so it will live on. Starting with this:

In 300 BC Carthage was attacked by the Syracusans under their tyrant Agathocles. According to the Greek historian Diodorus, the Carthaginians

were filled with superstitious dread, for they believed that they had neglected the honors of the gods that had been established by their fathers. In their zeal to make amends for their omission, they selected 200 of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly.... There was in their city of bronze image of Cronus (as the Greeks called Ba'al Hammon), extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed on the arms rolled down and fell into a gaping pit filled with fire.

Other sources speak of an annual ritual in which one or more children were chosen by lot from among all those of eligible age for sacrifice. The mother was required to stand by without weeping, for her tears would dishonor the gods.

Some enlightenment historians pooh-poohed stories of infant sacrifice in Carthage, calling them Greek or Roman propaganda. But when archaeologists excavated in the tophet, the sacred precinct of Carthage, they found there thousands of tiny burned skeletons, placed in urns and capped with grave stones that described these children as offerings to Ba'al Hammon and Tanit, king and queen of the Carthaginian gods. Many of the grave stelae were carved with the solar disk of Ba'al Hammon and crescent moon of Tanit, giving them an eerie resemblance to new age post cards. Most of the victims were less than six months old, but some were as old as three years. In only one way did the archaeology mitigate the harsh picture of frequent baby sacrifice drawn by the Greek and Romans: forensic study of the few well-preserved bones showed that the infants had been dead when they were burned. Most likely, their throats were cut, like lambs, before they were consigned to the sacred flames.

What on earth were the Carthaginians doing? Were they insane? What kind of religion requires such barbarities? Consider, by way of comparison, a little pamphlet I have here in front of me from the Unitarian Universalist Association. The Unitarians do not really have a creed; instead, they have a list of beliefs which members "covenant to affirm and promote." There is in this list nothing that I, a rational agnostic, find in any way objectionable. Indeed, we would probably have to turn to hard-core fundamentalists, or Chinese communists, to find anyone who would object to them. The Unitarians believe in

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person.
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. (Note that Unitarians don't have to commit to a world community now; instead, they just have to subscribe to it as an eventual goal. Immediate implementation might be controversial as well as impractical.) 
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process, within our congregations and in society at large.
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which are a part.

Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the Unitarian faith is their openness to ideas from "many sources." They draw on direct mystical experience of "the forces which create and uphold life", the teachings of prophets, "Wisdom from the world's religions", and even "humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit."

According to my pamphlet, the Unitarians are "grateful for the religious pluralism that enriches and ennobles our faith," but I doubt many of them would feel enriched or ennobled by Carthaginian sacrificial practice. Casting babies into the sacred fire challenges the tolerance of the most liberal-minded Universalist—and, through its very extremity, raises the question of what might be missing from the reasonable, compassionate approach to the world.

Unitarianism is, well, sensible. Yet it seems to me that the most important thing about the world, from the religious point of view, is that it does not make sense. The world is not just a place of reason and compassion, nor is it conveniently divided between people who strive for good and evil empires they can struggle against. The world is full of evil, terror, and disaster, much of it randomly distributed. Why? If God is as reasonable and compassionate as his Unitarian worshippers, why is there so much pain? Why does a good God like that of the Christians turn his back on suffering? Say what you will about Carthaginian religion, they had an answer. Their gods were as terrible as their world, as capricious, as mysterious. Toward their gods they felt the combination of fear and wonder that we call "awe", and their religion was awful in the true sense of the word.

The Carthaginians were not inhuman. They loved their children, and in our sparse sources we can glimpse the struggles they went through, their lapses, the years when times were good and the required sacrifices were forgotten. But then would come the disaster: a plague, a war, a terrible fire. The cry would go up that the Gods were angry, and parents would feel the sick sense of dread and impending loss. Who knows what motivated the ones who volunteered their babies? Perhaps they had already lost other children to disease, or their home towns had just been sacked and half their families snuffed out. Others faced the holy lottery, all of life in a concentrated moment: the worst fear, followed by either the most terrible loss or the greatest relief. They gambled with what they held dearest, and sometimes they lost. But don't we all? And doesn't the Carthaginians' acknowledgment of life's terror make their religion, in a sense, more honest than the sweet reason of modern Christianity, or the cool compassion of the Unitarians?

February 2, 2001

Milk and the Indo-European Expansion

Most archaeologists now think that the homeland of the Indo-European languages was the steppes north of the Black Sea, and that the people who emerged from that region and spread across Eurasia were from the Yamnaya culture. Their remarkable success probably has to do with their mastery of horses, their use of wheeled wagons, and their resistance to Yersinia pestis, the organism that causes the Black Death.

But maybe their adoption of dairying was another factor:

The long-distance migrations of early Bronze Age pastoralists in the Eurasian steppe have captured widespread interest. But the factors behind their remarkable spread have been heavily debated by archaeologists. Now a new study in Nature provides clues regarding a critical component of the herders' lifestyle that was likely instrumental to their success: dairying. . . .

A new study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany has revealed a critical clue and it might come as a surprise. It appears that the Bronze Age migrations coincided with a simple but important dietary shift -- the adoption of milk drinking.

The researchers drew on a humble but extraordinary source of information from the archaeological record -- they looked at ancient tartar (dental calculus) on the teeth of preserved skeletons. By carefully removing samples of the built-up calculus, and using advanced molecular methods to extract and then analyse the proteins still preserved within this resistant and protective material, the researchers were able to identify which ancient individuals likely drank milk, and which did not.

Their results surprised them. "The pattern was incredibly strong," observes study leader and palaeoproteomics specialist Dr. Shevan Wilkin, "The majority of pre-Bronze Age Eneolithic individuals we tested -- over 90% -- showed absolutely no evidence of consuming dairy. In contrast, a remarkable 94% of the Early Bronze Age individuals had clearly been milk drinkers."

The milk came from cows, sheep, and goats, and possibly also from horses, so they were not picky milk drinkers.

Markland, 1345

Interesting:

The Cronica Universalis written by the Milanese friar Galvaneus Flamma (d. c. 1345) contains an astonishing reference to a terra que dicitur Marckalada, situated west from Greenland. This land is recognizable as the Markland mentioned by some Icelandic sources and identified by scholars as some part of the Atlantic coast of North America. Galvaneus’s reference, probably derived by oral sources heard in Genoa, is the first mention of the American continent in the Mediterranean region, and gives evidence of the circulation (out of the Nordic area and 150 years before Columbus) of narratives about lands beyond Greenland.

Links 17 September 2021

Jeptha Homer Wade, Portrait of Nathaniel Olds, 1837. The glasses

were a fad among people who thought the new whale oil lamps 

were so bright they caused eye damage.

Analyzing Roman humor.

Scott Siskind inquires into semi-heavy water. Real heavy water, enriched with deuterium, will kill you over time, and there is actually some evidence that even the ordinary amount of deuterium is bad for you.

Six-minute film shot on the streets of New York in 1911. Colorized, but in a way that I find enriching rather than distracting. Love the way people are dressed.

Havana syndrome and microwave attacks. I still say it's hysteria.

John McWhorter says the best way to get from basic language knowledge to real understanding is a program called Glossika (NY Times). Tempted to do this for German to get my fluency back.

New archaeological finds from Sanxingdui in China, weird and fascinating. And a post featuring one spectacular artifact, a bronze tree.

Impressive gold hoard from Denmark, dating to the 6th century AD. There is a theory that a lot of sacrificial offerings were made after the volcanic eruption of 535 darkened the skies and led to three years of cold weather, and this might be one of them.

One simple way to increase the value of your home is to build an impressive entrance. (NY Times)

Between 1830 and 1862, thousands of slaves from Florida and elsewhere in the US escaped across the "saltwater road" to the Bahamas.

Vox review of a new reality show about one of TikTok's first celebrities, mainly about the ambiguity of fame and fortune. My take away was, however bad fame and fortune feel, these people still prefer them to the alternative.

Tom Friedman says that during the twenty years we spent trying to make the Middle East more like America – democratic, pluralistic – we have instead become more like the Middle East – tribal, factionalized, unable to work together toward common national aims. (NY Times)

Energy efficient building around the world; the tools needed to construct buildings that produce more energy than they use are now widely available, and many are being built. Most are ugly, but then so are most inefficient buildings these days.

Nikon Small World Micro-Photography Contest winners.

Using ancient DNA to study inbreeding: after analyzing 1785 genomes from around the world, these authors find that second cousin or closer marriage was not common in any period, except on certain islands, and that the rate of inbreeding has generally declined over time. If true, this is a fascinating finding, since we know the stated norms of many historical societies promoted cross-cousin marriage. 

Freaky contemporary Norse pagan music: Wardruna, Lyfjaberg, Helvegen; Danheim, Kala; and the Voluspa, set to music and sung by Einar Selvik, with the Edvard Grieg choir.

A Shield's Journey

This spectacular shield was made around 1535 by Girolamo di Tommaso da Treviso. It depicts the Romans under Scipio Africanus capturing Cartagena in Spain during the Second Punic War. The design is based on an earlier French tapestry and was probably chosen to honor Emperor Charles V, who had recently captured Tunis from the Turks.

The shield seems to have been passed around between various Italian noble families for the next 200 years. In the early 1700s it was acquired by a certain Tommaso, the last marquess degli Obizzi, and kept in the Castello del Catajo outside Padua, part of his vast collection of arms and armor. When he died, all of his lands and property passed to the House of Este, long the rulers of Ferrara. 

The Estes had a very long run as a prominent noble family, more than 600 years, but eventually their last heiress (Maria Beatrice Este) married a Hapsburg, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and all of their land and property was absorbed into the Austrian royal family. 

Using the Este fortune, the Archduke built Konopiště Castle in Bohemia into a fabulous Baroque showplace. The shield traveled there and became part of the castle collection. The castle declined in the nineteenth century and was in bad shape by 1889 when a certain Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria purchased it. He went on to be assassinated, thus sparking World War I. After the war Konopiště Castle was in Czechoslovakia. 

In World War II the Nazis came and expropriated everything in the castle–among the many things they hated, the Hapsburg family figured prominently–and it ended up in Vienna, where it was slated to bec displayed in grand museum celebrating Hitler's victories. In 1945 the US Army's art recovery team (the "Monuments Men") seized it, and it ended up in the Philadelphia Museum. Whence it has just now been returned to Czechoslovakia, part of a long process by which objects in that US Army collection have been slowly returned to the people and places from which they were looted.

Via The History Blog, which has a 20 megabyte image of the shield.

Pope Francis on Denying Communion

Asked about the US bishops who have discussed denying communion to President Biden and other pro-abortion Catholics, Pope Francis gave a long answer in which he condemned abortion as murder but also said:

I have never refused the Eucharist to anyone, to anyone. I don’t know if anyone in that condition came, but I never, never refused the Eucharist. As a priest, that is. Never. I have never been aware of having a person like the one you describe in front of me, that is true. Simply, the only time I ever had a bit...an interesting thing, was when I went to celebrate Mass in a rest home and we were in the living room, and I said: “Raise your hand if you want to receive Communion.” Everyone, the old men, the old women, everyone wanted Communion, and when I gave Communion to one woman, she took me by the hand and said to me: “Thank you, Father, thank you: I’m Jewish.” I said: “No, the one that I gave to you is Jewish, too...” The only strange thing, but the woman received Communion first, she said it after.

No. Communion is not a prize for the perfect, no? Let’s think of Port Royal (des Champs), of the issue with Angélique Arnaud, Jansenism: those who are perfect can receive Communion. Communion is a gift, a present; the presence of Jesus in his Church and in the community. This is the theology. Then, those who are not in the community cannot receive Communion, like this Jewish woman, but the Lord wanted to reward her without my knowledge. Why? Because they are out of the community—ex-comunitate—excommunicated they are called. It is a harsh term, but it means that they are not in the community, either because they do not belong to it, they are not baptized or have drifted away for some reason. . . .

Now let’s get to that person who is not in the community, who cannot receive Communion because they are outside the community, and this is not a punishment. No, the person is outside. Communion is uniting yourself to the community. But the problem is not the theological problem—that is simple—the problem it is the pastoral problem: how do we bishops deal with this principle pastorally. And if we look at the history of the church we will see that every time the bishops have dealt with a problem not as pastors, they have taken taken a political stance on a political problem. Think of St Bartholomew’s Night: “Oh, heretics, yes. But it’s a serious heresy...let’s cut all their throats....” No: it is a political matter. Let’s think of Joan of Arc, about that vision, let’s think of the witch-hunt.... Let’s think of the Campo de’ Fiori, of Savonarola, of all those people.

When the church defends a principle in an unpastoral manner, it acts on a political level. And this has always been the case, just look at history. What must the pastor do? Be a pastor. Be a pastor and don’t go around condemning, not condemning.... But is he a pastor for the excommunicated too? Yes, he is a pastor and must be a pastor with him, to be a pastors with God’s style. And God’s style is closeness, compassion and tenderness. The entire Bible says so. Closeness is already there in Deuteronomy where he says to Israel: “Tell me what people has its gods as close as I am to you?” Closeness, compassion. The Lord has compassion on us as we read in Ezekiel, in Hosea. Tenderness was there already in the beginning. It is enough to look in the Gospels and the things of Jesus. A pastor who does not know how to act with God’s style, is slipping and does many things that are not pastoral.

For me, I do not want to specify, since you spoke of the United States, because I do not know the details well of the United States, I will give the principle. You could say to me: “But, if you are close, tender and compassionate with a person, would you give the person Communion?” This is a hypothesis. Be a pastor, and the pastor knows what he must do at all times, but as a pastor. But if he goes out of the pastoral dimension of the church, he immediately becomes a politician: You see this in all the accusations, in all the non-pastoral condemnations the church makes.

Modeling Creative Bursts

It is a well-known theme of intellectual history that creative work often comes in bursts. A classic case is the major advances Newton made on gravity and calculus during the term Cambridge was closed due to the plague. You often read about "miraculous years" in the life of an artist, when one masterpiece after another poured out; Mozart's last year is a famous example.

A bunch of statisticians have just published a paper in Nature using big data, machine learning, image analysis, and a bunch of very fancy statistics to explore this phenomenon, and they find the following:

Across a range of creative domains, individual careers are characterized by hot streaks, which are bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. Yet it remains unclear if there are any regularities underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we analyze career histories of artists, film directors, and scientists, and develop deep learning and network science methods to build high-dimensional representations of their creative outputs. We find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused after the hot streak begins. Crucially, hot streaks appear to be associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak. Overall, these results may have implications for identifying and nurturing talents across a wide range of creative domains.

This makes intuitive sense. Artists experiment with different styles ("exploration"), then settle on one that works for them and throw themselves into work in that vein ("exploitation"). Chaucer, for example, wrote verse in the Italian style, then in the French style, then settled on his own style and poured forth The Canterbury Tales. Young composers often write pieces in the style of some other composer – Mozart's Variations on a Theme by Salieri is one you may have heard mentioned in a certain film – before finding their own voices. Scientists wander around working on different projects, then find a particular kind of research that feels both vital and right for them, throwing themselves into the work.

I have some caveats, though. For scientists in particular institutional support is crucial; if you read what scientists say about their own careers they often emphasize the situation they were in when they did their most famous work, with the right support and the right colleagues. Darwin's career can be boiled down to: voyage on the Beagle, which opened his eyes to biological diversity in a radical way, followed by fifty years of working and reworking the insights gained on that crucial trip. It is hard to imagine his career without the British government sending him around the world.

You can also think of many artists whose careers have nothing in common with this paradigm, e.g. John Singer Sargent who did great work in pretty much the same style for forty years. Novelists, a kind of artist highly important to me, have radically varying career trajectories. One common type is that they have something to say, usually drawn from their own experience, say it in one or two books, and then never produce anything else nearly as good. Others follow a paradigm something like what these authors describe, for example Hillary Mantel experimenting with various sorts of writing before setting on multi-part historical novels, coming to a glorious peak with Wolf Hall and Bring Out the Bodies. The authors of our studies acknowledge this when they say that while the pattern they see is statistically robust, "the overall effect size seems modest."

I find this interesting as an insight into creative careers but also as a glimpse into what sort of studies may become possible as data sets grow and machine learning deepens. So far, though, what can be produced seems like a rather minor contribution, not very new and explaining only part of what makes for a creative, productive career.

Via Marginal Revolutions

Working Class Parents and Government Assistance

Patrick Brown reports today in the NY Times on a series of focus groups held with working class parents. He takes the tone that the findings are surprising, but they are not: they are what any such exercise would have found over the past century. What working parents want is 1) for their jobs to pay them what they consider a living wage, and 2) not to feel like people who are not working are getting things they are not.

The government has a responsibility for boosting families with a worker present, most parents said, even while admitting the frustration that long, unpredictable hours can inflict on a family. Unprompted, parents in all three groups volunteered feeling damned if they do, damned if they don’t, with take-home pay seemingly insufficient to keep up with the bills yet too high to qualify for safety-net benefits.

One Georgia working mother remembered her frustration with finding out her income was slightly too high to qualify for Head Start. Unable to afford any other child care for her then-preschool-age son, she said, “I had to lie and say I wasn’t working.” That incident colors her view of policy proposals now. Sometimes, she said, “it seems like the people who are not working seem like they’re better off, because they get all the assistance.”

It is hard to design government programs that would achieve both of these goals. The EITC, or whatever it is called now, is a strong program in that direction, effectively paying a subsidy to working people whose incomes fall below some threshold. Obamacare subsidies are another approach. But to be affordable all these programs need thresholds toward the bottom of the middle class, which means that some large group of people will feel like working harder has only caused them to lose benefits that go to poorer people.  

Universal all-day preschool is a Biden administration initiative that would help some of these parents. But the cost of that in dollar terms is huge, and I suspect it might not be the best thing for many children.

What I hear over and over is, we don't want a handout, we don't want a bigger government, we just want a living wage, affordable housing, and affordable health care. As if those things could be magicked into being without bureaucracy and taxes.

Raising the minimum wage would help some people, but I suspect most of the people in those focus groups (HVAC installers, social workers) already earn well above any potential minimum wage, yet still feel financially frustrated. 

I am not at all sure that much can be done about this. Our housing is expensive because we keep crowding together into our biggest cities, where land is madly expensive. The only way to provide really affordable housing in New York or San Francisco would be to go Hong Kong-style and build innumerable tall towers full of tiny flats. Americans don't want that.

It may just be a version of the scissors of Malthus operating here: in any society, the expectation of what life should be rises toward what the median family can afford. Anyone who falls below that number, by definition half the people, feels pinched and frustrated. Our society is set up to demand a level of safety and comfort that is just plain expensive. Once things like air conditioning, air bags in cars, cable tv, and smart phones become the norm, just about everyone will want them, and the pressure to have that kind of life frustrates and stresses everyone who can't get there. Some of the countries that American leftists admire, because of their egalitarianism, work because people expect less in certain key ways. (Especially the size of their homes.) 

I still think a more egalitarian world would be better; more even distribution of wealth would certainly help the poorest, and make life seem more fair. But a world in which millions of people don't feel pinched and struggling may not be achievable through politics or economics; only a revolution of spiritual gratitude has any chance of getting to that magical place.

Paul Klee, Short Poems

Last Things Last

In the heart's center
The only prayers
Are steps
Receding.

– Translated by Anselm Hollo

Emerged from the Gray of Night

Now from gray-dark night emerged
Burdened and beloved,
Strong with night's fire
Drunk and staggered with God.
Amidst blue ethereum
Soaring over snowfields
Toward the wise constellations.

John Darnielle, "Wolf in White Van"

Wolf in White Van (2014) is an attempt to explore, intensely and realistically, the twisted depths of a nerdy teenage outcast's mind. It investigates a related pair of mysteries: how he came to be horribly maimed and why he lives entirely in imaginary worlds. It's interesting, and short, so I don't regret reading it, but I am somewhat mystified by the vast collection of rave reviews that decorates the paperback version I read. 

John Darnielle is better known as the songwriter and lead singer of The Mountain Goats. He is famous in that line of work for intense sensitivity to the emotions of social outcasts, and for brutal poetic honesty about everything from love to professional wrestling. I think this book is a sally in the same vein, a brutally honest poetic look at sci-fi nerddom. 

Our narrator, Sean, remembers that as a child he often lost himself in Conan fantasies. His Conan, however, was not the honorable barbarian of the books, but a darker and more demonic figure:

When I became Conan things were different; his new birth had left scars. I ruled a smoking, wrecked kingdom with a hard and deadly hand. It was dark and gory. No one liked living there, not even its king. It had a soundtrack. All screams.

He goes on to make a smoking wreck of his own body, and then to devise a post-apocalypse world in which he has reduced North America to a wasted radioactive ruin.

More than half the book is spent describing the play-by-mail game (this is 1990) Sean created while recovering from his "accident." The world is pretty standard post-apocalypse stuff, but some of the settings are imagined in intense detail: you are lying in the long grass by a certain old concrete overpass under a gray Oklahoma sky, now held by sinister men; what do you do? Approach them? Try to sneak around them? Attack them? So it goes, turn after turn, each response from the player generating a page or two of text that explores the consequences of the choice and carries the story along. The goal of the game is to reach a fortress called Trace Italien, within which civilization endures.

Didn't sound like a very fun game, though, because the choices are so limited. Some players write long letters describing their actions, but each turn boils down to choosing one of those two to four options. Nothing like a real role-playing game with its open world and potential for complete surprise.

And I think that is part of the point here: Sean doesn't want any real input from his players. This is his world, over which he rules like a blood-drinking barbarian king. Everything is completely under his control. The main desire he feels toward his own creation – and, it seems, toward everything else – is to frustrate, grind down, burn up, and ruin. It takes a while for the reader to understand the depths of Sean's fury, because his narrator's voice, speaking from many years later, is flat, calm, and nearly emotionless. But eventually you see.

I was a teenage sci-fi nerd once, and far from popular. I have felt at times something of the rage and delight in raging that animates much of our culture, from Death Metal to The Game of Thrones. But as an exploration of "fantasy and its dangers," as one of the reviewers on the back cover puts it, Wolfe in White Van did not impress me. I lived in my imaginary worlds because I loved them; I write books now partly to experience that same sense of dwelling in a beloved place I got from creating my Dungeons and Dragons world when I was 18. For me world-building is something like gardening. There may be dangers to it, as there is danger in anything taken too far, but there is nothing inherently dark about it. 

Well, except that it is part of human life, and therefore partakes of the shadows that hang over everything we do.

To me the darkness and danger that Darnielle explores in Wolf in White Van do not come from living in fantasy. Living in fantasy can take many forms, of which blasted apocalyptic ruin is only one. The demonic love of ruination comes from somewhere else.

____________

The Mountain Goats, This Year.

Extremists Abroad and at Home

At the 9-11 memorial event in Shanksville, PA, George W. Bush connected the terrorists of the early 2000s with today's insurrectionists:

We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within. There's little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard of human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.

Amen to that. 

Stepan Kolesnikov

Stepan Fedorovitch Kolesnikoff (1879 - 1955), was a Russian painter who worked most of his life in Serbia. The famous painting above, Church on an Island, is a good introduction to Kolesnikoff's work: spiritual, pretty, with a palate that tends toward winter and mist. 

Kolesnikoff was born in a peasant family, but his talent was somehow recognized and he won a scholarship to  an art school in Odessa. In 1903, Kolesnikoff was accepted into the Imperial Academy of Arts.

He moved to Belgrade in 1919 and lived there or nearby for the rest of his life.  

I don't think these are especially great art, but they are pretty and soothing. And just looking at them makes me feel cool, important during this season of sweltering Dog Days, with forecast highs around 90 all week.