Katherine Rundell on John Donne on Suicide

Tyler Cowen interviews Donne scholar and children's book author Katherine Rundell:

COWEN: For Donne, can the meaning of a suicide ever be truly transparent?

RUNDELL: No. I think, for Donne, suicide is one of the things that dogs his life. It was illegal during Donne’s lifetime to commit suicide. It was a crime, in that most strange of ironies, punishable by death. Suicides could be buried with a stake put through their hearts at the crossroads. In France, there have been accounts of dead bodies of suicides dragged through the streets as a warning. Of course, it was against religious doctrine.

John Donne’s letters tell us about his very real and urgent keening towards death. He was a man who felt the pull of, he says, his own sword. And he wrote the first full-length treatise in the English language, Biathanatos, on suicide [1608], which argues that in very specific, limited circumstances, suicide is not a sin, that Christ himself was the one great suicide.

For Donne, to be pulled towards suicide was both, for him, to feel he was being pulled towards sin, but also to feel that it would be a shortcut, a leaping into infinity and into the presence of God. For him, it was never going to be, in any way, straightforward or transparent.

COWEN: What’s the political meaning of Biathanatos, Donne’s tract on suicide? Is it asserting a right of self-ownership? How do we think about it? Is it egalitarian, or what is it doing, politically, in a very political time?

RUNDELL: Politically, of course, it’s complicated by the fact that he wrote it, but not to be read. He wrote a text that he explicitly told a friend, when he went to Germany later in life, “Neither burn it nor publish it. Give it not to the fire, but show it to no one,” because he was aware that it was a text that could lead him to be put in very real peril, not necessarily of anything dramatic like court cases, but he would’ve probably lost his job.

For him, the politics of it — profoundly opaque and probably informed by a lot of his own desire to justify his own suicidal tendencies. There are those within Donne’s scholarship who think that Biathanatos was, in fact, a personal bid to write out of himself his desire towards suicide, that in some ways, those who talk about it a great deal are perhaps the least likely to commit it, and that he was in some way protecting himself in that way, so that it was a personal text in a way that it doesn’t look.

I don’t think that it is arguing anything as radical as absolute self-ownership because I think that would be anachronistic for the time. But I think it’s one of the texts that come closest to arguing that our certainties . . . It famously says we have been sure about so many things, and we have been wrong about them. We have been wrong about the stars.

He is certainly saying all certainty has in it the peril of being not just wrong, but wrong in a way that will create misadventuring chaos. He is doing something quite radical there. He is saying there is no single great truth upon which we can base anything, and that was bold.

Stefan Zweig, "The World of Yesterday"

In the summer of 1942, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig mailed the manuscript for this book from Brazil, where he lived in exile, to his new publisher in Sweden. Soon afterward, he and his wife killed themselves.

The main theme of this memoir is how great it was to be a rich Jewish aesthete in Europe before 1914, and how badly everything went wrong thereafter. The tone at the beginning is warm and nostalgic, turning increasingly to bewilderment and bitterness as things in Europe get ever worse. The book is famous among conservatives of a certain sort, the ones who like stability, order, and doing things just because they have always been done that way. Yet Zweig was also critical of the old order, in ways that I think point toward why its collapse was inevitable. I found it most interesting as a document of a certain kind of person, the artist and art lover who mainly wants to be left alone to create and enjoy creation.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 into a family of Jewish industrialists. Since his older brother was genuinely interested in taking over the family business, he was free to ornament the family by pursuing an intellectual life. Early on Zweig makes an interesting observation about art in the later nineteenth century. Vienna had been a great city of music since the 1750s, but by Zweig's time the financial underpinnings of Viennese music had completely changed. In the eighteenth century music had been supported by the imperial family and other great aristocrats. But by 1860 the aristocracy had pretty much given up artistic patronage, and instead artists were supported by the bourgeoisie through subscriptions to the Philharmonic and the Opera. Among these bourgeois art supporters, Jews were especially prominent. The same was true of theater and painting. Families like Zweig's not only held subscrptions and memberships to all of the city's major artistic venues, they happily supported him for years as he he studied and wandered Europe and imagined himself as an artist. Wealthy Jews threw themselves into European culture, Zweig among them.

The Austrian school Zweig attended sounds much like the British one that George Orwell wrote about. The students learned a great deal, because if they did not they were punished and humiliated. Zweig's account is dark and bitter in tone, focusing on the emotional deadness of the place and the alienation of the students. And yet his future life was made possible by the languages he learned: French, Italian, English, Latin and Greek. He emerged marvelously educated. Orwell at least thought the two were connected, and that there is no way to get boys to learn Greek without beating them. It is the first glimpse of many in the book that the good things about 19th-century Euope were inextricably bound up with the bad ones.

The other thing about 19th-century life that most bothers Zweig in this book is the sexual hypocrisy, and in particular the way upper class girls were kept completely ignorant of sex. In his family there was an oft-told story of an aunt who fled on her marriage night to her sister's house in terror of the horrible things her husband had tried to do to her, "which she had only just escaped." Zweig, who was later a good friend of Sigmund Freud, finds all of this ridiculous, and praises the new sexual mores of the 1920s. In that time young people could interact "naturally," he says, without the bizarre rules and restrictions of the earlier era. But was maybe the intense artificiality of so much about 19th-century Europe part of the secret to its stability?

At 15, Zweig decided to become a poet, and from then on his life was mostly about art. When he was still in the university he published a book of poems (which later embarassed him) and soon after graduation landed an essay in the Arts section of Vienna's top newspaper. (That was what really impressed his family, who took their ideas about culture from its pages). But it was a long, winding road from those early successes to a mature literary career. Zweig spent much of the intervening time abroad, living for extended periods in Berlin and Paris and a shorter time in London, traveling to Italy, India, and the United States. He must have been a charming man because he made friends with artists wherever he went. The best writing in this book is Zweig's accounts of the world his artistic friends inhabited. I already posted his description of a visit to Rodin's studio, and there is an even better portrait of the poet Rilke, too long to post here, a shy man of such extraordinary sensitivity that he could not tolerate loud noises or work in an over-decorated room. Rilke could speak wonderfully to one or two others, but if he found himself at the center of a larger group he would stop talking and slink away. What most impressed Zweig in those years was the extraordinary devotion of artists to their work, the way many of them lived modest lives in cramped apartments or in self-imposed exile, nothing mattering but creation and the cultivation of creative friends. 

Until World War I, by his account, Zweig paid no attention to politics. He considered himself a European, equally at home in Austria, Germany, or France, with friends in every nation on the continent. All he asked from his government was to be left alone. What he praises about the politics of that era was the freedom, the fact that he could travel anywhere in the world without a passport or a visa, that his bags were never searched, his papers never checked by the police, his income never audited or even declared. He admits that Austrian workers had no real political power, but he seems to wonder why they even wanted such a thing, since the old Imperial government was doing just fine as far as he was concerned. The appearance around 1900 of populist parties, some of them anti-semitic, struck him as an irrelevent absurdity, not worth his attention. Nor did he pay any attention to colonial events. This, it struck me, was a mistake, since when the Great War came Zweig was flabbergasted by the violence of his contemporaries, whom he took for peaceful and peace-loving. A glance at the brutal wars in Africa might have shown him the truth on that point.

But the biggest weakness of the first half of the book is that at no point in it does Zweig even acknowledge that his life was great because he was rich, and that much of the freedom he enjoyed was purchased with his money and class. He neither knows nor cares what workers and peasants were up to, so long as they left him alone. It was only when they began voting for radical parties with angry leaders that he even mentions their existence.

The chapter on 1914 is excellent and moving. Zweig was bewildered by the extraordinary displays of nationalist emotion that broke out in every direction. The first emotion was joy:

Next morning in Austria, there were notices up in every station announcing general mobilization. The trains were full of recruits who had just joined up, flags waved, music boomed out, and in Vienna I found the whole city in a fever. The first shock of the war that no one wanted, not the people or the government, had now turned to sudden enthusiasm. Parades formed in the streets, suddenly there were banners, streamers, music everywhere. The young recruits marched along in triumph, their faces bright because they, ordinary people who passed entirely unnoticed in everyday life, were being cheered and applauded. To be perfectly honest, I must confess that there was something fine, inspiring, even seductive in that first mass outburst of feeling. In spite of my hatred and abhorrence of war, I would not like to be without the memory of those first days. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of people felt, as never before, what they would have been advised to feel in peace—that they belonged together. . . . Differences in social station, language, class and religion were sumberged at this one mement in a torrent of fraternal feeling. Strangers spoke to one another in the street; people who had avoided each other for years shook hands.

But as the war dragged on, joy turned to hate. Zweig, judged unfit for service and working as a clerk in an obscure corner of the war department, was dismayed that most of his intellectual friends joined in drumming up hatred of the enemy. He knew the man who wrote a briefly famous poem, The Hymn of Hate for England, and others wrote every day about British and Russian perfidy. This was Zweig's first experience of mass propaganda, and he was dismayed at how effective it was:

Modest tradesmen stuck or stamped the slogan Gott Strafe England —God punish England—on their envelopes, society ladies swore never to speak a word of French again, and wrote to the newspapers saying so. Shakespeare was exiled from German theatres, Mozart and Wagner from French and British concert halls. German professors explained that Dante had really been of Germanic birth, while the French claimed Beethoven as Belgian. . . . Mental confusion grew worse. The cook at the stove, who had never left her town and hadn't opened an atlas since she was at school, was sure that Austria could not survive without the acquisition of Sandshak (a small border village somwhere in Bosnia). In the street, cabbies disputed the amount of war reparations to be demanded of France, fifty billion or a hundred billion, without knowing how much a billion was. There was no town, no social group that did not fall victim to the terrible hysteria of hatred.

Zweig, determined to take some sort of stand against the war, hit on the idea of writing a play about the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah's warnings about a terrible coming storm were ignored by his contemporaries, which Zweig thought was close enough to events to be meaningful while being distant enough to perhaps slip by the censors. He wrote this in verse – it always struck me as strange that in the early 20th century, amidst radical artistic experiments of every kind, there was a vogue for plays in verse, but such it was – and by the time he finished it was too long to even perform on a single night. He did not really think it could be published, since the war was still raging, but this was in 1917, and beneath their patriotic exteriors many Europeans were sick of war. It was published as a book and the initial press run of 20,000 copies sold out in a day. It was performed in Switzerland, and the Austrian foreign ministry made no trouble about giving Zweig a visa to spend six months in Zurich to assist with the production. Zweig had the seductive experience of taking a lonely stand and then eventually seeing the rest of the world come to agree with him. Yet he did not dwell on this in 1942, because by then he had been proved dismally wrong many times over.

The chapters on the 1920s are also good. I especially liked the portrayal of life amidst the extraordinary inflation that struck first Austria and then Germany. People generally felt that if you had any money, you should just spend it, because it would be worth less tomorrow. Bars, theaters and nightclubs therefore thrived. Things eventually settled down, and life went on. In some ways, as I mentioned, Zweig liked this time better, with its sexual openness and crazy artistic explorations. Zweig also finally achieved major success as a writer. He wrote poems, plays, essays, novels, librettos for operas, but above all best-selling biographies of historical figures. He made the rundown house he had purchased just before the war into a showplace where he entertained artists and writers from all over Europe. Life was good.

And then came Hitler. The final section of the book is short, really only a sketch. Zweig tells only one memorable story, about his work with Richard Strauss on the opera Die Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman). Strauss was one of many Germans who tried to have it both ways under Hitler, collaborating enough to retain his important posts, and even to become a major figure in the culture ministry, while maintaining some autonomy and keeping his Jewish friends. One of his gestures of opposition was hiring Zweig to write the libretto for his new opera. He announced this quite publicly, almost daring the Nazis to stop him. Such was the admiration of leading Nazis for Strauss that it went ahead, and the opera received its first two performances. But then the Gestapo intercepted a letter in which Strauss was contemptuous of Nazism, which enabled Strauss's opponents to outmaneuver his defenders, strip him of his government posts, and shut down the opera.

Seeing that Austria would soon fall to Hitler, and that there was no place for him in Hitler's Europe, Zweig fled to England. At first his life there was pleasant enough, but then war broke out and as an Austrian citizen he became an enemy alien, under severe restrictions. So he moved to Brazil, where he seemed for a time to be relatively happy. He wrote this book, but even before the end he found that he had no more to say. In the face of Nazism, he could only fall silent, even into the silence of death.

For me, The World of Yesterday raises anew the question of what happened to Europe, and it points toward at least three answers. The first would be that the peace of the nineteenth century was only maintained by a fierce sort of oppression, mainly exercised not by the police but by society at large, and that when this oppression cracked bad things were bound to happen. Writing about his schooldays, Zweig asks himself why the authorities were so harsh on any kind of boyish exuberance:

All that now appears enviable – the freshness of youth, its self-confidence, daring, curiosity and lust for life – was suspect at that time, which set store solely on all that was well established. Only that attitude can explain the way the state exploited its schools as an instrument for maintaining its authority. Above all, we were to be brought up to respect the status quo as perfect, our teachers' opinions as infallible, a father's word as final, brooking no contradiction, and state institutions as absolute and valid for all eternity.

This was indeed the world imagined by 19th-century conservatives, in which order in society rested on children obeying their parents, wives obeying their husbands, students obeying their teachers, and everyone obeying the Kaiser and the state. Did the stability of the society ultimately rest on absurdities like teachers whipping boys who didn't do their Latin homework? Is youthful "lust for life" an expression of a dark anarchy at the heart of all humans, that has to be controlled for civilized life to emerge and endure? Did destructive impulses, caged for so long, eventually break their bounds and explode across the world?

You could also see Zweig's memoir as reinforcing the point made by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, that things fell apart because the good people stopped paying attention. Much of Europe's  liberal elite was like Zweig and Mann, happy to just get on with their lives on the theory that their world was stable and strong. If Mann's book does indeed use people marooned in a Swiss sanatorium as a metaphor for an upper class entirely detached from events in the political and economic world, Zweig would be the Mountain's perfect inhabitant. Hanging out it cafes with other aesthetes, talking only about art, they failed to even notice that their world was dissolving beneath them.

I am most attracted to a third view that I associate with Roberto Calasso. For all that the nineteenth century was in some ways intensely rigid and conservative, it was also an era of constant, profound change. I tend to see the sexual and social conservatism of the era as a reaction to all of that change, an attempt to maintain psychological steadiness amidst the unprecedented transformation of the world. In politics, stability was maintained in Britain, France and Germany by a steady expansion of rights for peasants and workers. It turned out, though, that just getting the vote did not satisfy people, and that once they had political rights they used them to fight for change that would benefit them. As Lenin and many others pointed out, there was an absurdity to bourgeois democracy in this period, which somehow assumed that workers and peasants could be kept from demanding real equality with talk of order and civilization. In this view Europe rode with relative peace on a tide of change for a century, but the contradictions that built up were bound eventually to lead to some kind of crisis.

Zweig's memoir offers no conclusions, only observations. I found them fascinating, but the book did not do for me what it seems to do for many others, because I did not finish it wishing we could bring back the world before 1914. I like my own time better.

Temple Grandin on Neurodivergence and Education

Temple Grandin is America's most famous high-functioning autist, leading a very successful life and even being the subject of a biopic while being utterly weird and unable to master many ordinary skills. As you might imagine, she did not like school, and thinks our schools are set up to fail people like her whose strengths are not in language or abstraction (NY Times):

I often get asked what I would do to improve both elementary and high school. The first step would be to put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics and welding. I would have hated school if the hands-on classes had been removed, as so many have been today. These classes also expose students — especially neurodivergent students — to skills that could become a career. Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up who have never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical.

Despite my accomplishments, if I were a young person today, I would have difficulty graduating from high school because I could not pass algebra. It was too abstract, with no visual correlations. This is true for many of today’s students who get labeled as bad at math, students who might otherwise pass alternative math courses such as statistics that would also apply to real-life work situations. There is too much emphasis in school on testing and not enough on career outcomes. The fact that I failed the SAT in math prohibited me from getting into veterinary school, but today I am a university professor in animal sciences and I am invited to speak to groups of veterinarians to advise them on their work. The true measure of an education isn’t what grades a student gets today, but where they are 10 years later.

After noting how many of the high-tech products used in the US are built elsewhere, she writes:

The reason this equipment is coming from outside the United States can be traced in part to differences in educational systems. In Italy and the Netherlands, for instance, a student at about age 14 decides whether to go the university route or the vocational route. The vocational route is not looked down on or regarded as a lesser form of intelligence. And that’s how it should be everywhere, because the skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.

I agree with all of this. I cannot see what good it does us to try to make every high school graduate "college ready," nor why we would want a society where millions of adults have never held a screwdriver or a chopping knife. I liked something Tyler Cowen once said about education, that the model should be more like the Boy Scouts than an assembly line.

Grandin seems to have gone full into the language of "neurodivergence," which I think has become an excuse for a lot of people to be shiftless and randomly nonconformist. But it is true that we are neurodiverse. There are many, many people in the world who can fix a car but not write a paragraph, who communicate more fluently in C++ than English, who can't do algebra but can intuit what people want and help them get it.

It would be very difficult to set up an educational system that helps all young people develop their talents, rather than forcing them through a rigid curriculum that causes many of them great pain. But we should try.

A Visit to Rodin's Studio in 1904

Stefan Zweig, remembering, years later, his visit to the studio of the sculptor Rodin:

After lunch we went over to the studio. It was a huge room full of replicas of the most important of his works, but among them stood or lay hundreds of delightful little individual studies – of a hand, an arm, a horse's mane, a woman's ear, usually just in plaster. To this day I still remember in detail many of these sketches, which he did just to keep his hand in, and I could talk for hours on end about that one hour I spent in Rodin's studio. Finally the master led me over to a plinth on which his latest work, the portrait of a woman, was still hidden under damp cloths. He removed them with his heavy, furrowed, peasant hands, and stepped back. Instinctively, I cried "Admirable!" and was then ashamed of saying something so banal. But with calm objectivity in which there was not a grain of vanity, he only murmured in agreement, as he viewed his work,"N'est-ce pas?" Then he hesitated. "Ah, except there, by the shoulder. . . just a moment!"

He took off his indoor jacket, put on his white coat, picked up a spatula, and with a masters' touch smoothed the shoulder of the soft feminine skin that breathed as if it were alive. Once again he stepped back. "Here, too," he murmured. Yet again a tiny detail enhanced the effect. Then he said no more. He stepped forwards, stepped back, looked at the figure relected in a mirror, growled and uttered indistinct sounds, made changes and corrections. His eyes, which had been full of friendly abstraction at the lunch table, now flashed with a strange light; he seemed to have grown taller and younger. He was working, working and working with all the passion and power of his mighty, heavy body. Whenever he took a vigorous step forwards or back, the floorboards creaked. But he didn't hear them. He did not notice that a young man was standing behind him, never making a sound, his heart in his mouth, happy to be able to watch such a unique master at work. He had entirely forgotten me. To him, I simply wasn't there. Only his creation and his work existed for him, and beyond them, unseen, the vision of absolute perfection.

This went on for a quarter-of-an-hour, half-an-hour, I don't now remember just how long. Great moments are always outside time. Rodin was so deeply absorbed in his work that a clap of thunder wouldn't have aroused him. His movements became more and more decisive, almost irate; a kind of wildness or intoxication had come over him, he was working faster and faster. Then his hands slowed down. They seemed to have understood that there was no more for them to do. Once, twice, three times he stepped back to look, without making any more changes. Then he murmured something quietly into his beard, and replaced the cloths around the figure as affectionately as you might place a shawl around the shoulders of the woman you love. He took a deep breath, released from tension. His figure seemed to grow heavier again. The fire had gone out. Then came the great lesson for me, something that I could hardly grasp. He took off his white coat, put his jacket on again, and turned to go. He had entirely forgbotten me during that time of extreme concentration. He no longer knew that a young man whom he had taken to the studio himself, to show him the place where he worked, had been standing behind him holding his breath, fascinated, as motionless as his own statues.

He made for the door. As he was about to open it, he saw me and looked at me almost angrily. Who was this young stranger who had stolen into his studio? But the next moment he remembered, and came toward me, as if ashamed of himself. "Pardon, monsieur," he began. But I would let him say no more and gratefully took his hand.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell, 169-171.

Zorats Karer, the Army of Ghosts

Zorats Karer is a complicated arrangement of megalithic stones in Armenia. This is one of those sites about which every amateur archaeologist in the country has an opinion, and you see all kinds of crazy claims about what is was and how old it is. The best guess seems to be that it is both a royal tomb and a site for astronomy-related rituals, dating to between 2000 and 1000 BC.

The site has had a bunch of names, including Ghoshun Dash, which means ‘Army of Stones’ in a Turkic dialect, and Karahundj or Carahunge, which was dreamed up by a twentieth-century archaeologist because it includes a word for ‘stone’ and an Armenian suffix that makes the whole word sound like Stonehenge. But it seems that some of the locals call it Zorats Karer, the Army of Ghosts, and who can argue with that?

Aerial view showing the complexity of the site.

View of the smaller circle in the center of the complex.

One of the fascinating things about the site is the holes that were carefully drilled through several of the menhirs. Look through these in the right way and you can get all sorts of site lines toward things like the midsummer sunrise or the setting of the Pleiades on the first day of spring. Such alignments are the obvious reason to have gone to all this trouble, but the bewildering variety of claims I found in half an hour online gives me pause. Especially since some of the alignments work better if you postulate dates like 33,000 BC. So I am afraid the exact use of these features remains a mystery.

Another thing that interested me was wikipedia's account of how the site has been interpreted. The first scholar to publish about the site said it was a corral for cattle, which is in "there is nothing so stupid that some scientist has not said it" territory. In the 1950s some locals said it was a burial place, but they thought the people buried there were Armenians who had fought the Turks in recent times. Archaeologists are under a lot pressure these days to consult the local people and get their indigenous wisdom before offering any hypothesis, but when it comes to things 3,000 years old, that usually doesn't get you very far. But then they weren't any farther off than that first anthropologist.

And to think that I never heard of it until today.

College Accreditation

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Gayle Greene explains what a nightmare reaccreditation has become for colleges. It used to be fairly pro-forma, but now the process is so involved that the college had to higher a special administrator just to lead the endeavor, which consumes many hours of faculty time.

Every professor and administrator is involved, and every course and program is brought into the review. The air is abuzz with words like models and measures, performance metrics, rubrics, assessment standards, accountability, algorithms, benchmarks, and best practices. Hyphenated words have a special pizzazz — value-added, capacity-building, performance-based, high-performance — especially when one of the words is data: data-driven, data-based, benchmarked-data. The air is thick with this polysyllabic pestilence, a high-wire hum like a plague of locusts. Lots of shiny new boilerplate is mandated for syllabi, spelling out the specifics of style and content, and the penalties for infringements, down to the last detail. . . .

A guideline is circulated explaining the difference between outcomes and objectives, to make sure we know it’s outcomes, not objectives, we’re being asked to produce. “Objectives are generally less broad that [sic] goals and more broad than student learning outcomes.” I do a Google search because I’m still confused, and sure enough, there’s a boatload about this online.

Outcomes are “what a student must be able to do at the conclusion of the course,” explains an online source, and in order to assure these, it is best to use verbs that are measurable, that avoid misinterpretation. Verbs like write, recite, identify, sort, solve, build, contract, prioritize, arrange, implement, summarize, estimate are good because they are open to fewer interpretations than verbs like know, understand, appreciate, grasp the significance of, enjoy, comprehend, feel, learn, appreciate. This latter set of verbs is weak because the words are less measurable, more open to interpretation. 

To guide you through this thicket of words, the National Assocation for Learning Outcomes Assessment produces a 27-page document titled To Imagine a Verb: The Language and Syntax of Learning Outcomes Statements. 

This is of course just the university-level version of the  Accountability Movement that has taken over American education. But in elemetary and high schools, Accountability is ultimately tied to standardized tests. Whatever you think of standardized tests, they at least anchor the process to something identifiable and countable. In the absence of standardized tests for college-level learning, the process floats on a sea of buzz words, with no obvious connection to anything.

And, to get back to one of my hobby horses, this is another symptom of our complete lack of agreement as to what educations is for, and what students are supposed to get out of it.

Links 6 January 2023

Drift, "Breaking Waves," Installation in Hamburg, Germany

NY Times essay about growing up with a "prepayment meter," the way poor people in Britain pay for energy: "the monster in my home was a meter." You have to keep feeding money into the meter or it cuts off your power, so if you run out of money you're out of luck.

Informative essay about Christopher Lasch and how his critique of American society is being used by intellectuals on the right. Raises an important question: with faith in Progress fading, is there any way for us to be hopeful about the future?

Long, weird essay about Captain Kirk and the original Star Trek, focusing on the way we make Kirk into an icon of 1960s toxic masculinity. But: "The unfaltering truth of the matter is that Kirk gets dumped by beautiful, intelligent, independent women that he cared for on an emotional level more than he gets laid by random hot alien babes." The author is irritated that Kirk as seducer has become culturally entrenched while Kirk/Spock gay interpretations are dismissed as the idiotic fantasies of lonely women, when there is plenty of evidence in the show for both. Honestly the original Star Trek was not very good at keeping the characters or the world consistent, which means any interpretation has to ignore certain episodes.

Chinese fast food, amazing short video.

Canadian poll finds vaccine refusers much less likely to support aid to Ukraine.

The trash pickers of Cairo.

The small attention given to the death of Barbara Walters reminds me again that in the 2020s we are not much impressed by, and are even somewhat embarassed by, the narratives of second-wave feminism. Nobody feels much sympathy for white women who stormed corporate America in the 1970s. I think this is good evidence that the past never interests most people except insofar as it informs the battles of the present. With the battles picked by second-wave feminism largely won, nobody cares any more about the leaders of that struggle, and we have moved on to other battles and other heroes.

Another criminology student suspected of a gruesome murder.

Statistics for how men and women interact on Ok Cupid. There is a meme out there that the most attractive 20% of men get all the messages, but in fact even the most attractive men get very few messages, fewer than average women; the most attractive women are deluged. But "The real picture we see from dating apps is that they don't work for a lot of people - including attractive women." And this: "Men and women select for the most attractive people on apps at the same rate." All the data show that we vastly over-value physical attractiveness and would be a lot happier if we focused on other characteristics, but we can't help ourselves.

The very weird preview trailer for the Barbie movie, leaving us no clue what the heck the movie is about.

Adam Tooze: "We need to talk about the state of Britain, the situation is dire. . . . the astonishing stagnation in productivity and real incomes now stretches back over more than a decade." Since 2007, Britain has experienced near zero growth in productivity and incomes. This is the worst 15 years of economic growth since the industrial revolution began.

Nant de Drance, a large Swiss power storage facility using pumped water, is now operational. The system uses miles of water tunnels carved through the mountains, and two large reservoirs.

New French law will require all large parking lots to be covered with solar panels.

Why we should not be sending people to Mars. Not necessarily my opinion.

Some predictions about 2023 made in 1923.

Looks like Missouri is going to kill the first transgender woman to be executed in the US, which I would say pretty well crystalizes why some people think the fight over transgender rights has been a big distraction from other, more important issues.

Governments have mostly refused to even try small experiments in releasing sulfur aerosols to fight climate change, but shady private companies are going ahead, financing their releases by selling them as carbon offsets. Kind of a scam, since nobody knows if this even works. But if govenrments won't do the experiments, somebody should.

If you have any curiosity about French mystic and anarchist Simone Weil, I recommend this essay at Commonweal by Costica Bradatan, focusing on the year she spent as a factory worker.

The FTC has proposed banning non-compete clauses, an action I support 100 percent, although I doubt it would survive judicial review. If only we could pass a law, although that would require a Speaker of the House.

Major paper arguing that the very ancient stone tools from Pedra Furada in Brazil, dated to between 32,000 and 50,000 years ago, were made by capuchin monkeys. This was suggested in 2017 by our friend Stuart Fiedel, and the new paper finds that the Pedra Furada artifacts look more like those made by monkeys than those found at definite human sites.

Lots of scientific articles being published, but fewer and fewer of them represent "breakthroughs." The authors say nobody knows why, but it seems to me that the closer we get to understanding the world, the more this would be true; plus, we understand pretty well now all the stuff that is easy to understand and are shifting our focus to really hard problems like how brains and bodies work, how the climate works, and so on.

Summary of the top technological advances of 2022.

Fascinating NY Times story about three Norwegian friends who spend their winter nights searching for petroglyphs, because they are easier to spot by flashlight, with a little snow. And they have found lots of new ones.

Ukraine Links

Zelenksy's New Year's speech, with English subtitles. Very powerful.

Reports all over the internet about a New Year's Eve HiMARS strike on a technical school in Makiivka where Russian mobilized soldiers were staying, with talk of hundreds of casualities. Confirmed by Girkin. And a thread of Russian comments and reactions.

Update: on January 3, a Russian telegram channel reported: "196 bodies and remains of bodies requiring DNA examination have already been recovered in Makeevka. 270 people are considered missing, including the 196 bodies and remains found." The Ukrainian MOD is claiming 600 casualties.

Ukraine said months ago that they were beginning to make their own 152 mm artillery shells, and now there are photos of these shells in use at the front.

Footage shot by a French television crew inside Bakhmut, series of short videos.

New Years' special from Russian television. Surely a sign of a sick society.

Interview with a senior analyst for Danish intelligence, says Putin's decision to invade Ukraine may have been influenced by cancer medication. Putin will likely not die from the disease, "But over time, it may lead the Russian elites to decide they need a stronger man at the helm."

Drone-dropped Ukrainian grenade hits a warehouse full of Russian weapons, short video.

American Society is Falling Apart

Powerful article by Anton Cebalo, summing up 20 years of research on the "social recession" in America:

One of the most discussed topics online recently has been friendships and loneliness. Ever since the infamous chart showing more people are not having sex than ever before first made the rounds, there’s been increased interest in the social state of things. Polling has demonstrated a marked decline in all spheres of social life, including close friends, intimate relationships, trust, labor participation, and community involvement. The trend looks to have worsened since the pandemic, although it will take some years before this is clearly established.

The decline comes alongside a documented rise in mental illness, diseases of despair, and poor health more generally. In August 2022, the CDC announced that U.S. life expectancy has fallen further and is now where it was in 1996. Contrast this to Western Europe, where it has largely rebounded to pre-pandemic numbers. Still, even before the pandemic, the years 2015-2017 saw the longest sustained decline in U.S. life expectancy since 1915-18.

Some numbers: church membership is down to below 50% for the first time ever, having fallen from 70% to 47% in twenty years. About 12% of Americans say they have no close friends; in one poll 22% of millennials reported having no friends at all. No good polling yet on Gen Z, but as Cebalo says anyone who has spent time on the internet knows their numbers will be at least as bad. The rate of major depression in people 16 to 25 has gone up 50% in just 12 years. Among people 18 to 30, 17% of women and 30% of men say they have had no sex since turning 18.

Cebalo thinks all of this is tied to a collapse of trust, with the amount of trust Americans report having in institutions and each other declining dramatically. As to what this will men going forward,

We have no clear, comparative basis on which to judge what will emerge from the growing number of people who feel lost, lonely or invisible. The closest comparison comes from the early 20th century when, for the first time, millions of provincial people moved to major cities to pursue their dreams. Many uprooted themselves then only to be poor and unfulfilled, who were later easily excited into a mania over mass politics and culture.

Cheerful.

James Webb Images

The Phantom Galaxy

Spiral Galaxy IC 5332

Tarantula Nebula

A pair of colliding galaxies, known as IC 1623

Neptune

The Academic Star System Crumbles

One of the weird things that happened in America between about 1980 and 2010 was the rise of the Star Professor. These people, concentrated in literary studies, could pack lecture halls and sell piles of books with their stunning insights into novels, writers, and the world. I never got it; some of them did interesting work, but I always thought they were just the flashiest practitioners of a rather shallow kind of analysis. But anyway they existed, drawing grants and graduate students to their programs and adding a bit of glamour to the profession. 

Some of them had lots of affairs (notably with their graduate students), multiple marriages, and so on, which spawned a whole field of Star Professor Gossip. Now, it seems, this kind of gossip is dying out, presumably because there are no new Star Professors and the originals are too old for affairs. Katie Kadue in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Let me let you in on a little secret. More than one person I know pursued an advanced degree in literary studies out of a love of gossip — whether because literature offered a chance to eavesdrop on the lives of others and to bask in the glow of fictional celebrities, or because an interpretive community of gossips is not so different from an interpretive community of readers. Learning that a famous professor was once married to another famous professor (who was also once his graduate student) feels like an initiation into a secret history, a privileged story at once damning and celebratory of the main characters involved.

“The gossip asks another to imagine along, build a reality, make it true, if only for the duration of the communication,’’ the academic star Judith Butler asserts in a defense of the academic star José Esteban Muñoz’s famous love of gossip, quoted in an article by a third academic star, Lee Edelman, who in an endnote reminisces about reminiscing with Muñoz shortly before his death: “There was probably some gossip too.” Gossip, David Shumway argues in his 1997 PMLA article “The Star System in Literary Studies,” “has become as significant to academic stardom as it is to film stardom.” It’s in part our prurient interest in the private lives of academics that makes them, in a limited sense, public figures.

It is entirely typical of this kind of people, obsessed with discourse, that myriad papers were presented about them and their world and the gossip about their world; their goings on became another Text as suitable for analysis and comment as any other Text. A weird shadow of this kind of academic stardom was the counter-network of jilted lovers and ex-spouses who were sometimes able to bring down one of these stars:

At the same time, gossip has been key to some stars’ meteoric falls: The whisper network, or what the feminist media scholar Ned Schantz has called “an old girls’ network,” potentially has the power to take the “old boys” out.

Kadue's article is annoying but ultimately kind of sad. It offers us a bunch of people who want desperately to be in the hot intellectual center of the universe, to be the coolest scholars, the academic insiders, to be in the room where it happens. But what is the 'it'? What is happening? Very little, so far as I can tell. We are witnessing the slow deflation of a discourse about discourse, in which new ways of talking about books somehow felt vital and real, in which commentary on analysis of writing about life seemed to matter. But it never did. I well remember when, after years of wondering what this was all about, it finally hit me: it was about boredom and fear of insignificance. Literary scholars have always suffered from a constant, nagging sense that what they do is pointless, so they celebrate anything that makes their work feel relevant. They also suffer from a nagging fear that they are boring dweebs, so they celebrate anything that makes them seem interesting, especially sexually interesting. Hence, the gossip.

It might have gone on much longer, but the collapse of student numbers in English departments has savaged the hiring of new professors. This has broken the pipeline by which star professors used their status to place their students in jobs. Without that job-making power, it turns out, nothing they do matters very much. It's a case for Marxist analysis: as the economic substructure crumbles, the cultural superstructure inevitably collapses into the ruins of its foundation.

There is nothing new here. For a few thousand years the cutting edge of human thought was astronomy, using higher math developed specifically to track the stars, all lavishly funded because kings and emperors were obsessed with astrology. For centuries the brightest minds on Europe spent themselves wrestling with thorny problems in Christian theology or Judaic law, devoting decades to problems that outsiders could only roll their eyes at. A century ago many geniuses were taken up with abstruse debates in Marxist theory. String theory, some physicists think, is just the most recent version. 

Smart people love building intellectual castles out of words, notions, and arguments. These thought palaces can become fantastically large and complex, whole cities of logic, giant trees of classification. For a time, which may be a long time, these castles give meaning to intellectual lives and make stars out of those who best perform the verbal or mathematical gymnastics required. They fall apart when people decide that they just don't matter.

The Opioid Conundrum

Pushing out opioids leads to abuse, but curtailing them has its own problems (NY Times):

Anne Fuqua keeps a list of suicide deaths. She’s chronicled hundreds of cases of chronic pain sufferers who have killed themselves after losing access to opioid medication since 2014. Recently, she almost became an entry.

Ms. Fuqua, a former nurse, has an incurable genetic disorder that causes ‌agonizing spasms and shaking. She can only function when she takes opioids. She’s one of the estimated five million to eight million Americans with chronic pain who regularly rely on them. But in November, her doctor’s license to prescribe controlled substances was suspended by the Drug Enforcement Administration — marking the second time she’s been left to fend for herself to avoid pain and withdrawal because of law enforcement action against a pain clinic.

Between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, the number of opioid prescriptions written for Americans roughly doubled, driven by dishonest pharmaceutical marketing campaigns and unscrupulous entrepreneurs who opened so-called pill mills to sell drugs. Medical guidelines, legislation, law enforcement and other measures have since returned painkiller prescribing to pre-crisis levels. But because people who lose access to medical opioids are rarely provided with immediate treatment (whether they are experiencing pain or addiction or both), the result has been more overdose and suicide deaths, not fewer.

I wrote here a few years ago about a case in which a man sued a doctor for prescribing the opioid pills that got his wife addicted and helped lead to her death. He was furious at the doctor, but one of the witnesses for the defense was the dead woman's mother, who said that she had been so crippled by pain that to have been given a few years of better life was a blessing even if the drugs eventually killed her. Opioids are bad for you, but so is chronic pain.

The US government recently reduced the amount of opioids that pharmaceutical companies are allowed to produce by 5%, and there are reports of shortages and people not being able to get their prescriptions filled. It is of course possible that some of these people would be better off cutting back on pills and pursuing other approaches to pain management, but randomly cutting 5% off cold turkey seems like a cruel way to run the experiment.

I don't think anything about chronic pain or opioids is simple, and I get irritated with people who want to blame everything on evil pharmaceutical companies. As I have written before, I have a sense that our struggle with chronic pain has strong psychological and sociological components, but I don't see how "let's build a better, less lonely world" is much of a policy. People are suffering, and every effort we make to reduce addiction means some people are not treated for pain. Many of them turn to illegal suppliers, which is one reason for the spike in Fentanyl deaths. 

Finding the balance is hard.

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, 2 January 2023

Harpers Ferry from Virginius Island

My son Ben and I drove over to Harpers Ferry today to explore. On the way I gave him my version of the John Brown saga and told him what I have recently learned about the Civil War fighting there. The trip takes about an hour, which is a great length of time for feeling like you are getting away without wasting too much time getting there.

We parked at the Visitor Center and walked to the town along the Shenandoah River, a steep downhill followed by a level stroll along the old Shenandoah Canal. The walk along the stone steps was made delightful by this little stream that paralleled us much of the way down.

The first ruins we encountered were those of the Hall Island pulp mill, in operation from the 1880s to the 1930s.

The Shenandoah Canal; the wall has been rebuilt.

Water gates for the raceway system on Virginius Island, with an unknown stranger contemplating the river.

Water tunnels to the old cotton mill.

Cotton mill ruins. This was built in the 1840s, converted to a flour mill after the Civil War, and abandoned after the 1889 flood. Old photographs of the building here.

Turbine pit at the cotton mill.

View of the Potomac from the Point, where the Potomac and Shenandoah come together. Love the trees growing on the old pylons.

Views of the town.

The Engine House, aka John Brown's Fort. The Park Service doesn't make a huge deal about this building, I suppose because it was moved and altered so much. Its history included being taken to Chicago for the 1892 World's Fair, and I don't think anybody really knows how much of what came back was authentic. It is still not back on its original site, but sits about 50 yards from the monument to Brown and his men.

Cute house on the slope.

Duck ripples in the canal. It was a great trip, and Ben likes to hear me talk about history more than any of my other children. According to the signs it is 1.6 miles down the trail from the Visitor Center to Harpers Ferry, and we walked around quite a bit before deciding to walk back. The last part is a 200-foot climb from the river up the stone stairs to the top of the bluff, which left my legs sore. But I'm still glowing from the trip.

Bosta: Vikings on the Isle of Lewis

The only famous bit of Viking archaeology on Lewis, or anywhere in the Hebrides for that matter, is the chessmen, 78 amazing pieces found in 1831. But these date to the very end of the Viking age in the 12th century, and written sources tell us that the Vikings were on Lewis by 800 AD. What other traces did they leave behind?

In 1992 a severe storm exposed stone walls of an ancient village which had lain hidden under sand dunes at Bosta Beach. These included oval foundations from Pictish houses of the Iron Age and rectangular Viking foundations. This probably should not have been a surprise, since Bostadh means farm in Old Norse. 

View of the site, with a reconstructed Pictish house in the center. You can see that this is a sheltered valley with access to the sea, the perfect spot for a Viking setller.

The reconstructed Pictish house. 

Incidentally it was the Viking form, the rectangular "Black House," that dominated the Hebrides from Viking times down to the nineteenth century, so that was one concrete legacy they left. Above is a restored village of Black Houses you can visit on Lewis, showing the form, although of course the chimneys are a 17th-century addition.

Vikings made boring pottery and not much metalwork was found at Bosta. The most interesting finds had to do with food, both animals and plants. Let's start with fish, because there was a major difference between the Viking period fish bones and those from the Pictish period. The Picts ate fish, but it was all caught close to shore. The Vikings, as you might expect, went much farther out to sea for their catches, and they also practiced net fishing of herring, which required the cooperation of several seagoing boats and dozens of people. This was another long-term impact they had on these islands, re-orienting them toward the Atlantic and in particular toward communal fishing.

The most common animal bones were actually from cattle, but cattle bones are much bigger and tougher than fish bones, so they survive much better, so this doesn't necessarily mean they ate more beef than any other meat. The bones included many young calves, which means that they kept their cows mainly for their milk; if you want beef, you let the cows grow for a year or two before you kill them. In later times the rents of some islanders were paid in butter.

Sheep, by contrast, were not killed until they were a year old, which is the normal pattern when people raise them for meat and wool. There were very few pig bones. The wild species included red deer (elk), gray seals, dolphins, otters, and a pine marten, the last two hunted for their fur.

The plant remains show that barley and oats were the main crops, as one would expect in this environment. The Vikings also grew flax, which the Picts did not, so that might be something else they introduced to the island.

How many Norsemen came to Lewis? Modern genetic studies suggest that about 22% of islanders' genes in the male lines come from Scandinavia, and 11% in the female lines. But that may not reflect the situation in the Viking Age; after all, the Scots reconquered the islands around eight hundred years ago, and we know of at least two waves of migration from the mainland to the outer islands, one in the 1740s. So in the year 1000 I suspect the number of Vikings was larger. The 2:1 ratio of male to female Norse is less than you see in many other violent conquests, so it seems that migration to the Hebrides was something of a family affair.

Combining this sort of archaeology with written sources gives us a picture of Viking life on Lewis. Some people lived in towns; Stornaway seems to be a Viking foundation. A Jarl lived there, with a court, which we know about because some bits of verse composed by Hebridean skalds were written down much later. But most people lived in farmsteads scattered across the island. They grew oats, barley, and flax; they raised cattle and sheep; dairying was a major focus of their work, especially for women. They lived side-by-side with people of Pictish and Irish descent, and their descendants ended up speaking Gaelic, a version of Irish with a bunch of Norse loan words.

Graveyard on Barra, Outer Hebrides

But in their hearts, the men at least were people of the sea. Those surviving bits of Hebridean poetry are all about sailing, including a poem called "Gigantic Waves." They loved ships and boats. When they went to war, it was by ship; a lord's strength was measured in ships. When they wanted a contest, it was often a rowing race. The work that most captured their imaginations was at sea, daring the Atlantic in pursuit of fish, seals, and whales. Communities were built around herring fishing, and local leaders arose to lead these communal hunts. Their homes were built so they could look out at the ocean. Very often, they died at sea, for the Atlantic was not a forgiving place.

Costica Bradatan on Romanian Failure

Costica Bradatan grew up in a peasant family in late Soviet Romania, a home with no books and not even many spoken words, yet somehow managed to end up as a humanities professor in the US. (So much for enrichment.) I was fascinated by his NY Times essay about Romania as a place devoted to failure:

At the time I was born, in the 1970s, the country was in the middle of an intense affair with utopia. Nothing breeds more failure than an obsessive quest for purity. The closer you get to perfection, the more abject the failure. We were supposed to reach the communist paradise any day, even as people’s lives were becoming progressively more hellish. The state was supposed to wither away, per Friedrich Engels’s prophecy; yet it was becoming more and more oppressive. Everything was owned in common, even though there was nothing much to be owned. For good measure, the utopian experiment was run largely by a gang of thugs. That strikes me now as a logical arrangement. You had to be either an incurable idealist or rotten to the core to believe in utopia, and idealism was never a plant to grow roots in that part of the world.

The Romanian state did everything — from the repression and surveillance to the police beatings and windows broken in the middle of the night — in the name of the working class. The regime was called “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” but that must have been a grammatical error: It was most obviously a dictatorship over the proletariat. The workers were kept deep in misery, ignorance and poverty. They were treated like beasts of burden and told that they were lucky, that under capitalism their lives would be so much worse. In school, many subjects were covered, but the discipline most widely taught was the art of cognitive dissonance: how to look at all of this and pretend to see none of it. If you mastered the craft, you could survive, even though you were left seriously broken inside. I lived in “1984,” knew it like the back of my hand, long before I discovered the book. . . .

By the late 1980s, some of the thugs got bored with the communist experiment and realized that it would be more fun if they turned capitalist. That’s how the regime collapsed, under the weight of its own absurdity, catching us, the children of utopia, amid its ruins. Not that this hurt us (by that point, we were too damaged to be hurt by anything), but it left us with a privileged relationship to failure, an affinity for it, even a special flair for it. Once in utopia, you are doomed; you carry its nothingness in your bones wherever you go.

Bradatan ends by saying that he is doing well in America because despite all our talk about success what really motivates us is fear of failure, something that scares Romanians not at all.

Predictions for 2023

Civilization will endure, and life will go on for most people much like it did last year.

Andrew Tate will stop bragging about how many Bugattis he has and start bragging about how many lawyers he has.

Seventeen more superhero movies will be released, and I will not see any of them.

The Just Stop Oil people will escalate their protests until they succeed in damaging a major work of art, turning even more people against their cause.

By the end of the year fewer than 40% of Americans will remember who Kamala Harris is.

No progress will be made in undrestanding dark matter.

The Taliban will spring Andrew Tate from prison, and he will join them and become their spokesperson.

Donald Trump will not go to prison, and people will be mad about this.

Nobody will win the Ukraine war.

Online cancellation will become less powerful and threatening, and the thought police will respond by canceling even more people, until everyone has been canceled and it doesn't make any difference.

American politics will be ugly; British politics will be farcical; Russian politics will involve lots of people falling out of tall buildings.

No progress will be made in understanding how memories are stored in the brain.

I will attempt to read 32 fantasy or sci-fi novels, toss 27 away after the first chapter, finish three, and think one was worth reading.

The flat earth movement will fracture over whether the edge of the world is blocked by ice mountains or concealed by a corporate/government/Illuminati conspiracy. The ice mountains faction will further fracture over whether the ice mountains are threatened by global warming or global warming is a corporate/government/Illuminati conspiracy. 

By the end of the year, at least one Nigerian mega-church pastor will be richer than Elon Musk.

The return of the woolly mammoth will remain five years away.

American academic life will somehow get even worse.

AI will keep getting smarter, and people will not.

Others?