When Tom Shicowich’s toe started feeling numb in 2010, he brushed it off as a temporary ache. At the time, he didn’t have health insurance, so he put off going to the doctor. The toe became infected, and he got so sick that he stayed in bed for two days with what he assumed was the flu. When he finally saw a doctor, the physician immediately sent Shicowich to the emergency room. Several days later, surgeons amputated his toe, and he ended up spending a month in the hospital to recover.
Shicowich lost his toe because of complications of Type 2 diabetes as he struggled to keep his blood sugar under control. He was overweight and on diabetes medications, but his diet of fast food and convenient, frozen processed meals had pushed his disease to life-threatening levels.
After a few more years of trying unsuccessfully to treat Shicowich’s diabetes, his doctor recommended that he try a new program designed to help patients like him. Launched in 2017 by the Geisinger Health System at one of its community hospitals, the Fresh Food Farmacy provides healthy foods–heavy on fruits, vegetables, lean meats and low-sodium options–to patients in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, and teaches them how to incorporate those foods into their daily diet. Each week, Shicowich, who lives below the federal poverty line and is food-insecure, picks up recipes and free groceries from the Farmacy’s food bank and has his nutrition questions answered and blood sugar monitored by the dietitians and health care managers assigned to the Farmacy. In the year and a half since he joined the program, Shicowich has lost 60 lb., and his A1C level, a measure of his blood sugar, has dropped from 10.9 to 6.9, which means he still has diabetes but it’s out of the dangerous range. “It’s a major, major difference from where I started from,” he says. “It’s been a life-changing, lifesaving program for me.”
Geisinger’s program is one of a number of groundbreaking efforts that finally consider food a critical part of a patient’s medical care–and treat food as medicine that can have as much power to heal as drugs. More studies are revealing that people’s health is the sum of much more than the medications they take and the tests they get–health is affected by how much people sleep and exercise, how much stress they’re shouldering and, yes, what they are eating at every meal. Food is becoming a particular focus of doctors, hospitals, insurers and even employers who are frustrated by the slow progress of drug treatments in reducing food-related diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and even cancer. They’re also encouraged by the growing body of research that supports the idea that when people eat well, they stay healthier and are more likely to control chronic diseases and perhaps even avoid them altogether. “When you prioritize food and teach people how to prepare healthy meals, lo and behold, it can end up being more impactful than medications themselves,” says Dr. Jaewon Ryu, interim president and CEO of Geisinger. “That’s a big win.”
The problem is that eating healthy isn’t as easy as popping a pill. For some, healthy foods simply aren’t available. And if they are, they aren’t affordable. So more hospitals and physicians are taking action to break down these barriers to improve their patients’ health. In cities where fresh produce is harder to access, hospitals have worked with local grocers to provide discounts on fruits and vegetables when patients provide a “prescription” written by their doctor; the Cleveland Clinic sponsors farmers’ markets where local growers accept food assistance vouchers from federal programs like WIC as well as state-led initiatives. And some doctors at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco hand out recipes instead of (or along with) prescriptions for their patients, pulled from the organization’s Thrive Kitchen, which also provides low-cost monthly cooking classes for members of its health plan. Hospitals and clinics across the country have also visited Geisinger’s program to learn from its success.
But doctors alone can’t accomplish this food transformation. Recognizing that healthier members not only live longer but also avoid expensive visits to the emergency room, insurers are starting to reward healthy eating by covering sessions with nutritionists and dietitians. In February, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts began covering tailored meals from the nonprofit food program Community Servings for its members with congestive heart failure who can’t afford the low-fat, low-sodium meals they need. Early last year, Congress assigned a first ever bipartisan Food Is Medicine working group to explore how government-sponsored food programs could address hunger and also lower burgeoning health care costs borne by Medicare when it comes to complications of chronic diseases. “The idea of food as medicine is not only an idea whose time has come,” says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “It’s an idea that’s absolutely essential to our health care system.”
Ask any doctor how to avoid or mitigate the effects of the leading killers of Americans and you’ll likely hear that eating healthier plays a big role. But knowing intuitively that food can influence health is one thing, and having the science and the confidence to back it up is another. And it’s only relatively recently that doctors have started to bridge this gap.
It’s hard to look at health outcomes like heart disease and cancer that develop over long periods of time and tie them to specific foods in the typical adult’s varied diet. Plus, foods are not like drugs that can be tested in rigorous studies that compare people who eat a cup of blueberries a day, for example, with those who don’t to determine if the fruit can prevent cancers. Foods aren’t as discrete as drugs when it comes to how they act on the body either–they can contain a number of beneficial, and possibly less beneficial, ingredients that work in divergent systems.
Doctors also know that we eat not only to feed our cells but also because of emotions, like feeling happy or sad. “It’s a lot cheaper to put someone on three months of statins [to lower their cholesterol] than to figure out how to get them to eat a healthy diet,” says Eric Rimm, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But drugs are expensive–the average American spends $1,400 a year on medications–and if people can’t afford them, they go without, increasing the likelihood that they’ll develop complications as they progress to severe stages of their illness, which in turn forces them to require more–and costly–health care. What’s more, it’s not as if the medications are cure-alls; while deaths from heart disease are declining, for example, the most recent report from the American Heart Association showed that the prevalence of obesity increased from 30.5% in 1999–2000 to 37.7% in 2013–2014, and 40% of adults have high total cholesterol.
What people are eating contributes to those stubborn trends, and making nutrition a bigger priority in health care instead of an afterthought may finally start to reverse them. Although there aren’t the same types of rigorous trials proving food’s worth that there are for drugs, the data that do exist, from population-based studies of what people eat, as well as animal and lab studies of specific active ingredients in food, all point in the same direction.
The power of food as medicine gained scientific credibility in 2002, when the U.S. government released results of a study that pitted a diet and exercise program against a drug treatment for Type 2 diabetes. The Diabetes Prevention Program compared people assigned to a diet low in saturated fat, sugar and salt that included lean protein and fresh fruits and vegetables with people assigned to take metformin to lower blood sugar. Among people at high risk of developing diabetes, those taking metformin lowered their risk of actually getting diabetes by 31% compared with those taking a placebo, while those who modified their diet and exercised regularly lowered their risk by 58% compared with those who didn’t change their behaviors, a near doubling in risk reduction.
Studies showing that food could treat disease as well soon followed. In 2010, Medicare reimbursed the first lifestyle-based program for treating heart disease, based on decades of work by University of California, San Francisco, heart expert Dr. Dean Ornish. Under his plan, people who had had heart attacks switched to a low-fat diet, exercised regularly, stopped smoking, lowered their stress levels with meditation and strengthened their social connections. In a series of studies, he found that most followers lowered their blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol levels and also reversed some of the blockages in their heart arteries, reducing their episodes of angina.
In recent years, other studies have shown similar benefits for healthy eating patterns like the Mediterranean diet–which is high in good fats like olive oil and omega-3s, nuts, fruits and vegetables–in preventing repeat events for people who have had a heart attack. “It’s clear that people who are coached on how to eat a Mediterranean diet high in nuts or olive oil get more benefit than we’ve found in similarly conducted trials of statins [to lower cholesterol],” says Rimm. Researchers found similar benefit for people who have not yet had a heart attack but were at higher risk of having one.
Animal studies and analyses of human cells in the lab are also starting to expose why certain foods are associated with lower rates of disease. Researchers are isolating compounds like omega-3s found in fish and polyphenols in apples, for example, that can inhibit cancer tumors’ ability to grow new blood vessels. Nuts and seeds can protect parts of our chromosomes so they can repair damage they encounter more efficiently and help cells stay healthy longer.
If food is indeed medicine, then it’s time to treat it that way. In his upcoming book, Eat to Beat Disease, Dr. William Li, a blood vessel expert, pulled together years of accumulated data and proposes specific doses of foods that can treat diseases ranging from diabetes to breast cancer. Not all doctors agree that the science supports administering food like drugs, but he’s hoping the controversial idea will prompt more researchers to study food in ways as scientifically rigorous as possible and generate stronger data in coming years. “We are far away from prescribing diets categorically to fight disease,” he says. “And we may never get there. But we are looking to fill in the gaps that have long existed in this field with real science. This is the beginning of a better tomorrow.”
And talking about food in terms of doses might push more doctors to put down their prescription pads and start going over grocery lists with their patients instead. So far, the several hundred people like Shicowich who rely on the Fresh Food Farmacy have lowered their risk of serious diabetes complications by 40% and cut hospitalizations by 70% compared with other diabetic people in the area who don’t have access to the program. This year, on the basis of its success so far, the Fresh Food Farmacy is tripling the number of patients it supports.
Shicowich knows firsthand how important that will be for people like him. When he was first diagnosed, he lost weight and controlled his blood sugar, but he found those changes hard to maintain and soon saw his weight balloon and his blood-sugar levels skyrocket. He’s become one of the program’s better-known success stories and now works part time in the produce section of a supermarket and cooks nearly all his meals. He’s expanding his cooking skills to include fish, which he had never tried preparing before. “I know what healthy food looks like, and I know what to do with it now,” he says. “Without this program, and without the support system, I’d probably still be sitting on the couch with a box of Oreos.”
Bye-bye Beverley: Credits roll for Paris’s last porn cinema
Seats, films and posters are among the items being sold after the closure of the Beverley, the last X-rated cinema in ParisAFP
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Paris (AFP)
Tucked away in a narrow Right Bank street, the Beverley held out for decades as Paris’s sole pornographic movie theatre, proudly yet discreetly offering non-stop showings of films from the 1970s and 80s.
But rising rents and changing social mores have finally caught up and the cinema’s fans have just a few days left to pick up memorabilia from a symbol of a bygone Paris.
After the final screening last Saturday — the traditional “couples night” — owner Maurice Laroche is remaining on site this week to sell films, posters, seats and whatever else is left.
“Everything is for sale, except me,” Laroche told AFP on Monday as a handful of men pored over boxes of reels or struggled to make off with a huge speaker.
But women made up around a third of the curious who criss-crossed the theatre’s narrow brick-walled auditorium when the sale began Sunday.
Laroche, who had managed the Beverley since 1983 before buying it 10 years later, said that at 75 he was ready to retire to the ocean resort town of Royan in southwest France.
His clients have become fewer as they’ve gotten older in recent years — most recently he had been selling less than 500 12-euro tickets a week, compared with 1,500 twenty years ago.
“This was a place where you could be certain no minors would see pornography — nowadays they’re all watching on their phones,” he said.
A property developer has bought the site, presumably with plans to install something more in line with the designer hotel and tapas bar up the street in a rapidly gentrifying corner of the capital.
According to France’s national cinema council only one X-rated cinema now remains in France, the Vox in Grenoble — though no one was answering the phone on Monday.
The council doesn’t appear to count the films shown at some of the seedier sex shops in Paris’s red light district at Pigalle, known for offering more than just a movie.
“In its heyday, around 1975, there were over 900 cinemas specialising in pornography in France. Just six years later, there were only 90,” French film journalist Jacques Zimmer told AFP.
Laroche said he would be taking his “head full of memories” and two of the red vinyl seats to the balcony of his new apartment.
Karl Marx was one of the most influential philosopher of all time and consequently his work has influenced a lot of films. The spectator faces Marxist problems such as: proletariat conditions, bourgeoisie dominance, the evolving technology and its connection to society, and revolution. Every problem is only a signal of the advent of the communist era, which consists of final justice on earth. This is the core of an entire movement which deeply influenced the world.
Obviously there were other philosophers, many influenced by Marx, who expanded those core elements in many other directions, some of them contemporaneous to him including Engels, Kautsky, Bernstein and others after his death (Rosa Luxemburg, Gyorgy Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch).
Every one of them shared a faith in proletariat justice, where object and subject finally identify each other. Lower industrial classes are the “soil” for the revolution and will bring true values for all humanity but doing this demands the fall of the dominant industrialized class: the bourgeoisie. Fraternity is the key word to the basis of a community, and Communism is the ultimate community where humanity frees itself from physical and mental slavery.
Marx has never described a “communist” society but he gave some advice in his Critique of the Gotha Program. He said that capitalism is the world where slave-masses serve the few dehumanized bourgeoisies. Once this is known it’s easy to understand that for a film to be Marxist it should reflect reality as closely as possible. It should reflect the horribleness of bourgeois society and the honorable values brought about by the proletarian class.
That is a simplified point of view in respect to the Marxist way to see arts (in particular in respect to Lukacs’s literary theories), but it shows the core of this concept. In fact, during the Soviet era, the most common type of film coming from “red” countries,was the documentary. What ‘s better than reality itself to show how society and socialism work?
Exemplary examples are the “Kino-pravda” works created by Dziga Vertov. The main ideas expressed Marx evolved through time and in particular during the 67-68’ period which brought a sort of renaissance and reconsideration of the core Marxist ideas, which ends in a post-structuralist philosophical movement. In this final development of “revolutionary” ideas, Marx was an influence along with others, so it can be said that in cinema’s post-68’ period is not a continuation of the Russian montage school.
Considering the history of socialism and the history of cinema, there is a wide range of achievement among the movies influenced by Marx and these show many different aspects of Marx ideas, demonstrating the multifaceted dimensions of this movement. On the other hand it is possible to show what Marxism has meant to humanity through the eyes of a number of directors.
10. Novecento (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)
This film demonstrates what a useful concept communism was in fighting fascism in Italian society during World War II. Novecento is the story of two men, born in the same day in the same village. One is the son of a country worker (Gerard Depardieu) and the other one is the son of the landholder (Robert DeNiro). They have different social backgrounds but grow together in friendship.
This movie is 5 hour long and considers other problems related to everyday life, love, and relationships, but the political aspect remains an undercurrent which keeps the film going. Poor people are too weak and ignorant to potently fight the rising fascist power and only when war comes to Italy they can start to form partisan rebel armies.
Marxism is the secret root that “feeds” the struggles of this movie, because everything is, at bottom, moved by social injustice. At the end the populist elements rising against the landowner resolves all the problems but only momentarily.
9. Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
A classic movie by Charlie Chaplin is a Marxist film? Chaplin was always sensitive to social problems. England has always been the land of socialist battles. Highgate cemetery is a sufficient proof of how deeply related England is to Marx’s life.
This film could be seen as a social accusation toward industrialization . If one wants to better understand what proletariat alienation is, this is the film to see. This movie is based on a simple concept which it explains well through stereotypical and ironic characters.
A society that works in a crazy context cannot be fit for man, who continuously searches to be free. If it is only a critical film more than constructive one, it reflects a particular aspect of industrial proletariat problems, a very old problem that is a socialist vindication but at the same time, is the basis of Marx’s philosophy.
8. Porcile (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)
Pasolini was one of the novelists who deeply embraced the Marxist philosophy. This film also reflects the hypercritical attitude in Pasolini’s cinema towards the bourgeoisies.
Porcile is split into two sections: one is a story about a rich family heir who is about to marry but also loves animals more than humans. The second part revolves around a cannibal looking for victims. The first part represents the moral alienation of an upper class man who cannot feel love anymore while his father thinks only about money. The second is a symbolic translation of a self-eating mankind, which cannot resist destroying a part of itself in favor of another part.
Marx comes through as a philosopher who shows moral degradation in spite of a final idea of perfection. Man can reach that plateau but doesn’t want to.
7. Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930)
Dovzhenko is one of the great names of the Russian montage school, which includes other directors such as Eisensten, Vertov, Pudovkin and Kuleshov. This film is a representation of the technological change brought by revolution.
This film posits other ideas but shows that Marxism could be seen as a prime mover. After the New Economic Policy ended in 1929, Russian organization of rural activities changed forever in 1930. Kolchoz arrival signed a point break in communist society.
Earth is the perfect example of the meaning of the changes in order to better understand the consequences of some decisions. Obviously Dovzhenko’s purpose was not to focus only on Russian reforms but to go further into the epic changes. He defined his cinema as a cine-poem. The spectator will notice the end of Kulaks, the forced collectivization of lands, the end of Ukrainian independence from Stalin’s decisions and the end of the New Economic Policy.
6. Three Songs about Lenin (Dziga Vertov, 1934)
This is not a fictional film but a documentary and represents the influence of Lenin in Russian culture and history. At the same time the spectator may notice the deep political exaltation of the dictatorship figure. This is the passionate homage of a director to a “people’s hero”.
If someone looks at this documentary without any political bias, one could understand the political situation in 1934 Russia. The sense of exaggeration is always present, but facing this means facing what was to be a Russian under Stalinism. That means Lenin must be seen as savior with no discussion allowed.
5. Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
This is not the only socialist film created by the famous French director, and probably is not his best when compared to “Week End” or “La Chinoise”. This film perfectly represents the style and the politics of Jean-Luc Godard in its complexity. Its director was heavily influenced by Marxist ideas and this is a sort of summation.
The film is subdivided into three movements: “Such things”, “Our Europe” and “Our Humanity”. Every chapter represents the deep connection between humans outside of ideological differences or political faiths. The film represents the trial of a new Europe, a crossway of languages and cultures, where society simply overwhelms economics.
Godard is one of the most complicated of directors and his language is very difficult for a spectator who has never seen his films. Derrida and Badiou are the main influences here but Marx could be seen as an “undercurrent” which moves every single idea inside the images.
4. October (Sergei Eisenstein, 1928)
Anyone interested in the way Lenin was able to take control of the Russian political situation during the fateful month of October 1917, should see this film. Sergei Eisenstein, the chief proponent of the Russian montage school creates one of his best works in collaboration with Grigori Aleksandrov.
Spanning from April 1917 when the provisional government took power and Lenin has returned from exile, there’s no clear protagonist in this film since the masses are the true protagonist. Lenin is the only leader who can lead the troubled nation. Kornilov was the general who tried to maintain political calm, but the drastic situation of the proletariat was too bad and revolution was close at hand. The complexity represented by this movie is based on Marxists conceptions.
One of the best scenes renders the representation of religion as “all the same thing” equalizing Christianity, Hinduism, and other ancient faiths. The perspicacious observer will notice the absence of other important personages of the Russian revolution such as Trotsky and Zinoviev. They were cut out of the film.
Lenin is portrayed as the people’s hero and the masses exalt him as the antidote for the bourgeois provisional government. This is a perfect example in understanding the cultural perception of revolution during Stalin era.
3. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Man with a Movie Camera is one of the most famous works of the Russian montage school and is one of its most experimental movies. It demonstrates a lot of different techniques regarding the positioning of the movie camera apart the obvious montage. With this movie Vertov tried to explain his concept of kinoglaz (movie-eye) through a series of everyday situations.
For the Marxist ideas of film, a director cannot use fictional situations to symbolize reality. The filmmaker has to use images from the real world. Vertov’s purpose was to show the beauty of the industrialized society using only scenes from the society itself. In this movie there are no actors, scenarios, or title cards and the main “protagonist” is the director himself, or better, his movie camera.
The aim is to achieve the perfect overlapping of eye and camera which is reminiscent of the final identification of object and subject in Marxist-Hegelian dialectics. The spectator is faced with a society that is experiencing its continuous evolution thankful to the revolution, socially and technologically speaking.
Communist society is shown at its best while the spectator is compelled to think in a sort of meta-cinema way. Marxists ideas are present here in their purest form. The revolution brought about by the Soviet citizens to their society permits the advent of real technology. Vertov here connects Marxism with the film’s techniques and philosophy.
2. Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)
This film came out during the “hot” year, when students all over Europe were protesting against the institutions. Pasolini depicts a typical Italian bourgeoisie family reacting towards an unknown man.
This film wants to show the reverse alienation of the dominant class, but focuses also on its incapacity towards other humans. When the family meets a mysterious man they are enthralled by his presence. All the true sentiments come from the family only after the man leaves. These range from the religious faith, to love, art and finally the “political” redemption of the father.
Pasolini want to show how the reality of human relationships could be lost if the focus is only on self and superficial and commoditized things. This film is contemporary because humans continue to live in this same situation and refuse to keep open minds as to what truly matters. Marxism in this film reaches its critical point concerning the dominant class existing at a metaphysical level.
1. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
This may be the most famous “Red propaganda” movie of all and there’s a reason for this. It is the story of a mutiny in one of the battleships of the Tsarist Russian naval force. It took place in the Black Sea during the 1905 revolutionary movement. The sailors of the Potemkin rebelled due to lack edible food and seemed destined to be executed for insubordination until one of them, Vakulinchuk, starts a mutiny. The force of the sailors overwhelms officers, doctor and a priest.
The Potemkin arrives in Odessa and the Tsarist troops decide to defeat the rebels. Doing that requires to pass onto civilians. One of the most famous scenes of the history of cinema displays the machine-like advance of the army while women, babies and other people are brutally killed. Battleship Potemkin’s destiny is already ordained but the ship will fall with honor with the red flag of rebellion in the air while the sailors refuse to combat their Tsarist comrades.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this film changed the entire perspective of the word “film” in the cinematic history. Apart the exceptional montage work there’s a clear reference to all the revolutionary movements against the oppression led by bourgeoisie power. The mutiny is towards religion, officers and false beliefs and is the only option possible for the oppressed.
To fall for fighting against oppressors maintains honor and only heroes will be remembered for doing so. In this particular case it would be useful to take a look to the heroic rebels of the 1905 revolution who have risen through time, such as Kalyayev, who became the protagonist of Albert Camus’s play The Just Assassins, or Boris Savinkov.
This film will not explain the Marxist conception of economy but it can explain what could cause a revolution for a social cause. Apart the political beliefs, this film represent an encouragement to fight injustice in any form. In its simplicity it can represents a chant for all the believers in the revolution.
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” — George Orwell1
Let’s start with this: The citizen’s right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right. The political principle at stake is quite simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force. This should perhaps be stated in the obverse: to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the citizenry as a whole. The history of arguments and struggles over this principle, throughout the world, is long and clear. Instituted in the context of a revolutionary struggle based on the most democratic concepts of its day, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is perhaps the clearest legal/constitutional expression of this principle, and as such, I think, is one of the most radical statutes in the world.
The question of gun rights is a political question, in the broad sense that it touches on the distribution of power in a polity. Thus, although it incorporates all these perfectly legitimate “sub-political” activities, it is not fundamentally about hunting, or collecting, or target practice; it is about empowering the citizen relative to the state. Denying the importance of, or even refusing to understand, this fundamental point of the Second Amendment right, and sneering at people who do, symptomizes a politics of paternalist statism – not (actually the opposite of) a politics of revolutionary liberation.
I’ll pause right here. For me, and for most supporters of gun rights, however inartfully they may put it, this is the core issue. To have an honest discussion of what’s at stake when we talk about “gun rights,” “gun control,” etc., everyone has to know, and acknowledge, his/her position on this fundamental political principle. Do you hold that the right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right?
If you do, then you are ascribing it a strong positive value, you will be predisposed to favor its extension to all citizens, you will consider whatever “regulations” you think are necessary (because some might be) with the greatest circumspection (because those “regulations” are limitations on a right, and rights, though never as absolute as we may like, are to be cherished), you will never seek, overtly or surreptitiously, to eliminate that right entirely – and your discourse will reflect all of that. If you understand gun ownership as a political right, then, for you, if there weren’t a second amendment, there should be.
If, on the other hand, you do not hold that the right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right, if you think it is some kind of luxury or peculiarity or special prerogative, then, of course, you really won’t give a damn about how restricted that non-right is, or whether it is ignored or eliminated altogether. If you reject, or don’t understand, gun ownership as a political right, then you probably think the Second Amendment should never have been.
It is my perception, based on public evidence, as well as countless conversations on the subject, that the latter position is that of most self-identified American liberals. However they may occasionally, tactically, craft their discourse to pretend, for an audience that does value the right of citizens to arm themselves, that they too value that right, most American liberals just do not. They do not even understand why it should be considered a right at all, in the sense elaborated above. They would love to restrict it as much as possible, and they would just as soon be done with the American constitutional guarantee of that right, the Second Amendment, which they see as some kind of embarrassing anachronism.
I think we should have this discussion honestly. If the latter is your position, say it. If you want to eliminate the Second Amendment right, mount a forthright political campaign to do so. Do not pussy-foot around with “I am not against the Second Amendment. I do not want to take your hunting rifles and your shotguns and your antique muskets,” when you really don’t like the Second Amendment at all, would love to see it repealed, and wouldn’t mind if everybody was forced to turn in every weapon that they owned.
‘Cause, guess what: You’re not fooling anybody. When your discourse reeks with intellectual and moral disdain for gun-rights and gun-rights advocates, when it never endorses, and indeed at best studiously avoids, the issue of gun ownership as a fundamental political right, it shows. And it certainly shows when you say outright that you’d love to confiscate all guns, no matter how you try to waffle on that later. Despite what’s implied in the ever-present disdain, gun rights advocates are not, ipso facto, stupid (or violent, or crazy), and certainly not too stupid to see where you’re heading. So let’s stop gaslighting gun-rights supporters as paranoid when they state what they see:
Dianne Feinstein, who had a concealed carry permit when she felt a ”sense of helplessness,” saying: “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them…. Mr. and Mrs. American turn ‘em all in. I would have done it.”
Not to mention Andrew Cuomo’s more recent: “Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option.”
Of course, you could counter that nobody should believe a word of anything these politicians say, anyway. How persuasive is this performance by pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands Joe?
Those who understand gun ownership as a fundamental political right correctly perceive, and are right to resist, the intended threat of its incremental elimination in gun-control laws that will have little to no practical effect, other than to demand more acts of compliance and submission to the armed authority of the state. And those who do want to take that right away must be – and they are, aren’t they? – willing to use the armed force of the state to enforce the rescission of that right on the fifty million or so Americans who own guns and never have done or will do anything murderous or illegal with them. That’ll institute a peaceful new society.
Guns, Gun Rights, and Liberal “Pacifism”
I am not talking about guns but gun rights. This is not about whether anybody likes or dislikes guns, and certainly nobody should fetishize them. It is unfortunate that, as with many debates in this country, the gun-rights debate is cast in the media as a clash between two extremely silly camps – those who fetishize guns positively, and those who fetishize them negatively. For there to be a serious political debate, both of these attitudes really have to be recognized, and dropped, by those who inhabit them. I don’t own a gun. I’m not defending my gun. I’m defending my right.
I think there should be fewer guns. I think we should have a more pacific society, one in which violence isn’t as alluring as apple pie, and we don’t have street parties to celebrate assassinations. I definitely think that the cultural representation of armed violence as a quick, effective, and attractive solution for all kinds of personal and social problems, which is ubiquitous in America, is ridiculous and pernicious. The answer to that is to do a lot of determined political and cultural work, not to pass a law and call in the armed police, the courts, and the penal system to enforce it on people who have done nothing wrong.
Guns are neither magic talismans against tyranny nor anathematic objects that cause crime and violence. Guns – certainly the personal firearms that are in question – carry a limited but real measure of inherent power, and therefore danger, that everyone should respect. (Indeed it is because they are powerful and dangerous that they are the nexus of an important political right.) But guns are not agents of history. They are not, per se, going to free a polity from oppression or generate unrestrained social violence. Within an insurgent political movement, they can at certain moments be useful, even crucial, for the former outcome; and, within a context of social decay brought on by other factors, they can seriously exacerbate the latter. Their overall positive or negative effect is only determined by the political and social context in which they are used, and the character of the agents who use them.
American liberals can all too easily recognize and disparage the positive fetishism regarding guns, but can be blind to their own negative fetishism. Underlying this noli me tangere negative fetishism are confusions and contradictions regarding what I’ll call the casual “imaginary pacifism” that crops up repeatedly as a constituent of American liberal ideology. I am not here referring to the kind of consistent and absolute, usually religious-based, pacifism that we traditionally associate, rightly or wrongly, with figures like Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi, and the Amish – the kind of pacifism that would, under all circumstances, “turn the other cheek” and abjure the use of armed force to defend one’s self (or anybody else), let alone to advance or defend a political movement. Such a consistent, rigorous, pacifism is an honorable position, and those who hold and live it deserve respect.
They are, however, few and far between, and most American liberals are not among them. The vast majority of American liberals – like persons of all other groups – while they want to live peaceful lives, free of violence, for themselves and everyone else in the world, support the use of armed force in defense of themselves, their loved ones, and some political agenda or another. While they actually hold a position that accepts legitimate uses of armed force, a lot of American liberals like to imagine that they are living in some kind of sympathetic identity with their edited, angelic versions of King and Gandhi, and they are shocked, shocked, and react with utter revulsion, at the discourse of people who proclaim upfront that they are not.
(They are even more shocked to be confronted with the idea that maybe King and Gandhi were not exactly the kind of “pacifists” they imagine them to have been. For King: “Violence exercised merely in self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.”2)
This kind of pretend pacifism is most repugnant when it issues from the mouth of the commander-in-chief of the world’s most elaborate killing apparatus, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,“ as King put it. Nothing is more –“hypocritical” is hardly a sufficient word – than seeing an American president lecturing political movements throughout the world on the need for “non-violence,” as if he were some kind of pacifist, using pseudo-pacifism as a ground for being unapologetically self-righteous.
But this kind of presumption is annoying wherever it saturates liberal discourse – which is kind of everywhere. Take, for example, this gem:: “As a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind,” followed a few sentences later by: “We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities … who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, .., for the defense of this nation” [emphasis in original]. Zero Dark Thirty, you see, is a pacifist document. (Or at least the document of a pacifist.) That a person of obvious intelligence and cultural sophistication can utter such contradictory nonsense, without recognizing it as such, is a symptom of how deeply this presumptive imaginary “pacifism” I am evoking is ingrained in American liberal ideology.
This position seeps down through the “sub-political” issues of self-defense and personal responsibility. Not-really-pacifist “pacifist” liberals, I find, often get wrapped up in a recurring ideological process of shedding and assigning guilt. I wouldn’t touch a gun. I’ll just call my paid servant the policeman to come and shoot my assailant for me. My hands stay clean of gunshot residue and other stains; he wields the horrid gun and the moral responsibility, and quandary, of using deadly force – which I’ll endlessly analyze with my colleagues over dinner. And if it really was my ass that was saved, we’ll all congratulate ourselves for maintaining our “pacifist” guiltlessness, while romanticizing the guy who did the dirty work for us. Katherine Bigelow speaks for many, who actually think there is some kind of extra moral virtue in this way of living in the world. I find a more cogent description in the Sartrian term “bad faith.”
For myself, since I neither am nor pretend to be a pacifist, if I were in some mortal danger that called for the self-defensive use of deadly force, I would rather take on myself the responsibility for using that force – moral quandary, dirty hands and all – than shift it onto someone from a quasi-professional caste created to be my absolving wet workers.
If we are going to hold police and other armed agents of the state responsible for using armed force appropriately – and we should – then we should be willing to assume the same responsibility for which we hold them. What we should not do is essentially absolve them of responsibility because they’re doing the dirty work we would neeeever do ourselves, work from which we have distanced ourselves morally and intellectually, work that we consider for us but not ours.
In my vision of a liberated society, first of all, the number of persons who, functioning like our police and/or armed forces, might have to spend more time than most prepared for confrontation would be reduced to a minimum; secondly, they really would be defensive and protective; and, finally, importantly, they would function, and be felt, as extensions of the responsibilities that all citizens share and embrace, not as a separate moral species, specially bred for violence, to be called from their fortified compound to vacuum up problems and guilt. That our society is not like that is symptomatized both by how its police and armed forces are organized in relation to the whole of society, and by how they are segregated in the “pacifist” mind as both feared and indispensable – moral Morlocks to the moral Eloi of the liberal elite.
As one trenchant feminist promoter of gun rights (Inge Anna Laris) summarized it: “Police forces were established to augment citizen self-protection, not to displace the citizens’ right of self-protection” And, I would add, to share, not displace, citizens’ individual and collective responsibilities and quandaries in all of that.
Gun Rights and The Prohibition Impulse
It often seems to me that guns are to liberals what drugs are to conservatives. Liberals respond to the real damage that guns do as factors that exacerbate (but do not cause) destructive behaviors is the same way conservatives have responded to the real damage that drugs do in exacerbating destructive behaviors – with the impulse for prohibition, enforced by the law and its armed agents, the police. Quick, pass a law! Call the cops! has become a virtually automatic reaction of conservatives and liberals alike, according to their various tastes; it’s “the same inability to understand the fundamental nature of the problem at hand coupled with a perpetual, short-sighted faith in the inherent justness of well-meaning legislation.” (Mike King)
The prohibition impulse is as problematic for guns as it is for drugs (and alcohol), which are ten times more deadly than guns (see chart below), and at least as damaging to families. Indeed, because they can change states of mind, drugs can be said to cause, and not just exacerbate, destructive behaviors. Let’s not forget that the prohibition impulse for alcohol and drugs was driven by sincere reformist concern about the widespread damage these substances did, especially to children of society’s poorest families. The alcohol prohibition movement was driven by (mainly middle-class) women, and the punishing disparity in crack cocaine sentencing was originally championed by African-American legislators, for these reasons.3 Neither worked out so well. Both provide cogent examples of how the law can be worse than the crime.
(I won’t get into the academic arguments that gun control does not reduce crime, which come from self-described “member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, … Democrats 2000, …Common Cause, [and] other politically liberal organizations,…lifelong registered Democrat, [and] contributor to liberal Democratic candidates,” Gary Kleck, as well as conservative John Lott.4)
Liberals have to recognize that, when you ban guns, you are not just eliminating a right, you are creating a criminal offense – in fact a whole set of new crimes. How many months or years will you have to be confined by the armed guards of the state for having a rifle with a pistol grip or a 10-round magazine? How many of those fifty million gun owners are you going to lock up, after raiding their homes? You better have stiff sentences, right? Every prosecutor running for office will tell you so.
One has to be kind of obtuse not to understand that a War on Guns, no matter how liberally inspired, will end up like all other such campaigns. It will create crime and pre-crime, and ”take the level of police statism, lawlessness and general social pathology up a notch in the same way Prohibition and the Drug War have done. [It will] expand the volume of organized crime, … to empower criminal gangs fighting over control over the black market, … lead to further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, further militarization of local police via SWAT teams, and further expansion of the squalid empire of civil forfeiture, perjured jailhouse snitch testimony, entrapment, planted evidence, and plea deal blackmail.” (Kevin Carson)
Speaking of the War on Drugs: Is there any greater source of “gun violence” in America? “Most of the nonsuicide gun deaths in this country happen in densely populated, lower-income urban environments, [where] gangs and poverty are the proximate causes of the violence.” You know, the Drug War Theater, where “addressing the incentives that lead young people in our inner cities to gravitate toward crime—incentives like the ability to gain money and status by trafficking in drugs when few other opportunities are available—would do more to begin to address the gun violence endemic in America than any of the well-intentioned but likely ineffectual ‘gun control’ laws that could be passed.”5 Liberals all know and talk all the time about the horrors of the War on Drugs. Is there peep one in any of the gun control proposals from liberal politicians or pundits about ending this disastrous crusade, arguably the greatest single source of gun violence in America? Silly me for asking.
Gun Rights and the American State
What the modern American capitalist state has done is invert the relative valorization of a standing army vs. an armed people that was held by a long tradition of radical democrats, and by many, if not most, “Founding Fathers.”6 This skews the minds of everyone in society, and is no progressive achievement.
In the current gun rights debate, one does not have to think too hard to catch the tiny little fact that anti-gun-rights liberals, besides not really being pacifists, are not really proposing to eliminate guns at all. Is there one liberal gun-control proposal being put forward that makes the teensiest move toward diminishing the use of guns, including military-style assault weapons, by the police? Is there one that addresses, in the weensiest way, the continuing, massive militarization of the police that has been taking place in this country?Is there one that will take away one gun, one bullet, one armed personnel carrier, one drone, or one dollar from the bloated internal security apparatus (let’s not even mention the foreign war machine) of the American nouveau police state? From its corporate militia comrades?
No. What all liberal gun-control proposals seek to do, and all they seek to do, is to reduce and eventually eliminate the right of ordinary citizens to possess firearms. These proposals treat the armed power of the state with, at best, benign indifference. They ignore, or dismiss as of no importance, the way these policies will further weaken the power of the citizen relative to the state. There is a definite ideology underlying all this: That the state – the American capitalist state we live in – should have a monopoly of armed force; that this state is a benign, neutral arbiter which will use its armed force in support of and not against its citizens, to mediate conflicts fairly and promote just outcomes in ways that the citizens themselves cannot be trusted to do.
All the liberal gun-control proposals do, and I would suggest the anti-gun-rights position in general must, rest on this premise. For reasons set forth below, I think it’s wrong-headed, and I do not see how one can deny that it is elitist and authoritarian.
This ideology is most likely to exude from those whose lived experience is that the armed power of the state does overwhelmingly act on their behalf, that the police are their friends – people who are secure in their implicit understanding that they have nothing to fear, personally or politically, from the armed agents of the state, and that when they call those agents to help them, they will come and help them, and not beat them down or shoot them on sight, “by accident.”
At many levels, this ideology promotes the phony notion of what the American capitalist state is, an ideology that we should be helping to extirpate from people’s minds, not helping to perpetuate in the name of ensuring their safety. Under the guise of nonviolent pacifism, this ideology only occludes the violence of the armed state that underlies all of our lives in capitalist society. The state we live in is not a neutral class-agnostic arbiter. It is the instantiation of a relation of forces between classes, which “uses social crises to reinforce a range of social relationships and control certain populations.”7 In our case, it exists to guarantee, by armed force locked and loaded in advance and on call 24-7, the absolute hegemony of the corporations and the banksters (the ruling class/the 1%/your-euphemism-for-avoiding-marxist-language-here) over the working people and dispossessed (the 99% and such). We should dispense with any of the comforting illusions about this. This state of postwar Euro-American felicity – the liberal, democratic capitalist welfare/social-democratic state – has reverted to its core class function.
Indeed, we have just seen that the armed police forces of the state, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, “are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity[,] functioning as a de facto intelligence and enforcement arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” At this point, it is blindingly obvious that, as Etienne Balibar so cogently put it over thirty years ago, the modern capitalist state, ours included, “is expressly organized as the State of pre-emptive counter-revolution.”
It might help to understand Balibar’s conclusion in terms of a rough Kuhnian distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” politics.8 In the normal political paradigm, which endures over a relatively long period of stability, everybody plays by the same legal and constitutional rules, everyone’s rights are respected equally, and disputes are settled in transparently fair and equal political and legal processes, with minimal and similarly fair and transparent uses of armed force. In the revolutionary situation, which predominates in relatively brief and compressed periods of upheaval, the point is to completely replace one paradigm with another. In this situation, established and insurgent factions seek each to overcome the other. Each seeks to increase its own hegemony and powers while reducing the other’s autonomous rights and powers. Disputes, clearly understood as aspects of the one big conflict over which social and political paradigm will rule, are settled by the frankly unequal application of force – whether the force of money, law, political pressure, or arms.
The curious thing is that we are not in “revolutionary” politics, since (unfortunately) there is no serious political force threatening or seeking to overthrow the political paradigm of the capitalist state. But we are not exactly in a “normal” paradigm either, since the deep instability, unfairness, and precarity of the capitalist state are just too visible. We are, as Balibar suggests, in pre-emptively counter-revolutionary politics, where the capitalist state, on behalf of the tiny minority faction (I call it a class) it empowers, is preparing in advance to repel the fundamental, paradigm-changing, challenges it anticipates. It is doing this by the increasing, and increasingly aggressive and obvious, unequal application of money, laws, political power, and armed force.
In other words, it’s a “revolutionary” political period without the revolutionary politics. With only the counter-revolutionary politics. It’s a period where the paradigm is being radically changed, not by an insurgent, but by the establishment faction. In the midst of this, too many American liberals are clinging to a nostalgic, wish-fulfillment dream society where, if they can just, over the next few election cycles, get the right mix of noblesse-oblige economics and equal-opportunity imperialist identity-politics, everything will be peachy keen once again. (Isn’t it great to watch Barack and Hillary order Seal Team Six into action! If only we can reform the filibuster.) Welcome to the world of unchallenged counter-revolution.
Well, the first counter-revolutionary act of every government is to collect the guns, and a necessary element of pre-emptive counter-revolution in the American polity is the disarming of the people. Nobody on the left, nobody interested in the radically democratic transformation of our society, should be interested in helping with that.
Yet all liberal gun-control schemes remain blithely indifferent to, when not aggressively dismissive of, these concerns. Somehow, a lot of people have come to imagine that depreciating versus valuing citizens’ gun rights is a left-right dichotomy Only in the ridiculous political discourse of the United States, where Barack Obama is a “marxist” (or any kind of “leftist” at all), can citizens’ right to gun ownership be considered a purely right-wing demand. The notion that an armed populace should have a measure of power of resistance to the heavily armed power of the state is, if anything, a populist principle, and has always been part of the revolutionary democratic traditions of the left. The notion that disarming the people in a capitalist state – and one in severe socio-economic crisis, at that – would be some kind of victory for progressive, democratic forces, something that might help move us toward an emancipatory transformation of society, derives from no position on the political left. As one commentator puts it: “I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy. Regardless of the ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.”
There’s no way around it: The net effect of eliminating the right of citizens to possess firearms will be to increase the power of the armed capitalist state. It will not be a more pacifistic, but a more authoritarian society, one in which the whole panoply of armed police we’ve already come to accept as part of the social landscape will be even more ubiquitous, while citizens’ compliance and submission will be more thoroughly assured. As Patrick Higgins puts it: “The formula for gun control seems pretty obvious to me. Less guns for the people who are most likely to need them, more guns for cops and soldiers and those sympathetic to them.” If you’re good with that, then go for it. I am not.
As Higgins implies, cops and soldiers will not be the only ones left holding guns. My friends have kids in an elite New York City private school. A few years back, during seventh-grade bar/bat mitzvah season – which, in these social circles, is like a months-long Hollywood after-party for thirteen-year olds – their son was invited to his classmate’s party. Not the bar mitzvah where the parents flew a bunch of parents and kids to Paris for their son’s coming of age. No, the bat mitzvah held in Rockefeller Center. Ceremony in the Rainbow Room. Party in the skating rink. Closed to the public. On a Saturday night. When my friend went to pick his son up to bring him home, he was stopped at the perimeter of the promenade, just inside the ring of limos, by armed guards with those really fully automatic weapons, who would not let him in because he didn’t have an invitation. He had to wait outside for his son to come out. Thank goodness for cell phones, which, of course, every thirteen-year-old has.
Here’s the thing, and everybody knows it: Whatever strictest possible gun-control regime is instituted by favored liberal politicians, the family who threw that party will still have all the guns that it wants at its disposal. Donald Trump will still have his carry permit. Goldman Sachs will have all the weapons it wants for its private army, which will still be working as an allied brigade of the supposedly public branch of the ruling class’s armed forces, and which its PR people will make sure is never crudely referred to as a “militia.” And don’t worry, Joe, no one will be taking your Beretta. Forty-nine million nine-hundred thousand ninety-nine hundred or so Americans who have never done a wrong thing will be disarmed by force, but every one of this class will have all the guns s/he wants at his or her disposal. There will be a system of waivers, fees and private security armies for anyone in the .01%. Keeping in mind the incredible growing socio-economic inequality in this country – which, of course, the push for strict gun control has nothing to do with – the American social landscape is going to be populated with more, not fewer, gun-toting characters like these, who will have less, not more, accountability, and among whom there are no imaginary Gandhis:
It’s too bad that we Americans, with liberals much too complicit in this, have accepted – along with the growth of obscene social inequality – the incremental loss of many of our fundamental rights – from privacy (warrantless surveillance) to the right of judicial due process before being summarily executed by our elected king. If some fifty million or so gun owners want to stand up militantly for one fundamental right at this point, good for them. If, in the ridiculous American political context, a lot of them self-identify as right-wing, well, bad on them, and let’s by all means tell them they should be standing up for a lot of other rights, including their own right to a decent socio-economic life.
At the same time, folks on the left should be ashamed if gun owners become the first to stand up militantly against the pre-emptively counter-revolutionary assault on our rights. Maybe self-identified liberals should do more than trash those folk for defending a right they think is important; maybe liberals should consider how they have continually undermined the building of a populist left, by steering discontent into conventional political support for their favored Lord High Executioners, and teaching – by example, exhortation, and outright collaboration – servility and compliance in the face of right after right, and social benefit after social benefit, being stolen by those same elected autocrats. The problem with militant right-wing populism is not that it’s militant or populist. And a large part of the reason there is not the militant left-wing populism there should be is that most liberals are neither left, nor militant, nor populist.
The concentration of wealth, and the concentration of armed power, in the hands of a few, are both bad ideas. And the one has everything to do with the other.*
I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the urbane liberal revulsion to guns has to do with the picture in the urbane liberal’s mind of who has them – you know, the wrong sort of people, right-wing “wingnuts,” whose brains are addled by moonshine and Fox News. There is no question that a lot of people with ridiculous right-wing political and economic ideas are among the loudest defenders and proudest exercisers of the right to bear arms. But, you know, there’s this other empowering, infinitely more dangerous right, one that more than fifty million people use to authorize the truly nutty killing of hundreds of thousands of people, and a whole host of truly nutty actions that endanger us all. That’s the right to vote. I am horrified about how the great majority of voters – conservative and liberal, wingnut and Serious – use that right to authorize massively homicidal and criminal policies. Still, my understanding of the emancipatory democratic political tradition precludes any thought that, in the course of normal politics, depriving any of them – even those whose brains are addled by Jamba Juice and MSNBC – of that right would be an appropriate way for me to try to change the policies I abhor.
Rights empower. Power is dangerous. The right to vote is as dangerous a power as any. Those who have been deprived of it grasp it eagerly when they get it because for so long it’s been on display but out of reach, just like the master’s shiny new gun. Once everyone gets their hands on those rights/powers, they may use them – or, gee, think about them – in all kinds of ways I would find objectionable and damaging. They also will find out that those rights/powers are not in themselves effective of their liberation. The task is not to deprive people of fundamental rights, but to persuade them to think about and use them in different and more effective ways. And one has to know that’s possible. It’s happened before, and will again.
Recent Objections and the Contentious History of Gun Rights in America
Recently, some progressives9 have argued that, all the rhetoric about arming the people to resist tyranny notwithstanding, the real intent of the authors of the Second Amendment was to preserve slavery, and that, therefore, those who cite the Second Amendment as supporting every citizen’s right to bear arms today are – well, ignorant wingnut enablers of slaveholding racism, I guess.
The logic escapes me here. Sure, the Second Amendment was ratified in a context where most of the framers — certainly those of the Southern plantocracy – assumed that the right it guaranteed was – like every other right instituted by the Constitution at time – meant to be limited to free white males, who were the only fully-enfranchised citizens. But, really, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, so there’s something wrong with us using his words to promote equal rights? As do the authors of every law, indeed every text, the framers wrote something whose significance and effect exceeds what they could have imagined. The text, the law, that the framers wrote now stands apart from and beyond their personal intentions. Perhaps it is because they could not imagine the extension of a certain right that they wrote a text that does not exclude it. I’ll take that. We all do.
In this case however, we have clear evidence of subsequent law that was intended by its framers to extend the right to bear arms not only beyond, but against, the purposes of slavery. One might have noticed that, through a series of excruciating struggles during the course of American history, including a Civil War, the full enfranchisement of citizenship with all its attendant rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, was extended to all the previously excluded groups of American society. It is crystal clear that the intention of the framers of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was to guarantee the right to bear arms to freed slaves. As Adam Winkler points out: “Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, ‘Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.’”
Whatever the intentions of the framers in the eighteenth century, the right to keep and bear arms is today treated as a right of all citizens – for sure, only, as with every other right – because it was fought for as such. That – the fruit of that fight – is the right we are talking about in today’s political and historical context. Far from using the framers’ prejudices to dismiss this particular right, liberals and progressives should be celebrating this extension of it, as they do so many other rights that have, by the twenty-first century, been achieved through legal, political, and, yes, armed struggle, sometimes using constitutional statutes in ways their authors could never, in their wildest dreams, have imagined. Like, you know, gay marriage.
These superficial historical arguments actually confirm that, historically, in America as elsewhere, guns have been recognized as tools of empowerment, to be distributed as widely as possible among those considered worthy of empowerment, and to be denied to those deemed unworthy of empowerment and eligible for subjugation. Who, in today’s America, do these liberal commentators think is unworthy of that empowerment?
The argument that tries to wed the Second Amendment to slavery for all time is particularly misleading, because it has to deny all the ways in which the right to bear arms was fought for and used by African-Americans, with great courage, throughout our history, in order to defend and extend their rights. Winkler describes the freedmen’s struggle and revanchist racist resistance over this right after the Civil War, including the role of the Ku Klux Klan as “disarmament posse”: [A]t the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles… [M]any blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision [of their freedom]. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’” …Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes …One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. …The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan. In response to the Black Codes …General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.” That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye… told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.”
Unfortunately, when “the old landed gentry managed to successfully assert its power against the Reconstruction regime, former slaves were disarmed by house-to-house patrols, either under the Black Codes or by such irregular bodies as the Klan,” 10 which enabled the subjugation of African-Americans in the South to the new nightmare of Jim Crow.
In the cauldron of the Klan’s lynching fever, writing in 1892, Ida B. Wells learned and taught a valuable lesson (that George Orwell would later echo):
Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves … and prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. (Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases) Ida Wells: another “wingnut.”
Ida and the Klan both understood what the latter’s ideological confrère later repeated: The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. — Adolf Hitler (in Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, pp. 425-426.).
Regarding the Civil Rights struggle of the 20th century, and without diminishing for a second the powerful non-violent struggle led by MLK, we should be aware of the ways in which that history has been edited to create “pacifist” saints who are safe for the Imperial hagiography, while rendering invisible the ways in which the renewal of armed resistance by African-Americans in the South after WWII helped to galvanize the final offensive against Jim Crow: The same was true of the Civil Rights struggle a century later, after World War II. In areas where armed self-defense efforts by civil rights activists were widespread, they significantly improved the balance of power against the Klan and other racist vigilante movements. Numerous armed self-defense groups — e.g. the Deacons for Defense and Justice, whose members used rifles and shotguns to repel attacks by white vigilantes in Louisiana in the 1960s — helped equalize the correlation of forces between civil rights activists and racists in many small towns throughout the south. Especially notable was Robert Williams, who in 1957 organized an armed defense of the Monroe, NC NAACP chapter president’s home against a Klan raid and sent the vigilantes fleeing for their lives. Williams’s book Negroes With Guns later inspired Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers Party. (Carson, and, on Robert Williams, see my related post Sealed With A Kiss: Mabel and Kathleen Talk Armed Self-Defense) Indeed, as Higgins points out: “The modern day gun rights movement was not pioneered by the NRA … but by the Black Panthers, whose co-founder, Huey Newton, found genuine protective value in the Second Amendment.” And the modern gun-control movement began as a response to this by conservative Republicans, who were scared witless when Newton and the Panthers showed up on the California State Capitol steps ostentatiously carrying their perfectly legal firearms: “Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw ‘no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons’.” (Winkler)
The riots of 1967, which included armed resistance, also brought new gun control initiatives by the American elite:
The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire. A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.” (Winkler) The non-violent civil disobedience strategy of the MLK wing of the Civil Rights movement, based on ostentatiously unarmed submission to arrest and detention by the armed agents of the state, was enormously effective, but it was not the only thing that had a profound effect in concentrating the minds of the white American elite on the urgent need to change things substantively and quickly. I mean real fast. Anyone who does not know that Martin’s voice was in constant tension with the growing influence of those like Malcolm and Huey, that a lot of black people and their white supporters had had quite enough of submission to the armed police of the racist state, and that the fear of armed black insurrections was on the minds and in the political equations of the ruling class and its armed agents, is enmeshed in a pacifistic dream history.
Gun Rights and the Dynamics of Radical or Revolutionary Contestation
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will,” Frederick Douglass said, and true that. And there’s no demand without, somewhere behind it, an “or else.”
Do not get me wrong: Militant unarmed non-violent resistance is a very powerful political tactic. I would say that it’s the most effective mode of protest, resistance, and contestation for building crucial popular support against modern state oppression, and it is certainly the preferred mode of contestation for progressives, no matter how radical their goals, in the United States today.
Yet today is not forever, and while there is no power more crucial for radical change than a unified mass movement that represents the majority of people, it is also true that there are powers, privileges, prerogatives, supremacies, and wealth that will not be conceded by the group or class that holds them to any movement of any size or moral quality, except under threat of deadly force. To rephrase Douglass: Armed power, arrayed in defense of national, ethnic, racial, and/or class supremacy, will not concede to moral suasion alone. It never has and it never will.
Every successful mass movement for radical or revolutionary change will reach that point where it has to decide if it has had enough of beatings, arrests, detentions, and killings by the armed forces of the regime it is challenging. It will have to decide whether to finally submit, or to advance decisively, with new forms of resistance.
No one has put this more eloquently in recent years that did the leaders of the 2011 Egyptian revolt, in their solidarity message to Occupy Wall Street:
It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious. Let’s dispense with the straw men. Do you really think you’re going to defeat the US Army with your puny little rifles? No, and not just because I have understood all along that any “military-style” civilian rifle is no match for an actual military weapon. No, I understand that the idea that every gun owner showing up on Pennsylvania Avenue tomorrow could possibly result in serious, systemic political and socio-economic change is ridiculous – maybe even as ridiculous as the idea that voting for the next Democratic presidential candidate could do so. I understand that, for there to be any prospect of the change of the sort I would like, there is no shortcut around building a political movement. I am talking about political principles that are fundamental to a movement in the long run, not magic solutions in the short run.
I also understand that, in the US or any modern state, any plausible regime of gun rights will leave the state with a supremacy of armed force, even if not a monopoly. Still, the state’s lack of a monopoly on that does not count for nothing. In the process of building a mass movement that undermines the authority and legitimacy of the state, and the morale of its armed agents, there will be many discrete moments of confrontation, presumably getting progressively more militant and threatening to the status quo. A modicum of armed power among the citizenry may not exactly equalize, but can noticeably recalibrate, the correlation of forces. If there is some armed resistance to the armed forces of the state, this will change the calculus, especially in a state which claims popular legitimacy. In the eruptions of armed resistance in the Civil Rights era, this is exactly what we saw, not so long ago, in this country.
Even if the state constantly wins such battles, it may suffer politically debilitating losses. (Who “won” the Newark and Detroit and Los Angeles riots?) Its political leaders and police and military agents will have different, more difficult, political costs to calculate. Yes, as long as the young working-class men and women driving the tanks and shooting the really fully automatic weapons on its behalf keep doing so, the Imperial High Command may be able to crush everything from sporadic uprisings to a massive popular rebellion. But it will be at great cost to the state’s legitimacy. And, human beings that they are, the willingness of those men and women to keep doing that on behalf of their masters – their defection calculus – will be affected not just by political and moral appeals (Do you really want to shoot your brothers and sisters who are fighting for their pensions?), but also by the real possibility that they might get shot doing so. Militant, radical and revolutionary movements are filled with hundreds of unpredictable moments of decision, which can become game-changing tipping points. Unpredictable, but not entirely unforeseeable.
I’m pretty sure, too, that if, after the development of an overwhelming mass movement, there is some kind crucial insurrectionary moment, it will be settled not by the power of personal civilian weapons, but by the power of the armed forces that the besieged state has built up for itself. The key moment is not the defeat, but the defection, of the armed forces of the state. The ultimate power does not rest with who starts out with the most guns, or even with who shoots them the most (or at all), but with who ends up determining which way they are pointed. The most successful insurrectionary moment is one in which no bullet has to be fired; everyone just has to know at whom they will be headed if they are.
That is still a struggle over the use and control of arms. Pointing a gun is using it.
Understanding the dynamic of radical and revolutionary change, not repeating platitudes about how omnipotent is the state and how unchangeable is society, is really thinking historically. I heard someone ridiculing a gun-rights supporter on TV the other day, along these lines: Do you realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about tyranny or resistance to tyranny, in the United States? Really? Let’s roll the videotape back a few years, and try that out again: Do you realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about American presidents, Republican and Democrat, torturing, kidnapping for torture, nullifying habeas corpus, spying without warrants on everybody, setting up a separate justice system for Muslims, rewarding billions in bonuses to bankers who crashed the economy, offering Social Security and Medicare as sacrifices to those bankers, aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers and journalists while granting complete immunity and government favor to torturers and banksters, personally overseeing the assassination of anyone they want anywhere in the world, including American citizens, starting seven or eight secret wars? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about the great European social-democratic states, Socialist governments included, overseeing forced austerity on behalf of banksters, selling off the land and assets of their countries, reneging on the pensions of their citizens, ushering in 25-30% unemployment, facing riots and pitched battles with police in the streets?
Understanding that things can and will change, radically at times, is an historical attitude. Asserting that the society and moment we live in today is omnipotent and unchangeable –proclaiming, essentially, that history is over – is what I understand as pure ideology. “Tyranny” – or whatever you prefer to call it – has, not so long ago, already been here and been successfully resisted, with non-violent and not non-violent tactics – unless you think Jim Crow doesn’t qualify. And whatever-you-want-to-call-it is back – unless you think a regime that practices assassination, unilateral war-making, unlimited surveillance, austerity imposition, and issues from a completely corrupt electoral process, etc., doesn’t qualify. And it may well be resisted again. I don’t know how the street protests and occupations of state capitols and such by workers and pensioners and student debt-slaves and people thrown out of their homes and out of their jobs may unfold in America in the near future, but they very well may take lessons from more than the edited history of such struggles in our country and around the world. Nothing ridiculous there, as far as I’m concerned. History is not over.
I am certainly as stumped as Glenn Greenwald by the unfortunate state of American political passivity he describes (and which never ceases to amaze my foreign friends):
The real mystery from all of this is that it has not led to greater social unrest. To some extent, both the early version of the Tea Party and the Occupy movements were spurred by the government’s protection of Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. Still, Americans continue to be plagued by massive unemployment, foreclosures, the threat of austerity and economic insecurity while those who caused those problems have more power and profit than ever. And they watch millions of their fellow citizens be put in cages for relatively minor offenses while the most powerful are free to commit far more serious crimes with complete impunity. Far less injustice than this has spurred serious unrest in other societies. According to my understanding of history, though, I would say, “Wait a minute.” As Greenwald points out, the deep-seated problems are all there and are likely to worsen, and the Obama effect will wear out. I’ll refer back to the example above of the Civil Rights movement. Change – significant but not quite revolutionary change – happened, and it happened faster, I contend, because of the reality and threat of armed resistance.
Gun Rights and the Problematic of Mass Killings and School Shootings
Don’t we have to save the children?
Just after midnight on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old former Marine, killed his mother and wife by stabbing them in the heart. A few hours later, he called his wife’s office to let them know she wouldn’t be in that day, packed up an M1 .30-caliber carbine, a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, a 6mm bolt-action hunting rifle, a .35 caliber pump rifle, a 9mm Luger pistol, a 25-caliber pistol, a .357 Magnum revolver, 700+ rounds of ammunition, Dexedrine, Excedrin, toilet paper, deodorant, and other sundries, and went up on the Tower on the University of Texas campus in Austin, where he methodically murdered 12 people, and wounded 32 others. Whitman picked off people – mostly young kids in their teens and twenties – at random. From up to 1500 feet away – no one could see it coming – he rained sudden, instant death on solitary strollers and couples walking together – boyfriend and girlfriend, sisters. He’d shoot first one, then the other, and then he’d shoot people who tried to drag wounded friends and strangers to safety. This went on for almost two hours, with police and armed citizens returning fire, until two cops and an armed civilian got to the top of the tower, and killed Whitman. I remember it vividly. From my safe redoubt in New York, I was terrified. It still shakes me up to think about it.
Are the guns the problem here?
This is not a flippant question. Clearly, the world would be a better place if Charles Whitman had never had a gun that day. Does saying that mean we are impelled to ban guns, and to effectively eliminate a fundamental political right, criminalizing fifty million people who have done nothing wrong? I do not think so. Clearly, armed civilians helped minimize and end the carnage. Does saying that mean we are impelled to recognize how wonderful guns are and how great it would be for everyone to be packing all the time? I do not think so. For me, whatever the role of guns in exacerbating and ending the harm caused in incidents like this, what such incidents really demonstrate is that guns are neither the problem nor the answer, precisely to incidents like this, and that incidents like this are not what’s at stake in the problematic of “gun control.”
The primary causal factor in an incident like this is something much more powerful than a gun; it’s, for lack of a better term, a state of mind. We have all been horrified that there have been too many mass killings by young men in opportunistic venues, with guns. If they had been with different weapons – one with a gun killing ten people in a school, one with an ax who killed eight people in a mall, and one with a can of gasoline who burned fifteen people to death in a movie theater – what would the central focus of our concern be? What would we be asking about why this is happening, about what might be causing more young men to engage in spates of seemingly senseless, suicidal-homicidal mass violence, about what we might do to recognize and eliminate, as far as possible, those causes? What programs and policies would we be exploring? Because those are the same questions, with the same central focus, that we should be asking now. And that focus would not be on the weapons used.
The fundamental problem we have to deal with in incidents like these is that, once someone is in the state of mind where he is impelled to do such a thing, he is going to do it, with one weapon or another, and you’re going to have horror and grief. Yes, the ability of such a person to get his hand on a gun – legally or illegally, bolt action or semi-automatic, with or without a “thumbhole stock,” he really won’t care – exacerbates the damage he can do, but it is not the cause of the problem, and addressing guns in any way does exactly nothing to address the cause of the problem. We have to look at what causes that state of mind.
This is a very difficult problem. As I suggested above, I do think that the ubiquitous cultural representation of armed violence as a quick, effective, and attractive solution for all kinds of personal and social problems is pernicious. It steers someone in such a state of mind to go for the gun. Adam Lanza was in the SWAT team of his mind. But for someone in his state of mind, his choice of targets, his need to eliminate them brutally and right now, could as easily have come from watching a rerun of Village of the Damnedas from playing Call of Duty.
One thing for sure, if one wants to deal with that difficult problem, all the hoopla about “military-style assault weapons” is pure distraction. “Assault weapons” is a term invented by the gun industry to conflate civilian and military weapons for marketing purposes, and anti-gun rights politicians have jumped on that confusion for their own agenda. And “style” is, well, just that. It’s clear to me, from many conversations, that a lot of people do not understand that “semi-automatic” means “shoots one bullet per trigger pull,” and not “fires continuously as long as you hold the trigger” (“automatic”), and that many people think “military-style” refers to some special enhanced functionality rather that to design components like “thumbhole stocks” or “a pistol grip that extends beneath the action,” which do nothing to increase the lethality of the weapon. The true power is in the ammunition, not the rifle, and the most powerful ammunition, loaded to bring down 300-500 pound animals, is used in popular “hunting “ and “deer” rifles of the kind Charles Whitman used, not in these “military-style assault weapons.”
The only item on the list of anathematized “assault weapons” features that can be construed to have any significant functional value in this kind of mass shooting incident is the magazine. If you imagine that banning 100-round magazines will be helpful, go ahead. But be aware that a knowledgeable shooter wouldn’t use one; the Colorado movie shooter was taken down because he used a 100-round magazine, which jammed, as they are known to do. A shooter with a 30- or 10-round magazine, or even with a revolver and speedloaders, will still kill a whole lot of unarmed people. And legally limiting magazine capacity to seven bullets is just silly, as Gov. Cuomo found when he realized he had outlawed police handguns. (Of course, he’ll re-write the law to make an exception for those armed agents of the state.) A magazine is also a very easy item to fabricate (as guns themselves soon will be via the 3D printer). Trying to stop mass shootings by outlawing large-capacity magazines is like going after lung cancer by outlawing big cigarette cases.
This “assault weapons” burst of gun control fervor may make you feel like you’re doing something about mass shootings and saving the children, but it’s as much a silly shortcut around the real problem as is the idea that everyone packing heat is going to make us suddenly free of tyranny. The only way you can make yourself feel that you’ve substantially eliminated the damage guns do in such situations is by outlawing all guns, handguns included, and believing that will actually mean that guns will not be available. And, after all the personal, political, and social energy spent trying to capture and imprison everyone with an “assault weapon” having a “thumbhole stock” or a handgun with an eight-round magazine, or a 3D printer, after all the (even further) erosion of constitutional protections against search and seizure, and further militarization of police and SWAT teams, and further filling of the prisons with people who had never done any harm to any other human being, you would not have done one thing – not one single thing – to address the cause(s) of the problem you were claiming to want to solve.
If you want to address the fundamental problem in these kinds of incidents, then you’d better look somewhere else, at something that can explain the state of mind that drives them. Charles Whitman, who was medicating himself with Valium and Dexedrine, had, the autopsy revealed, a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor that would have killed him within a year. Before the shootings, he had visited a psychiatrist, who noted: “This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility … He readily admits having overwhelming periods of hostility with a very minimum of provocation. Repeated inquiries … were not too successful with the exception of his vivid reference to ‘thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people’.”
So, fair question or not: Were the guns the problem there?
In April 2001, 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school in Washington state and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage. Fortunately, he didn’t kill anybody. After being held for 14 months, he was released under community supervision, based on the testimony of psychiatrists about the adverse effects of the drugs he was taking. Cory remembered nothing of his violence. The incident took place after he had been switched, cold-turkey, from Paxil to a high dose of Effexor to treat “situational depression.”
Here’s what Cory’s father said: “The morning that Cory went to school and did what he did, my wife and I just knew that it had to be something with the drugs. That morning he had taken about 300 milligrams of Effexor, and I thought it was something about him going off one of the drugs and then the high dose of the other. One of Cory’s friends told us that Cory was yelling and then he just stopped, looked down and saw the gun in his hand and woke up.…I guess I could blame myself for having the gun available, but if I’d known then just what these drugs could do it would have been the drugs that would not have been in our home. They always talk about how the kids who do these things are the ones who get picked on by the jocks and stuff, but Cory was a jock. He was on the varsity basketball team, played football and golf, and was very popular in school. I pray every night that the media will get ahold of this issue. If Cory had been on PCP the media would say ‘Oh, he needs drug rehabilitation,’ but because these were prescribed medications they say ‘Oh, it can’t be that,’ but now we know it can be.”11
How about it? Were the guns the problem there? The fundamental, causal problem? If Cory had killed those 23 kids, would it be pistol grips and thumbhole stocks we should be obsessing about?
Both Paxil’s and Effexor’s manufacturers’ inserts state explicitly that the drugs “increase the risk of suicidal behavior,” and that analysis of “antidepressant drugs (SSRIs and others) showed that these drugs increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults (ages 18-24).”
Columbine? Perhaps you missed the story of Mark Allen Taylor, who was shot at least six times by Columbine shooter Eric Harris. At the time of the shooting, Harris had taken Luvox for his anger, anxiety, depression, disorganized thoughts, homicidal thoughts, suspiciousness and a temper – having been switched from Zoloft. Taylor, along with a New Jersey police officer who killed six people while on Luvox, sued Solvay, the drug’s maker. (Matthew Beck, from Connecticut, who killed four of his co-workers and himself while on Luvox, couldn’t join them.) Taylor said: “I’m suing Solvay because I believe that Eric Harris did what he did because of this drug.” Dr. Peter Breggin’s report to the court stated: “[At] the time he committed multiple homicides and suicide, Eric Harris was suffering from a substance induced (Luvox-induced) mood disorder with depressive and manic features that had reached a psychotic level of violence and suicide….Absent persistent exposure to Luvox, Eric Harris probably would not have committed violence and suicide.”12
Paxil, Effexor, and Luvox are on Time Magazine’s list of the “Top Ten Legal Drugs Linked to Violence.” (Respectively, 10.3x, 8.3x, and 8.4x more likely to be associated with violence than other drugs.) In a 2001 study, Yale researchers reported that 8.1 percent of all admissions to a university psychiatric hospital were “owing to antidepressant-associated mania or psychosis.”35 If the same percentage of all the 10.7 million US psychiatric hospital admissions at the time of the study were ”antidepressant-associated” manic or psychotic episodes, that would be 860,000 people.
As one researcher testified to the FDA about drugs of this type: “We have never seen drugs so similar to LSD and PCP as these SSRI antidepressants. All of these drugs produce dreaming during periods of wakefulness.”13
Let’s make sure we eliminate those pistol grips.
Did these SSRI-antidepressants cause these mass shootings, or the other 60+ incidents of school violence of the kind we’re so horrified about that are also linked to antidepressant drugs?41 I don’t know. I don’t know because, well, there isn’t much talk, investigation or concern about that, what with the hunt for “military-style” guns taking up so much attention.
It’s a complicated question, because, as one Italian researcher noted: “Antidepressant-induced mania is not simply a temporary and reversible phenomenon, but a complex biochemical mechanism of illness deterioration.” It’s not just a matter of what drug you take, but of how doctors now cycle kids through one antidepressant after another. It’s often the withdrawal phase of a drug that causes the most problems: “As patients are switched from one antidepressant to another or to a polypharmacy regimen, their illness may be propelled ‘into a refractory phase, characterized by low remission, high relapse and high intolerance.’ Antidepressants increase the risk of a ‘switch’ into mania, and thus into bipolar illness.”
(There is no verification of what drugs Adam Lanza was taking. As of January 11th, the toxicology report on his autopsy was still “weeks” away.)
I do think that those who are concerned about these mass shootings, and about the increase in the number of these incidents over the last 15 years, might want to spend at least as much time and energy looking at factors that could actually be causing the extremely bizarre states of mind that propel adolescents and young adults into such violence, as they do haranguing society about exacerbating factors. Because I know that guns do not cause these states of mind.
What changes have taken place in American society over the past couple of decades that are likely to be producing these states of mind more often among adolescents and young adults? Is it that evolution produced a new generation of excitable boys, genetically predisposed to psychotic violence? That guns are intrinsically more lethal (ask Charles Whitman), or more prone to jump into young people’s hands? Or that kids are, for the first time in history, being constantly dosed with powerful, psychoactive, literally mind-altering, drugs, whose effects have been seriously and repeatedly challenged (even if in ways that are kept largely invisible to most media consumers)?
“Imagine how people would totally rethink things.”
The most deadly school massacre in American history was not Sandy Hook. It occurred in 1927, in Bath, Michigan. Andrew Kehoe bludgeoned his wife to death, firebombed his house and farm buildings, blew up the Bath Consolidated School with explosives he had secretly planted for months, killing 38 grade-school children, and then blew himself up in his truck filled with dynamite and shrapnel, taking out the school superintendent and a few others.43
No guns. A state of mind. It’ll find a way.
(OK, he did use a rifle to detonate the dynamite in his truck. Not the same.) I had a pretty tough holiday season, including the death of a close family member. In the midst of all that, seeing the faces and imagining the last moments of those 20 children killed at Sandy Hook shook me to the core. I’d really like to see a discussion of how a young man like Adam Lanza could set himself to do such a thing. Tirades against pistol grips and magazines, and attempts to criminalize fifty-million people who have done nothing wrong, aren’t doing it for me. They are not that discussion, and only divert from it.
So, the right to own guns is a fundamental political right, and guns don’t cause psychosis-driven mass shootings, therefore no regulations, right?
Wrong. No right is “god-given” or “natural” (although there are some that we, for good reason, treat in our socio-political discourse as if they were). Rights are the achievements of historical struggle, which, in my book, makes them even more precious. Nor are rights absolute. The “free-speech” right comes as close as you can for me, but there’s still “Fire!”-in-a-crowded-theater. It is not plausible that, in any modern society, guns would be entirely unregulated. No modern state is going to allow the unregulated possession of Stingers or fifty-caliber machine guns.
There will be gun regulation, and there is, a lot of it. And, often, in those toddling towns where the regulation is “toughest,” gun violence is highest. I’m not sure what else we need, but I’ll listen. Let’s have a discussion about reasonable gun regulations that, on all sides, firmly and sincerely recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental political right, which deserves a place of honor on our wall of historical achievements.
Given that shared assumption, we can proceed to confront all the devils in the details. Some regulations I will find legitimate. I can’t go on about the dangers of states of mind, and then object to any notion of a background check. I do object, however, to those proposals that are silly (“military-style”) and whose main purpose is to train citizens into more thorough compliance, to those that have no respect for what the fundamental right of gun ownership means, to those that have obvious confiscatory intent (register and re-register everything), and to those that will criminalize fifty-million people who have done nothing wrong. Like the New York State law passed by Cuomo. “I support the Second Amendment, I really do. You can keep your musket and your Derringer,” is transparently insincere, and won’t cut it.
Above all, let’s not, because of a fearful reaction to horrific events, jump on gun-control proposals that are not going to stop those horrors, and will play into an elite agenda of complete citizen disempowerment and loss of hard-won rights. That is exactly what we have done since 9/11, and it is past time to say, ”No more!”
One of the things I’m open to is the idea that a prospective gun owner should have to get some training. (At no expense, of course. It’s a right, and if it’s reasonable for the state to require training to exercise it, it’s necessary for the state to provide that training for everybody, of every class, who wants it.) I’ve fired guns, and learned how to handle them – and I actually think everybody should, which I also think would help change the debate – but, as I said, I don’t own any. Haven’t felt the need for it. If I moved to one of those dangerous neighborhoods, like the pretty towns in New Jersey or Colorado I have visited, where the bears come in to use your swimming pool, I might feel that need real quick. (I’m with Stephen Colbert on the bears.) The only thing that might get me to rush out and purchase a gun, as it’s already got 2.2 million people to do, is the threat that my right to do so was about to be eliminated.45 And I might now have to consider going armed, to fend off those of my liberal friends who will come gunning for me after reading this.
…………………………
Update (2/9/2014): “Public Unaware.” A couple of recent charts::
1“The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do, they cannot give the factory worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see it stays there.”
“The Complete Works of George Orwell”, Edited by Peter Davison, 1998, volume 12 of the 20 volume set. Pages 362-365 contain a reprint of the entire article, “Don’t Let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home Guard,” Evening Standard, 8 January 1941.
As the quote indicates, King never eschewed violence entirely. Early in his career, King’s home was described as an “arsenal” of guns, with armed supporters often posted to prevent a Klan assassination. King even applied for a concealed carry permit, which was refused by the local police in Alabama, who “used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans” – an historical example used by advocates of “shall issue” vs. “may issue” laws about carry permits. (Adam Winkler, “MLK and His Guns.”)
And there’s Gandhi’s famous quote: “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” The full context doesn’t make it any better for anti-gun-rights faux-pacifists. The quote continues: “If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.” Gandhi was exhorting Indians to join the British army in WWI, as a tactical move that might persuade the British of their loyalty, thereby hastening the repeal of the hated Arms Act, and at the same time getting training that might later be useful in the independence struggle.
The Arms Act was one of a series of measures adopted by the British in response to a serious Indian rebellion, the mutiny of 1857: “[T]the Indian masses were systematically being disarmed and the means of local firearm production destroyed, to ensure that they (the Indian masses) would never again have the means to rise in rebellion against their colonial masters. Towards this end the colonial government … brought into existence the Indian Arms Act, 1878 (11 of 1878); an act which, exempted Europeans and ensured that no Indian could possess a weapon of any description unless the British masters considered him a “loyal” subject of the British Empire.” http://www.abhijeetsingh.com/arms/india/
And let’s not even get into Gandhi’s even more notorious: “We adopted it [the weapon of non-violence] out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”
The full quote is debated, with some suggesting that Gandhi’s ”we” was not meant to include himself and his movement and/or that he was really trying to emphasize the power of non-violence. I’m not persuaded, but judge for yourself: “Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”
The general point: For both MLK and Gandhi: “No Justice, No Peace” was, I would suggest, a more cogent slogan than “Disarm the People.”
8Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, has been one of the most influential books on the history and philosophy of science. In it, Kuhn argues that the history of scientific thought and practice is not steadily and continuously incremental. It is marked, rather, by periods of conceptual stability – “normal science” – that are interrupted by conjunctures of “revolutionary science” which cause comprehensive and radical “paradigm shifts.”
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flashes victory signs, declaring he will prevail amid a “coup,” during a press conference at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, on Friday. (Ariana Cubillos / AP)
On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.
A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.
Covert involvement of the United States, by the CIA or other intelligence services, isn’t mentioned in any of the Times’ editorials on any of the coups. Absent an open, undeniable U.S. military invasion (as in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada), things seem to happen in Latin American countries entirely on their own, with outside forces rarely, if ever, mentioned in the Times. Obviously, there are limits to what is “provable” in the immediate aftermath of such events (covert intervention is, by definition, covert), but the idea that the U.S. or other imperial actors could have stirred the pot, funded a junta or run weapons in any of the conflicts under the table is never entertained.
More often than not, what one is left with, reading Times editorials on these coups, are racist, paternalistic “cycle of violence” cliches. Sigh, it’s just the way of things Over There. When reading these quotes, keep in mind the CIA supplied and funded the groups that ultimately killed these leaders:
Brazil 1964: “They have, throughout their history, suffered from a lack of first class rulers.”
Chile 1973: “No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself.”
Argentina 1976: “It was typical of the cynicism with which many Argentines view their country’s politics that most people in Buenos Aires seemed more interested in a soccer telecast Tuesday night than in the ouster of President Isabel Martinez de Perlin by the armed forces. The script was familiar for this long‐anticipated coup.”
See, it didn’t matter! It’s worth pointing out the military junta put in power by the CIA-contrived coup killed 10,000 to 30,000 Argentines from 1976 to 1983.
There’s a familiar script: The CIA and its U.S. corporate partners come in, wage economic warfare, fund and arm the opposition, then the target of this operation is blamed. This, of course, isn’t to say there isn’t merit to some of the objections being raised by The New York Times—whether it be Chile in 1973 or Venezuela in 2019. But that’s not really the point. The reason the CIA and U.S. military and its corporate partisans historically target governments in Latin America is because those governments are hostile to U.S. capital and strategic interests, not because they are undemocratic. So while the points the Times makes about illiberalism may sometimes be true, they’re mostly a non sequitur when analyzing the reality of what’s unfolding.
Did Allende, as the Times alleged in 1973 when backing his violent overthrow, “persist in pushing a program of pervasive socialism” without a “popular mandate”? Did, as the Times alleged, Allende “pursue this goal by dubious means, including attempts to bypass both Congress and the courts”? Possibly. But Allende’s supposed authoritarianism isn’t why the CIA sought his ouster. It wasn’t his means of pursuing redistributive policies that offended the CIA and U.S. corporate partners; it was the redistributive policies themselves.
Hand-wringing over the anti-democratic nature of how Allende carried out his agenda without noting that it was the agenda itself—not the means by which it was carried out—that animated his opponents is butting into a conversation no one in power is really having. Why, historically, has The New York Times taken for granted the liberal pretexts for U.S. involvement, rather than analyzing whether there were possibly other, more cynical forces at work?
The answer is that rank ideology is baked into the premise. The idea that the U.S. is motivated by human rights and democracy is taken for granted by The New York Times editorial board and has been since its inception. This does all the heavy lifting without most people—even liberals vaguely skeptical of American motives in Latin America—noticing that a sleight of hand has taken place. “In recent decades,” a 2017 Times editorial scolding Russia asserted, “American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results.” Oh, well, good then.
What should be a conversation about American military and its covert apparatus unduly meddling in other countries quickly becomes a referendum on the moral properties of those countries. Theoretically a good conversation to have (and one certainly ongoing among people and institutions in these countries), but absent a discussion of the merits of the initial axiom—that U.S. talking heads and the Washington national security apparatus have a birthright to determine which regimes are good and bad—it serves little practical purpose stateside beyond posturing. And often, as a practical matter, it works to cement the broader narrative justifying the meddling itself.
Do the U.S. and its allies have a moral or ethical right to determine the political future of Venezuela? This question is breezed past, and we move on to the question of how this self-evident authority is best exercised. This is the scope of debate in The New York Times—and among virtually all U.S. media outlets. To ante up in the poker game of Serious People Discussing Foreign Policy Seriously, one is obligated to register an Official Condemnation of the Official Bad Regime. This is so everyone knows you accept the core premises of U.S. regime change but oppose it on pragmatic or legalistic grounds. It’s a tedious, extortive exercise designed to shift the conversation away from the United States’ history of arbitrary and violent overthrows and into an exchange about how best to oppose the Official Bad Regime in question. U.S. liberals are to keep a real-time report card on these Official Bad Regimes, and if these regimes—due to an ill-defined rubric of un-democraticness and human rights—fall below a score of say, “60,” they become illegitimate and unworthy of defense as such.
While obviously not in Latin America, it’s also worth noting that the Times cheerled the CIA-sponsored coup against Iran’s President, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. Its editorial, written two days after his ouster, engaged in the Times’ patented combination of victim-blaming and “oh dear” bloviating:
“The now-deposed Premier Mossadegh was flirting with Russia. He had won his phony plebiscite to dissolve the Majlis, or lower House of Parliament, with the aid of the Tudeh Communists.”
“Mossadegh is out, a prisoner awaiting trial. It is a credit to the Shah, to whom he was so disloyal, and to Premier Zahedi, that this rabid, self-seeking nationalist would have been protected at a time when his life would not have been worth the wager of a plugged nickel.”
“The Shah … deserves praise in this crisis. … He was always true to the parliamentary institutions of his country, he was a moderating influence in the wild fanaticism exhibited by the nationalists under Mossadegh, and he was socially progressive.”
Again, no mention of CIA involvement (which the agency now openly acknowledges), which the Times wouldn’t necessarily have had any way of knowing at the time. (This is part of the point of covert operations.) Mossadegh is summarily demonized, and it’s not until decades later the public learns of the extent of U.S. involvement. The Times even gets in an orientalist description of Iranians, implying why a strong Shah is necessary:
[The average Iranian] has nothing to lose. He is a man of infinite patience, of great charm and gentleness, but he is also—as we have been seeing—a volatile character, highly emotional, and violent when sufficiently aroused.
Needless to say, there are major difference between these cases: Mossadegh, Allende, Chavez and Maduro all lived in radically different times and championed different policies, with varying degrees of liberalism and corruption. But the one thing they all had in common is that the U.S. government, and a compliant U.S. media, decided they “needed to go” and did everything to achieve this end. The fundamental arrogance of this assumption, one would think, is what ought to be discussed in the U.S. media—as typified by the Times’ editorial board—but time and again, this assumption is either taken for granted or hand-waved away, and we all move on to how and when we can best overthrow the Bad Regime.
For those earnestly concerned about Maduro’s efforts to undermine the democratic institutions of Venezuela (he’s been accused of jailing opponents, stacking the courts and holding Potemkin elections), it’s worth pointing out that even when the liberal democratic properties of Venezuela were at their height in 2002 (they were internationally sanctioned and overseen by the Carter Center for years, and no serious observer considers Hugo Chavez’s rule illegitimate), the CIA still greenlit a military coup against Chavez, and the New York Times still profusely praised the act. As it wrote at the time:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.
Chavez would soon be restored to power after millions took to the streets to protest his removal from office, but the question remains: If The New York Times was willing to ignore the undisputed will of the Venezuelan people in 2002, what makes anyone think the newspaper is earnestly concerned about it in 2019? Again, the thing that’s being objected to by the White House, the State Department and their U.S. imperial apparatchiks is the redistributive policies and opposition to the United States’ will, not the means by which they do so. Perhaps the Times and other U.S. media—living in the heart of, and presumably having influence over, this empire—could try centering this reality rather than, for the millionth time, adjudicating the moral properties of the countries subject to its violent, illegitimate whims.
(The cover of the controversial political novel The Gladfly, by Ethel Voynich.
Ethel Voynich’s master piece novel, The Gadfly, about revolutionary Italy was a runaway success in revolutionary Russia and China.)
Corkwoman Voynich published the story in 1897 and the story of a young Englishman who travelled to Rome during the most tumultuous time in Italian history captured the Soviet imagination in a way that few other English language novels have done before or since.
The Gadfly sold well over 5 million copies in 22 of the Soviet Union’s official languages and inspired no less than seven musical adaptations and five film and theatre adaptations each.
Originally met with disapproval by the authorities in Tsarist Russia due to its themes of rebellion and social change, it became standard school reading for many years in the Soviet Union and enjoyed considerable popularity in both Iran and the People’s Republic of China too. It was also widely read by Irish Republican and socialist prisoners in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison after the Easter Rising in 1916.
In it, the gallant protagonist Arthur Burton journeys to Italy at the height of the so-called Risorgimento as “The Gadfly” and becomes embroiled in ecclesiastical scandal with a shocking denouement.
Despite being published at the tail end of the 19th century the book enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the 1950’s after a Soviet movie adaptation in 1955 sold 39 million box office tickets. Its enduring mass appeal in China meant that during the Cultural Revolution the once officially sanctioned text was suppressed, as nervous Communist officials worried it would inspire anti-Maoist movements.
Today “The Gadfly” is out of print in the English language, while available free in the public domain site Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3431/3431-h/3431-h.htm – but it remains a much loved book in many countries that lived with the promise of socialist liberation from capitalist rule.
Anglo-Irish writer Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly (1897)is a dramatic story of revolutionary ambition and the fraught relationship between revolutionary movements and the Catholic Church. Set during the nineteenth-century Italian Risorgimento, it tells the story of an Englishman named Arthur (the ‘Gadfly’) who becomes embroiled in the Young Italy movement, helping to distribute weapons and spread seditious, anti-clerical pamphlets. Alongside the Gadfly, there is the quietly brave and revolutionary Gemma, who defies traditional gender roles. This book gained a huge international profile and was popular in Soviet Russia and later in communist China.
This globally-influential Anglo-Irish novel reveals connections between revolutionary Russia and Ireland. The movement towards independence in Ireland c. 1912 to 1923 is now commonly referred to as the Irish Revolution, although this term remains contentious. The more conservative nature of the Irish revolution compared to its Russian counterpart in 1917 has led scholars to ignore their points of comparison and overlap. The Gadfly offers the opportunity to compare these two revolutions in terms of Voynich’s own biography, themes in the novel, and the distribution and political use of the book in Russia and Ireland.
Voynich’s biography demonstrates the importance of transnational political and cultural networks on the eve of the Irish and Russian Revolutions. Voynich (née Boole) was born in 1864 in Blackrock in Cork to English parents, the celebrated mathematicians and philosophers George and Mary Boole. She moved to London after the death of her father but returned to Ireland regularly during her childhood. As a young woman, she became involved in radical circles in London, meeting prominent Russian political exiles like Prince P. A. Kropotkin and Stepniak (Sergey Kravchinsky). With Stepniak’s help, she learned Russian, working as a governess and tutor in Russia in the late 1880s. Her connections to the Russian Empire deepened after she met and later married Wilfred Michael Voynich, a political radical from Poland (then partly under Russian imperial control), who had recently escaped from exile in Siberia.
While few Irish radicals travelled to Russia or married Russian subjects, Voynich was not alone in her curiosity about Russian politics. During the 1920s and 1930s, numerous young Irish radicals, such as Roddy Connolly (son of the influential socialist and revolutionary James Connolly) and Rosamond Jacob, followed in her footsteps to Moscow, searching for political possibilities. Voynich’s life is just one example of how people’s lives and experiences transcended national and political borders during the revolutionary period, defying neat historiographical categorizations.
The themes of The Gadfly relate to important social and political debates in revolutionary Russia and Ireland. Despite its historical Italian setting, the novel had contemporary political implications. At a time of international suffrage movements, the novel suggests women could play an important role in revolutionary movements. The narrator declares how “Gemma would fight at the barricades. She was made of the clay in which heroines are moulded; she would be the perfect comrade.” Russian and Irish women would indeed play an important role on the ‘barricades’, whether it be women like Constance Markievicz in the Easter Rising, or Bolshevik feminists like Alexandra Kollontai.
The relationship between the Church and revolution is also central throughout the novel. In one dramatic scene, we learn how a Catholic priest informed on the Gadfly after he gave away details of the revolutionary movement in confession. Voynich’s own relationship to religion was complex and changed throughout her life, reflecting some of the wider debates surrounding atheism and socialism in both Russia and Ireland at this time.
The circulation of The Gadfly demonstrates the political significance of literature in Russia and Ireland. The Gadfly was first published in the US and then in Britain in 1897, before being translated into Russian by the critic and translator Zinaida Vengerova, whom Voynich had met in Russia. The dramatic novel became hugely popular, first appearing in serial form in the socialist-leaning journal Mir Bozhii and then in multiple book editionsafter 1900. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, The Gadfly (or Ovod in Russian) became a staple revolutionary text, selling an estimated 4 million copies with at least 60 Russian-language editions in print. A 1957 article in the Soviet cultural journal Voprosy Literatury commented on the book’s significance, although it lamented how little was known about its mysterious Anglo-Irish author. This changed after Soviet journalists rediscovered the elderly Voynich in New York, helping her to gain celebrity status in the Soviet Union.
The Gadfly was far less successful in Ireland than in the Soviet Union. During the Irish Civil War of 1922 to 1923, The Gadfly was circulated in some republican circles, including among anti-Treaty prisoners. In his memoir, the Donegal republican Peadar O’Donnell commented how it “is a curious fact, which many of the Mountjoy prisoners must be easily able to recall, that it was around these days that the Gadfly was being widely read in ‘C’ wing.” O’Donnell remembers how his fellow prisoner Joe McKelvey “often commented” on the book, particularly the Gadfly’s execution; McKelvey even placed the book beside his bed before his own execution in December 1922. After this, the book largely fell into obscurity in Ireland. One journalist noted in 1966 how the “only literary recognition [Voynich] has received in her own country is that the book was placed on the banned list of publications some 50 years after it appeared.”
The history of The Gadfly demonstrates the globally-connected nature of both the Russian and Irish Revolutions. Voynich’s travels and circulation of the Gadfly among republican prisoners suggest that the Irish Revolution was not uniformly conservative or detached from international radicalism. And yet The Gadfly was far less popular in Ireland compared to in the Soviet Union. Political policies and cultural attitudes to religion were an important factor in this, and in the wider divergence of the revolutions. The novel’s anti-clerical tone was popular in the Soviet Union, but in post-revolutionary Ireland the Catholic Church exerted considerable influence over society and politics. With its hero the ‘Gadfly’ making blasphemous comments like the “mental disease called religion”, it is hardly surprising that neither the book nor its author was widely celebrated in post-independence Ireland.
Anna Lively is a History PhD student at the University of Edinburgh studying the ‘Transnational connections between the Russian and Irish Revolutions, 1905–1923’. She previously completed an MSc in Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in History at the University of Exeter. Her research is funded by a Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities studentship. She tweets @AnnaLively14.
I was scanning the hodgepodge of paperback books on a shelf in the parlor. I wanted to remove any work I might have sitting on a shelf for decades without touching. I need to give away some more books and make room in the intellectual clutter of my domicile.
I saw the title ‘The Gadfly.’ I hadn’t touched that book in years and years; I had never read the novel. Someone had moved out of an apartment while I was in college and I had adopted the orphaned paperback. I was impressed with the blurbs on the front and back cover. The books was reportedly the ‘number one’ American best seller in Russia.
The Pyramid Published paperback I have has a cover price of fifty cents. The printing date is ‘April 1961.’ The back cover claims that the ‘rediscovered’ classic was being printed in a 500,000 run because of the anticipated interest.
In Russia a number of movies and operas had been based on the work. The music from the works is still appreciated and performed today.
A decent movie from 1955 in good color and period costumes – but – no subtitles – a story set in Italy with everyone speaking Russian. Employ suspension of disbelief, find the plot of the story before hand to understand roughly what is going on, and then pay attention to the actors faces and body movements. This is a good movie. I watched half of it last night. (1:37:46 min)
A passable audio reading of ‘The Gadfly’ from Librivox on Youtube
From Wikipedia:
The Gadfly is a novel by Irish writer Ethel Voynich, published in 1897 (United States, June; Great Britain, September of the same year), set in 1840s Italy under the dominance of Austria, a time of tumultuous revolt and uprisings.[1] The story centres on the life of the protagonist, Arthur Burton, as a member of the Youth movement, and his antagonist, Padre Montanelli. A thread of a tragic relationship between Arthur and his love, Gemma, simultaneously runs through the story. It is a story of faith, disillusionment, revolution, romance, and heroism.
The book, set during the Italian Risorgimento, is primarily concerned with the culture of revolution and revolutionaries. Arthur, the eponymous Gadfly, embodies the tragic Romantic hero, who comes of age and returns from abandonment to discover his true state in the world and fight against the injustices of the current one. The landscape of Italy, in particular the Alps, is a pervading focus of the book, with its often lush descriptions of scenery conveying the thoughts and moods of characters.
Plot
Arthur Burton, an English Catholic, travels to Italy to study to be a priest. He discovers radical ideas, renounces Catholicism, fakes his death and leaves Italy. While away he suffers great hardship, but returns with renewed revolutionary fervour. He becomes a journalist, expounding radical ideas in brilliant satirical tracts published under the pseudonym “the gadfly”. The local authorities are soon dedicated to capturing him. Gemma, his lover, and Padre Montanelli, his Priest (and also secretly his biological father), show various forms of love via their tragic relations with the focal character of Arthur: religious, romantic, and family. The story compares these emotions to those Arthur experiences as a revolutionary, particularly drawing on the relationship between religious and revolutionary feelings. This is especially explicit at the climax of the book, where sacred descriptions intertwine with reflections on the Gadfly’s fate. Eventually Arthur is captured by the authorities and executed by a firing squad. Montanelli also dies, having lost his faith and his sanity.
With the central theme of the book being the nature of a true revolutionary, the reflections on right wing religion and left wing rebellion proved to be ideologically suitable and successful. The Gadfly was exceptionally popular in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and Iran exerting a large cultural influence. In the Soviet UnionThe Gadfly was part of school reading and the top best seller, indeed by the time of Voynich’s death The Gadfly is estimated to have sold 2,500,000 copies in the Soviet Union alone.[5] In P.R. China, there are several publishers translated the book, and one of them (China Youth Press) sold more than 2,050,000 copies.[6] Irish writer Peadar O’Donnell recalls the novel’s popularity among Irish Republican prisoners in Mountjoy Prison during the Irish Civil War.[
On the other hand, in Italy, where the plot takes place during the Italian Unification, the novel is totally neglected:[8] it was translated into Italian as late as in 1956 and was never reprinted: Il Figlio del Cardinale (literally, The Son of the Cardinal). A new edition, carrying the same title, came out in 2013.
1899. The Gadfly by Edward E. Rose, commissioned by Stuart Robson. Voynich described this version as an “illiterate melodrama”, and tried to get an injunction to stop it being performed.[10]
O’Donnell, Peadar The Gates Flew Open (1932) Ch. 14
S. Piastra, Luoghi reali e luoghi letterari: Brisighella in The Gadfly di Ethel Lilian Voynich, “Studi Romagnoli” LVII, (2006), pp. 717–735 (in Italian); S. Piastra, Il romanzo inglese di Brisighella: nuovi dati su The Gadfly di Ethel Lilian Voynich, “Studi Romagnoli” LIX, (2008), pp. 571–583 (in Italian); A. Farsetti, S. Piastra, The Gadfly di Ethel Lilian Voynich: nuovi dati e interpretazioni, “Romagna Arte e Storia” 91, (2011), pp. 41–62 (in Italian).
Therese Bonney & R. F. Rattray, Bernard Shaw, a Chronicle, Leagrave Press, Luton, England, 1951, p.135.
Los Angeles Herald, Volume 604, Number 8, 8 October 1899, p.13
(1954 Movie ‘The Egyptian’ from the popular novel by Mika Waltari concerning the times of Akhenaten (2:13:03 min) )
The first God
Out of the many gods of ancient Egypt an inspired Pharaoh created a monotheistic faith. What was Atenism and why did it fail?
A small stele, probably used as a home altar, depicts Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti with their three eldest daughters. Aten is represented as a sun-disc with the Sun’s rays ending in hands proffering Ankh signs to the royal couple. Amarna period, c1340 BCE. Courtesy the Neues Museum, Berlin
More than 3,000 years ago, ancient Egypt, with its myriad gods and goddesses, saw the founding of two monotheistic religions within a century of each other. One is associated with Moses, the Bible and ancient Israel’s faith, which is the foundation of Judaism and Christianity. The other burst on to the scene around 1350 BCE, flourished for a moment, and was then eclipsed when its founder died in 1336 BCE. We call the religion Atenism. Where did it come from? And why didn’t the world’s first monotheism last?
(1954 Movie ‘The Egyptian’ from the popular novel by Mika Waltari concerning the times of Akhenaten (2:13:03 min) )
In the 4th millennium BCE, there were two distinct cultures in Egypt: one in the Delta (north) region, the other in the south. This geographical and political dualism had its counterpart in religion. In the north, the most powerful god in the Egyptian pantheon was Re, the sun god. His cult centre was in a suburb of present-day Cairo, still known by the ancient Greek name Heliopolis, ‘City of the Sun’, and his principal icon was a pyramid-shaped stone called the benben. The pyramids and obelisks still familiar today owe their shape and symbolic significance to this ancient solar image. By his agency, Re created other gods, over which he was chief, as well as humans. Re’s son was Horus the sky-god, represented as a falcon, and the Pharaohs were the incarnation of Horus. So their title was ‘Son of Re’.
Meanwhile, in the southern town of Thebes (modern Luxor), the god Amen emerged as the most powerful religious force. As his name suggests in ancient Egyptian, Amen is the ‘hidden one’ and is often depicted in human form with blue skin, representing the blue sky or atmosphere. Amen’s principal cult centre was Karnak Temple in Thebes. Around 2000 BCE, then, there were two dominant deities in Egypt: Re, who reigned in the north, and Amen, who ruled the south.
Northern and southern Egypt were embroiled in civil war between c2150 and 2000 BCE. Rival pharaohs ruled Egypt, resulting in parallel kingships based in Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south. It was left to a 11th-dynasty ruler, the Theban Mentuhotep II to unify the land through war around 2000 BCE. By around 1950 BCE, Amenemhet – meaning ‘Amen is foremost’ – founded another dynasty, the 12th. He was the first to incorporate Amen into his name. Amen’s time had come. In a unifying gesture, Amenemhet moved the capital north, back to the Memphis area where Upper and Lower Egypt meet, with his devotion to Amen intact. He called his new capital Itj-tawy, ‘Seizer of the Two-Lands’, and likely here he fused together Amen and Re into a single, powerful deity: Amen-Re, who was called ‘the king of the gods’. Amen-Re’s influence spread through all Egypt, and for 600 years he had no rival atop the pantheon. Karnak mushroomed into the largest temple complex in ancient Egypt as ruler after ruler honoured this god, his consort, Mut, and Khonsu, their son.
The Karnak complex expanded significantly between 1500 and 1350 BCE when the 18th-dynasty monarchs ruled. While Memphis remained the political capital, Thebes was considered the imperial capital. From Karnak, divine oracles directed the kings to conquer neighbouring lands, and they duly obliged. Egypt’s empire stretched north and east to beyond even the Euphrates River, and in the south, Nubia, the northern half of Sudan, was colonised. Tribute and booty poured into Egypt during this century and a half, with Karnak Temple and its powerful priesthood the major recipients. There is no greater testimony to the prosperity of this era than the colossal building projects of Amenhotep III (1390-1353 BCE) at Karnak and Luxor Temples, largely in the name of Amen-Re. Egypt and its god Amen-Re had reached the zenith of power. But no one could have foreseen how quickly things would change with the death of Amenhotep III.
The crown-prince Thutmose, eldest son of Amenhotep III, was set to follow his father to the throne. However, the prince died unexpectedly, leaving the succession to his younger brother. This prince, also called Amenhotep, might have been only in his mid-teens when his father died in the 38th year of kingship, around 1353 BCE, when he became Amenhotep IV. His youth is demonstrated in a carved scene in the tomb of a high-ranking official named Kheruef where the new king is shown making offerings to the gods under the watchful auspices of his mother, rather than standing alone or with his queen, the famous Nefertiti. The gods to which he is depicted making offers are Atum and Re-Horakhty (both solar deities). Atum is presented as a human with a kingly crown on his head, while Re-Horakhty is a human with the head of a falcon, a sun-disc upon the raptor’s head. It appears that, from the outset, Amenhotep IV had an affinity for traditional sun-gods. He was not yet a monotheist.
Based on an inscription dated to regnal year 1 of Amenhotep IV at the sandstone quarry of Gebel el-Silsileh (south of Luxor), we learn that here the new king began his first building project. It records the hewing out of a large benben stone for ‘Re-Horakhty who rejoices in his horizon in his name of Shu which (or who) is in the Aten in Karnak’. This lengthy name seems to be a theological creed, and is often called the ‘didactic name’ of Aten. No earlier form of the sun-god employed such a lengthy name. So this is new.
Little is known about this temple as it was destroyed after the king’s death, and the blocks reused to build other edifices in the area. Only a handful of decorated and inscribed blocks have survived, and some remain partially visible in the 10th Pylon or gateway at Karnak. One of these blocks, which now graces the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, shows the new deity: ‘Re-Horakhty who rejoices in his horizon in his name of Shu which is in the Aten’. Only the head of the falcon is preserved. A large sun-disc sits on its head, which has a cobra wrapped around the disc with its head flaring up just above the falcon’s beak. This initial representation of the sun-god looks just like the solar deity, Re-Horakhty. On the right side of the scene, the king himself is depicted and above him the lower portion of a sun-disc is preserved. It has cobras on both sides, and hanging from their necks is an ankh-sign, the so-called key of life. Three more ankhs are connected to the underside of the Sun.
Something changed, and the king built at least four temples to Aten
Another block believed to be from this same temple preserves only a portion of a larger scene. It too contains the creedal name, but it depicts the image of the god Shu, whose name occurs in the creedal formula, along with his wife, Tefnut. Here, she is called ‘the father of the gods’, and the first god created by Atum is associated with atmospheric or cosmic light. It is clear from this early temple block that the introduction of this new form of the sun-god did not preclude mentioning primordial deities such as Shu and Tefnut. That means that Amenhotep had no aversion to ‘the gods’: at this stage, he could not even be called a henotheist, or one who worships one deity without rejecting the existence of others.
But something changed between the king’s second and fourth regnal years. During this period, he built at least four temples to Aten in eastern Karnak. These sanctuaries were later dismantled, but thanks to the Egyptian penchant for recycling building material, the temple blocks were reused elsewhere. Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of inscribed blocks from these later edifices have been collected by Egyptologists. Over time, they have become dilapidated, thereby exposing the earlier stone. The sandstone blocks in question were of a different size than those used to construct previous temples (called talatat by Egyptologists). Because of their unique size, they are easily recognisable when reused.
Efforts to piece together this massive jigsaw puzzle (actually four puzzles!) have been a challenge, but some impressive scenes have been reconstructed on paper from drawings and photographs of the decorated blocks. From these scenes, the four original temples were identified. One key Egyptologist leading the effort to assemble the blocks was the historian Donald Redford (then of the University of Toronto), who sought to glean as much information as possible from the scenes about the formative years of Atenism.
In 1925, French Egyptologists working at Karnak Temple were summoned to examine some strange demolished statues that were uncovered outside the eastern wall of the temple complex during the excavation of a drainage canal. After exposing more of the statues, which turned out to represent Akhenaten and temple blocks, the work was abandoned, and the area largely forgotten. Fifty years elapsed before work resumed in 1975. As a graduate student, I had the privilege of working with Redford on these excavations between 1975 and 1977. We re-excavated the now-covered area exposed in 1925, and then moved north where we uncovered the southwest corner. Years later, the northwest corner was found too.
Between the corners, an entrance was cleared where the avenue of statues continued west, perhaps toward one or more of the other Aten temples. The telltale talatat blocks were used throughout. The western wall was 715 feet (220 metres) wide. Ongoing work has uncovered traces of talatat walls and statue fragments below the village farther to the east of our excavation area, showing that it was a square structure. This makes it the single largest temple built at Karnak up till that time. And the name of the temple, critical to understanding the origins of Atenism, is found on talatat blocks: Gemet Pa-Aten, ‘The Aten is Found’.
By studying the carved reliefs and texts on the blocks, a number of conclusions could be reached about this new religion. Significantly, it was within the large, open courtyard that a royal jubilee was celebrated, and in fact this might have been the main function of Gemet Pa-Aten. Royal jubilees were normally celebrated on or around the 30th anniversary of the coronation (that’s when Amenhotep III did his), and they rejuvenated the kingship. At around age 19-20, Akhenaten surely did not need such a boost!
At coronation, the throne name of the king was revealed. When construction on Gem Pa-Aten began, in the 2nd or 3rd regnal year, the king still used his birth name Amenhotep. But before the project was completed around his 4th or 5th year, without explanation he dropped that name and adopted the name by which he is known in history: Akhenaten. It means ‘He who is beneficial to the Aten’. The blocks from early in the project that had ‘Amenhotep’ written on them were erased and replaced by his new name.
Images of other deities were expunged, and the plural writing for ‘gods’ scratched off
The iconography of the deity in this temple (and the others at Karnak) was altered to reflect the king’s changing theology. The falcon image virtually disappears, only to be replaced by the ubiquitous sun-disc with extended Sun rays, and the extended name ‘Re-Horakhty who rejoices in his horizon in his name of Shu which is in the Aten’ is written in a cartouche, a device used to identify royal names. With the jubilee, Akhenaten seems to signal that the Aten was now the ultimate ruler, replacing Amen-Re.
This alteration of the king’s name was the first step in a programme to exterminate Egypt’s most powerful deity. What followed was a systematic programme of iconoclasm in which images of Amen and writings of his name throughout Egypt were desecrated and removed. Beyond Egypt’s north Sinai border, in recent excavations I directed, limestone door lintels inscribed with the name of Amenhotep II (Akhenaten’s great-grandfather) were uncovered. Here too, ‘Amen’ was obliterated from the cartouche, and so was Amen-Re’s name. The zealots were careful, however to preserve the writing of Re, which is written with the sun-disc sign (the same hieroglyph used in Aten’s name). The temples of his father, Amenhotep III, were not off-limits. ‘Amen’ is hacked out of the cartouches and images of Amen were erased, even in temples in distant Nubia (Sudan). In some instances, images of other deities were also expunged, and there are cases where the plural writing for ‘gods’ (netjeru) had been scratched off.
A decision was also reached around the 5th or 6th year to abandon Thebes and establish a new capital in middle Egypt called Akhet-Aten (also known by the modern Arabic name ‘Amarna’), meaning ‘the Horizon of Aten’. This pristine land had not been sacred to any deity before. No city or temples previously stood there. Only temples to Aten were built there, and the largest was called Gemet Pa-Aten. With the move of the royal family to Akhet-Aten, a third and final form of Aten’s name is introduced: ‘Living Re, Ruler of the Horizon, Rejoicing in the Horizon in His Name of “Re, the Father, who has come as the Aten”’. Gone are ‘Horakhty’ and ‘Shu’, two deities, and only Re the sun-god who manifests his power in or through the visible Aten or sun-disc remains. The king no longer tolerated any divine name or personification of a force of nature that could be construed as another deity.
The exclusivity of Aten and the campaign to exterminate Amen and other deities is proof positive of a movement from polytheism to monotheism. If doubt remains that Akhenaten was a monotheist, consider some elegant and touching lines in TheGreat Hymn to the Aten, inscribed on the wall of the tomb of the high official named Aye at Amarna:
O sole god beside who there is none … You create the earth according to your desire, you alone: People, all large and small animals, all things which are on earth, which walk on legs, Which rise up and fly with their wings. The foreign lands of Syria and Nubia, (and) the land of Egypt … The lord of every land who rises for them, the Aten of daytime, whose awesomeness is great. (Now concerning) all distant countries, you make their life … (O you) who gives life to the son in his mother’s womb, and calms him by stopping his tears; Nurse in the womb, who gives breath to enliven all he makes …
The themes of universalism, divine oneness, the exclusivity of Aten and his tender care for all creation drive home the point that ‘there is none’ beside Aten. This is a monotheistic statement not unlike the Islamic confession ‘there is no god but God’. And on the theme of divine oneness, the Jewish Shema comes to mind: ‘Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.’ The sun-god was a universal deity: wherever one went in the world, the Sun appears.
(A popular novel of Akhenaten’s times ‘The Egyptian’ by Mika Waltari)
Atenism was a monotheistic experiment. But what instigated such a radical shift from the polytheistic orthodoxy that had flourished in Egypt for millennia, and what led to the demotion of Amen-Re from his preeminent status, a position he had held for centuries? Here, there is little agreement among Egyptologists. There are those who think that this religious move was designed to wrest power from the Amen priesthood’s dominance that challenged the crown itself. Simply put, it was a political move. But this view does not adequately consider Akhenaten’s genuine devotion to Aten as reflected in the incredible temples dedicated to him, not to mention the intimacy expressed towards Aten in the hymns.
Others consider Atenism to be simply the climax of an evolution that had been underway for more than a century, in which Re had been moving towards universal status. This interpretation, however, does not take into account the programme of iconoclasm towards Amen and other deities, and the disappearance of traditional images of the sun-god (human form, falcon head, pyramid images, etc). One could advance Aten without eradicating Amen in a polytheistic system.
My theory is that Akhenaten himself very early in his reign (or even just before) experienced a theophany – a dream or some sort of divine manifestation – in which he believed that Aten spoke to him. This encounter launched his movement which took seven to nine years to fully crystallise as exclusive monotheism. Great idea, but based on what evidence? Mention has already been made of the two major Aten Temples called Gemet Pa-Aten constructed at Karnak and Akhet-Aten. A third temple by the same name was built in Nubia. Three temples with the same name is unprecedented, and suggests that its meaning, ‘The Aten is Found’, was vitally important to the young king’s religious programme. Could the name of the three sanctuaries memorialise the dramatic theophany that set off the revolution?
Akhenaten also uses the same language of discovery to explain how he found the land where he would establish the new city, Akhet-Aten. The aforementioned boundary inscription records Akhenaten’s words when travelling through the area that would become his new capital:
Look, Aten! The Aten wishes to have [something] made for him as a monument … (namely) Akhet-Aten … It is Aten, my father, [who advised me] concerning it so it could be made for him as Akhet-Aten.
Later in the same inscription, the king again repeats the line: ‘It is my father Aten who advised me concerning it.’ These texts point to an initial phenomenological event in which the king discovered the new form of the sun-god and then, through a later revelation, Aten disclosed where his Holy See should be built.
With Atenism, the evolution from polytheism to monotheism occurred rapidly, in just a few years
Historians of religion over the past 150 years thought that such a shift to monotheism must have been a gradual development taking place over millennia. Just like every field of learning in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the academic study of religion was shaped by evolutionary philosophy, an extension of Darwinian thought. From this perspective, religion began in the hoary past from animism, where everything – trees, rivers, rocks, etc – was possessed by spirits; followed by totemism; then polytheism; henotheism; culminating finally in monotheism. This linear development took thousands of years, it is claimed, moving from simple to complex forms. Some thinkers maintain that monotheism was achieved in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE for the ancient Jews, a development mirrored among Greek philosophers, in Zoroastrianism and other Asian religions during the same general period. But with Atenism, as the evidence suggests, the evolution from polytheism to monotheism occurred rapidly, in just a few years, contrary to the traditional understanding that monotheism appeared eight centuries later.
Some have toyed with the idea that either Moses influenced Akhenaten or vice versa. Indeed, Sigmund Freud in his book Moses and Monotheism (1939) opined: ‘I venture now to draw the following conclusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion, then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion.’ But there is simply no evidence for such a connection. As noted, Akhet-Aten was located in central Egypt, more than 200 miles away from the Land of Goshen in the northeastern delta where the Bible places the Hebrews. Based on an inscription made upon the stones that marked the city’s boundaries, Akhenaten vows that he would never leave this sacred zone: ‘I shall not pass beyond it.’ This means that the kind of contact between Moses and the Pharaoh reported in the book of Exodus could not have occurred given the distance between the two.
The main reason I reject the theory of one religion impacting the other is that each one is based on its own theophany. The Lord God appeared to Moses at the burning bush in Sinai and revealed his name, Yahweh, according to Exodus. Akhenaten had his own divine encounter that gave rise to Atenism. Put another way, both religions stand on their own distinctive revelations.
Typically, what is needed for a religion to endure is that a leader or prophet who believes he or she received a divine message has a band of faithful followers to disseminate the tradition, and a set of authoritative writings is preserved for future generations. This is the case of Moses and the Torah (the Law). Similar is the case for Christianity with Jesus, his apostles and the New Testament Scriptures, and likewise Muhammad and the origins of Islam and the Quran, as well as Joseph Smith, the Latter Day Saints and the book of Mormon.
Akhenaten’s movement lacked followers who shared his convictions so that, when he died, his family and the priests and officials who had served him jettisoned Atenism and restored Amen-Re atop the pantheon of deities and reopened closed temples. His daughters, whose birth names all included ‘Aten’, were renamed with Amen instead, and his eventual successor traded in his previous name: Tut-ankh-aten became Tut-ankh-amen. Aten’s temples were demolished, the great city Akhetaten was deserted, and the various hymns to Aten that expressed the theology of his religion remained memories on the walls of tombs. Not one of these has been found in later writing to indicate that a scriptural tradition resulted.
If indeed Moses lived in the 13th century BCE as many scholars today believe, then it seems likely that Akhenaten was the first human in recorded history to embrace the exclusive worship of one god. But it is the teaching of one God expressed in the Hebrew Bible that has endured the test of time, and remains the longest lasting monotheistic religion. Atenism was an idea whose time hadn’t yet come: a shade of the great monotheisms to be.
Jogging for 15 minutes a day, or walking or gardening for somewhat longer, could help protect people against developing depression.
Jogging for 15 minutes a day, or walking or gardening for somewhat longer, could help protect people against developing depression, according to an innovative new study published last month in JAMA Psychiatry. The study involved hundreds of thousands of people and used a type of statistical analysis to establish, for the first time, that physical activity may help prevent depression, a finding with considerable relevance for any of us interested in maintaining or bolstering our mental health.
Plenty of past studies have examined the connections between exercise, moods and psychological well-being, of course. And most have concluded that physically active people tend to be happier and less prone to anxiety and severe depression than people who seldom move much.
But those past studies showed only that exercise and depression are linked, not that exercise actually causes a drop in depression risk. Most were longitudinal or cross-sectional, looking at people’s exercise habits over a certain period or at a single point of time and then determining whether there might be statistical relationships between the two. In other words, active people might be less likely to become depressed than inactive people. But it’s also possible that people who aren’t prone to depression may be more likely to exercise. Those types of studies may be tantalizing, but they can’t prove anything about cause and effect.
To show causation, scientists rely on randomized experiments, during which they assign people to, for instance, exercise or not and then monitor the outcomes. Researchers have been using randomized trials to look at whether exercise can treat depression after people already have developed the condition, and the results have been encouraging.
But it would be almost impossible to mount a randomized trial looking at whether exercise prevents depression, since you would need to recruit a large number of people, convince some to exercise, others not, follow them for years and hope that enough develop depression to make any statistical analysis meaningful. The logistics involved would be daunting, if not impossible, and the costs prohibitive.
Enter Mendelian randomization. This is a relatively new type of “data science hack” being used to analyze health risks, says Karmel Choi, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychiatric genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who led the new study.
With Mendelian randomization, scientists zero in on small snippets of genes that vary from person to person. These variants are passed out before birth and do not change afterward; they are not altered by upbringing. Thanks to large-scale genetics studies, scientists have associated many of these snippets with specific health behaviors and risks. People with certain gene variants are, for example, more likely to overeat or be physically active than people without that variant.
More recently, scientists realized that these differences in people’s DNA offered, in effect, ready-made randomized trials designed by nature, since the variants occurred in mathematically random fashion.
Because of that inherent randomization, scientists could crosscheck the numbers of people with or without a snippet related to a health risk or behavior, such as, say, a strong likelihood to exercise, against another health outcome, such as severe depression. And if a large percentage of people with the variant did not develop the condition, scientists felt they could conclude that the behavior related to that variant caused the change in risk for the other condition.
And that result is what Dr. Choi and her colleagues found when they applied Mendelian randomization to exercise and depression. To reach that conclusion, they turned first to the UK Biobank, an enormous database of genetic and health information for almost 400,000 men and women. There they identified people who carried at least one of several gene variants believed to increase the likelihood someone will be active. Most of those people were active, and few of them had experienced depression.
People without the snippets, meanwhile, tended to move less, and they also showed greater risks for depression.
Delving deeper, the scientists found that, statistically, the ideal amount of exercise to prevent depression started at about 15 minutes a day of running or other strenuous exercise. Less-taxing activities like fast walking, housework and so on also afforded protection against depression, but it took about an hour a day to have an effect.
Finally, to be sure that physical activity was affecting the risk for depression, and not the other way around, the scientists repeated the Mendelian style of analysis on a separate large genetic database. This time they looked for gene variants related to depression and whether people who carried those variants and a propensity for depression tended to be physically inactive. It turned out, they did not.
So, the researchers concluded, physical activity in this analysis lowered the risk for depression, but depression did not affect whether people exercised.
Mendelian randomization remains a mathematical exercise, of course, and in the real world, people’s lives and behaviors are shaped by more than genetics. Many factors no doubt play a role in who develops depression. The gene variants related to being active could, for instance, also and separately play some kind of antidepressant role, Dr. Choi says, adding that the intertwined genetic and behavioral linkages between exercise and mental health will require many more studies to disentangle.
But already these results do provide “strong evidence” that being physically active, whatever your genetic makeup, can help protect against depression, Dr. Choi says.
Audio Intro – Issac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (7:01 min)
One of the most important books ever produced – yet there is no audio reading of the work on Librivox the public domain volunteer audio book internet publisher. I did find an introductory preface read by a woman with a charming accent; I paired her reading with a video of a fireplace with logs aflame in various hues.
A manuscript of Issac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was sold a few years ago by Christie’s at an auction for fine printed books and manuscripts. It broke an auction record for the highest sale price of a printed scientific book at $3,719,500. That was nearly four times the initial estimate. The manuscript, also known simply as Principia, is considered to be “one of the most important works in the history of science.” The text contains classical mechanics, laws of planetary motion and, most famously, Newton’s universal law of gravity. With mathematics, Issac Newton’s work helped shed light on a branch of science that up until that point was shrouded in darkness and hypotheses. While Newton’s theories were not immediately accepted, later on, no one could rationally deny him. It was published in 1687 in Latin. Later an English translation was made in 1728. The copy that sold at auction was in impeccable condition. The description from Christie’s website stated that it only had minor signs of wear with some scuffing. It is important to note that this book is in its original form and has never been restored. It is a first edition and bound in fully inlaid red morocco with gold leaf and black detailing. Only one other copy has sold at auction with such a binding, making this copy quite rare.
I made this video a couple of years ago as a way to approach the work. I found the audio on Libravox and have a copy of ‘Principia.’ I bought a set of the Great Books for $49 and one volume has the Principia. So, my copy cost me about a dollar. I can skate around my house holding a leather bound gilt edged hardcover copy of one of the most important books ever written. Someone paid $3,719,500 to get an original copy, but I have something close to that original work. I watched the video last night and liked the changing hues of color in the fire. I made the video years ago and haven’t watched it in a long time. Later I put the video on again and picked up my copy of Principia and followed along with the reader on the video. Repetitio mater studorium est – the Latin phrase for ‘repetition is the mother of learning.’ I figure if I bombard my hippocampus with enough of Issac Newton’s words and thoughts I will be one step closer to Issac Newton.
Addendum:
I’m thrilled to be associated with Issac Newton even if it is through a tweet for this post. I enjoy simply reposting the picture of Newton with his prism and telescope and books … and ideas. He was born on Christmas day…
Written: 20 August, 1918. First Published:Pravda No. 178 August 22, 1918; Published according to the Pravda text checked with the manuscript Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 28, 1965, pages 62-75 Translated (and edited): Jim Riordan Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters Online Version:V.I.Lenin Internet Archive, 2002
Comrades! A Russian Bolshevik who took part in the 1905 Revolution, and who lived in your country for many years afterwards, has offered to convey my letter to you. I have accepted his proposal all the more gladly because just at the present time the American revolutionary workers have to play an exceptionally important role as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism—the freshest, strongest and latest in joining in the world-wide slaughter of nations for the division of capitalist profits. At this very moment, the American multimillionaires, these modern slaveowners have turned an exceptionally tragic page in the bloody history of bloody imperialism by giving their approval—whether direct or indirect, open or hypocritically concealed, makes no difference—to the armed expedition launched by the brutal Anglo-Japanese imperialists for the purpose of throttling the first socialist republic.
The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.
About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human endeavour, in the utilisation of machinery and of all the wonders of modern engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them, and are throttling the Russian Socialist Republic in 1918 on the pretext of “protecting” it from the Germans.
The four years of the imperialist slaughter of nations, however, have not passed in vain. The deception of the people by the scoundrels of both robber groups, the British and the German, has been utterly exposed by indisputable and obvious facts. The results of the four years of war have revealed the general law of capitalism as applied to war between robbers for the division of spoils: the richest and strongest profited and grabbed most, while the weakest were utterly robbed, tormented, crushed and strangled.
The British imperialist robbers were the strongest in number of “colonial slaves”. The British capitalists have not lost an inch of “their” territory (i.e., territory they have grabbed over the centuries), but they have grabbed all the German colonies in Africa, they have grabbed Mesopotamia and Palestine, they have throttled Greece, and have begun to plunder Russia.
The German imperialist robbers were the strongest in organisation and discipline of “their” armies, but weaker in regard to colonies. They have lost all their colonies, but plundered half of Europe and throttled the largest number of small countries and weak nations. What a great war of “liberation” on both sides! How well the robbers of both groups, the Anglo-French and the German capitalists, together with their lackeys, the social-chauvinists, i.e., the socialists who went over to the side of “their own ” bourgeoisie, have “defended their country”!
The American multimillionaires were, perhaps, richest of all, and geographically the most secure. They have profited more than all the rest. They have converted all, even the richest, countries into their tributaries. They have grabbed hundreds of billions of dollars. And every dollar is sullied with filth: the filth of the secret treaties between Britain and her “allies”, between Germany and her vassals, treaties for the division of the spoils, treaties of mutual “aid” for oppressing the workers and persecuting the internationalist socialists. Every dollar is sullied with the filth of “profitable” war contracts, which in every country made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And every dollar is stained with blood—from that ocean of blood that has been shed by the ten million killed and twenty million maimed in the great, noble, liberating and holy war to decide whether the British or the German robbers are to get most of the spoils, whether the British or the German thugs are to be foremost in throttling the weak nations all over the world.
While the German robbers broke all records in war atrocities, the British have broken all records not only in the number of colonies they have grabbed, but also in the subtlety of their disgusting hypocrisy. This very day, the Anglo-French and American bourgeois newspapers are spreading, in millions and millions of copies, lies and slander about Russia, and are hypocritically justifying their predatory expedition against her on the plea that they want to “protect” Russia from the Germans!
It does not require many words to refute this despicable and hideous lie; it is sufficient to point to one well-known fact. In October 1917, after the Russian workers had overthrown their imperialist government, the Soviet government, the government of the revolutionary workers and peasants, openly proposed a just peace, a peace without annexations or indemnities, a peace that fully guaranteed equal rights to all nations—and it proposed such a peace to all the belligerent countries.
It was the Anglo-French and the American bourgeoisie who refused to accept our proposal; it was they who even refused to talk to us about a general peace! It was they who betrayed the interests of all nations; it was they who prolonged the imperialist slaughter!
It was they who, banking on the possibility of dragging Russia back into the imperialist war, refused to take part in the peace negotiations and thereby gave a free hand to the no less predatory German capitalists who imposed the annexationist and harsh Brest Peace upon Russia!
It is difficult to imagine anything more disgusting than the hypocrisy with which the Anglo-French and American bourgeoisie are now “blaming” us for the Brest Peace Treaty. The very capitalists of those countries which could have turned the Brest negotiations into general negotiations for a general peace are now our “accusers”! The Anglo-French imperialist vultures, who have profited from the plunder of colonies and the slaughter of nations, have prolonged the war for nearly a whole year after Brest, and yet they “accuse” us, the Bolsheviks, who proposed a just peace to all countries, they accuse us, who tore up, published and exposed to public disgrace the secret, criminal treaties concluded between the ex-tsar and the Anglo-French capitalists.
The workers of the whole world, no matter in what country they live, greet us, sympathise with us, applaud us for breaking the iron ring of imperialist ties, of sordid imperialist treaties, of imperialist chains—for breaking through to freedom, and making the heaviest sacrifices in doing so—for, as a socialist republic, although torn and plundered by the imperialists, keeping out of the imperialist war and raising the banner of peace, the banner of socialism for the whole world to see.
Small wonder that the international imperialist gang hates us for this, that it “accuses” us, that all the lackeys of the imperialists, including our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, also “accuse” us. The hatred these watchdogs of imperialism express for the Bolsheviks, and the sympathy of the class-conscious workers of the world, convince us more than ever of the justice of our cause.
A real socialist would not fail to understand that for the sake of achieving victory over the bourgeoisie, for the sake of power passing to the workers, for the sake of starting the world proletarian revolution, we cannot and must not hesitate to make the heaviest sacrifices, including the sacrifice of part of our territory, the sacrifice of heavy defeats at the hands of imperialism. A real socialist would have proved by deeds his willingness for “his” country to make the greatest sacrifice to give a real push forward to the cause of the socialist revolution.
For the sake of “their” cause, that is, for the sake of winning world hegemony, the imperialists of Britain and Germany have not hesitated to utterly ruin and throttle a whole number of countries, from Belgium and Serbia to Palestine and Mesopotamia. But must socialists wait with “their” cause, the cause of liberating the working people of the whole world from the yoke of capital, of winning universal and lasting peace, until a path without sacrifice is found? Must they fear to open the battle until an easy victory is “guaranteed”? Must they place the integrity and security of “their” bourgeois-created “fatherland” above the interests of the world socialist revolution? The scoundrels in the international socialist movement who think this way, those lackeys who grovel to bourgeois morality, thrice stand condemned.
The Anglo-French and American imperialist vultures “accuse” us of concluding an “agreement” with German imperialism. What hypocrites, what scoundrels they are to slander the workers’ government while trembling because of the sympathy displayed towards us by the workers of “their own” countries! But their hypocrisy will be exposed. They pretend not to see the difference between an agreement entered into by “socialists” with the bourgeoisie (their own or foreign) against the workers, against the working people, and an agreement entered into for the protection of the workers who have defeated their bourgeoisie, with the bourgeoisie of one national colour against the bourgeoisie of another colour in order that the proletariat may take advantage of the antagonisms between the different groups of bourgeoisie.
In actual fact, every European sees this difference very well, and, as I shall show in a moment, the American people have had a particularly striking “illustration” of it in their own history. There are agreements and agreements, there are fagots et fagots, as the French say.
When in February 1918 the German imperialist vultures hurled their forces against unarmed, demobilised Russia, who had relied on the international solidarity of the proletariat before the world revolution had fully matured, I did not hesitate for a moment to enter into an “agreement” with the French monarchists. Captain Sadoul, a French army officer who, in words, sympathised with the Bolsheviks, but was in deeds a loyal and faithful servant of French imperialism, brought the French officer de Lubersac to see me. “I am a monarchist. My only aim is to secure the defeat of Germany,” de Lubersac declared to me. “That goes without saying (cela va sans dire ),” I replied. But this did not in the least prevent me from entering into an “agreement” with de Lubersac concerning certain services that French army officers, experts in explosives, were ready to render us by blowing up railway lines in order to hinder the German invasion. This is an example of an “agreement” of which every class-conscious worker will approve, an agreement in the interests of socialism. The French monarchist and I shook hands, although we knew that each of us would willingly hang his “partner”. But for a time our interests coincided. Against the advancing rapacious Germans, we, in the interests of the Russian and the world socialist revolution, utilised the equally rapacious counter-interests of other imperialists. In this way we served the interests of the working class of Russia and of other countries, we strengthened the proletariat and weakened the bourgeoisie of the whole world, we resorted to the methods, most legitimate and essential in every war, of manoeuvre, stratagem, retreat, in anticipation of the moment when the rapidly maturing proletarian revolution in a number of advanced countries completely matured.
However much the Anglo-French and American imperialist sharks fume with rage, however much they slander us, no matter how many millions they spend on bribing the Right Socialist-Revolutionary, Menshevik and other social-patriotic newspapers, I shall not hesitate one second to enter into a similar “agreement” with the German imperialist vultures if an attack upon Russia by Anglo-French troops calls for it. And I know perfectly well that my tactics will be approved by the class-conscious proletariat of Russia, Germany, France, Britain, America—in short, of the whole civilised world. Such tactics will ease the task of the socialist revolution, will hasten it, will weaken the international bourgeoisie, will strengthen the position of the working class which is defeating the bourgeoisie.
The American people resorted to these tactics long ago to the advantage of their revolution. When they waged their great war of liberation against the British oppressors, they had also against them the French and the Spanish oppressors who owned a part of what is now the United States of North America. In their arduous war for freedom, the American people also entered into “agreements” with some oppressors against others for the purpose of weakening the oppressors and strengthening those who were fighting in a revolutionary manner against oppression, for the purpose of serving the interests of the oppressed people. The American people took advantage of the strife between the French, the Spanish and the British; sometimes they even fought side by side with the forces of the French and Spanish oppressors against the British oppressors; first they defeated the British and then freed themselves (partly by ransom) from the French and the Spanish.
Historical action is not the pavement of Nevsky Prospekt, said the great Russian revolutionary Chernyshevsky.[2] A revolutionary would not “agree” to a proletarian revolution only “on the condition” that it proceeds easily and smoothly, that there is, from the outset, combined action on the part of the proletarians of different countries, that there are guarantees against defeats, that the road of the revolution is broad, free and straight, that it will not be necessary during the march to victory to sustain the heaviest casualties, to “bide one’s time in a besieged fortress”, or to make one’s way along extremely narrow, impassable, winding and dangerous mountain tracks. Such a person is no revolutionary, he has not freed himself from the pedantry of the bourgeois intellectuals; such a person will be found constantly slipping into the camp of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, like our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and even (although more rarely) Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Echoing the bourgeoisie, these gentlemen like to blame us for the “chaos” of the revolution, for the “destruction” of industry, for the unemployment and the food shortage. How hypocritical these accusations are, coming from those who welcomed and supported the imperialist war, or who entered into an “agreement” with Kerensky who continued this war! It is this imperialist war that is the cause of all these misfortunes. The revolution engendered by the war can not avoid the terrible difficulties and suffering bequeathed it by the prolonged, ruinous, reactionary slaughter of the nations. To blame us for the “destruction” of industry, or for the “terror”, is either hypocrisy or dull-witted pedantry; it reveals an inability to understand the basic conditions of the fierce class struggle, raised to the highest degree of intensity that is called revolution.
Even when “accusers” of this type do “recognise” the class struggle, they limit themselves to verbal recognition; actually, they constantly slip into the philistine utopia of class “agreement” and “collaboration”; for in revolutionary epochs the class struggle has always, inevitably, and in every country, assumed the form of civil war, and civil war is inconceivable without the severest destruction, terror and the restriction of formal democracy in the interests of this war. Only unctuous parsons—whether Christian or “secular” in the persons of parlour, parliamentary socialists— cannot see, understand and feel this necessity. Only a life less “man in the muffler”[3] can shun the revolution for this reason instead of plunging into battle with the utmost ardour and determination at a time when history demands that the greatest problems of humanity be solved by struggle and war.
The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the “destruction” of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!
The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie—now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.
The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labour movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. I also recall the words of one of the most beloved leaders of the American proletariat, Eugene Debs, who wrote in the Appeal to Reason,[4] I believe towards the end of 1915, in the article “What Shall I Fight For” (I quoted this article at the beginning of 1916 at a public meeting of workers in Berne, Switzerland)[5]—that he, Debs, would rather be shot than vote credits for the present criminal and reactionary war; that he, Debs, knows of only one holy and, from the proletarian standpoint, legitimate war, namely: the war against the capitalists, the war to liberate mankind from wage-slavery.
I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown Debs into prison. Let the bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.
We are blamed for the destruction caused by our revolution. . . . Who are the accusers? The hangers-on of the bourgeoisie, of that very bourgeoisie who, during the four years of the imperialist war, have destroyed almost the whole of European culture and have reduced Europe to barbarism, brutality and starvation. These bourgeoisie now demand we should not make a revolution on these ruins, amidst this wreckage of culture, amidst the wreckage and ruins created by the war, nor with the people who have been brutalised by the war. How humane and righteous the bourgeoisie are!
Their servants accuse us of resorting to terror. . . . The British bourgeoisie have forgotten their 1649, the French bourgeoisie have forgotten their 1793. Terror was just and legitimate when the bourgeoisie resorted to it for their own benefit against feudalism. Terror became monstrous and criminal when the workers and poor peasants dared to use it against the bourgeoisie! Terror was just and legitimate when used for the purpose of substituting one exploiting minority for another exploiting minority. Terror became monstrous and criminal when it began to be used for the purpose of overthrowing every exploiting minority, to be used in the interests of the vast actual majority, in the interests of the proletariat and semi-proletariat, the working class and the poor peasants!
The international imperialist bourgeoisie have slaughtered ten million men and maimed twenty million in “their” war, the war to decide whether the British or the German vultures are to rule the world.
If our war, the war of the oppressed and exploited against the oppressors and the exploiters, results in half a million or a million casualties in all countries, the bourgeoisie will say that the former casualties are justified, while the latter are criminal.
The proletariat will have something entirely different to say.
Now, amidst the horrors of the imperialist war, the proletariat is receiving a most vivid and striking illustration of the great truth taught by all revolutions and bequeathed to the workers by their best teachers, the founders of modern socialism. This truth is that no revolution can be successful unless the resistance of the exploiters is crushed. When we, the workers and toiling peasants, captured state power, it became our duty to crush the resistance of the exploiters. We are proud we have been doing this. We regret we are not doing it with sufficient firmness and determination.
We know that fierce resistance to the socialist revolution on the part of the bourgeoisie is inevitable in all countries, and that this resistance will grow with the growth of this revolution. The proletariat will crush this resistance; during the struggle against the resisting bourgeoisie it will finally mature for victory and for power.
Let the corrupt bourgeois press shout to the whole world about every mistake our revolution makes. We are not daunted by our mistakes. People have not become saints because the revolution has begun. The toiling classes who for centuries have been oppressed, downtrodden and forcibly held in the vice of poverty, brutality and ignorance cannot avoid mistakes when making a revolution. And, as I pointed out once before, the corpse of bourgeois society cannot be nailed in a coffin and buried.[*] The corpse of capitalism is decaying and disintegrating in our midst, polluting the air and poisoning our lives, enmeshing that which is new, fresh, young and virile in thousands of threads and bonds of that which is old, moribund and decaying.
For every hundred mistakes we commit, and which the bourgeoisie and their lackeys (including our own Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries) shout about to the whole world, 10,000 great and heroic deeds are performed, greater and more heroic because they are simple and inconspicuous amidst the everyday life of a factory district or a remote village, performed by people who are not accustomed (and have no opportunity) to shout to the whole world about their successes.
But even if the contrary were true—although I know such an assumption is wrong—even if we committed 10,000 mistake for every 100 correct actions we performed, even in that case our revolution would be great and invincible, and so it will be in the eyes of world history, because, for the first time, not the minority, not the rich alone, not the educated alone, but the real people, the vast majority of the working people, are themselves building a new life, are by their own experience solving the most difficult problems of socialist organisation .
Every mistake committed in the course of such work, in the course of this most conscientious and earnest work of tens of millions of simple workers and peasants in reorganising their whole life, every such mistake is worth thousands and millions of “lawless” successes achieved by the exploiting minority—successes in swindling and duping the working people. For only through such mistakes will the workers and peasants learn to build the new life, learn to do without capitalists; only in this way will they hack a path for themselves—through thousands of obstacles—to victorious socialism.
Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our peasants, who at one stroke, in one night, October 25-26 (old style), 1917, entirely abolished the private ownership of land, and are now, month after month, overcoming tremendous difficulties and correcting their mistakes themselves, solving in a practical way the most difficult tasks of organising new conditions of economic life, of fighting the kulaks, providing land for the working people (and not for the rich), and of changing to communist large-scale agriculture.
Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our workers, who have already, after a few months, nationalised almost all the biggest factories and plants, and are learning by hard, everyday work the new task of managing whole branches of industry, are setting the nationalised enterprises going, overcoming the powerful resistance of inertia, petty-bourgeois mentality and selfishness, and, brick by brick, are laying the foundation of new social ties, of a new labour discipline, of a new influence of the workers’ trade unions over their members.
Mistakes are committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our Soviets, which were created as far back as 1905 by a mighty upsurge of the people. The Soviets of Workers and Peasants are a new type of state, a new and higher type of democracy, a form of the proletarian dictatorship, a means of administering the state without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. For the first time democracy is here serving the people, the working people, and has ceased to be democracy for the rich as it still is in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic. For the first time, the people are grappling, on a scale involving one hundred million, with the problem of implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat and semi-proletariat—a problem which, if not solved, makes socialism out of the question.
Let the pedants, or the people whose minds are incurably stuffed with bourgeois-democratic or parliamentary prejudices, shake their heads in perplexity about our Soviets, about the absence of direct elections, for example. These people have forgotten nothing and have learned nothing during the period of the great upheavals of 1914-18. The combination of the proletarian dictatorship with the new democracy for the working people—of civil war with the widest participation of the people in politics—such a combination cannot be brought about at one stroke, nor does it fit in with the outworn modes of routine parliamentary democracy. The contours of a new world, the world of socialism, are rising before us in the shape of the Soviet Republic. It is not surprising that this world does not come into being ready-made, does not spring forth like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.
The old bourgeois-democratic constitutions waxed eloquent about formal equality and right of assembly; but our proletarian and peasant Soviet Constitution casts aside the hypocrisy of formal equality. When the bourgeois republicans overturned thrones they did not worry about formal equality between monarchists and republicans. When it is a matter of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, only traitors or idiots can demand formal equality of rights for the bourgeoisie. “Freedom of assembly” for workers and peasants is not worth a farthing when the best buildings belong to the bourgeoisie. Our Soviets have confiscated all the good buildings in town and country from the rich and have transferred all of them to the workers and peasants for their unions and meetings. This is our freedom of assembly—for the working people! This is the meaning and content of our Soviet, our socialist Constitution!
That is why we are all so firmly convinced that no matter what misfortunes may still be in store for it, our Republic of Soviets is invincible.
It is invincible because every blow struck by frenzied imperialism, every defeat the international bourgeoisie inflict on us, rouses more and more sections of the workers and peasants to the struggle, teaches them at the cost of enormous sacrifice, steels them and engenders new heroism on a mass scale.
We know that help from you will probably not come soon, comrade American workers, for the revolution is developing in different countries in different forms and at different tempos (and it cannot be otherwise). We know that although the European proletarian revolution has been maturing very rapidly lately, it may, after all, not flare up within the next few weeks. We are banking on the inevitability of the world revolution, but this does not mean that we are such fools as to bank on the revolution inevitably coming on a definite and early date. We have seen two great revolutions in our country, 1905 and 1917, and we know revolutions are not made to order, or by agreement. We know that circumstances brought our Russian detachment of the socialist proletariat to the fore not because of our merits, but because of the exceptional backwardness of Russia, and that before the world revolution breaks out a number of separate revolutions may be defeated.
In spite of this, we are firmly convinced that we are invincible, because the spirit of mankind will not be broken by the imperialist slaughter. Mankind will vanquish it. And the first country to break the convict chains of the imperialist war was our country. We sustained enormously heavy casualties in the struggle to break these chains, but we broke them. We are free from imperialist dependence, we have raised the banner of struggle for the complete overthrow of imperialism for the whole world to see.
We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief. These detachments exist, they are more numerous than ours, they are maturing, growing, gaining more strength the longer the brutalities of imperialism continue. The workers are breaking away from their social traitors—the Gomperses, Hendersons, Renaudels, Scheidemanns and Renners. Slowly but surely the workers are adopting communist, Bolshevik tactics and are marching towards the proletarian revolution, which alone is capable of saving dying culture and dying mankind.
In short, we are invincible, because the world proletarian revolution is invincible.
N. Lenin
August 20, 1918
Endnotes
[1] The dispatch of the letter to America was organised by the Bolshevik M. M. Borodin, who had recently been there. With the foreign military intervention and the blockade of Soviet Russia this involved considerable difficulties. The letter was delivered to the United States by P. I. Travin (Sletov). Along with the letter he brought the Constitution of the R.S.F.S.R. and the Soviet Government’s Note to President Wilson containing the demand to stop the intervention. The well-known American socialist and journalist John Reed secured the publication of all these documents in the American press.
In December 1918 a slightly abridged version of the letter appeared in the New York magazine The Class Struggle and the Boston weekly The Revolutionary Age, both organs of the Left wing of the American Socialist Party. The Revolutionary Age was brought out by John Reed and Sen Katayama. The letter evoked keen interest among readers and it was published as a reprint from The Class Struggle in a large number of copies. Subsequently it was published many times in the bourgeois and socialist press of the U.S.A. and Western Europe, in the French socialist magazine Demain No. 28-29, 1918, in No. 138 of the Call, organ of the British Socialist Party, the Berlin magazine Die Aktion No. 51-52, 1918, and elsewhere. In 1934 the letter was brought out in New York in the form of a pamphlet, which contained the passages omitted in earlier publications.
The letter was widely used by the American Left Socialists and was instrumental in aiding the development of the labour and communist movement in the U.S. and Europe. It helped advanced workers to appreciate the nature of imperialism and the great revolutionary changes effected by the Soviet government. Lenin’s letter aroused a mounting protest in the U.S. against the armed intervention.
[2] Lenin quotes from Chernyshevsky’s review of the book by the American economist H. Ch. Carey, Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the Union, and its Effects. Chernyshevsky wrote: “The path of history is not paved like Nevsky Prospekt; it runs across fields, either dusty or muddy, and cuts through swamps or forest thickets. Anyone who fears being covered with dust or muddying his boots, should not engage in social activity.”
[3]Man in the muffler—a character from Chekhov’s story of the same title, personifying a narrow-minded philistine scared of initiative and new ideas.
[4]Appeal to Reason—American socialist newspaper, founded in Girard, Kansas, in 1895. The newspaper propagated socialist ideas and was immensely popular among the workers. During the First World War it pursued an internationalist policy.
Debs’s article appeared in the paper on September 11, 1915. Its title, which Lenin most probably quoted from memory, was “When I Shall Fight”.
[5] See present edition, Volume 22, page 125. Speech Delivered at an International Meeting in Berne.
When I was in high school, I found out that my friends didn’t like me. One of the girls in my “group” told me I wasn’t invited to a birthday party because “everyone” thought I was annoying—which, to be honest, at 15 I probably was—and for months I was ostracized. It took some time for me to worm my way back into the gang, but until then, I was devastated, and I swore I would spend the rest of my life being likable.
But, as David Foster Wallace (sorry) wrote in Infinite Jest (sorry again), “certain persons simply will not like you not matter what you do,” and no matter how likable you think you are, you’re not going to win over every person you meet. “Remember that it is impossible to please everyone,” Chloe Brotheridge, a hypnotherapist and anxiety expert, tells us. “You have your own unique personality which means some people will love and adore you, while others may not.” Of course, while this concept is easy to understand on its face, it’s difficult to keep your perspective in check when you find you’re, say, left out of invitations to happy hours with co-workers, or getting noncommittal responses from potential new friends, or you overhear your roommates bad-mouthing you. Rejection is painful in any form, whether it be social or romantic, and it’s a big ego blow to get bumped from the inner circle.
Before you freak out, keep in mind that it’s not just normal to be occasionally disliked, but in fact, it’s healthy. Rejection is a way to suss out who’s compatible with whom, and just as getting romantically dumped by someone leaves you open to finding a better suited partner, getting axed from a social group gives you space to find folks that are a little more your speed. Plus, it’s empowering not to fear being disliked—not that you should run around violating social norms, but when you’re not wasting energy molding your personality to someone else’s to be accepted, you’re more likely to find people who genuinely like you for you, and those relationships are far less exhausting to keep up.
Still, it sucks to feel disliked. Here’s how to get through it without falling down a rabbit hole of sadness.
It’s okay to feel the pain
Humans are social creatures, and so we experience painful biological responses to rejection. “Historically it was essential for our survival,” Brotheridge explains. “When we were evolving and living in tribes, being rejected and kicked out of the community would have been a matter of life or death.” When we get rejected, our brains register an emotional chemical response so strong, it can physically hurt. We’re also likely to cycle through a series of responses that’s not dissimilar to the stages of grief. First, the blame game starts. “The first stop on the train is self blame: ‘It’s my fault, I did something to upset them,’” Sean Grover, a psychotherapist and author of When Kids Call the Shots, tells us. Up next is shame: “You feel ashamed, you feel humiliated, you feel weak,” Grover says.
Then, like any dumped individual, you’ll probably try to win back your rejecter. “Not because, necessarily, you want them to like you, but you just don’t like this feeling of being disliked,” Grover says. “It’s, ‘Let me get you to like me so I can feel better about myself.’” Last but not least, you’ll likely feel like you’re a failure, and that’s when it gets dark. “These are very, very, primitive early feelings. For somebody not to like you, it induces a regression,” Grover says. “Generally, that brings you back to high school, middle school, elementary school, when it was all about whether you’re cool or not. Once you get caught in the feeling, it really pulls you under, and then you’re struggling.”
These feelings aren’t exactly pleasant, but they’re also perfectly healthy and normal, so long as you don’t end up dwelling on them, preventing yourself from moving forward.
Know that it’s not (totally) your fault
This type of rejection is literally personal, and it’s easy to start questioning your self worth when someone makes it clear they don’t like you. But we all act out of our own insecurities and unique experiences, and for the most part, being disliked is a measure of mutual compatibility. So, it’s not really that it’s not you but them, so much as it’s both you and them. “This person, this situation, where they are in their life, it’s not compatible to where you are,” Jennifer Verdolin, an animal behavior expert and adjunct professor at Duke University, tells us. “We have preferences in terms of personality, and that’s not to say that your personality is bad. It’s different from mine, and I prefer to hang around people who are similar to me.”
Sometimes, the people who dislike you don’t think certain facets of your personality jibe with theirs; sometimes, you just don’t offer them enough social capital to be worth their time. “Because we’re a very social species with a pretty intense dominance hierarchy, especially when it comes to work, and sometimes in social situations, people make specific strategic alliances and switch alliances as it suits them to meet their needs as they define them,” Verdolin says. “So people will try to achieve status, and a lot of time, whether they like you or don’t like you may have nothing to do with who you are.”
Either way, likability has a lot to do with what you bring to someone else’s table, whether or not you realize it. “We see this in all kinds of species. They preferentially tend to spend time, outside of mating, with either individuals who are similar to them in status, individuals who are similar to them in personality, individuals who are similar to them in some sort of way genetically, so, family,” Verdolin says. “So if you don’t have anything in common that is equally valuable to both parties, then you will likely be rejected. It’s kind of an inevitability.”
But watch for signs of your own bad behavior
While you shouldn’t always blame yourself if someone doesn’t like you, if you’re finding this is a pattern, you may want to take an unbiased look at your own behavior. “When I put people in a [therapy] group, I get to see immediately what problems or tics or bad social habits they have,” Grover says. He recalls a successful, handsome male patient of his who was having trouble holding onto romantic relationships. Though they were unable to solve the problem together in individual therapy, Grover managed to convince the patient to join a group. “Within five minutes, I was horrified,” Grover says. “He gets very anxious in front of people, and to camouflage his anxiety he becomes overly confident, which comes across as arrogant. The women in the group commented that he was becoming less popular the more they got to know him.”
The patient’s anxiety was manifesting in such a way that he had difficulty relating to people in a social setting, but because our own egos tend to protect us from our faults, he wasn’t aware of his bad habits. “I had to help him be aware of how his anxiety manifested,” Grover said. “Anxiety can make people act aggressive or really anxious, and in a group situation it’s super effective to see that.”
One way to find out what’s going on, Verdolin says, is to ask for feedback as to why you’re disliked. Then, if someone tells you, say, you’re annoying, or overly braggy, or self-obsessed, you can take a step back and analyze whether there’s some validity to the criticism.“Ultimately you have to know who you are well enough to say, okay, that information sounds pretty valid, I do tend to do that, I can see why that might not be attractive to other people, so I’m going to work on changing it,” Verdolin says. “You might be being given important information that you should take a look at seriously, and evaluate to see if there’s truth to it.”
Still, remember that while some of your behaviors might turn people off, likability is typically a two-way street. “It is, more often than not, some sort of reflection of [the other person’s] history, their prejudices, their fears,” Grover says.
Remind yourself that making new friends is no easy task
One of my greatest fears is that I’ll start a new job or move to a new place where I don’t know anyone and have to make new friends. Changing your social circle can be isolating; it’s when you’re most likely to feel disliked or suffer from social anxiety. “I think we have a little bit of an unrealistic expectation that we should be able to [enter social groups] anywhere, with all people,” Verdolin says. “When you’re first trying to establish rapport in relationships with people in, say, a new work environment, you’re coming into a dynamic that’s already set in structure. There are already cliques, there are already personalities, there are already dynamics, and you have no idea what you’re stepping into.”
Verdolin suggests that people faced with starting a new job or making a big move start slowly to get a sense of their new social environment. “With animals, sometimes they’ll integrate by having a sampling interaction with everyone else in the group before making decisions, to kind of get a lay of the land, so to speak, before trying to jump right in,” Verdolin says. At a new job, for instance, it might be worth suggesting going to lunch with folks one-on-one, to find the group’s friendliest entry point. “Some people are very welcoming and some people are not,” Verdolin says. Get to know people slowly, and focus your energy on those who seem most receptive, rather than the group’s most exclusive members, or toughest nuts to crack.
Spend extra time with the people who do like you
Even if you find yourself on the outs with some folks, chances are, you’ve at least got a few people you can rely on when you’re feeling low. “Spending time with people that care about you can boost your self-esteem and help you to feel more secure,” Brotheridge says. Besides acting as a balm to your wounded ego, focusing your energies on relationships with people who appreciate you will, in the larger picture, be a much more fulfilling use of your time and social energy.
And keep in mind that the best way to make genuine friendships is to be genuine yourself. “If you just walk around wanting to be liked, it’s very stressful, and people will read that as inauthentic,” Grover says.
And tell the haters to suck it
At least, tell them in your head. Grover says that when all else fails, it’s best to embrace having the occasional enemy. “Delight in it. Really, just enjoy it,” he says. After all, as Grover says, sometimes it’s actually better to be formidable. “If people are jealous or whatever, all feelings are welcome.” You don’t need to go around antagonizing people, but if someone doesn’t like you and the feeling is mutual, you don’t necessarily have to go out of your way to appease them, either.
If you want to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of good habits, don’t start at the gym. Start at the office
‘The real solution is to move. All day. The stillness is what’s killing us.’
A few years ago, James Levine, a doctor of endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic, sparked a radical change in America’s office furniture. His research had inspired a pile of viral stories cataloging the negative effects of sitting at a desk: leg muscles shut down, blood pressure increases, good cholesterol plummets, your children starve. OK, I made up that last one, but the real takeaway was no less dire. “Excessive sitting is a lethal activity,” Levine, who has studied sedentary behavior for nearly 20 years and is the most widely quoted expert on the topic, told the New York Times in 2011. And the solution – at least the one people heard – was to start standing.
Cue the office makeovers. Over the next several years, workers all across America embraced stand-up desks. At Outside’s headquarters in Santa Fe, New Mexico, our building manager furiously reconfigured work spaces. Desks were removed from their shelving brackets, raised a foot and a half, and remounted. Walking the hallways, I’d do double takes every time I realized that another editor had taken a stand against sitting. Close to half our offices were eventually converted. Good science had spurred a small change that was dramatically improving our health. We were literally rising from the dead!
Or were we? The stand-up revolution was followed by another wave of stories reporting that being on your feet in the same place all day has its own downsides, including increased risk of cardiovascular problems. What’s more, at least at Outside, few people’s habits really changed. This morning, I took a tour around our building to assess our commitment to stand-up desks. In 14 of the converted spaces, editors were either hunched over on stools or perched on chairs that they had elevated to meet the new level. They were still sitting, only higher. In a half-dozen other cases, people had simply lowered their desks back to their old positions.
When I called Levine and told him what had happened at Outside, he let out the sigh of a man who’d heard all this before. “It’s not the furniture that makes the difference, it’s the behavior,” he said. “The desk without the behavior doesn’t help you.”
In other words, we missed the larger point that Levine and his colleagues were trying to convey. The solution to sitting isn’t to stand, though it helps. In fact, according to the findings of a 2015 consensus panel on the topic, we need to be on our feet two to four hours while at work. But the real solution is to move. All day. The stillness is what’s killing us. We should be pacing the hallways and climbing stairs and squatting and lunging and stretching.
Now that requires a radical change, one exponentially more difficult than putting your desk on stilts. But aiming for more movement might also be the most important habit you adopt from an issue of Outside packed with 72 pages of fitness advice. This is especially true if, like me, you exercise vigorously each day and therefore consider yourself healthy. Researchers have shattered that idea. I might run for an hour every weekday morning, but studies show that if I then go to work and sit at my desk for epic stretches, which I do, I am no more immune to the side-effects of sedentary living than the prototypical couch potato.
When I accepted this scary conclusion, I realized how difficult moving really is. I’m not like my ancestors who worked on a farm where motion was an all-day requirement. My job seems specifically designed to keep me wasting away in a chair. A phone and a computer allow me to communicate and conduct business with nearly any writer on earth without leaving a two-foot radius.
Then there’s the fact that, as Levine put it, “people don’t like change”. In one of his more recent studies, subjects who agreed to take on a rigorous regimen to move throughout their workday saw an initial spike in stress levels. Not surprisingly, the repeated prompts from researchers to exercise were pissing them off. Eventually, those subjects who managed to stick with the plan experienced an overall decrease in stress – and, corporate-HR types should note, a 15% increase in productivity. But therein lies another challenge. How do you actually stick with a two-hour movement plan without a team of researchers to keep you honest? Especially when you consider what might be the biggest hurdle of all: the public embarrassment. Moving all day requires one to willfully perform lunges and complex yoga stretches and push-ups in a place where such behavior seems loony. “Getting off your bottom is almost forbidden,” said Levine. “We have to have environments that send the right message.”
‘I’ve meekly learned to be a stealth mover.’
Still, I was determined to be the guy who changed his behavior. (Writing this article was a great motivator.) It didn’t go so well at first. I arrived at work determined to move more, but once I sat at my desk, old habits glued me to the computer and I forgot all about my intentions. So I placed a sticky note on my office door that said FARTHER, a little prompt reminding me to use the facility most distant from me every time I needed a drink of water or bathroom break. I also connected my computer to the printer downstairs and across the building. And rather than sending emails or using the phone, I tried to go directly to colleagues’ offices.
Once I had those tricks nailed, I got some digital help. There are dozens of fitness wearables that can remind you to move, from the basic step counter to the fully loaded Apple Watch. Instead, I went with a free phone app called Move. It buzzes every 45 minutes and assigns me a random exercise: say, 20 body-weight squats or 15 push-ups. These alerts initially drove me crazy. (Again?!) And their commands can be cloyingly phrased: “It’s time to move it, move it.” But eventually I welcomed the interruptions. I noticed that I felt refreshed when I returned to my desk, like I’d rebooted my clogged circuitry.
And the embarrassment? I haven’t exactly been a bold office revolutionary. Instead, I’ve meekly learned to be a stealth mover. Now I either find ways to look like I’m doing something perfectly normal or I make sure I don’t get caught. I do push-ups with an ear cocked toward the door, listening for approaching footsteps. I do wall sits in a corner that no one can see from the hallway. While I’m on the phone, I pace as if I’m carefully deliberating vital magazine business. At my desk, I do inconspicuous yoga poses with names like seated eagle and hip opener. I do laps around the building carrying papers to look as if I’m going somewhere, when all I’m really doing is walking in a large, 223-step circle back to my office. (If you want the full log from a recent day, see “Self Pro Motion”, below.)
Am I happier? Less stressed? More productive? Any conclusions I draw from my experiment would be based on anecdotal evidence, the enemy of real research. But here’s what’s certain: if I continue to squeeze in an extra hour or two of movement each day, I’ll be significantly healthier in the long run. That’s the takeaway Levine and his colleagues need us to hear.
If you want to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of good habits, don’t start at the gym. Start at the office.
What three hours of daily movements looks like
7am
Morning run (45 minutes)
8.30am
Walk to coffee shop (10 minutes)
9.15am
25 push-ups (1 minute)
10am
Wall sit (2 minutes) Walk around the building plus three flights of stairs (5 minutes)
10.45am
20 body-weight squats (2 minutes) Trip to far water fountain (3 minutes)
11.30am
Pick up papers at printer plus two flights of stairs (4 minutes)
12.15pm
25 push-ups (1 minute) 15 side lunges, each leg (2 minutes) Plank pose (2 minutes) Pacing during phone call (10 minutes)
1pm
Walk around building for quick meetings (10 minutes) Desk yoga: hip openers, seated eagles, spinal rotations, shoulder stretches (5 minutes)
2pm
25 push-ups (1 minute)
2.30pm
Walking meeting (45 minutes)
3.30pm
15 Hindu push-ups (1 minute) 20 side leg raises (1 minute)
4.15pm
Chair pose (1 minute) 20 body-weight squats (2 minutes) Walk around the building (5 minutes)
5pm
Plank pose (2 minutes) 20 burpees (2 minutes)
5.45pm
Walk around building plus four flights of stairs (5 minutes)
Not tracked: Walking to and from the car, roaming the grocery store, playing with my kids, etc.
Marchers were led by a brass band down Rice Lane, songs were performed at graveside and several speeches were made
(A brass band led hundreds of people to Robert Tressell’s graveside in Walton Park cemetery at Rice Lane City Farm)
Crowds gathered to pay tribute to Socialist writer Robert Tressell on the anniversary of his death. Around 600 people met yesterday at Walton’s Noonan Close – named after Tressell’s birth name of Robert Noonan – and marched to his graveside on Rice Lane City farm.
The march began just after 11am on Sunday and the route that the marchers took on the memorial march included Hornby Road, Rice Lane, Rawcliffe Road and then towards the farm. They were led by brass band the Parr (St Helens) Band, and some of the gathering carried Labour and trade union banners. Liverpool Socialist Singers led the singing of the The International at the graveside and the brass band performed Abide with Me.
There were speeches made by Liverpool Walton MP Dan Carden, Walton CLP Chair Lena Simic, Mumin Khan from the Quilliam Mosque in Kensington, local trade unionist and the CLP’s Equalities Officer Sarah Morton and Walton CLP Secretary Alan Gibbons.
Tressell died of a tuberculosis-related illness at the age of 40 in Liverpool Royal Infirmary on February 3, 1911 and he was buried in pauper’s grave a week later at Walton Cemetery, where Rice Land City Farm is. His famous novel – The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – is an account of the working lives of a group of house painters and decorators in a fictional town called Mugsborough.
It was finished in 1910 and was credited with being a huge influence on the 1945 General Election, which saw Labour swept to power.
Mr Carden said: “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is credited with rallying people behind the landmark, reforming Labour government of Clement Attlee, ushering in the Welfare State and the NHS.
“The terrible conditions faced by the working people in the novel are sadly not history.
“In the Walton constituency and across the city, people are struggling under the impact of low pay, precarious working and Universal Credit.
“Homelessness and reliance on food banks is soaring.
“Tressell’s masterpiece remains as relevant today as when it was written more than a century ago.
“The lessons Tressell taught us still inspire the labour movement today as we fight to win a socialist Labour government that will transform society by shifting the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and communities like those I represent in north Liverpool.”
He said: “I am proud of my CLP for supporting workers in struggle, the Arriva bus drivers, the RMT guards fighting to keep a second safety critical person on the train and the FBU who have just been successful in resisting cuts to fire services.
“The way to remember Robert Tressell and the way forward for working people is the election of a socialist Labour government under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.”
One of the worst things about the new year is having to endure everyone’s smug announcements about all the ways they plan on being better than you for the next 365 days. This year, it seems gluten-free diets and lemon detox cleanses are giving way to the anti-clutter industry. Spurred on by the “wellness” guru Marie Kondo, people seem obsessed with telling us how “renewed” they feel by having more money but — get this — less actual stuff than those hoarding poors.
Don’t get me wrong. I am as fanatically opposed to consumption and possession for their own sakes as any aging hippie in Vermont. I am such a grinch that I don’t even buy my children toys for Christmas. I am so rabidly opposed to the reign of synthetic materials in modern life that I would support a plastic tax of 10 or even 20 percent on everything from kitchenware to t-shirts, and an outright ban on things like polypropylene straws.
But thinking that we have too much worthless junk lying around in our landfills and our homes is not the same thing as dressing up a bad argument for minimalism with mystic mumbo-jumbo. By all means, don’t be a slob or a hoarder. But don’t pretend that there is something inherently virtuous — or aesthetically pleasing — about making your dwelling look like the set of an old iPod commercial, either.
Kondo’s defenders have been quick to point out that if you have a strong negative reaction to the suggestion that you should get rid of, say, two thirds of your books, you are proving her point, which is allegedly that you are supposed to have some kind of intense spiritual relationship with every last dog-eared Gladys Mitchell paperback, including the one you found by chance inside the box of discarded audio equipment in the butler’s pantry. So far from being a kind of metaphysical argument against consumer fetishism, the anti-clutter movement is actually a sublimated defense of it. Instead of having that extra pair of kitchen scissors because well, who knows why, it is supposed to be because you have decided to ascribe certain religious virtues to your cutlery. I’ll pass, thanks.
Why is clutter worth defending then? I can think of several reasons. One is simply that most people do not have time to sit down and painstakingly consider the relative merits of each of the knickknacks on the shelf. Clutter shaming is the latest in a long line of similar reversals in elite opinion. Like buying sliced bread, feeding infants with formula, being overweight, and divorce, having more stuff than you know what to do with is something that only the very wealthy could have managed once upon a time. The pattern is always the same: Once the well-to-do realize an innovation or indulgence is not such a good idea after all, they are able to revert back, thanks to their considerable material and social resources. For decades now we have encouraged people to buy as much as they are able to afford — or not afford — because the American economy depends upon endless undifferentiated consumption. I wonder what we will gaslight the poor over next.
The difference, though, is that unlike Wonder Bread, clutter can in fact be beautiful. When you look at a book of Victorian interiors, you don’t see minimalism. You find tasteful Morris wallpapers covered with pictures and engravings, fireplaces topped with busts of dead admirals and gilt rococo mirrors, elaborately carved and upholstered sofas and chairs surrounded by end tables of every size. Books line entire walls all the way up 10- or 12-foot ceilings. Grand pianos choke under the weight of family albums and other memorabilia. Hutches are swallowed by gleaming china. When I look at a Marie Kondo video I see apartments that resemble a cross between a Target ad and the WonkaVision test room: bare taupe or white walls, cage-like shelving “units,” plastic faux-woven baskets, an occasional (fake) plant. There is no evidence that people — least of all children — actually live in these places.
Clutter also makes it possible to enjoy the pleasure of stumbling upon some long-lost cherished object. Poking around my office just this morning I found the following: candle holders in the shape of hedgehogs that have belonged to my wife since she was a teenager; a wind-up toy dinosaur that walks like a drunk person; an ancient 10-inch Columbia record of Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande; and an old cigar box full of holy cards. What could be more delightful than idly scanning the shelves and happening by chance upon what turns out to be the perfect book for that cozy moment when you settle down to read during the last half an hour or so before bed? If your entire music library is stored, for reasons of “space,” on a tablet or some Amazon server, how are you supposed to enjoy the felicity of random browsing?
I can’t pretend to argue that clutter has done much for my mental health or that I have had any religious experiences with the 30 boxes of books in our second upstairs landing. But the look on my younger daughter’s face when she finds her old rabbit at the bottom of an overcrowded toy box is something I would not trade for anything, least of all a conversation with a stranger about the supposed virtues of something called “organizational consulting.”
Protect your vision with these nutritious (and delicious) foods
PHOTO BY: Lew Robertson/Getty Images
Tuna
“Getting omega-3 fatty acids matters for maintaining healthy eyes,” says Sunir J. Garg, retinal surgeon at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. A 2016 meta-analysis of studies on fish consumption and age-related macular degeneration found that people who ate the most fish had the lowest risk of the sight-stealing disease. Aim for two to three servings a week of dark meat fish such as tuna and salmon.
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Blueberries
These violet-hued gems are rich in anthocyanins, potent antioxidants that easily cross the blood-retina barrier to provide extra vision protection. They also may improve vision in people with normal tension glaucoma, a form of the disease that damages the optic nerve. If you spend a lot of time in the sun, blueberry anthocyanins may be particularly helpful, since research shows that they can protect your retina against damage from UV light exposure. You’ll also get anthocyanins from other dark red, blue and purple foods like blackberries, currants and red grapes.
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Dark Chocolate
If you need another reason to indulge in a chunk of dark chocolate today, here’s one. An intriguing 2018 study published in JAMA Ophthalmology reported that adults who ate a bar of dark chocolate could literally see better — enjoying improvements in visual clarity and contrast sensitivity — about two hours afterward, perhaps because of a boost in blood flow. Even if your Dove bar doesn’t sharpen your vision, the flavonoids found in dark chocolate may help improve vision in people with glaucoma as well as reduce your risk for macular degeneration. But consume in moderation, or you’ll have other health issues to worry about!
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Spinach
Spinach and other dark leafy greens like kale and collard greens are packed with two antioxidants — lutein and zeaxanthin — that are stored in the eye’s macula, which helps shield the eye from damaging light. Lutein is especially good at filtering out blue light, which is the kind that glares from your phone and computer screens. These antioxidants also appear to help maintain rich blood flow to your eyes. “Aim for at least three servings a week,” Garg says. Lutein and zeaxanthin are fat soluble, so drizzle on the olive oil for maximum absorption — and deliciousness.
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Eggs
Egg yolks are brimming with the same powerful eye-protecting antioxidants, lutein and zeaxanthin, that are found in leafy green vegetables. The beauty of getting them in your omelets is that the high fat content in eggs means that you very easily absorb all that antioxidant goodness. In fact, one study found that eating just one egg a day for five weeks increased lutein levels by 26 percent and zeaxanthin levels by 38 percent (the study also found this egg-a-day routine had zero ill effects on cholesterol or triglyceride levels). Egg yolks are also a rich source of vitamin D, which may also help protect against macular degeneration.
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Oysters
Oysters Shellfish like oysters are among the best sources of the mineral zinc, which healthy eyes have in abundance. Zinc helps vitamin A create melanin, a pigment that protects your eyes. Zinc deficiency can cause poor night vision, or night blindness, as well as cataracts. In high doses, zinc also appears to be able to slow the progression of macular degeneration once you have early stages of the disease. But you don’t need more than the daily recommended dose — 8 milligrams a day for women and 11 milligrams a day for men. Oysters deliver more of the mineral than any food, but you also can get plenty of zinc from beef, other shellfish and fortified cereals.
PHOTO BY: Duncan Davis/Getty Images
Hot Tea
Folks who drink hot tea every day are 74 percent less likely to develop glaucoma than those who don’t, according to a study of more than 1,600 adults published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. The researchers found no such associations between glaucoma and other commonly consumed beverages, including caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee, iced tea and soft drinks. Though the study isn’t conclusive, brewed tea is a good source of disease-fighting antioxidants.
PHOTO BY: Maximilian Stock Ltd./Getty Images
Oranges
Vitamin C should really be called Vitamin See. Like other antioxidants, it helps prevent free-radical damage and may reduce your risk of cataracts and macular degeneration. It also helps build collagen, which provides structure for your cornea. You can get ample doses of C from strawberries, red bell peppers and all citrus fruits. Oranges, however, might be the real apples of your eyes: In one study of adults 49 and older, those who said they ate at least one serving of oranges a day had a 61 percent lower risk of age-related macular degeneration 15 years later than those who said they didn’t eat oranges.
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Sunflower Seeds
A Spanish study of nearly 600 men and women age 65 and older found that people who ate a healthy diet providing at least 8 milligrams of vitamin E a day had significantly lower rates of cataracts and cataract surgery than those who ate lesser amounts. The recommended daily value for this powerful antioxidant vitamin is 15 milligrams, the amount in 2 ounces of sunflower seeds. Other good sources are almonds, hazelnuts and peanut butter.
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
Carrots
No list of sight-saving foods would be complete without carrots — after all, as the joke goes, you never see a rabbit wearing glasses. Bad Bugs Bunny yuks aside, carrots are a rich source of beta-carotene, an antioxidant carotenoid that your body converts to vitamin A, which is essential for good vision. Vitamin A helps with the production of both rod and cone cells, which help you see in low light conditions and to see colors. Beta-carotene also helps fend off disease-causing free radical damage. Eating high amounts may lower your risk for diseases like macular degeneration, cataracts and glaucoma. You can get beta-carotene from yellow, orange and red fruits and veggies like sweet potatoes and cantaloupes as well as dark leafy greens like kale and broccoli.
Must-have graphic design books for your bookshelf.
There are hundreds of fantastic graphic design books out there, offering words of wisdom, design inspiration, and refreshers on key principles and techniques. Whether you’re looking to swot up on design theory or recharge your creative batteries, we’ve curated the best titles here, in this essential reading list.
You’ll find plenty of classic titles in this list from the great names of graphic design, but there are also plenty of books you might be less familiar with. Whether you’d like to know more about logos, go further with type, or get to know more about your favourite graphic designers, this list of great books for graphic designers has something for you.
Alina Wheeler’s best-selling guide to branding has been updated for a fifth time to include new and expanded coverage of social media cross channel synergy, crowdsourcing, SEO, experience branding, mobile devices, wayfinding and placemaking. Split into three sections – brand fundamentals, process basics and case studies – Designing Brand Identity provides in-depth guidance for both designers and entire branding teams, walking through a universal five-stage process for brand development and implementation.
Pentagram partner Paula Scher recommends it: “Alina Wheeler explains better than anyone else what identity design is and how it functions,” she says. “There’s a reason this is the 5th edition of this classic.” And with a foreword from Design Matters podcast host Debbie Millman, you know you’re in good hands.
Do you know who’s collecting information on you? If you’ve applied for a job, apartment or insurance, chances are you’ve had a background check run on you. These reports can include information on your income, loan payments, debts, and on and on, and consumer reporting companies can even include a “risk score” for you.
And while you’re likely familiar with a credit agency like Equifax, you’re probably not aware of the breadth of companies collecting your personal information.
Lenders (including those that offer credit cards, home, payday, auto including auto leasing and student loans)
Employers, volunteer organizations, and government agencies to determine eligibility for government assistance (employment and background screening)
Landlords and residential real estate management companies (tenant screening)
Banks, credit unions, payment processors and retail stores that accept personal checks (check screening)
Companies that market and sell products and services specifically to lower-income consumers and subprime credit applicants, such as short-term lending and rent-to-own businesses among others
Communications and utility companies (e.g., mobile phone; pay TV, electric, gas, water)
Retail stores for product return fraud and abuse screening as well as retail stores that offer financing such as appliance and rent-to-own businesses, among others
Gaming casinos that extend credit to consumers and/or accept personal checks
Because of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you can get copies of these reports yourself from the various consumer reporting agencies if you request one—which is important if you need to correct any inaccuracies they include.
You can typically request each one for a “reasonable” fee every 12 months, and you’re entitled to a free copy “after an adverse action is taken against you based on information in your report from that company and under other specific circumstances,” per the CFPB. Requesting a copy won’t hurt your credit score.
The CFPB says that most agencies will give you a copy of your report for free (this article will indicate the price for each), and that because of that, you may not necessarily need to pay for a credit monitoring service if you’re regularly updated. That said, it’s a lot of legwork, and a credit monitoring service might make sense for convenience’s sake.
Here are the companies that report on various consumer sectors. Note: Not every company will have a report on you, it depends what information has been reported to them.
Credit Agencies
Most people are familiar with the three main credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and Transunion. Your credit report includes information on your credit card and loan payment history, how much credit is available to you, information from debt collectors and inquiries from other creditors, among other info.
You can access any three of the reports on AnnualCreditReport.com. Again, you can request one from each agency for free every 12 months.
You’ll want to check these reports every year—ideally, you’ll pull your report from one of the three agencies every four months—and after an identity theft scare.
Employment Screening
Employment screening companies verify information like your credit history, salary, education, professional licenses, etc., to employers and potential employers.
“They may also provide criminal arrest and conviction information as well as fingerprint information from state and federal criminal record databases; driving record information; drug and alcohol testing and health screening information; and non-profit and volunteer activity verification,” notes the CFPB.
Typically you’ll need to authorize an employer to conduct a screening. “If possible, when you give your authorization, ask for the name(s) of the employment screening company being used,” the CFPB advises, so that you can check the same reports your employer is getting. They’re likely running the background check from one of these businesses:
The Work Number: The Work Number is operated by Equifax and will provide one free copy of your report every 12 months
Tenant/Housing Screening
You can ask the management company through which you’re applying for housing for the name of the consumer reporting company it uses to screen applicants.
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“A tenant screening report with negative information in it, such as prior housing evictions, could result in a rejected lease application, or it may get approved but with tough conditions inserted into the lease agreement such as requiring you to pay twelve months of rent in advance,” reports the CFPB. The management companies likely use one of the following companies:
Banks and credit unions may use a bank/check screening to decide whether or not to allow a customer to open checking account.
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“For example, you may have negative information in your report if you had a checking account before and you have an unpaid negative balance on that account,” writes the CFPB.
If you’ve had your identity stolen, you’ll want to correct this information so you can open a bank account. Here are agencies the bank might pull a report from:
TeleCheck Services: The company will provide a free report every 12 months
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Medical Insurance
“Fact-check your medical specialty report before or when applying for private life, health, critical illness, long-term care or disability income insurance,” writes the CFPB.
MIB, Inc.: You can access a free report once every 12 months
A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males.
The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham Pantheon
When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.” Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past. The ever-growing fossil record fills in one missing link in the quest for evidence of protohumans, only to expose another. Meanwhile, no single line emerges to connect these antecedents to Homo sapiens, whoseorigins date back about 300,000 years. Instead, parallel and divergent lines reveal a variety of now-extinct hominids that display traits once considered distinctive to our lineage. For example,traces of little “Hobbits”found in Indonesia in 2003 show that they walked upright and made tools; less than four feet tall, with brains about a third the size of ours, they may have persisted until modern humans arrived in the area some 50,000 years ago
As data pile up, so do surprises. Microscopic methods indicate that certain marks on 2.5-million-year-old bones were probably made by sharp stone tools; scientists had previously assumed that such tools came later. The dental tartar caked on the teeth of Neanderthalssuggeststhat the brawny, thick-boned people (almost-humans on one of the parallel lines) probably ate cooked barley along with their meat; these famously carnivorous folks were really omnivores, like us. DNA from tiny fragments of bone—for instance, thetip of a pinkie many thousands of years old—has brought to light a whole new humanlike species that once interbred with us, as Neanderthals did. Charles Darwin drew evolution as a bush, not a tree, for a reason.
The study of human evolution is by now about much more than bones and stones. In 1965 a remarkable book—Irven DeVore’s collection Primate Behavior (which led me to study with DeVore)—made what then seemed a radical claim: We will never understand our origins without intensive study of the wild world of our nonhuman relatives. A handful of scientists, including Jane Goodall, set up tents in distant jungles and savannas. Following monkeys, apes, and other creatures in their habitats, these scientists turned their notes and observations into voluminous, quantitative data. DeVore and others devoted themselves just as rigorously to the remaining human hunter-gatherers, found on every habitable continent except Europe—our biological twins, living under conditions resembling the ones we evolved in.
The multifaceted effort was new and ambitious, but the idea was old. DeVore had hanging in his office an 1838 quote from Darwin’s notebook: “Origin of man now proved … He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” It’s an aphorism that calls to mind one of my favorite characterizations of anthropology—philosophizing with data—and serves as a perfect introduction to the latest work of Richard Wrangham, who has come up with some of the boldest and best new ideas about human evolution.
In his third book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, he deploys fascinating facts of natural history and genetics as he enters a debate staked out centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among other philosophers), and still very much alive today: how to understand the conjunction of fierce aggression and cooperative behavior in humans. Why are we so much less violent day-to-day within our communities (in pretty much all cultures) than our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are within theirs? At the same time, how is it that human violence directed toward perceived enemy groups has been so destructive?
Wrangham, who teaches biological anthropology at Harvard, was mentored by both Goodall and DeVore. He was in a sense working toward this latest venture in his two previous books, which explore the opposing poles of behavior. Renowned for his meticulous fieldwork, especially with chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, Wrangham showed just how common chimp brutality is. Goodall had acknowledged with frank regret that her beloved chimpanzees could be quite violent. One mother and daughter killed the infants of other females in their group. Males often coerced and beat females, and would sometimes gang up and attack a chimp from another group.
At Kibale, large groups of chimps range together, and aggression escalates accordingly. Wrangham observed as these bigger parties of males got excited and went out on “patrol” in what looked like an organized way: They walked along their territorial border, attacking lone chimps from neighboring communities when they came across them en route. In his 1996 book, Demonic Males, co-authored with Dale Peterson, Wrangham recapped this and other evidence to draw a dire portrait of humanity (the male version) as inherently violent by evolutionary legacy. Here was vivid support for a Hobbesian view of human nature, rooted in genetics.
Wrangham’s 2009 book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, pursued a very different hypothesis. Based on archaeological evidence, he made the case that our ancestors mastered fire much earlier than most of us had believed—perhaps closer to 2 million rather than 800,000 years ago—which changed everything for them. In particular, cooking made possible a much more diverse diet, by allowing the consumption of fruits, leaves, and other plant foods with toxic potential when eaten raw. It made meat, too, safer and easier to digest. As a major bonus, fire extended the day into the night. Given how important we know conversations and stories told around the fire areto human hunter-gatherers, it’s easy to see how this process could have accelerated the evolution of language—an essential ingredient for less physically aggressive interactions.
In his new book, Wrangham grapples fully for the first time with the paradox of the title. Over the decades during which he has focused mostly on the dark side of human nature, evidence has steadily accumulated that humans, from early on in their development, are the most cooperative species in the primate world. Put apes and humans in situations that demand collaboration between two individuals to achieve a goal, as a variety of experimenters have done, and even young children perform better than apes. Meanwhile, classic work on chimps has been complemented by new studies of bonobos, our other close relative. No more removed from us genetically than chimps are, they are a radical contrast to them, often called the “make love, not war” species. Some of our nonhuman kin, such fieldwork has revealed, can live and evolve almost without violence.
Wrangham draws on this trove of material as he pursues yet another ambitious hypothesis: “Reduced reactive aggression must feature alongside intelligence, cooperation, and social learning as a key contributor to the emergence and success of our species.” (By reactive aggression, he means attacking when another individual gets too close, as opposed to tolerating contact long enough to allow for a possible friendly interaction.) He also applies his evolutionary logic to studies of a wider array of animals. He dwells in particular on some marvelous experiments that explore the taming of wild foxes, minks, and other species by human-directed artificial selection over many generations.
Such breeding efforts, Wrangham notes, have produced “the domestication syndrome”: a change in a suite of traits, not just the low reactive aggression that breeders have deliberately singled out. For instance, ina fox study begun in Russia in the early 1950s, the pups in each litter least likely to bite when approached by humans were bred forward. Yet a variety of other features appeared in tandem with docility, among them a smaller face with a shortened snout and more frequent (less seasonally circumscribed) fertile periods, as in some other similarly domesticated species.
Enter the bonobos, to whom Wrangham turns as he considers how diminished aggression may have been selected for in the evolution of humans. Once thought to be a type of chimpanzee, bonobos are now known to be a different species. The standard view holds that they separated from chimps 1 to 2 million years ago, and were isolated south of a bend in the Congo River. Female bonobos form strong coalitions—partly based on sex with each other—that keep a lid on male violence. The “trust hormone” oxytocin is released during female sex: You could say that the partners are high, in both senses of the word, on trust. Because females run things, males don’t attack them, and even male-on-male violence is extremely limited. Bonobos also display the other traits common to the domestication syndrome, which suggests—as in the case of the foxes—a broad genetic dynamic at work.
Wrangham accepts the consensus that the difference between bonobos and chimps is fundamental, genetic, and evolutionary. His distinctive explanation of the divergence reflects his training in ecology: He has learned that over many generations, ecological realities create species-specific behavior. In the case of bonobos, he suggests, a lush habitat in which they were protected from competition with either chimps or gorillas gave them the luxury of decreasing their own reactive aggression. Other examples of nonhuman self-domestication in the wild exist—for instance, the Zanzibar red colobus monkey diverged from the mainland African red colobus in similar ways during its island isolation—but bonobos are the closest and most relevant to us.
In fact, Wrangham’s notion of human evolution powered by self-domestication has an ancient lineage: The basic idea was first proposed by a disciple of Aristotle’s named Theophrastus and has been debated several times since the 18th century. This latest version, too, is bound to provoke controversy, but that’s what bold theorizing is supposed to do. And Wrangham is nothing if not bold as he puts the paradox in his title to use. In his telling, the dark side of protohuman nature was enlisted in the evolution of communal harmony.
Central to his argument is the idea that cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central role in our self-domestication. Much as the Russian scientists eliminated the fierce fox pups from the breeding pool, our ancestors killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking out and killing victims in neighboring villages (which recalls the patrolling chimps that Wrangham reported on earlier in his career). The twist in his current theory is that such ambushes are turned inward, to protect the group from one of its own: They serve as a form of capital punishment. Wrangham cites a number of examples of anthropologists witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their midst.
The idea is intriguing, and it is indeed true that human hunter-gatherers, whose societies exist without governments, sometimes collectively eliminate bad actors. But such actions are rare, as the Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee emphasized in his extensive studies of the !Kung, which include the report of an unusual case: After a certain man killed at least two people, several other men ambushed and killed him. My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice. Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital punishment could. (Female bonobo coalitions would seem primed to serve a similar taming function.)
Although he downplays such a comparatively domestic story of self-domestication, Wrangham has nonetheless highlighted a puzzle at the core of human evolution, and delivered a reminder of the double-edged nature of our virtues and vices. “Human nature is a chimera,” he concludes, evoking both the hybrid monster of mythic lore and the biological phenomenon of genetically hybrid organisms. In a closing meditation on a 2017 visit to Poland, he writes, “I walked around Auschwitz. I could feel the chimera at its best and worst.” Violence and virtue, he recognizes, are not opposites but powerful, not always reliable allies. “So much cooperation,” he notes of the smoothly operating human machinery of mass murder—“it can be for good or bad.” To protect us from danger, which now arises mainly from our own inclinations and actions, clear-eyed wisdom like that is surely what we need.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “How Humans Tamed Themselves.”
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