The sunflower field at Dix Park looked fantastic this week! I visited there several times to bask in their sweetness, and also to test out my new camera. I tried to look at them in different ways, and thought a few of the images were worth sharing.
Speaking of pictures, it was cheering to see the new shots from the Webb Space Telescope showing the early universe. It is truly mind boggling to think of the size and age of the universe (more than two trillion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, stretching back about 13.8 billion years), and to think we have the technology to look back in time almost that far. There is a lot to regret about humans, but this is one thing I really like about them – at times they are full of unselfish curiosity and wonder.
I’ll admit I’ve been feeling a bit low lately from discouraging news on multiple fronts – environmental, legal, social, economic, military, meteorological, medical, ethical, etc. It’s tempting to vent about some of these, but I’m thinking that’s unlikely to be helpful just now for me or others.
Instead I’m trying to take special note of positive events, big and small, and cultivating compassion.
Granddaughter Gus, almost 10 months old, just started crawling, and is getting really good at it. She can pull herself up on the window sill and have a look out at the back yard. She’s usually cheerful, and eager to see what each new thing she can grab tastes like.
I played Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3 for my piano club friends last week. This is a famous piece of music, for good reason, with gorgeous melodies and dramatic modulations. There are some exciting virtuosic flourishes, which are at the edge of or just beyond my ability level, depending on the day. I made a few mistakes, but I felt it was musical. Playing the piano for me is primarily about therapy (self care), but I’m glad when I can share with others some of the beauty and joy.
Liszt had a long (1811-1886) and interesting life. I’ve been reading Alan Walker’s very fine biography of him, and am now in the second of the three volumes. He was a towering musical figure in his time, but recent generations have tended to underappreciate his achievements. I’ve been struck not only with his brilliance, but also his remarkable generosity.
I got two of the volumes used, sold by college libraries, where it appeared they’d been checked out either once or never. It pained me a little that they couldn’t find readers, but at least they found me!
Liszt and his great contemporaries, including Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, continue to inspire me. In addition to absorbing their musical messages, I’m making more use of their discoveries in my jazz playing. Some of their harmonic ideas have already been thoroughly incorporated into the jazz standards that I’ve made my own, but there are always new possibilities.
We had a happy July 4 family gathering at the Outer Banks. There are a lot of stress inducers in the news these days, and it was good to unload some stress. It helped to spend some time walking on the beach and some time reading.
I also brought along my new camera, the Nikon Z9, and started getting comfortable with it. There is definitely a learning curve, but I was pleased with some of the results, a few of which are here. It was fun seeing the wild horses at Corolla, which mostly seemed in good health. We also stopped at Alligator River wildlife refuge on the way and saw a few bears, owls, and (a first for us!) alligators.
Alligator at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge
Speaking of animals, I highly recommend a lively short essay by Ed Yong titled How Animals See Themselves. Yong highlights some of the amazing sensory capabilities of non-human animals, including not just extraordinary sight, smell, and hearing, but also abilities like echolocation which we can barely conceive of. Appreciating the umwelt (a term he promotes) of these animals makes our own lives richer, and potentially more compassionate. I’ve downloaded Yong’s new book on this subject, An Immense World.
On a related subject, NPR had a great little piece this week on octopuses and how they operate. I hadn’t realized that the receptors in the suckers of an octopus are vastly more numerous than the nerves in our fingers, and each sucker has not only a sense of touch, but also of taste and smell. Instead of processing information in a centralized brain, most of their neurons are associated with their suckers. Scientists are starting to figure out how all their mini-brains work together so that, for example, they can unscrew jars from the inside and perform astonishing feats of camouflage. I’ve seen a a few of these creatures on diving trips in the Caribbean, and they are truly amazing.
Meanwhile, while recovering from covid, I finished a big book: Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. It had been some forty years since I last read this famous work, but I still remembered some of it. Besides being long, it is notable for its scope, which is both narrow (a few months in the lives of a handful of Russian aristocrats) and broad (Russian society in the process of major changes). Having learned some history over the last few decades, I was better positioned to appreciate Tolstoy’s insights and also his blind spots.
Some of the book, which was written in the mid-1870s was visionary, or at least a magnificent struggle for a vision. There is insight into the emotional lives of the characters, including their most creative and destructive emotions. At times Tolstoy’s consciousness seems to merge with the lives of animals and plants, and evokes the grandeur of nature. But at other times he seems to regard peasants as useful but inferior, like horses, and other animals as merely good targets for shooting.
Part of Anna Karenina deals with the severe depression suffered by its title character, and also by Levin, who most represents Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy doesn’t use anything like the modern vocabulary for describing psychological problems, but he evokes them with power. It is not comfortable to enter into these experiences, but they are definitely timely.
I’ve resisted the urge to post my various recent musings in an effort not to increase planetary anxiety, or my own. I’ve also had to work my way through some health issues that took up a lot of bandwidth. Sorry about that, and about this.
Spring has been arriving in Raleigh in fits and starts, but the early blooms are out now. I was happy to see the new tulips at Fletcher Park and daffodils at Raulston, and wanted to share a few pictures. May they give a little peace.
I also wanted to share a few thoughts on the possibility of nuclear war starting in Ukraine. As dreadful as that prospect is, there could be a silver lining: it may help us understand the nuclear peril we face and inspire us to work for a peaceful solution.
This week there was an op ed piece in the NY Times by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stephenson (S&S) titled Why Putin Went Straight for the Nuclear Threat. I ended up responding to the piece with a comment in the Times’ electronic edition. Afterwards, when I then started skimming the hundreds of other comments on the piece, I assumed my views were shared by plenty of others.
But no. It’s nice, in a way, to get some proof that your thinking is not entirely conventional. It was deeply disturbing, though, to find that there were a great many Times commenters who accepted and even welcomed the prospect of nuclear war with Russia. I decided it might be worthwhile to explain a little more what I was trying to say.
S&S’s premise is that nuclear weapons are generally a good thing, in that they provide a “delicate balance of deterrence.” That is, S&S posit an underlying rationality to the existing nuclear power arrangement in which a small group of leaders may at any time for any reason launch nuclear weapons powerful enough to end civilization.
In the recent Times piece, S&S are concerned that this “delicate balance” may be disturbed by the U.S. announcing that it does not intend to enter into a nuclear war. They appear to believe that Putin is bluffing with his nuclear cards, and that we should call the bluff.
Nuclear war, however, is different from poker. In poker, an erroneous guess about a bluff may, depending on the stakes, cost a lot of money. In nuclear war, it may mean the end of millions or billions of human lives, if not outright extinction, as well as the end of most other life on Earth.
This catastrophic risk has been with us in varying degrees since the enormous build up of nuclear forces in the 1960s. There have been periodic discussions of the risks of nuclear accidents, unintentional nuclear escalations, or planned attacks. At times, thinkers have noted the peril of keeping nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert, with one head of state entitled at any moment and with no explanation to unleash their devastating power.
But these short spells of sanity are mostly quickly forgotten, as other policy matters seem more pressing. The conventional narrative of “nuclear deterrence” is seldom called on to explain and defend itself. But it should be. In spite of its shadowy but powerful supporters – the arms manufacturers, politicians, generals, think tank scholars, and multiple layers of bureaucracy – there is no reason to think it is at all rational. In fact, it is both irrational and deeply immoral.
Part of the foundational idea for nuclear forces is that they deter other nuclear powers from attacking with their nuclear weapons. This is, of course, circular reasoning, in that it relies on the premise that nuclear weapons must exist and cannot be eliminated. If we reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons through verifiable treaties, there would be no need for this sort of deterrence.
Moreover, there’s no reason to think that this deterrence notion is what really accounts for the lack, so far (except for the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan), of nuclear aggression. It seems at least as likely that nuclear nations avoid nuclear attacks from a combination of various feelings and ideas, such as compassion, horror at the prospect of mass slaughter, and fear that any nuclear attack will escalate and cause a nuclear winter that will kill almost everything.
Here, as in most human problems, it’s impossible to know exactly why people do what they do, or what they may eventually decide to do. Rationality seldom guides our behavior. This lack of predictability is another reason to work diligently to find a way to back off the nuclear precipice.
The other foundational idea at the heart of nuclear strategy is that having the most powerful weapons will deter non-nuclear fighting. This deterrence idea has been repeatedly debunked by history.
The US superiority in nuclear weapons did not deter Soviet aggression in eastern Europe or prevent national liberation movements in former colonial lands. It did not deter Korea or Vietnam. It did not deter Iraq or Afghanistan, or ISIS. These and other movements won their gamble that the US was unwilling to conduct wholesale nuclear slaughter even when fiercely opposed.
The same, of course, was true for the Soviet Union as its empire fell to pieces: its nuclear arsenal, purchased at great cost, was useless. Now we are seeing that this is true of Ukraine. As the Ukrainians attack seemingly mighty Russian armored columns with small drones and shoulder-fired antitank weapons, they are betting that Putin will not respond with a devastating nuclear attack.
It may be that Putin believes he could intimidate Ukraine and its supporters with a small nuclear weapon that does only limited damage. He may believe that such a smaller weapon would not be viewed as a nuclear attack requiring a response, and therefore be less likely to trigger a nuclear escalation that ends all civilization.
Of course, to the extent Putin thinks rationally, he would recognize that he cannot positively know what either Ukrainians or the nuclear-armed western powers would do, just as they cannot know what he would do. Heck, none of these players know what they themselves would do!
All the actors in the nuclear drama are humans, prone to confusion, fear, and panic. Faced with a nuclear onslaught, it is most likely they would act irrationally. A head of state with a nuclear button could easily be as irrational as the rest of us. Meanwhile, in a crisis, a field commander with a tactical nuclear weapon is all too likely to fire it, starting the final conflagration.
Assuming we avoid nuclear catastrophe over Ukraine, this crisis may help us understand the urgency of resolving our perilous situation. Policies that reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war and arms control treaties that over time eliminate nuclear weapons should be back at the top of our domestic and international agenda.
I learned this week of Back from the Brink, a group that advocates for these and related measures, and made a donation to support their work. Their website is preventnuclearwar.org.
For Valentine’s Day, I’m sharing a few more of the pictures I took last month at Yellowstone National Park. As I worked my way through the mass of images, I found that a lot of the ones I liked showed animals in pairs, families, and herds, finding food and friendship and otherwise getting through the harsh winter.
With a new covid variant still at large, many species endangered, democracy in peril, and so many other huge problems, it’s a big challenge to stay optimistic and hopeful. So I’m giving special emphasis in my daily reading to good news, when I can find it.
Bighorn sheep
Ordinary journalism privileges disasters and conflict over successes and collaboration. This has come to seem natural in our works of history and literature. Drama is fundamentally conceived of as conflict.
We’re deeply habituated to assuming the worst, and viewing the world through a dark lens. To some extent, we’re addicted to alarming stories that get us agitated. This may well be bad for our health, and it also limits our imaginations. But we don’t have ready terminology for an alternative approach.
Bison
Anyhow, I’ve been enjoying the unfolding non-drama of NASA’s James Webb telescope, which launched on December 25, 2021, and now is fully deployed and in orbit around the sun about a million miles from us. The 18 mirrors are currently being calibrated, but so far, amazingly, everything seems to be working as designed.
Wolves
The Webb project took 25 years to design and build. Its basic mission is at first glance obscure – improving our understanding of the state of the universe billions of years before the earth came into existence. But it shows one of the truly charming, quirky aspects of human nature – irrepressible curiosity. Despite the old neo-liberal assumption that big endeavors can only be justified in dollars and cents, the Webb can’t be explained in terms of a profit motive. Cutting edge science like astrophysics is at base about this kind of curiosity: the inherent satisfaction of just understanding things better. The Webb website, which has a lot of good news so far, is here.
Ravens
Speaking of webs and understanding more about the universe, I finished reading Jeremy Lent’s recent book, the Web of Meaning. It’s an ambitious work that proposes to integrate recent science with earlier thought systems. I was drawn to it for its helpful introduction of Taoist, Buddhist, and neo-Confucian ideas, as well as systems drawn from pre-colonial indigenous cultures.
Lent makes a useful distinction between reductionist science, which purports to be comprehensive but isn’t, and more open scientific processes. He calls out the long history of dualist thinking in science, but points up affinities between ancient non-Western systems of thinking and modern scientific discoveries.
Bison in thermal vents
In Lent’s view, one of the keys to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe is the interconnectedness of everything. He recognizes the extreme peril facing our planet and everything in and on it, but posits that we can develop a new mindset and new sustainable systems. He could be wrong. But I found his summary of big ideas in science and philosophy readable and stimulating, and his optimism was encouraging.
Geese in thermal vents
Still looking on the bright side, I came across an interesting essay by Matthew Rosza in Salon with some psychological explanations for why a substantial number of people believe the Big Lie that Trump won the last presidential election. It is, of course, depressing that lots of people unite behind notions that are plainly absurd and potentially dangerous, but this real life social experiment can give us new insights into human cognition and its glitches. It might make us a little more humble, and a little more open.
Trumpeter swans taking off
Anyhow, the Rosza essay points up how even nutty ideas can start to sound normal if repeated constantly and in different contexts by someone with apparent authority. Their salience depends partly on how they feed the biases and needs of the fans, and the fans’ various desires to fit into their groups and find emotional satisfaction. For example, people who are fearful of opponents and angry at losing an election are more willing to accept a crazy narrative that makes them feel better.
In the Salon piece, Dr. Matt Blanchard had this interesting perspective:
Everything we know about the human brain suggests it is composed of numerous systems that interact, overlap, excite, inhibit, and often contradict each other, and may even hide information from consciousness. . . . So it comes as no surprise that the act of ‘believing’ is not just one thing that humans do. Instead, this one word represents a wide range of relationships that humans have with information. We don’t truly ‘believe’ things, so much as provisionally accept information we find useful.
Dr. Blanchard also noted that the strength and tenacity of beliefs varies. Some beliefs, like trust in a loved one, are high stakes, with big consequences for believing wrongly, and those are likely to be more thoroughly tested against reality. Others have little day-to- day effect on our lives, like presidential races or religious observances. Those low stakes beliefs may be more readily tried out without much reflection, just for fun.
It makes sense that the Big Lie and other bizarre beliefs have little to do with reasoning, but serve emotional needs, like providing solace and building group ties. This suggests that such beliefs can change when adherents find other solutions to their fear, anger, and other emotional problems. Maybe that’s what we should try – less fighting, and more compassion.
Week before last I got to visit snowy Yellowstone National Park, most of which is in Wyoming. My hope was to find and photograph some of the big animals that live there, like bison, wolves, elk, coyote, fox, deer, bighorn sheep, eagles, pronghorns, swans, and bobcats. I got pictures of all of these, except the bobcat, and also saw a river otter and a pine martin that had just killed a snowshoe hare.
Bighorn sheep
The trip was led by master photographer Charles Glatzer, and the four other photographers had lots of wildlife experience. We traveled in vehicles especially equipped for the snow and ice, with tires that came up to my chest. Our two driver-guides were cheerful and accommodating, and one, Christi, was impressively knowledgeable about wildlife and the park.
It was very cold at times – down to 5 below zero. Even with gloves and warmers, a few times my fingers were too numb to feel the camera shutter button. I was conscious of the risk of frostbite, and stayed just clear of it.
Bison in thermal area near Old Faithful geyser
Yellowstone is big and varied, and it resists easy summaries. There are mountains, canyons, rivers, and valleys. It is unique in its volcanic activity, with geysers, hot springs, and thermal vents spewing smoke. It has the largest concentration of non-human mammals in the lower 48. Sometimes the animals are plentiful and easy to see, and sometimes not.
Bison fleeing wolves
Bison, almost extinct at the beginning of the 20th century, are a signature species that in recent years has been successful in the park. I got to see many of them. The most exciting moment was when a pack of wolves (I saw 5) attacked a herd of about 20 or so bison.
As the wolves tried to take down a smaller, slower bison, all were running for their lives. I thought they were going to cross the road 50 yards ahead, but then they turned and charged straight toward us, and passed right beside our vehicle. The wolves were unsuccessful, but they stayed around for a few minutes to catch their breath.
A wolf
I was sorry to hear that hunters are legally permitted to “harvest” bison who wander into public lands outside the park boundaries. The wolves of Yellowstone, with an estimated population of fewer than 100, are also being killed by hunters when they venture outside the park.
It really is a strange, sad thing that some humans find it fun to inflict suffering and death on these creatures, and are allowed to do it. Children generally start life with curiosity about and affection for animals, and view them as living beings like us, with their own feelings. Our culture then socializes us in the opposite direction. Regarding non-human animals as of no moral consequence, and fit objects for murderous sport, is presently considered normal.
Like almost everyone, I was taught that humans are superior to animals, and that animals exist merely for the pleasure of humans. Eventually I arrived at a different view, which is this: humans are animals with certain unique attributes, but no special right to exploit and mistreat other animals. Every animal has its own talents and its own inherent worth. Each is entitled to respect.
Bald eagle taking off
With that understanding, it becomes a lot easier to think about non-humans’ lives, customs, and cultures. They survive in harsh environments, and know how to live simply in the present. They could teach us a few things.
On my trip, I reread The Last of the Curlews, by Fred Bodsworth. It’s a short, beautiful novel about an Eskimo curlew, a shorebird species that was once abundant and is now extinct. The book describes the last of these birds as it migrates between the Arctic to South America, struggling with the elements and searching for a mate. Bodsworth helps us better understand our planet through the lens of a single bird.
I haven’t had a chance to go through all my Yellowstone pictures yet, but I got a start, and found several I liked. I’m hoping to make it through the rest in the next week or two, and to share a few more.
Here are a few more shorebird pictures from our wonderful wedding celebration at Atlantic Beach, NC. Clark, our new daughter-in-law, exceeded all expectations! I also enjoyed spending time on the beach with the birds, and interpreting these images. As noted below, I, and probably you, can definitely use more of the beauty and peace of nature.
As we start a brand new year, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with dire problems: the resurgent pandemic, mass shootings, fires, tornadoes, droughts, melting ice caps, and the list goes on. There’s a lot to deal with. As part of my meditation practice, I try to make some time every day for conscious gratitude and compassion, including self-compassion.
Given all our other problems, it’s obviously not a great time to discuss the possible end of American democracy. We’re already exhausted. But we need to buck up and find our second wind. Our system has been much weakened and may fail entirely. If we want to save it, we have to act soon.
Besides worry overload, another reason I hesitate to raise the subject is that there is so much wrong with American-style democracy. Its most valuable ideals – free elections, equality before the law, free speech and other civil liberties – have never been fully realized. Meanwhile, this system has given us extreme inequality, embedded racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia.
We have the world’s largest rate of incarceration, and an endless war on drugs that keeps prisons full and sustains worldwide criminal organizations. Our military brings death and chaos to remote areas of the globe, while maintaining hair-trigger readiness to end civilization in a nuclear war. For many, there is not adequate food, housing, transportation, or medical care. For non-human beings, it’s even worse. In short, our political processes have not produced what we would reasonably expect of a wealthy, enlightened nation, and they’ve done a lot that we cannot be proud of.
But for all our shortcomings and failures, American democracy still provides one thing that is extremely valuable: the possibility of change. We have a tradition of fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. Our votes almost always get counted and determine the winner. Exceptions are vanishingly rare.
If the governing party loses, it peacefully concedes and allows the business of government to continue. The new government might improve things, and at any rate, it is generally agreed that it is entitled to take a shot. This has been true for a long time, and it’s hard to conceive that it could be otherwise. But it easily could.
Now, more than a year after the last presidential election, a substantial majority of Republicans have been persuaded that the election was stolen, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president. They reject the overwhelming weight of the authorities – court decisions, officials, scholars, and news media – that contradict that view.
Republican leaders at the national and state level, with very few exceptions, continue to support the big lie that the true winner in 2020 was Donald Trump, and to refuse to support or cooperate with investigations into the illegal attempts to nullify the victory of President Biden.
Republican legislators in some 19 states have already passed laws to make future Democratic victories less likely by making it more difficult for some groups to vote. Several Republican-dominated states are getting rid of their non-partisan election officials who refused to assist in overturning the last presidential election and installing supporters of the big lie.
In other words, many states are putting in place a system to stack the deck against Democrats and then, if that doesn’t work, nullify election results. In addition, dozens of states have enacted new laws criminalizing various acts of protests, including ones that would likely occur after a stolen election. Meanwhile, the courts have been stacked with Republican judges.
While all this is happening, repeating the big lie prepares the psychological ground. If enough people are convinced, wrongly, that election fraud is common, they may also be convinced that their own cheating isn’t so bad. Cynicism, apathy, and fear could be paralyzing, or at least keep many people from protesting.
These forces could in short order leave us with an authoritarian, neo-fascist system. That is, a system with all of our current problems, minus the machinery to allow for political change to address those problems, and minus long-standing institutional restraints on repressive violence and corruption.
I know this is no fun to think about, but fortunately, it’s not hard to understand intellectually. The challenge is to fix it. As to Republicans who understand the big lie and disapprove of it, they need to show some backbone, and tell the truth. Democrats who understand it need to get to work educating others on what’s happening. And they need to get involved, volunteering, making phone calls, watching the polls, and so forth – all the no-fun jobs that are part of free and fair elections.
Although I think saving our democracy will be tough, our ancestors have won long-odds fights for rights before. In the last century, women fought hard to win the right to vote, and African Americans won the right to be treated as full citizens. The forces that have brought us to this point – fear, hatred, ignorance, greed – are nothing new, and we already have the tools to counter them: kindness, compassion, and love. But hope alone won’t get the job done. We need to get to work.
Our son Gabe got married last week to his sweetheart, and now Clark is our own dear daughter-in-law. The wedding took place at Atlantic Beach, NC, capping a big week of celebrations. It was great to see the happy couple plight their troth, but also to get to know Clark’s family and their friends.
We stayed near the beach, and I had a chance to get out near sunrise to see what was happening there. I enjoyed watching the shorebirds, and taking some pictures. In the early light, with the sea running in and out, and the little birds doing the same, it was challenging to get a good image.
One little peep was unusually friendly, or at least curious, and trotted right up and circled around me, too close to shoot with my long lens. Back home, I found there were quite a few bad shots, but also a few that showed things I didn’t already know of the world of these small hearty creatures.
Another little high point of the week: playing with our granddaughter Augusta. At 10 weeks, she was still a wee thing, but with big curious eyes. She seemed to like looking at patterns in fabric and being covered for an instant with her bib. She had a fabulous smile!
A few weeks earlier, we’d finally faced the fact that we just didn’t like the yellow paint we’d got for the living room last year, and got organized to change it. The next morning, painter George C. and his assistant showed up with paint, brushes and drop clothes, and put in a color called revere pewter. It was such a relief! They made the room a lot calmer and more welcoming. I checked the edges and corners, and they did a good job.
As usual at this time of year, I’ve got to think about Christmas presents for people who really don’t need anything of a material sort. Diane, my mother-in-law, who died this year, decided a few years back that her gift to us would be a contribution to the charity of our choice. We liked the idea, and tried to implement it in our family, though with only limited success.
Margaret Renkl had a good column last week encouraging contributions to regional charities that work for environmental causes. I wasn’t familiar with all of her groups, but they sounded worthwhile.
My charitable contributions especially involve animals – reducing animal cruelty and protecting endangered species and ecosystems. In case you’re interested in those problems, I’ll mention some organizations I’m supporting: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, World Wildlife Fund, Audubon Society, Ocean Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, and the Jane Goodall Institute.
In memory of Diane, I’d also like to flag one other charity: Compassion and Choices. Its focus is patient rights and individual choice at the end of life, including access to medical aid in dying. There’s a good documentary called When My Time Comes, available to stream from PBS, showing the issues that this group is helping on.
Happy Native American Heritage Day! Here are a few more pictures from my recent visit to the Four Corners area. Monument Valley (above) is a Navajo Tribal Park, and the people that live there are almost all Navajos. One morning a Navajo guide drove us out on the red dirt to see more of the strange rocks. He was a friendly guy, and he was happy to talk about his culture, including their food, festivals, and clan system.
As we passed by little camps of people who lived in that harsh climate without electricity or running water, I wondered how they managed. But it occurred to me, of course, they help each other when they need help. And our guide helped me understand, they don’t feel like they need a lot of things. They like being there, in that land with their families.
As a schoolchild I learned the story that Thanksgiving was a holiday that everyone liked and no one could criticize. It is hard to take issue with conscious gratitude, or getting together with loved ones for a celebratory feast.
But I’ve learned more recently that Native Americans have good reason to dislike the myth of the first Thanksgiving, which makes it hard to spot and understand the greed and violence of many of the Europeans who colonized North America. I heard a good Post Reports podcast this week that included reflections from Wampanoag descendents of those who helped the Pilgrims grow food for the prototype Thanksgiving, and who ultimately became victims.
A Wampanoag woman interviewed in the podcast said she always thought America’s having a single day for giving thanks was a bit strange. In her tradition, people were taught to be thankful every day.
For those brought up, as I was, to view Native Americans as interesting but backward, and the taking of their lands as divine manifest destiny, it’s not easy to hear that many colonial Europeans were merciless pillagers. But it’s definitely worth replacing the myth with actual history, since we get connections to real people, including living Native Americans and their ancestors, rather than fantasy superheroes and supervillains.
On the history front, I started reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The book is a new synthesis of current archeology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and other research bearing on the development of humans and their institutions. It’s long, but I’ve already encountered some exciting ideas.
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the concepts of freedom and equality that we thought were developed by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment were actually first worked out and shared by Native Americans, who discussed them over a period of decades with the first European traders and missionaries. Leading eighteenth-century European theorists described these ideas and practices as coming from America, but for later colonial generations, committed to extirpating Native cultures, dissonance made it impossible to entertain the notion of those cultures as intellectual pioneers and leaders.
If recent developments are any guide, it may be a while before these ideas make it into our childrens’ history textbooks. I’m still trying to understand parents disrupting school board meetings around the country in protest against the teaching of what they call “critical race theory (CRT).” I finally figured out that this crowd has redefined the term to have nothing to do with its original academic meaning. For certain angry white parents, CRT now means “teaching history related to American slavery and its aftermath in a way that includes the physical horror and moral shame of it.”
Now Republican-dominated legislatures across the country are banning the teaching of CRT and other efforts to educate children regarding racism. This is disturbing, as are death threats against educators, but this is also educational, in a way. We might have thought everyone understood at least the basics of the American slave system and agreed it was wrong. We may have further thought that no one would feel threatened by a fuller understanding of how that system shaped our country. But now we know that for some of our fellow citizens, this is definitely not the case.
Widespread ignorance about our racial history could be viewed as a failure of our educational system. But to some extent, it has quietly been the status quo for many years. New light is being shined on this shameful history, and for many, and probably most of us, that’s something to welcome and reflect on. Deeper understanding may help us improve our institutions and our communities.
Ancient cliff dwellings at. Mesa Verde
At the same time, it’s definitely frightening when angry anti-CRT parents and Republican politicians start talking about burning books and attacking educators.
This is a wake-up call. Scholars are continuing to make new discoveries, and we’re getting new opportunities for exploration of fresh ideas. But we also have new threats that we better treat seriously. We cannot allow provocative ideas to be banned, books to be burned, and educators to be terrorized and silenced. Our democracy is in trouble, and it needs us to lift our voices.
I took these pictures a couple of weeks ago in the Four Corners area, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah come together. With a group of photographers led by a master photographer, Joe Brady, I explored Monument Valley, the Valley of the Gods, Goosenecks State Park, Mesa Verde, and other remarkable areas. We didn’t see much wildlife, but there were epic rocks and scraggly plants that manage to survive in the red rocky desert.
But animals were on my mind, as I finished reading Carl Safina’s new book Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. The book has three main sections concentrating on species we may feel like we know something about: sperm whales, scarlet macaws, and chimpanzees.
Safina shows the beauty and intelligence of these creatures, and provides a window into their complex social lives. “Animal culture” is not a well-settled concept, but Safina demonstrates that these species all have developed elaborate systems that they use to regulate their social lives and teach to their young. He thinks we can learn from them.
Apropos of lessons that might be learned, I also finished reading Craig Whitlock’s new book, The Afghanistan Papers. The book is largely based on a secret U.S. government study regarding what went wrong in our longest war. In the study and in later interviews, various generals, civilian defense officials, diplomats, and soldiers described what they experienced, and what conclusions they drew.
I took away two main points. First, the U.S. government lied over and over about what was happening in Afghanistan. Generals and presidents alike kept saying that the situation was improving, that we were turning the corner, and we would win. However, from early on, the situation in most of the country was a hopeless quagmire, and those with the relevant information knew it.
Second, and even more disturbing: almost no one involved in making decisions about U.S. policy in Afghanistan knew or cared to know much about the country’s history, politics, and culture. Those in charge reduced the situation to simple black and white — good guys and bad guys — and vaguely imagined that success consisted of removing the designated bad guys.
The long American tradition of seeing violence as an all-purpose solution, rather than a deep problem, accounts for some of the tragedy of our misadventure in Afghanistan. Our cultural blinders contributed to our collective self-deception, and extended it over two decades.
Even now, it appears that many people know nothing about how we worsened the violence and corruption in Afghanistan, and think we should have stayed the course for additional decades. It is ironic and disturbing that an act of true political courage by President Biden — confronting our entrenched collective delusion and stopping our part of the war — has few defenders.
With so many pressing political and social issues at hand, it’s unlikely we’ll have a quiet period of collective reexamination of lessons to be learned from our Afghanistan mistakes. We may never get to a remorseful pledge to never again inflict so much death and chaos on another unfortunate country. But hope springs eternal, and so I recommend Whitlock’s book, which is quite readable. Here are some other thought-provoking recent articles with useful perspectives on the disaster:
Michael Massig in the New York Review of Books: The Story the Media Missed in Afghanistan. Massig points up the role that a compliant mainstream media played in creating the widespread delusion that the war was worthwhile and successful.
Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books: The Lie of Nation Building. As part of a review of Whitlock’s book, O’Toole argues that the Afghanistan experience was a dark mirror showing deep flaws in American democracy. The trillions of U.S. dollars spent on the war created new frontiers of kleptocracy and corruption in Afghanistan, not to mention new fortunes in the American military-industrial complex. O’Toole doesn’t go into all this, perhaps because it’s obvious: this wasteful disposal of mountains of taxpayer money also meant lost opportunities for addressing American inequalities and improving our healthcare, education, transportation, and other systems.
Anand Gopal in The New Yorker: The Other Afghan Women. In this extraordinary piece, Gopal takes us into the world of some rural Afghan women, including those who found the brutality they experienced from the Taliban less abhorrent than the brutality of the local warlords who the U.S. brought on as proxies.
Philip Roth’s childhood home in Newark (the yellow house)
While we were in Jersey City last month seeing our marvelous new granddaughter, one afternoon we drove over to Newark to pay homage to one of our greatest writers, Philip Roth (1933-2018). We found the street where he grew up and parked across from his old house. Back in his day, it was a working class Jewish neighborhood, and now it’s a working class Black neighborhood. His boyhood home had a plaque honoring him, but otherwise it looked like the other houses.
We also went to the Newark Public Library to see the new Philip Roth Room. The writer bequeathed a significant sum and his own books to the library where he spent many hours as a young reader. We enjoyed looking through his collection and inspecting various personal items, including his manual typewriter. The curator was a pleasant woman who knew a lot about Roth and his books. There were no other visitors on the weekday afternoon we were there, but she was hopeful that visits would pick up after the pandemic.
The Plot Against America, the unexpectedly timely HBO series about fascists who try to seize power in the U.S., is based on Roth’s novel. It probably inspired some new readers to try Roth, and I hope more will do so. His books confer the out-of-body travel pleasures of good realist fiction, along with arresting honesty, naughty humor, and a fierce passion. The physical Newark he grew up in has changed almost beyond recognition, but the sweet, quirky, hardworking place can still be visited in his books, like The Plot Against America and American Pastoral.
On our trip I also finished re-reading Lolita, by Vladimir Nabakov. I hesitated to re-engage with this famous book, which makes an uncomfortable proposition: that we sympathize with an unrepentant child molester. There’s moral risk, to say the least. It casts a hypnotic spell that feels exhilarating as it drowns our sensibilities. The monstrousness of the narrator is almost obscured by the beautiful and hilarious language. Nabokov’s close observations of our consumer culture and hypocrisies cut to the heart. The book is hard not to love, and also hard to feel entirely good about.
Sally tries to read the plaque. The Roths lived on the second floor.
Having not read Lolita for forty years, I was surprised at how much I remembered, but still, I’d forgotten a lot. Plus there was a lot I just hadn’t processed initially. For example, without belaboring the matter, Nabokov makes clear that Humbert H, in addition to being a scholar and old world aesthete, has a history of mental illness, alcoholism, and obsession with violence.
Side note: It’s curious how we systematically and unconsciously overestimate the capabilities of language. Those most accomplished in language may be the most prone to overlooking the vast realm of experience where language is irrelevant, and even counterproductive. Likewise, intellectuals with strong verbal skills often view abstractions as superior to the simple and concrete, and easily mistake them for reality. Thus our leaders zealously pursue reasonable-sounding but impossible goals, such as defeating “terrorism” or “drugs,” at horrific cost.
But the great works of Roth and Nabokov are a reminder that language can also expand our conceptual world. Great writers make us question our preconceptions and see new possibilities.
The Casual Blog 