This is an interesting Comment is Free article at The Guardian - arguing that Christianity really caught on as a result of a plague in the 3rd century which made a religion with a teaching and obligation to help the poor and suffering look much better than the pagan religions, in which the gods were capricious and mainly to be feared and appeased.
I wonder if some will challenge the image of pagan religion this relies on, though?
Each to their own, of course: but the thing about cricket that I find unforgivable is the incredible length of time it takes up.
I'm finding it a bit hard to think of a worse year over the last several decades, in a "reasons to feel optimistic about the direction the planet is heading in," sense. I guess people may have felt this way in (say) the mid 70's - a far from happy decade - but I was still somewhat of a techno-optimist at that stage and had a teenage life to live.
But gee, I mean - now we have the whole Middle East a complete humanitarian disaster again; much of Africa in terrible governance and humanitarian crisis, again; the danger to the West and Western interests from Russia and China, again; the unbelievable election of Trump, again; the loonies he wants to put in control and the drug addled, power hungry billionaire who helped put him in place (well, I guess this not a case of again - it's like a bad gothic Batman story come to life for the first time.) Another Christmas market terror incident in Europe just puts the cherry on top.
Also - overlaying all of this (which was not the case in the 70's) is the global climate disruption that Right wing (mostly ageing) idiots still refuse to acknowledge, and which we can only deal with by waiting for them to die.
Anyway, I'm talking about the vagus nerve because of this interesting story at CNN:
Vagus nerve stimulation may relieve treatment-resistant depression, study finds
And this story that it opens with - about how depression struck someone - surprised me (due to its sudden onset:
Nick Fournie was 24 years old when severe depression upended his life.
Fournie had been married to his longtime sweetheart for two years, and had no reason to suspect he had any mental health issues.
“I just thought to myself, ‘If this is it, if this is all there is to life — if it ended now, I’d be OK with it,’” Nick, now 62 and based in Illinois, said of that fateful day outdoors nearly 40 years ago.
But one day as he was mowing the lawn, his perspective on life abruptly flipped from light to dark. The shift would set him and his wife, Mary, on a tumultuous, yearslong journey of fighting for his well-being and another chance at a happy life together — until they learned of an alternative, obscure treatment that would change everything.
I wonder how often that happens - I am much more used to the idea that it develops somewhat gradually, or perhaps as a result of a sudden crisis such as a nervous breakdown.
This is at the Nature website:
In 1773, US polymath Benjamin Franklin argued that scientists should try to invent a method of embalming such that a human could be revived in the future. He admitted “a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence”. Neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston thinks that such brain preservation and revival could well become feasible. But his complex book acknowledges this proposition as “scary and disquieting” — requiring us to scrutinize our own mortality, “a deeply unpleasant task”.The book is The Future Loves You. The description at the publisher's site is:
A brilliant young neuroscientist explains how to preserve our minds indefinitely, enabling future generations to choose to revive us.I look forward to reading a lengthier review!
Anyway, I am surprised at the observation of Benjamin Franklin - quite ahead of his time there. (I see that Frankenstein wasn't published until 1818, and I presume it may have popularised the concept of revival of the dead.)
You sure want to pick the right 100 year period to be revived in, though. I mean, he died in 1790, and although the world of 1890 had undergone the industrial revolution, it had got nothing on the changes between 1890 and 1990. I'm not sure we'll ever see anything quite like that century again, in fact!
I think the Medical Journal of Australia used to run humorous short pieces at Christmas, so I had a look at it today, and instead became depressed while reading this article:
It's open access, so you can read it and marvel too at the intensity of what I sometimes describe as "sociology talk": the use of a terminology invented for their own field and which has gone on to become the navel gazing justification for academic careers: whole careers devoted to taking to talking to each other about their own terminology and world views, and telling others that they just don't get it like they do.
Now, I know: you could have the same criticism of philosophy, which is a field I am generally sympathetic to. But at least philosophers don't turn up at government meetings arguing that their insights are crucial to solving social disadvantage - they by and large have the good sense to let economists worry about economics, and doctors and epidemiologists worry about improving health, and so on.
To clarify: it's not as if I am one to think you ignore everything (say) a remote indigenous community thinks about their health services if you want to improve it. But that's the immensely irritating problem I have with the likes of this article: its insights could be condensed to something like this: "indigenous people come from a different cultural background, and it pays to try to work with them and take their views into consideration when trying to improve their health services."
But no, let's spend money on career academics and researchers and their conferences that spin a simple principle into well paying careers of waffle.
Here are some key paragraphs:
Decolonisation
Colonisation stems from, as well as perpetuates racial imbalances of knowledge, knowledge production and knowledge practice. Decolonisation and decoloniality are a few of many tools used in attempts to dismantle, hinder, reverse, stop or remove colonising practices, with the aim of privileging the rights of Indigenous people.13,20,21,22 We acknowledge the various, and sometimes conflicting conceptualisations and applications of decolonising and decolonial practices. These conflicts are influenced by place, people and socio‐political contexts, including the lack of transformative actions that should be of benefit to Indigenous peoples.21,23,24,25,26 Three key features, of the many, relating to decolonial and decolonising practices that we implement in our team are described below.
Establish and understand positionality
Positionality is where one speaks from; it is reflective of values, beliefs and worldviews and how these underpin daily life.1 For Indigenous peoples, positionality is reliant on relationality, whereby relationships to Country, family and community underpin values, beliefs and worldviews.1,3 Positioning includes one's professional context and intentions of research, as much as it is about positioning within the workplace.21 Furthermore, understanding one's workplace and the relationships formed with Indigenous communities, past and present, is essential. Positioning in context of colonisation is also important. Non‐Indigenous people need to understand their own positioning in relation to colonisation, including privileges associated with unearned power.20 Whereas Indigenous peoples' positioning with colonisation is linked with both historical and contemporary forms of oppression, which aims to eradicate Indigenous peoples and knowledges. Indigenous peoples have another link to colonisation; one that is associated with survival, resistance and a reclamation of Indigenous Knowledges and practices
Ugh.
Ross Douthat seems to have had such a good holiday in Italy, visiting a famous Benedictine monastery, that he has written a column headed:
Religion Has Been in Decline. This Christmas Seems Different.
The reasons he presents for this seem way, way, more about his good mood after a holiday, rather than a serious consideration of evidence.
If anything, even if you restrict the view to the USA, the fact that even Catholics have swung to a character like Trump should give more grounds for pessimism about the future of religions, rather than optimism. I mean, here is the Washington Post talking about the Trump flunky just appointed to be his Vatican ambassador:
Burch co-founded Catholic Vote, a lay advocacy group in 2005. The organization backed Trump in 2020 and 2024. Burch is the author of the 2020 book, “A New Catholic Moment: Donald Trump and the Politics of the Common Good,” and co-author of a 2021 book “America Catholic Daily Reader,” about Americans who have been shaped by their Catholic faith.
According to exit polls, Catholic voters supported Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin. In 2020, Catholics backed Biden, who would become America’s second Catholic president, by a five-point margin. In both years, just over 1 in 5 voters were Catholic.
The only reason I think Ross can sense a mood swing might be around certain culture war ones such as the extremes of trans rights. But just because the extremes of identity politics might be undergoing some successful pushback hardly means a return to mainstream religion in the population overall.
Update: a more interesting article, to me, in the NYT is a short discussion with famous writer on early Christianity, Elaine Pagels, who really must be getting on in age. (Yes, I see she is 81.) This passage explains her views:
You have a foot in each of two worlds, faith and academia, that often seem like rival sides of the God gulf. Can we find paths of mutual respect to bridge that chasm?
The Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry. Intellectualizing these traditions — or turning them into dogma — doesn’t make them spiritually deep. What we call Christianity is not a single thing. Instead, it consists of a 2,000-year-old collection of stories, prayers, liturgies, music, miracles — sources drawn from traditions as different as Eastern Orthodoxy is from Pentecostalism or Christian Science. No one can swallow the entire tradition: It’s undigestible. Instead, anyone who identifies as Christian chooses certain elements of it.
A professor friend said to me: “I’m an atheist. How can you believe all that stuff?” First of all, as I see it, “believing all that stuff” is not the point. The Christian message, as I experienced it, was transformational. It encouraged me to treat other people well and opened up a world of imagination and wonder.
Your own faith journey seems to bridge the chasm. You were raised in a household hostile to faith, then became an evangelical, then had a crisis when a friend died and you were told he wouldn’t go to heaven because he was Jewish.
When some Christians said to me that non-Christians are going to hell, I left their church. That made no sense to me. What about Jesus’ message of God’s love? At that point I left Christianity behind. For some people, there’s no middle ground. You’re either in or out — that’s how it’s often practiced. So for years I was out, although I knew that something powerful was there. But after years of being out, I kept wondering, what made that encounter with Christianity so powerful?
So I had to go back, asking questions. How were these stories written? How do they affect us so powerfully? They speak to a deep human longing for a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience. For we can respond to the same story in more than one way. As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story. But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle. As poet Seamus Heaney writes, “Believe that a further shore / is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles.”
This research sounds important:
Dark energy 'doesn't exist' so can't be pushing 'lumpy' universe apart, physicists say
But I guess I have to wait for Sabine Hossenfelder's view on it before I can tell how seriously to take it!
(And I wish the article did more to explain the "'timescape' model of cosmic expansion". Or did Sabine already talk about this? It's hard to remember, she puts out so much content!)
Have a look at this very well made, graphics filled, article in the Washington Post that explains a lot about the rising ocean, and in particular, how it is likely going to be bad in the the south of the USA.
This section, for example, explains stuff that is very often missed out in the discussion:
First, as ice melts in Greenland or Antarctica, meltwaters spill into the ocean, raising global sea levels everywhere. But, counterintuitively, the coastlines farthest from the ice sheets are hit hardest.
That’s because the ice sheets are gigantic — so gigantic, in fact, that they exert a gravitational pull on the ocean. (The Greenland ice sheet weighs approximately 2.7 quadrillion metric tons, equal to about 450 million Great Pyramids of Giza; the Antarctic ice sheet is 10 times heavier.)
Normally, that enormous weight pulls oceans close to the ice sheets, making sea levels around Greenland and Antarctica higher than they would be otherwise. But as the ice melts, that effect lessens. Sea levels close to the ice sheet fall, and sea levels farther away rise.
Jerry Mitrovica, a professor of earth sciences at Harvard University and one of the leading experts on melting ice sheets and ocean levels, recalls looking at a plot of sea levels near Greenland. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It was just an incredible thing to see around this melting ice sheet that sea level change, at least regionally, is dramatically going down.”
Researchers use satellites to track this effect. Two GRACE Follow-On satellites, launched in 2018 by NASA and the German Research Center for Geosciences, orbit the Earth about 140 miles apart — as they do, subtle changes in Earth’s gravitational pull yank one farther from the other. Those shifts paint a picture of the planet’s gravity, which scientists can use to predict the precise pull of the ice sheets on ocean waters.
Here's the start of an article at The Atlantic entitled:
Postpone Your Pleasures, And enjoy them all the more.
which I haven't read in full (paywall), but the point appeals to me:
My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or were forced into exile. He himself spent a year in a refugee camp, an experience that affected him for the rest of his life. Every time he wanted to make a point about society or culture, he always started with: “Well, during the civil war …”
One evening, a few months before he died, he read in his local paper an article of mine about unhappiness. “You have a lot of complicated theories,” he told me, “but the real reason people are unhappy is very simple.” I asked him to elaborate. “They don’t enjoy their dinner,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “Well, during the civil war, we were always hungry,” he said. “But one day a year—Christmas—we got to eat whatever we wanted, and we were so happy. Today, people snack all day long, are never hungry, don’t enjoy their dinners, and aren’t happy—even on Christmas.”
Would I be happy with an Atlantic subscription? Possibly. Digital is $90 (US) a year. Maybe I ask the family to each pay a third.
Meanwhile, I still, lazily, haven't decided if I should drop the NYT or WAPO. I feel I only need one.
* Clive Robertson, the cranky persona-ed news reader and broadcaster, died last week. I hadn't thought about him for years, but his death reminded me how much I used to enjoy his late night news show. His droll, dry wit was very amusing, and I miss that we have nothing similar today.
* Australian author John Marsden has also just died (at only 74 - as I age, I long to read only about deaths that are at older ages than that!). I only read his famous first book in the "Tomorrow - When the War Began" and thought it was OK, but I knew he had been very influential in the youth fiction market, and in youth education generally. I didn't recall this:
John’s youth was harrowing in different ways, and he never hid the fact that he was a bit bruised by life. He became suicidal as a university student and was institutionalised; he once wrote that the world of the psychiatric hospital was in some ways “more real than the one outside. In here the masks are off, people don’t pretend so much. [They] don’t have the energy or strength.” Perhaps that’s why he was able to inhabit his characters so fully. It is extraordinary for a man of his generation to write teenage girls so convincingly and with such empathy.
Update: yes, as Tim points out below, now Michael Leunig has died, aged 79. (Again, fellas, for my long term planning, I only want to see people start to leave this mortal coil from about 85!) I guess like most people I didn't mind Leunig at his peak, but his brand of idiosyncratic eccentric takes did start to wear thin in the long term.
I see that Sabina Hossenfelder has a video up about her scepticism of Musk's Mars colonisation plans.
If anything, I reckon it was way, way too gentle on Musk, even though she doesn't think his plans will happen any time soon.
She spends too much time on the long term difficulties of permanently colonising Mars (the issue of it not being to retain an atmosphere due to solar wind is covered, for example) without talking enough about the short term wild implausibility of Musk's fantasy - the huge number of rocket builds and launches needed, the totally tricky orbital re-fueling that has not been tried and is (I reckon) always going to be a high risk manoeuvre - probably with the potential to create a huge mess of orbital debris - and the routinely overlooked matter of how difficult it will be to build a biologically self supporting colony on Mars.
I think this latter issue is just common sense - look at the problems the Biosphere experiment went through, and that was on a planet where all the organic material needed could just be driven in on the back of a truck.*
At least I saw some support in the video comments for my view that if you want a "lifeboat" for planet Earth, why not build it on the Moon? (The only plausible reason against it that I can think of is that no one knows what effect low gravity pregnancy will have on the babies - but then, the same might turn out to be an issue in Mars gravity too. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out it's really, really difficult to carry a baby to term in low gravity, for some reason we have no idea about at the moment. That would ruin Musk's "longtermism" pretty rapidly.)
I remain very confident that Musk will face a downfall sooner or later, and people will wonder why more experts didn't speak out about his wild overconfidence earlier...
* Have a look at the website for a long on-going research project of the European Space Agency to develop a closed system for life support, including food, called Melissa. As far as I tell, they might be up to trying it out on a small rat colony. And I liked this part from their FAQ page:
Why after 30 years the project is not finish yet ?
The proper answer to this one is probably:
Why man has no try to duplicate the Earth functions earlier ? In other words, although humans are fully depending of the Earth ecosystem functions (e.g. oxygen, water, food, ...), we have today no back-up. Anyone who looks a bit more carefully to the challenges of artificial ecology will rapidly perceive the enormous difficulties. We have seen over the years many similar projects : CELSS, CEEF, CERES, BIOSPHERE 2… almost all of them had to stop due to incorrect evaluation of the challenges, and necessary amplitude and duration of the efforts.
Yeah, I've slowed down a bit in my reading of the abridged version of Journey to the West, and I note as follows:
a. it takes to about the half way point of the book before the journey actually begins;
b. I am now 55% percent in, and we still haven't met the 4th travel companion (Sandy in the TV series);
c. I was rather surprised that in Chapter 17, the Heart Sutra suddenly appears in full. I had just watched one of the Doug's Dharma videos on Youtube in which he spoke about it.
The Heart Sutra has had my attention before. I think I am now closer to understanding its point, though....
So, we're getting a fair bit of handwringing over much of the public reaction to that US health fund executive being murdered:
And it has made me finally post a thought I've had about Trump for years.
I predict - if ever he is successfully assassinated, I reckon the reaction of about 60% of Americans (and 90 of the rest of the globe) will be exactly like the end of the Seinfeld episode in which George (accidentally) kills his fiancée Susan: a couple of awkward exchanges and half sincere mutterings of "that's so bad", and within 60 seconds, "so, wanna get some coffee?"
The New York Times has an article about this:
Black Americans experience schizophrenia and related disorders at twice the rate of white Americans. It’s a disparity that has parallels in other cultures.Here's a bit:
As a growing body of research reveals, Black people in the United States suffer the hallucinations and delusions of psychosis — the voices that seem to emanate from outside a person’s head, the visions, the paranoias, the breaks with common reality — at a rate roughly twice that of white people. In Europe, racial disparities regarding psychosis are yet wider. Even after researchers control for socioeconomic factors and address issues of diagnosis, the alarming racial gaps remain.
Studies suggesting a link between minority or outsider status and psychosis run back about a century. A 1932 study looked at hospital admissions for psychosis in Minnesota. It found that Norwegian immigrants were admitted at twice the rate of native Minnesotans or Norwegians in their home country. By the 1970s, researchers were turning specifically to racial divides in psychiatric disorders, and by the 2000s, the relationship between race and psychosis (which appears to outstrip any correlation between race and more common conditions like depression) was becoming well studied in both the United States and Europe. Yet despite the mounting data, in the United States, until recently, the issue was relegated to the edges of mainstream psychiatry — or perhaps beyond the edges.
The whole thing is pretty odd, as explained in this part (with my bold):
In the United States, Black-white ratios are at least 1.9 to one; some studies show that disparities for nonwhite Hispanics are narrower but still notable. In Europe overall, Black-white differentials hover in the vicinity of four to one. In England, the gap for Black Caribbean and Black African immigrants runs between four to one and more than six to one. In the Netherlands, for Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants, the ratio is around three to one.
Among the immigrant groups, one plausible factor is the dislocation and stress that can come with the immigrant journey itself. But while such trauma may seem an obvious trigger, given that many immigrants arrive in their new nations after dangerous journeys and unable to speak the language that surrounds them, researchers have found repeatedly that second-generation immigrants to the United States and Europe develop psychosis at rates at least as high as their parents. Something is happening in the new country.
