Category: Enlightenment

Let There Always Be Light: Dark Matter and the Mystery of Our Mortal Stardust (Patti Smith Reads Rebecca Elson)

Here’s the link to this article.

BY MARIA POPOVA

This is the fourth of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER FOUR

Months before Edwin Hubble finally published his epoch-making revelation about Andromeda, staggering the world with the fact that the universe extends beyond our Milky Way galaxy, a child was born under the star-salted skies of Washington, D.C., where the Milky Way was still visible before a century’s smog slipped between us and the cosmos — a child who would grow up to confirm the existence of dark matter, that invisible cosmic glue holding galaxies together and pinning planets to their orbits so that, on at least one of them, small awestruck creatures with vast complex consciousnesses can unravel the mysteries of the universe.

Night after night, Vera Rubin (July 23, 1928–December 25, 2016) peered out of her childhood bedroom and into the stars, wonder smitten with the beauty of it all — until she read a children’s book about the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell, who had expanded the universe of possibility for half of our species a century earlier. The young Vera was suddenly seized with a life-altering realization: Not only was there such a thing as a professional stargazer, but it was a thing a girl could do.

Vera Rubin as an undergraduate at Vassar, 1940s
Vera Rubin as an undergraduate at Vassar, 1940s

In 1965 — exactly one hundred years after Maria Mitchell was appointed the first professor of astronomy at Vassar, which Vera Rubin had chosen as her training ground in astronomy — she became the first woman permitted to use the Palomar Observatory. Peering through its colossal eye — the telescope, devised the year Rubin was born, had replaced the one through which Hubble made his discovery as the world’s most powerful astronomical instrument — she was just as wondersmitten as the little girl peering through the bedroom window, just as beguiled by the beauty of the cosmos. “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,” she reflected in her most personal interview. “I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.”

Galaxies had taken Rubin to Palomar, and galaxies — the riddle of their rotation, which she had endeavored to solve — became the key to her epochal confirmation of dark matter. One of the most mesmerizing unsolved puzzles in astronomy, dark matter had remained only an enticing speculation since the Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky had first theorized it when Vera was five.

A generation later, a small clan of astronomers at Cambridge analyzed the deepest image of space the Hubble Space Telescope had yet captured — that iconic glimpse of the unknown, revealing a universe “so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back” — to discern the origin of the mysterious dark matter halo enveloping the Milky Way. Spearheading the endeavor was an extraordinary young astronomer back to work during a remission of a rare terminal blood cancer ordinarily afflicting the elderly.

Rebecca Elson, 1987

Nursed on geology and paleontology on the shores of a prehistoric lake, Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960–May 19, 1999) was barely sixteen and already in college when she first glimpsed Andromeda through a telescope. Instantly dazzled by its “delicate wisp of milky spiral light floating in what seemed a bottomless well of empty space,” she became a scientist but never relinquished the pull of the poetic dimensions of reality. During her postdoctoral work at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Elson found refuge from the narrow patriarchy of academic science in a gathering of poets every Tuesday evening. She became a fellow at a Radcliffe-Harvard institute for postgraduate researchers devoted to reversing “the climate of non-expectation for women,” among the alumnae of which are Anne Sexton, Alice Walker, and Anna Deavere Smith. There, in a weekly writing group, she met and befriended the poet Marie Howe, whose splendid “Singularity” became the inspiration for this animated season of The Universe in Verse.

It was then — twenty-nine and newly elected the youngest astronomer in history to serve on the Decennial Review committee steering the course of American science toward the most compelling unsolved questions — that Elson received her terminal diagnosis.

Throughout the bodily brutality of her cancer treatment, she filled notebooks with poetic questions and experiments in verse, bridging with uncommon beauty the creaturely and the cosmic — those eternal mysteries of our mortal matter that make it impossible for a consciousness born of dead stars to fathom its own nonexistence.

Rebecca Elson lived with the mystery for another decade, never losing her keen awareness that we are matter capable of wonder, never ceasing to channel it in poetry. When she returned her borrowed stardust to the universe, a spring shy of her fortieth birthday, she left behind nearly sixty scientific papers and a single, splendid book of poems titled A Responsibility to Awe (public library) — among them the staggering “Theories of Everything” (read by Regina Spektor at the 2019 Universe in Verse) and “Antidotes to Fear of Death (read by Janna Levin at the 2020 Universe in Verse).

Permeating Elson’s poetic meditations, the mystery of dark matter culminates in one particular poem exploring with uncommon loveliness what may be the most touching paradox of being human — our longing for the light of immortality as creatures of matter in a cosmos governed by the dark sublime of dissolution.

Bringing Elson’s masterpiece to life for this series is Patti Smith (who read Emily Dickinson’s pre-atomic ode to particle physics at the 2020 Universe in Verse), with animation by Ohara Hale (who animated Emily Dickinson’s pre-ecological poem about ecology in Chapter One of this experimental season of The Universe in Verse) and music by Zoë Keating (who read Rita Dove’s paleontological poem at the 2018 Universe in Verse).

LET THERE ALWAYS BE LIGHT (SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER)
by Rebecca Elson

For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things:

To weigh us down.
To stop the universe
From rushing on and on
Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star going out.

Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

Let there be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection.

Previously on The Universe in Verse: Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith); Chapter 3 (trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell and the poetry of the cosmic perspective, with David Byrne and Pattiann Rogers).

From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation

Here’s the link to this article.

BY MARIA POPOVA

From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation

We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.

A generation after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic mirror to humanity with “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Pattiann Rogers — who writes with uncommon virtuosity about the intersection of the cosmic and the human, and whose poems have therefore been a frequent presence in The Universe in Verse — offers a poignant cosmogony of our self-creation in the stunning final poem of her book Flickering (public library).

HOMO SAPIENS: CREATING THEMSELVES
by Pattiann Rogers

I.

Formed in the black-light center of a star-circling
galaxy; formed in whirlpool images of froth
and flume and fulcrum; in the center image of herring
circling like pieces of silver swirling fast, a shoaling
circle of deception; in the whirlpool perfume of sex
in the deepest curve of a lily’s soft corolla. Created
within the images of the creator’s creation.

Born with the same grimacing wrench of a tree-covered
cliff split wide suddenly by lightning and opened
to thundering clouds of hail and rain.

Cured in the summer sun as if in a potter’s oven,
polished like a stone rolled by a river, emboldened
by the image of the expanse beyond earth’s horizon,
inside and outside a circumference in the image
of freedom.

Given the image of starlight clusters steadily silent
above a hillside-silence of fallen snow… let there be sleep.

II.

Inheriting from the earth’s scrambling minions,
images of thorn and bur, fang and claw, stealth,
deceit, poison, camouflage, blade, and blood…
let there be suffering, let there be survival.

Shaped by the image of the onset and unstoppable
devouring eclipse of the sun, the tempestuous, ecliptic
eating of the moon, the volcanic explosions of burning
rocks and fiery hail of ashes to death… let there be
terror and tears. Let there be pity.

Created in the image of fear inside a crawfish
skittering backward through a freshwater stream
with all eight appendages in perfect coordination,
both pincers held high, backing into safety beneath
a fallen leaf refuge… let there be home.

III.

Made in the image of the moon, where else
would the name of ivory rock craters shine
except in our eyes… let there be language.

Displayed in the image of the rotting seed
on the same stem with the swelling blossom…
let there be hope.

Homo sapiens creating themselves after the manner
and image of the creator’s ongoing creation — slowly,
eventual, alert and imagined, composing, dissembling,
until the right chord sounds from one brave strum
of the right strings reverberating, fading away
like evening… let there be pathos, let there be
compassion, forbearance, forgiveness. Let there be
weightless beauty.

Of earth and sky, Homo sapiens creating themselves,
following the mode and model of the creator’s creation,
particle by particle, quest by quest, witness by witness,
even though the unknown far away and the unknown
nearby be seen and not seen… let there be goodwill
and accounting, let there be praise resounding.

Complement with astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s ode to dark matter and the mystery of being, “Let There Always Be Light,” non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson’s astonishing “Center of the Universe,” and Jane Hirshfield’s “To Be a Person,” then revisit Pattiann Rogers’s harmonic of the human and cosmic perspectives, read by David Byrne and illustrated by Maira Kalman.

The lights are shining in Blue America

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE SEP 14, 2023

A lighthouse glowing over a calm sea | The lights are shining in Blue America
Credit: Pixabay

Overview:

Throughout America’s blue states and cities, Democratic officeholders are passing laws to help people and make their lives better, from education to health care to gun control to the environment to voting rights—and more besides.

Reading Time: 4 MINUTES

[Previous: The lights are flickering in Red America]

Red states are suffering from the laws they voted for.

Thanks to their rejection of Obamacare, rural areas have become health care deserts as hospitals lose money and shut down. COVID-denying, vaccine-refusing ideology has directly led to conservative areas suffering far more deaths and disability than would otherwise have been the case. Abortion bans are causing doctors to flee in droves, leaving states without maternity care. Schools are starved of resources, crippling the minds of the next generation and driving away businesses that need educated workers. Open-carry laws have spurred a plague of gun murders and suicides.

However, the state of the nation isn’t uniformly bleak. While the red states regress, blue states are doing better than ever. In places with enlightened, progressive governments that actually care about the well-being of their citizens, Democrats are passing a blizzard of laws to help people and make their lives better.

The Midwest

Start with Minnesota. Democrats won a trifecta in 2022, taking the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. They immediately made good use of their majority to turn the state into a laboratory in progressive policy:

Just over halfway through their legislative session, Minnesota legislators have already enacted or advanced measures that touch nearly every area of the Democratic Party platform, including policies about reproductive rights, democracy, voting, green energy and LGBTQ protections.

Among other progressive measures, Minnesota Democrats codified abortion rights into law. They massively expanded voting rights, set up automatic voter registration for teenagers, and provided for the automatic restoration of voting rights to people who’ve completed criminal sentences. They expanded background checks and red-flag laws for gun purchases. They required utilities to offer 100% clean energy by 2040. They legalized recreational marijuana.

And that’s not all. Another article, “The Minnesota Miracle“, lists even more Democratic accomplishments: They created a paid family and medical leave program that covers all workers. They passed a child tax credit to help poor families. They banned conversion therapy and passed sanctuary laws for transgender children with family in less tolerant states. They bumped up education spending and instituted free breakfast and lunch for all public school students. They passed laws guaranteeing access to health insurance and driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status.

Nearby Michigan, like Minnesota, elected a Democratic trifecta in 2022—in Michigan’s case, for the first time in forty years. Also like Minnesota, Michigan Democrats wasted no time. They banned conversion therapy; outlawed discrimination against LGBTQ people; repealed a Republican anti-union law; expanded the earned income tax credit; and passed a package of gun-control laws.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer also signed a “historic” education budget that boosts per-student spending and expands pre-K. It guarantees free breakfast and lunch for all public school students, making Michigan the seventh state to do so.

There’s also Illinois. While there wasn’t a huge reservoir of pent-up progressive changes in this deep blue state, there were still some good ideas. For example, they passed a law that bans book bans. In response to right-wing censorship, it prevents schools and libraries from removing books based on “partisan or doctrinal disapproval”, on pain of losing state funds. Illinois also eliminated cash bail and expanded support for abortion to help people coming from neighboring states.

The West

The biggest, most forward-thinking initiative in the Western states comes from California. The Golden State is manufacturing its own insulin through the non-profit CalRx initiative.

California will sell insulin for $30, up to 90% less than private companies charge. It will be a major disruption to the price-gouging rampant in Big Pharma. Other generic drugs, like naloxone, may soon follow.

In New Mexico, voters approved tapping into the state’s land grant fund to pay for early childhood education. A set of proposed state regulations would make child care free for most children up to age 5.

And Colorado, like California, is taking steps to rein in out-of-control medical costs. One new law caps the cost of EpiPens at $60. Another caps the interest rate on medical debt. A third bars it from being included on credit reports, which helps people who were unjustly turned down for loans or credit because of a medical crisis that was no fault of their own.

The East

In New York, I’ve previously written about the Build Public Renewables Act, one of the most ambitious laws ever passed to bring us closer to a green-energy future.

The Rhode Island legislature passed a law that makes wage theft a felony—eliminating the longstanding disparity that employees who steal from employers can expect prosecution and harsh punishment, whereas employers could steal from employees with little consequence.

Vermont, like New Mexico, approved a plan that greatly expands child care. It subsidizes families and reimburses providers. It’s paid for by a payroll tax—which is only fair, since employers benefit when their employees have reliable child care.

Massachusetts joins Minnesota and Michigan in making school meals free for all students, and the only surprise is that they hadn’t done so already. Lawmakers also made community college free for state residents.

Last but not least, East Coast states pioneered the idea of shield laws to fight right-wing anti-choice and anti-trans ideology. These laws prevent patients and doctors from being sued, arrested, or prosecuted for receiving abortion or gender-affirming care, and forbid states from cooperating with any such investigation by overreaching law enforcement in red states. Connecticut passed the first of these laws, but the idea has spread to Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Vermont.

As conservative states sink further into the mire of theocracy, the blue states stand above them, shining like lighthouses. Not only are they protecting their citizens against religious-right encroachment, they’re offering more and more benefits like free child care, high-quality education, and access to affordable medical care. Our nation is increasingly diverging onto two separate tracks, and blue states will be havens, not just to liberals, but to everyone who wants to live a happy, healthy and prosperous life.

Freedom requires education: There’s no choice without knowledge

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE

SEP 07, 2023

Two doors of weathered wood side by side in a stone wall | Freedom requires education: There's no choice without knowledge
Credit: Tim Green/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Overview:

If you want to be free, you have to have an understanding of the choices. Conservatives who push book bans and rage against pluralistic education are fighting against their own stated goal.

Reading Time: 4 MINUTES

[Previous: No one has the right to starve a child’s mind]

Imagine you find yourself in a room, facing two doors.

One door is rough, weathered wood. The other is made of boards polished smooth.

There’s carved writing on both, but it’s in a language you don’t read, in characters you’ve never seen. There are chains of intricate symbols inlaid into the frames in gold and silver, but they’re utterly meaningless to you.

There’s just one thing you know. One door is the entry into a golden existence: a long life of peace, ease and good health, full of friends and love. The other opens onto a dark and gloomy road: a hard life of unhappiness, suffering, misery, loneliness, and early death.

Knowing that your fate is riding on the choice, which door would you pick?

The cosmic shell game

The correct answer—assuming you’re a rational skeptic—is that this isn’t a choice at all.

Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another. You have to have some background knowledge, some way to evaluate which of the options before you is better. If you could read the language carved on the doors, or if you recognized any of the symbols, you might be able to make a better-than-chance judgment about the correct one. Without this knowledge, picking either door would be a blind guess. You might as well flip a coin.

Of course, in real life, we’re in an even worse place than this pared-down hypothetical. In the real world, there are more than just two doors. There are thousands, each one densely covered with their own writing and their own symbols (notwithstanding the evangelists who think there are only two choices: “My Religion” and “Everything Else”). In addition to that, each door is surrounded by a dense crowd of people yelling that their door is the one true way to happiness and all the others are pretenders.

Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another.

Longtime readers may remember this as the scenario in my essay “The Cosmic Shell Game“. It’s a potent reason to distrust the truth claims of religious believers. No one can investigate all these options, and very few people even try. Instead, most people choose the faith they belong to because of an accident of birth. Their decision is effectively random, no more trustworthy than flipping a coin.

This argument doesn’t just apply to religions. It works equally well as a metaphor for philosophies, nationalities, political ideologies, and every other major life decision where making one choice forecloses others. How can anyone make any trustworthy or informed choices about anything, when the space of possibility is so large as to be unnavigable?

The lay of the land

It’s impossible to study every religion, philosophy and ideology in the universe to make a definitive ranking. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying. We’ll never have perfect knowledge, but we can always gain more knowledge. And the more knowledge we have, the better the choices we can make. It’s like trying to hike across uncharted territory. Even if you don’t have a complete map, the more you know about the lay of the land, the better able you are to find a safe path.

This goes for every field of inquiry. The more you know about history, the more you can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The more you know about science, the less likely you are to hold a belief that was already tested and disproven. The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.

The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.

For best results, this knowledge should be a broad cross-section of humanity, not limited to one gender or one race or one religion or one country. It’s the same reason why diverse groups make better decisions: it’s less likely that everyone has the same blind spots, so one person will see what another overlooks. You can achieve the same effect as an individual by stocking your mind with the widest possible selection of human thought and knowledge.

That’s why pluralism is so important in education. It’s the answer to conservatives who think it’s an underhanded liberal ploy—a way to instill leftist values to the exclusion of all others. Actually, it’s just an acknowledgment of a basic fact of reality: it’s really complicated, and figuring stuff out is hard!

Knowledge sets you free

Conservatives say that freedom is their number one value, the thing they care about above all else. Fair enough. Here’s what I say to that: Freedom is only truly possible for an educated person—and the more education you have, the more free you are.

Anyone can be “free” in the wild-animal sense of pursuing immediate desires without constraint. But the truest, most uniquely human kind of freedom is the ability to make decisions that steer the course of your life. Just as in the two-doors analogy, that kind of freedom is only possible when you have the knowledge to make responsible choices. Otherwise, it’s just random guessing or blindly following the path presented by birth or society.

It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world.

If you had a kitchen cabinet full of cans, some of which were nutritious and some were poison—but you had no way of knowing which is which—would you boast about your “freedom” to pick any one you felt like? Of course not, because no one values the freedom of ignorance or the freedom to plunge blindly into danger. The only kind of freedom anyone wants is the freedom to choose right—whatever you believe the right choice to be.

It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world. It’s knowledge that gives you the power to shake off indoctrination, recognize fallacies for what they are, and choose the worldview whose claims are borne out by evidence.

Book curses and book blessings

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE

AUG 25, 2023

A medieval manuscript, with a book curse written in the margin | Book curses and book blessings
A medieval book curse. The text on the right reads: “Book of Our Lady Ter Doest donated by Lord Dean Joseph of St. Donaas in Bruges. Whoever takes it away or alienates or tears out a sheet, be damned. Amen.” Credit: Bruges Public Library

Overview:

When books were rare and precious objects, their owners protected them with curses to deter thieves and vandals. We should adopt that same attitude of repugnance toward modern-day censors.

Reading Time: 5 MINUTES

We take it for granted that books are common objects. It’s easy to find one on any subject you want to read about.

You can patronize your favorite bookstore, where the shelves are stacked floor to ceiling with books. You can borrow a treasure trove of books from your local public library for free. Or you can buy anything you want from an online bookseller with an infinite virtual catalog and have it on your doorstep in a few days.

This casual abundance makes it easy to overlook how good we’ve got it. Book lovers of past eras had a much harder time. Until very recently in human history, books were rare and precious treasures.

Before Gutenberg

For thousands of years, from the dawn of literacy until the invention of movable type (1450 in Europe, and several centuries earlier in China), the only way to copy a scroll or a book was by hand, one letter a time.

It was a slow, arduous task requiring the labor of trained scribes. Imagine a medieval scriptorium: rows of monks working by candlelight in unheated rooms, writing with quill pens and ink they made themselves from local pigments. Imagine the straining eyes, the aching backs, the cramping hands. One marginal note, written in a medieval manuscript by the copyist, gives a sense of the labor involved: “Now I’ve written the whole thing. For Christ’s sake, give me a drink!”

Even the parchment that books were written on was a valuable commodity. It was made from calfskin, and it might require the slaughter of dozens or hundreds of calves to yield enough for an entire book. There was good reason not to waste it. This led to the creation of palimpsests: a book whose previous writing was erased, washed or scraped off, so that the precious parchment could be reused for something new.

These palimpsests are a treasure trove for modern scholars. With multispectral imaging, we can read the older, nearly-invisible traces of letters underneath the newer writing. Some ancient manuscripts are only known from these remnants.

Because books were so laborious to produce, the copyists made each one an object of beauty. Many surviving ancient texts are illuminated manuscripts, decorated with elaborate border art and illustrations, sometimes made with gold or silver leaf. A particularly elaborate book like the Lindisfarne Gospels might have taken as long as ten years to craft.

All the work required meant that books were luxuries of the very rich. And to top it all off, books were fragile. Unlike, say, a marble statue or an iron tool, they could easily be destroyed by fire, by water, by rot, or by simple thoughtless vandalism. All that staggering labor could be erased in moments—and often was. (The sum total of written material in Old English comes from a mere four books that survived the centuries.)

Naturally, people who owned books were fiercely protective of them. After you’d gone to the trouble of getting a book copied for your collection, you’d be more than a little piqued if someone borrowed it and never gave it back.

“Let him be fried in a pan”

This inspired one of my favorite literary inventions: the book curse.

Scribes would write these curses at the beginning or end of a book. Like Egyptian pharaohs’ curses on anyone who desecrated their tombs, they promised an awful fate for anyone who stole the book, damaged it, mutilated it, or borrowed it and didn’t return it to the owner.

A short book curse might threaten book thieves with excommunication, damnation or general wrath of God, like this one: “May the sword of anathema slay / If anyone steals this book away.”

However, they could also be longer and more inventive. A more detailed one went like this:

“If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen.”Marc Drogin, Anathema: Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses, quoted in Atlas Obscura

Another one reads:

“To steal this book, if you should try,
It’s by the throat you’ll hang high.
And ravens then will gather ’bout
To find your eyes and pull them out.
And when you’re screaming ‘oh, oh, oh!’
Remember, you deserved this woe.”

Medieval people were seriously hardcore about protecting their books.

The evil of book burners

Of course, book curses weren’t magic spells. They had no power outside the superstitious fear they inspired in potential thieves. On the other hand, that’s why the concept is brilliant. The kind of person who’d want to steal a book, presumably, also cares deeply for the written word. That’s the same kind of person who’d be most likely to believe that words have supernatural power to inflict harm on wrongdoers.

Aside from antiques and rare editions, books aren’t so scarce anymore. On the contrary, we’re positively drowning in words. There are more books published than anyone could read in a lifetime. For the first time in history, our biggest problem isn’t finding books, but choosing which ones to read.

We live in a world those candlelit medieval scribes could scarcely have imagined. Even still, there’s something we can learn from them. The lengths they went to to safeguard their precious books—and the violent hatred they felt for thieves and vandals—is an attitude we’d do well to reclaim.

In those ancient times, it was a special kind of evil to burn or otherwise destroy a book. To do so would be to consign countless hours of labor, sweat and devotion to the flames. It was all too possible to erase a book from existence by destroying every copy.

Nowadays, book burning and censorship are merely symbolic acts. The internet enables endless digital replication, perpetual archiving and virtually free distribution, all protected by encryption if necessary. It makes wannabe book destroyers’ efforts perfectly futile. Anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge, or a little bit of money, can read any book they want with very little effort.

Even so, we should hold to the view that to burn a book—literally or metaphorically—is one of the worst crimes you can commit. To keep knowledge out of the hands of those who come seeking it is a grave sin, in the secular sense of the word. Only those with truly depraved souls would attempt such a deed.

Books are accelerators

A book is a distillation of knowledge. It condenses months or years of research into a product that can be read and absorbed in a few hours. Because of this wonderful power, books were the first accelerators that sped up the pace of human progress. The more and more widely we read, the better equipped we are to comprehend the world and to see through others’ eyes. We can each be the beneficiary of many lifetimes’ worth of progress, far more than any one individual could rediscover on their own.

It’s this acceleration that book burners and book censors want to prevent. They want to keep us all tied to a single view of the world, a single set of ideas. Every book that challenges the status quo, that proposes new ways of seeing, is a mortal threat to them. When they come knocking to take the books from our hands, we know what to say to them, courtesy of our medieval forebears. We ought to have our book curses at the ready for any who want to defile the temple of knowledge.

Newsom-DeSantis debate is about the future of America

Here’s the link to this article.

STEVE SCHMIDT

AUG 5, 2023

Photo credits: (L) Justin Sullivan/Getty Images and (R) Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

I’m going to make a prediction.

The forthcoming debate between Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis, hosted by Sean Hannity on Fox News, will humiliate Ron DeSantis. It will demonstrate how extreme Florida politics has become, and effectively end Ron DeSantis’s life in national politics.

Gavin Newsom, on the other hand, will emerge from the Fox lion’s den unscathed and victorious with his national stature cemented.

MAGA extremists have no idea how to handle California’s razor sharp and habitually underestimated second term governor, who is a first rate communicator, fearless on issues of liberty and freedom, and aggressive on the debate stage. Newsom will maintain an affable bearing and friendly smile, while skewing the absurdities and delusions of the Tallahassee Mussolini, who seeks the presidency of the United States to “slit throats.”

Gavin Newsom has a very different temperament and character. Here is a true story about Gavin Newsom. He gave me the best parenting advice anyone has ever given me, and I will always be grateful to him for that:

James Redford produced and directed an HBO documentary called ‘The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia,’ in which Governor Newsom is featured. Newsom subsequently created a brilliant children’s book about dyslexia that has helped multitudes of American parents and kids deal with the challenges and opportunities facing dyslexic kids.

Many years ago, I found myself having a conversation with Newsom about my then five-year-old son, who had just been diagnosed as dyslexic. There was a room full of people who were eager to talk to the Lt. Governor, but he didn’t excuse himself from the conversation. He said there would definitely be obstacles to face and overcome, but that, in the end, my son would come to realize that his learning difference was  “his great gift.” Whatever anyone else may think of what he told me, I regard it as brilliant, and more importantly, true. More than that, on every occasion I have seen him since, he has asked how my son is doing.

He is a good man. He is decent, and he cares about leaving the world better off. He cares about leaving America stronger for our descendants. He understands the concepts of obligation and responsibility that defend liberty that Ron DeSantis disdains and denigrates with his actions and performative cruelties. This will all come through during the Hannity debate. Newsom’s fearlessness of the MAGA mob will give courage to decent Americans — even those who disagree with him on some issues — to take a stand against the smallness, vindictiveness, and appalling disregard for the American way of life that DeSantis demonstrates through word and deed.

The American creed and the MAGA creed are oppositional, irreconcilable and diametrically opposed. The MAGA creed is a grotesquerie that imposed a dogma of obedience and submission upon the weak-minded who believe jingoism is patriotism and progress is revanchism. The concept of individual responsibility has been replaced by a gospel of grievance and resentment. It is accompanied by a shrill chorus of victimization and whining that has abandoned grit, perseverance, duty, responsibility and self-respect in favor of their opposites.

Today, the taker reigns supreme inside of the MAGA delusion-sphere in which a vast audience of brittle sheep have been coddled in their hallucinations, as opposed to being confronted directly with reality through a medium that used to be called “The News.” The world that Gavin Newsom is entering believes the lies they have been fed. The propaganda has been ceaseless and effective. Generally speaking, there have been few antidotes offered against it, and it has spread far and wide.

The Hannity audience is as deluded as it gets. No doubt vast segments believe Portland and Seattle were destroyed as thoroughly as Hiroshima by Black Lives Matter and Antifa. They have been primed to be abused with lies, lies, lies and more lies. It is tragic, but also predictable because the lie is a feature of every autocratic system and movement there has ever been. The lie is to the tyrant what gravity is for everyone else. It anchors everything. Everything is touched by gravity, as all things are touched by the lie — until the moment the veil is pierced with the truth. In this regard, Gavin Newsom is playing the role of a Cold War president speaking directly to the Soviet people without the filter of state propagandists interfering. What Hannity’s audience will hear is a profound moral choice laid out. Gavin Newsom will be making the case for America.

A twisted theology has taken root in America over the Trump era. Its despicable apostles have become the everyday voices of extremism to which we have become desensitized, at our peril. The rhetoric of fascist Charlie Kirk calling for prison or the death penalty for President Biden isn’t just a federal crime, but an inherently political proposition. The MAGA right is now explicitly embracing the murder, assassination, mayhem, street violence, and disorder that it had previously intimated. Listen:

Revenge. Intimidation. Threats. Retribution. Death. Is this what we want? Is it possible this is what the American people will choose on the eve of the 250th anniversary of American independence? Does the coalition of the extreme and apathetic outnumber the patriotic, tolerant and decent? Is thuggery appealing? If not, why are Biden and Trump running even in the polls? Shouldn’t we the people talk about such things?

Ron DeSantis may be the worst presidential candidate of the last 50 years who has received any attention whatsoever from the national media. He is a most peculiar man — to say the least.

Rarely, if ever, is the sheltered Fox crowd exposed to the concept of complexity and pragmatism. The governor of California is afforded no such luxuries, given that he has one of America’s most complicated jobs. He will be a worthy messenger from the world where there isn’t much appetite for civil war, shooting protesters, locking up political opponents, or excusing the most reckless and depraved behavior possible as essential to protecting America.

This debate will be one worth watching. It is always worth watching when America is being defended against treachery and corruption. The argument matters. The principles matter. I can’t wait to watch.

Modern Liberalism Born of Enlightenment Thought

Here’s the link to this article.

James A. Haught | March 31, 2023 | Kiosk Article

[ Ethics-Morality | Freethought | Philosophy | Politics | Rationalism ]

Values that later grew into liberalism began stirring in the epoch now known as the Enlightenment, starting more than three centuries ago, chiefly in England and France. It was an era when kings still ruled brutally by “divine right,” and the church still sought to execute “heretics” holding irregular beliefs, or jail skeptics for blasphemy. Most people were agricultural serfs, working on lands inherited by wealthy barons and counts. The bottom-rung majority had virtually no rights.

But the Enlightenment roused a new way of thinking: a sense that all people should have some control over their lives, a voice in their own destiny. Absolute power of authorities—either the throne or the cathedral—was challenged. Reformers asserted that human reason and the scientific method can improve society and benefit nearly everyone.

The 1600s were a time of ugly intolerance, much of it stemming from alliances between church and throne. In England’s notorious Star Chamber, controlled by the Anglican archbishop, Puritan and Presbyterian dissenters were forced to testify against themselves, then sentenced to have their ears cut off or their faces branded with markings such as S. L. (for seditious libeler). One victim, John Lilburne, became a public hero because he wrote pamphlets claiming that all people deserved “freeborn rights” not subject to king or church.

Europe was emerging from horrors of religious wars and massacres between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic France persecuted Huguenot Protestants. Jews were attacked cruelly and banned from certain nations, including England. Sporadic executions of “heretics” and “witches” still occurred. England’s last accused witch was put to death in 1684. A few others were executed around Europe and the New World for another century.

This was the background that helped spawn Enlightenment reform.

England was shattered by civil war in the 1640s between Parliament and Puritans on one side versus King Charles I and Anglicans on the other. Charles was beheaded and the power of kings was reduced—expanding an erosion that began four centuries earlier when barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, yielding certain rights.

By the late 1600s, some thinkers began pondering society and government.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote Leviathan asserting that people need a “social contract” to secure safe lives. In a dog-eat-dog natural state, he said, everyone suffers from “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Therefore, he said, people must yield power to a sovereign government to enforce order and protect them. Hobbes supported a king as the sovereign—but the tide away from absolute kings already was flowing. Hobbes raised awareness that the social order is made by humans, not by God.

In his many writings, Hobbes repeatedly affronted the clergy. A bishop accused him of atheism, possibly punishable by death. The allegation subsided, then flared again. Nearing 80 years old, Hobbes hastily burned some of his papers and eluded prosecution.

John Locke (1632-1704) hatched notions of democracy, arguing that all people, male and female, deserve a degree of equality. He dismissed the divine right of kings, and advocated separation of church and state to avert religious conflict.

John Milton (1608-1674) was more than an epic poet who wrote in four languages. He also supported popular government and attacked state-mandated religion. When Parliament imposed censorship on writings, he defied a licensing requirement and published an Areopagitica pamphlet claiming that all thinking people are entitled to free expression of their beliefs. “Books are not absolutely dead things,” he said. “He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” The principle of free speech and free press was furthered.

In France, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) championed democracy and envisioned an elected government with power divided between executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1788)—”that consuming fire called Voltaire,” as Will Durant called him—was a brilliant French writer who became a heroic champion of human rights. Endlessly, he denounced cruelties of bishops and aristocrats. Here’s an example: In the devout town of Abbeville, a teen-age youth, Francois de la Barre, was accused of marring a crucifix, singing impious songs and wearing his hat while a church procession passed. He was sentenced to have his tongue torn out, his head chopped off, and his remains burned. Voltaire wrote bitter protests against this savagery. He helped appeal the youth’s case to Parliament, which showed “mercy” by affording the blasphemer a quick death by beheading—with a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary nailed to his body.

Voltaire’s protest writings roused ferment across Europe and won reversal of a few cases. He freed Jean Espinas, who had spent 23 years aboard a penal galley ship because he sheltered a fugitive Protestant minister for one night. Likewise, he freed Claude Chaumont from a galley bench, where he had been sentenced for attending a Protestant worship service.

In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine wrote that Voltaire’s “forte lay in exposing and ridiculing the superstitions which priestcraft, united with statecraft, had interwoven with governments.”

At first, Enlightenment ideas were somewhat suppressed in Europe, where kings and archbishops still prevailed, but they found fertile ground in America’s colonies. Brilliant radicals such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison read them ardently and adopted them as a pattern for the first modern democracy, the United States of America. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson summed up the essence:

All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Less-known founding father George Mason incorporated the principles into the Bill of Rights, keeping church and state apart, guaranteeing free speech, and protecting each person from abuses by the majority. Similarly, the personal liberties were reiterated in the Rights of Man and the Citizen adopted by the French Revolution, and eventually in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Eleanor Roosevelt helped craft for the United Nations.

Thus democracy became self-contradictory. A basic premise is majority rule—yet a bill of rights prevents majority rule. For example, the Christian majority cannot vote to banish minority Jews or skeptics. Personal beliefs are exempt from majority rule.

The Enlightenment was the seedbed that sprouted most of the liberal freedoms now enjoyed in democracies everywhere. It projected a model for humane, safe, fair modern life.