Day 228: Samadhi

Between Hui-neng and Lin-chi came four illustrious masters in the Golden Age of Zen in China: Nan-yueh, Ma-tsu, Po-chang, and Huang-po. When Hui-neng met Nan-yueh, he asked him, "Where do you come from?" Nan-yueh replied, "I come from Tung-shan." "What is it that so comes?" asked Hui-neng. It took Nan-yueh six years before he could answer, "Even when it is said to be something, the mark is already missed!"
   
When Nan-yueh met Ma-tsu, the latter was doing nothing but zazen day and night. One day Nan-yueh asked him, "What are you trying to accomplish, Reverend Sir?" Ma-tsu said, "I am trying to become a Buddha." Nan-yueh walked away without a word, picked up a piece of brick, and started to polish it. Ma-tsu asked, "What are you doing?" Nan-yueh said, "I am making a mirror." Ma-tsu further asked, "Can polishing a brick make it into a mirror?" Nan-yueh retorted, "Can doing zazen make one into a Buddha?" Ma-tsu asked, "What should I do then?" Nan-yueh replied, "It is like putting a cart to an ox. When the cart does not move, which is better, to beat the cart or the ox?" Ma-tsu was unable to answer. Nan-yueh then explained, "If you want to learn to do zazen, know that Zen is not in sitting or lying. If you want to become a Buddha by sitting, know that the Buddha has no fixed form. Never discriminate in living the Dharma of nonattachment. If you try to become a Buddha by sitting, you are killing Buddha. If you attach to the form of sitting, you can never attain Buddhahood."
   
Ma-tsu gave two famous answers to the question, "What is Buddha?" First he said, "Mind is Buddha," and later, "No mind, no Buddha." On another occasion when he was asked, "What kind of man does not keep company with anything?", he replied, ''I will tell you when you swallow the water of the West River in one gulp."
   
One day after a flock of wild geese flew by, Ma-tsu asked Po-chang, "What are they?" "They are wild geese," said Po-chang. "Where are they flying?" asked Ma-tsu. "They are already gone," answered Po-chang. Ma-tsu then suddenly grabbed Po-chang's nose and wrenched it. Po-chang cried in pain. "You say they have flown away, but all the same they have been here from the beginning," said Ma-tsu. Po-chang broke into a cold sweat and was enlightened. The next day Ma-tsu was about to give a talk when Po-chang came forward and rolled up the mat to end the talk. Without protesting Ma-tsu came down from his seat and returned to his room. He then called Po-chang and asked why he had rolled up the mat. Po-chang said, "Yesterday you twisted my nose, and it was quite painful." Ma-tsu asked, "Where was your thought wandering then?" "It is not painful anymore, Master," replied Po-chang. Years later Po-chang once again came to Ma-tsu for instruction. Ma-tsu gave a loud shout "Katsu!" which crushed everything in him and deafened him for three days.   

Po-chang established work as an integral part of the monastic order. Out of concern for his health the monks hid his farming tools, since Po-chang refused to rest even in his old age. When he could not find them, he retired to his room but then refused to eat, saying, "A day without work, a day without eating."
   
One day a visitor came seeking an abbot for a monastery. Po-chang called his monks. The visitor asked them to walk three steps and clear their throats to determine their worthiness. Beginning with the head monk, none of the monks could pass this test except the cook monk, who was immediately approved. The head monk protested the evaluation, however, so Ma-tsu gave his own test. He placed a pitcher on the floor and said, "Do not call this a pitcher. What do you call it? The head monk said, "It cannot be called a piece of wood." The cook monk simply kicked the pitcher over with his foot. Ma-tsu proclaimed, "Head monk, you have been outdone by this cook monk." Eventually Po-chang transmitted the Dharma to Huang-po, saying, "When the disciple's insight is identical with that of the master, the master's power is diminished by half. When the disciple's insight surpasses that of the master, then he is worthy of receiving the transmission."

There is a famous story about Huang-po pointing out the true Self to a governor. Visiting a temple, the governor pointed to a portrait and asked the abbot, "Who is he?" The abbot answered, "The late abbot." The governor then asked, ''Here is his portrait, and where is the person ?" The abbot could not answer, but the governor was insistent. Unable to find anyone who could, the abbot finally thought of a monk who had come for lodging and spent his time cleaning the courtyards. Huang-po was called, and the governor asked him, "Venerable Sir, these gentlemen are unfortunately unwilling to answer my question. Will you be good enough to undertake the task?" "What is the question?" Huang-po said. The governor repeated the question, "Here is the portrait of the former abbot, and where is the person?" At once Huang-po called out, "Governor!" "Yes!" responded the governor. "Where is he?" answered Huang-po.   

Lin-chi I-hsuan was born between 810 and 815 and was already a well-versed Buddhist scholar when, in his twenties, he decided to study Zen under Huang-po. Plain and direct in his behavior, Lin-chi trained for three years without asking a single question. The head monk recognized his potential and urged him to approach the master. He told Lin-chi just to ask what the cardinal principle of Buddhism was. Lin-chi went, but before he had finished speaking, Huang-po hit him. Lin-chi did not understand, but the head monk urged him to try again. The same thing happened again and again. Lin-chi regretted the karma preventing him from understanding and decided to leave. Meanwhile the head monk praised Lin-chi to Huang-po, so when Lin-chi came to take his leave, Huang-po advised him to see Ta-yu.

Meeting Ta-yu, Lin-chi said, "Three times I asked Huang-po what the cardinal principle of Buddhism was and three times he hit me. I don't know whether I was at fault or not."

~~Samadhi: Self Development in Zen, Swordsmanship, and Psychotherapy -by- Mike K. Sayama

Day 227: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

Some basic features of the political culture emerging out of anonymity are neither new nor difficult to grasp. Consider the anonymous leak that revealed COINTELPRO, a systematic and illegal spying program leveled against the American population. One Pennsylvanian night in 1971, a group calling itself the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” forced its way into an FBI field office with a crowbar. As millions of Americans tuned into their radios to listen to Muhammad Ali square off with Joe Frazier in an epic fifteen-round boxing match, the activists emptied file cabinets of more than one thousand documents. Those on the subject of political surveillance were leaked to the media and published in the March 1972 issue of WIN Magazine, a journal of the War Resisters League, and COINTELPRO was revealed to the public for the first time. The program was initiated in 1956 by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and operated successfully until 1971.

COINTELPRO’s mandate was initially narrow: to disrupt the internal operations of the Communist Party USA, which Hoover believed to be under the direct influence of Russian infiltrators. Very quickly, its scope expanded to include the disruption of home-grown political activism of all varieties, including radical, conservative, and even moderate liberal efforts. One stated goal was to

prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position … King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.

And, indeed, the documents provide clear evidence of the elaborate steps the FBI took to monitor King in particular. The illegal surveillance lasted for years, starting in the late ’50s when the program was first authorized by Hoover. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, William Cornelius Sullivan, associate director of the FBI, wrote to Hoover, “We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security.” King was considered “an unprincipled man” who had a “weakness in his character.” Sullivan wrote, “We will at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” Soon after King was named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine, the FBI was illegally authorized to bug his hotel room; “trespass is involved,” they wrote. The resulting transcripts were presented to Hoover, who responded, “They will destroy the burrhead.” The bugs captured evidence of King’s marital infidelity, which excited Sullivan and Hoover, since the recordings could be used to destroy the “animal.” An excerpt from the FBI letter sent to blackmail King evinces the ugly historical truth that the US government terrorized one of the nation’s most revered and peaceful civil rights crusaders:

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
...
Let’s fast forward to February 5, 2011, when Anonymous uncovered a corporate plot devised by Washington, DC–based security firm HBGary Federal to spy on and disrupt WikiLeaks. Given the digital nature of contemporary documents, there is no longer a need to leave the comfort of one’s home, much less break into some office space, to access secret documents. Working together on IRC, Anonymous hackers penetrated the HBGary computer system and downloaded seventy thousand company emails, along with other files that included a PowerPoint presentation entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat.” The tactics suggested therein are strikingly similar to those practiced and perfected during COINTELPRO. The presentation outlines a set of strategies the firm claimed could be “deployed tomorrow”...

~~Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces Of Anonymous -by- Gabriella Coleman

Day 226: Edison and the Electric Chair

MR. EDISON, what is your calling—your profession?"
          "Inventor."

"Have you devoted a good deal of attention to the subject of electricity?"

The hearing room erupted in laughter. It was a standard lawyer's question, intended to establish the qualifications of an expert witness, but it was hardly necessary in this instance. The men who packed the room—lawyers, electricians, doctors, and assorted gawkers—knew very well the qualifications of the man on the stand. In 1879 Thomas Edison had invented the first practical incandescent lamp—the light-bulb—and over the next decade he carried his light into homes and offices around the world. As the world's most celebrated electrical authority, Edison clearly had "devoted a good deal of attention to the subject of electricity."

The inventor took the question in stride. "Yes, sir," he replied.

The date was July 23, 1889, and the lawyer asking the questions was William Poste, deputy attorney general of New York State. Edison was forty-two years old, his dark hair streaked with white, face smooth-shaven, gray eyes sparkling. In his black suit and white tie, Edison had the aspect, one reporter remarked, of "a benignant clergyman of middle age." No stranger to the American legal system, he sat thoroughly at ease in the witness chair. Inventing was a cutthroat business, and Edison spent a great deal of time dealing with lawyers—suing other companies for stealing his patents, getting sued in turn for stealing theirs. Invention, he might have said, was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent litigation.

The hearing on this day in July, though, was not concerned with patents. It had to do with a murder case.

"What amount of electrical energy," Poste continued, "do you think would be sufficient to produce instant, painless, death in all cases?"

"One thousand volts," Edison said.

"What experiments have you observed in your laboratory bearing upon that question?"

"Only of horses and dogs."

Edison referred to a series of tests that had taken place over the previous year at his New Jersey laboratory. The inventor's assistants attached electrodes to dogs—about two dozen in all, bought at a quarter a head from neighborhood boys—and killed them with powerful jolts of electricity. Six calves and two horses also died in the experiments.

"Now, Mr. Edison," the attorney said, "in your opinion, can an electrical current be applied to the human body by artificial means in such a manner as to produce death in every case?"

"Yes, sir."

"Instant death?"

"Yes, sir."

"Painless?"

"Yes, sir."

A year and a half earlier New York State had abolished hanging and decreed that condemned criminals would be executed with electricity. The first murderer condemned under the new law filed an appeal, claiming that electrical execution was a cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. A judge ordered hearings to collect expert testimony on the matter, and Edison agreed to testify in support of the new method.

~~Edison and the Electric Chair -by- Mark Essig

Day 225: An Uncertain Glory

The issue of accountability relates closely to that of corruption, which has received a great deal of attention recently in Indian political debates. In the absence of good systems of accountability, there may not only be serious neglects of duties, but much temptation for officials to deliver at high ‘prices’ what they are actually supposed to deliver freely, as part of their job. This ‘reward’, aside from being an example of corruption based on official privilege, can also deflect a facility from those for whom it was meant to others who have the means and the willingness to buy favours. Corruption has become such an endemic feature of Indian administration and commercial life that in some parts of the country nothing moves in the intended direction unless the palm of the deliverer is greased.

It is good that this long-standing problem has become a widely discussed issue in recent years, generating a good deal of public discontent. This is as it should be, for corruption is a huge drag on the economy – and more immediately on the lives of the people of the country. However, democracy demands not only that grievances about terrible practices be widely aired, but also that this leads to serious reasoning about what can be sensibly done to remove the problem. The temptation to ‘end corruption’ by summary punishment delivered outside the Indian legal procedures, which seems to attract many people (not surprisingly, given their frustration with the existing legal actions), may be hugely counterproductive. Aside from the possibility of penalizing the accused (which could be erroneous), rather than the tried and the guilty, the procedures of instant summary justice generate the illusion – a costly illusion – that something is being done to change a corrupt system that generates corrupt practices. We have to seek real remedies that work, rather than pleasing retribution meted out to the guilty – or the accused. Corruption is fostered and nurtured by the absence of systems of accountability, which cannot be generated by the favoured gross means of retribution under summary justice. Even establishing some kind of super-powerful ombudsman, with draconian powers that are not tempered by judicial procedures (as in some versions of the proposed ‘Lokpal Bill’), can generate more problems than it helps to solve. When a system is faulty, and gives people the wrong kind of incentives – to neglect one’s duty and to reap illicit earnings without systematic penalties – what has to be amended is the system itself. For example, any system that leaves government officers effectively in sole command – or oligarchic dominance – over giving licences (say, import or mining licences), without checks and invigilation, can become a minefield of corrupt practices.

What kind of institutional change could be considered and pursued? At least three different issues are central to the prevalence of corruption in public services. First, corruption flourishes in informational darkness: by nature, it is a secretive affair. An institutional change that fosters transparency and accessibility of information can be a real force in spoiling the prevalence of bribery and embezzlement. Second, corruption survives in a social environment of tolerance of misdeeds no matter how ‘moral’ people tend to see such misdeeds. A general belief that corruption is ‘standard behaviour’ and has to be tolerated unless the misdeeds are fully exposed and are unusually blatant can generate a situation where bribe-seekers are not under much pressure to reform, whether from others or from their own conscience. Third, corruption can be curtailed through a realistic threat of prosecution and sanction. But prosecution can be difficult to secure in the absence of witnesses prepared to speak out or of documentary evidence, and this can be a major barrier to suing or punishing a bribe-taker, which in turn tends to give a sense of immunity to the civil servants who seek – and get – bribes. There are also other issues involved (some of which were discussed earlier in this chapter), but the trio of informational lacuna, social leniency and prosecutional difficulty are among the factors that help to sustain a culture of corruption.

So what can be done about each of these underlying factors? There has been some genuine progress in tackling the first of these problems – that of hidden information. The Right to Information Act of 2005 has been a major step toward greater transparency and accessibility of information, making governmental affairs much more open to the public and helping to foster accountability as well as reduce corruption.

Though very widely used already, the Act still has enormous further potential, notably through wider enforcement of norms of ‘pro-active disclosure’ as well as of mandatory penalties in the event of non-compliance. Other technological and social innovations, including the rapid spread of information technology and (in some states) the institutionalization of social audits, have also consolidated this trend toward transparency. Here again, there are significant achievements as well as an enormous scope for further gains.

The second issue – that of social leniency – is also indirectly helped by greater transparency of information. For instance, the use of ‘naming and shaming’ demands naming before shaming can be attempted. Vigorous public campaigns and skilful use of the Right to Information Act, combined with constructive use of the media (including ‘social media’), can be of great help in this respect, as well as in altering public perceptions of what is acceptable and what is not. This approach has already been used with good effect in various contexts, from public scrutiny of the backgrounds, including possible criminal records, of electoral candidates to the analysis of tax returns or business deals of public personalities, and can be taken much further than it has been so far. Underlying the reluctance to make larger use of this remedial measure is both what can be called an ‘inertia of social norms’ (a subject which we will take up presently) and a belief – often implicit – that norms cannot change much until and unless some prominent prosecution with punitive judgement draws heralded attention to the transgression involved.

It is on the third front – effective prosecution– that very little has been done so far. It is, of course, not surprising that acts of corruption are often difficult to expose and establish with sufficient confidence to justify prosecution. But even a relatively small number of cases of successful prosecution, if they are stringent and well publicized, could have important deterrent effects on the incidence of corruption. Yet conviction rates are so ‘ridiculously low’ (as the Law Commission of India put it in its 160th report, submitted in 1999) that the Prevention of Corruption Act has not even achieved this minimal objective. The problem goes well beyond the routine difficulties of establishing guilt in corruption cases.

~~An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions -by- Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen

Day 224: Private Island

Wrightington Hospital, in the countryside near Wigan, grew in fits and starts around an eighteenth-century mansion that Lancashire County Council bought in 1920 after the death of its last resident, a spendthrift with a fanatical attachment to blood sports. The hospital promotes itself as ‘a centre of orthopaedic excellence’. National Health Service hospitals have to promote themselves these days. In 2011 it survived a brush with closure. It’s neat and scrubbed and slightly worn at the edges, unable to justify to itself that few per cent private firms set aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, invented a reliable way to replace human hips with artificial ones, creating a benchmark by which the success and failure of the NHS would always be judged.

They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too tricky for general hospitals. There’s a sort of blazer and brogues testosterone in the corridors, where the surgeons have a habit of cuffing one another’s faces affectionately. At the end of a hallway lined with untidy stacks of case notes in wrinkled cardboard folders Martyn Porter, a senior surgeon and the hospital’s clinical chairman, waited in his office to be called to the operating theatre. He offered me his intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he declared. ‘If they said, “We’re going to privatise the NHS,” they’d be kicked out the next day.’

The patient Porter was about to operate on was a sixty-year-old woman from the Wirral with a complex prosthesis in one leg, running from her knee to her hip. She had a fracture and Porter had got a special device made for her at a workshop in another part of the NHS, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore in Middlesex. The idea was for the device to slide over the femoral spur of the knee joint, essentially replacing her whole leg down to the ankle. ‘The case we’re doing this morning, we’re going to make a loss of about £5,000. The private sector wouldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘How do we deal with that? Some procedures the ebitda is about 8 per cent. If you make an ebitda of 12 per cent you’re making a real profit.’ You expect medical jargon from surgeons, but I was surprised to hear the word ebitda from Porter. It’s an accountancy term meaning ‘earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation’.

‘Last year we did about 1,400 hip replacements,’ he said. ‘The worrying thing for us is we lost a million pounds doing that. What we worked out is that our length of stay’ – the time patients spend in hospital after an operation – ‘was six days. If we can get it down to five days we break even and if it’s four, we make a million pound profit.’

I felt I’d somehow jumped forward in time. A year had passed since the 2010 election that brought the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to power. The Coalition’s programme promised: ‘We are stopping the top-down reconfigurations of NHS services, imposed from Whitehall.’ A few weeks after they gained power, a new health secretary, the Conservative Andrew Lansley, announced his plans for a top-down reconfiguration of England’s NHS services, imposed from Whitehall. When I talked to Porter, Lansley had barely been in his job a year, and hadn’t yet, supposedly, shaken up the NHS. But here was a leading surgeon in an NHS hospital, about to perform a challenging operation on an NHS patient, telling me exactly how much money the hospital was going to lose by operating on her, and chatting easily about profit and loss, as if he’d been living in Lansleyworld for years. Had the NHS been privatised one day while I was sleeping?

When the NHS was created in 1948, it had three core principles. It would be universal: everyone would get medical treatment whenever they needed it. It would be comprehensive, covering all forms of healthcare, from dentistry to cancer. And it would be free to use. No matter how much the system cost to run, no matter how much or how little any individual had contributed to those costs, no matter how expensive their treatment or how many times they went to the doctor, they’d never be billed for it. Through dozens of reorganisations since then, these principles have remained, along with another: that it’s never a bad time for a fresh reorganisation. Otherwise, much has changed.

The main source of the money that funds the NHS is still, as it was in 1948, general taxation. For the first thirty years of the health service’s existence, civil servants in Whitehall and the regions doled out annual budgets to hospitals and GPs according to the populations they served. Money flowed down from the Treasury, but it didn’t flow horizontally between the different parts of the NHS. Each element got its overall allowance, paid its staff, obtained its equipment and supplies, and co-operated, sometimes well, sometimes not, with the other elements, according to an overarching plan. The aim was fairness, an even spread of care across the country. In a monopoly healthcare system, competition has no place; on the contrary, it seemed sensible to the planners to avoid duplication of services. It was patriarchal and democratic, innovative and hidebound, cumbersome and cheap. For the majority without private insurance, if you were ill, you knew you’d always be cared for; if you were cared for carelessly, you had nowhere else to go.

Trying to describe in generally comprehensible terms how money flows through the NHS today would be hard enough without the shifting channels of policy. In England – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have gone along divergent health paths – the various parts of the NHS had already begun altering or abolishing themselves in response to the reorganisation announced in 2010 when the reorganisation itself was reorganised. In 2012, the Coalition responded to the clamour against Lansley’s reorganisation by sacking Lansley and keeping the reorganisation. Truly you can’t step in the same NHS river twice. The last period of relative stability was just before Lansley came along, when, crudely speaking, the money flowed like this. Every so often – perhaps every year, or every two or three – the Department of Health made its pitch to the Treasury for the amount of money it thought it should get from the overall tax pot, and was then told how much it would actually get. Most of the money came from general taxation – income tax, VAT, corporation tax, duties on booze and tobacco – but a proportion came directly from national insurance, a vitiated form of the link between that levy and the welfare state its architects intended. In the last pre-Lansley allocation, Health got £101.5 billion for the following year, a slight increase. Most of it – £89 billion – was divided up between about 150 local agencies called Primary Care Trusts, or PCTs, spread around the country. PCTs acted as the ‘commissioners’ of health services, ordering a community’s medical care from hospitals, GPs and mental health professionals and paying them accordingly.

~~Private Island: Why England Now Belongs to Someone Else -by- James Meek

Day 223: Missionary Position

Those prepared to listen to criticism of Mother Teresa’s questionable motives and patently confused sociological policy are still inclined to believe that her work is essentially humane. Surely, they reason, there is something morally impressive in a life consecrated to charity. If it were not for the testimony of those who have seen the shortcomings and contradictions of her work firsthand, it might be sufficient argument, on the grounds that Mother Teresa must have done some genuine good for the world’s suffering people.

However, even here the record is somewhat murky and uneven, and it is qualified by the same limitations as apply to the rest of Mother Teresa’s work: that such work is undertaken not for its own sake but to propagandize one highly subjective view of human nature and need, so that she may one day be counted as the beatific founder of a new order and discipline within the Church itself. Even in the quotidian details of ostensibly “charitable” labor, this unresolved contradiction repeatedly discloses itself.

Take, as one unremarked example, the visit of Dr. Robin Fox to the Mother Teresa operation in Calcutta in 1994. As editor of The Lancet, perhaps the world’s leading medical journal, Dr. Fox was professionally interested in, and qualified to pronounce upon, the standards of care. The opening paragraphs of his report in the journal’s 17 September 1994 issue also make it clear that he paid his visit with every expectation of being favorably impressed. Indeed, his tone of slightly raised-eyebrow politeness never deserts him:

There are doctors who call in from time to time but usually the sisters and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge) make decisions as best they can. I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and paracetamol. Later a visiting doctor diagnosed probable malaria and substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film? Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible. How about simple algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the curable from the incurable? Again no. Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism: the sisters must remain on equal terms with the poor.… Finally, how competent are the sisters at managing pain? On a short visit, I could not judge the power of their spiritual approach, but I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa’s approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer.

It should be underlined that the state of affairs described by Dr. Fox was not that obtaining in some amateur, impoverished clinic in a disaster zone. Mother Teresa has been working in Calcutta for four and a half decades, and for nearly three of them she has been favored with immense quantities of money and material. Her “Home for the Dying,” which was the part of her dominion visited by Dr. Fox, is in no straitened condition. It is as he described it because that is how Mother Teresa wishes it to be. The neglect of what is commonly understood as proper medicine or care is not a superficial contradiction. It is the essence of the endeavor, the same essence that is evident in a cheerful sign which has been filmed on the wall of Mother Teresa’s morgue. It reads “I am going to heaven today.”

According to many other former volunteers, Dr. Fox may have paid his visit on an unusually good day, or may have been unusually well looked after. Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta who has since written extensively about the lives of nuns and religious women, has this testimony to offer about the Home for the Dying:
My initial impression was of all the photographs and footage I’ve ever seen of Belsen and places like that, because all the patients had shaved heads. No chairs anywhere, there were just these stretcher beds. They’re like First World War stretcher beds. There’s no garden, no yard even. No nothing. And I thought what is this? This is two rooms with fifty to sixty men in one, fifty to sixty women in another. They’re dying. They’re not being given a great deal of medical care. They’re not being given painkillers really beyond aspirin and maybe if you’re lucky some Brufen or something, for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer and the things they were dying of …
They didn’t have enough drips. The needles they used and re-used over and over and over and you would see some of the nuns rinsing needles under the cold water tap. And I asked one of them why she was doing it and she said: “Well to clean it.” And I said, “Yes, but why are you not sterilizing it; why are you not boiling water and sterilizing your needles?” She said: “There’s no point. There’s no time.”

The first day I was there when I’d finished working in the women’s ward I went and waited on the edge of the men’s ward for my boyfriend, who was looking after a boy of fifteen who was dying, and an American doctor told me that she had been trying to treat this boy. And that he had a really relatively simple kidney complaint that had simply got worse and worse and worse because he hadn’t had antibiotics. And he actually needed an operation. I don’t recall what the problem was, but she did tell me. And she was so angry, but also very resigned which so many people become in that situation. And she said, “Well, they won’t take him to hospital.” And I said: “Why? All you have to do is get a cab. Take him to the nearest hospital, demand that he has treatment. Get him an operation.” She said: “They don’t do it. They won’t do it. If they do it for one, they do it for everybody.” And I thought—but this kid is fifteen.

Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.” There are many people in the direst need and pain who have had cause to wish, in their own extremity, that Mother Teresa was less free with her own metaphysical caresses and a little more attentive to actual suffering.

After I had helped to make Hell’s Angel, a documentary about Mother Teresa’s shortcomings which was screened on Channel Four in England in the autumn of 1994, I received a number of communications from former volunteers and even from former members of the Missionaries of Charity. Some wished to remain anonymous and some seemed actuated by motives of revenge or other personal disorders. My practice in citing the ones I consider to be genuine is as follows: the person must have been willing to be quoted by name and to give bona fide answers to some background questions. Let me instance Ms. Elgy Gillespie, author, journalist and sometime editor of The San Francisco Review of Books. Experienced in the care of AIDS patients, she spent some time at Mother Teresa’s San Francisco branch:

Sent to cook in her hostel, tactfully named “The Gift of Love” (it is for homeless men with HIV), I found a dozen or so very sick men; but those who weren’t very sick were exceptionally depressed, because they were not allowed to watch TV or smoke or drink or have friends over. Even when they are dying, close friends are not allowed. They are never allowed to drink, even (or especially) at the funerals of their friends and roommates and some have been thrown out for coming home in drag! When I mentioned the Olympics to them, they looked even more depressed. “We are not watching the Olympics,” said a sister from Bombay, “because we are making our Lenten sacrifice.” When they’re very sick and very religious (which is often the case …) this doesn’t matter, but with brighter men or older men it seems intolerable.

A Guatemalan writer that I befriended there was desperate to get out, so a friend of mine who also cooks there (an African American who is a practicing Catholic) adopted him for as long as she could. He became much sicker and when she begged him to go back because she couldn’t mind him, he begged her to keep him because he knew they didn’t medicate enough, or properly, and was afraid he would have to die without morphine … I am now cooking occasionally for the homeless men at the Franciscans where one of the patients, Bruce, is an ex-Mother Teresa and neither he nor the priest have a good word to say for the Sisters at “The Gift of Love.”

Many volunteers at hostels and clinics from Calcutta to San Francisco have comparable tales to relate. Especially impressive is the testimony of Susan Shields, who for nine and a half years worked as a member of Mother Teresa’s order, living the daily discipline of a Missionary of Charity in the Bronx, in Rome and in San Francisco. I have her permission to quote from her unpublished manuscript, In Mother’s House, which is an honest, well-written account, offered by a woman who left the Missionaries of Charity for the same reason that she joined it—a love of her fellow humans.3 If her memoir reads like the testimony of a former cult member, this is because in many ways it is. She relates that, within the order, total obedience to the dictates of a single woman is enforced at every level. Questioning of authority is not an option.

I was able to keep my complaining conscience quiet because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother. To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse, guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I would understand the many things that seemed to be contradictions.

~~Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice -by- Christopher Hitchens

Day 222: Temptations of the West

Ayodhya is the city of Rama, the most virtuous and austere of Hindu gods. Travelling to it in January 2002 from Benares, across a wintry North Indian landscape of mustard-bright fields, hectic roadside bazaars, and lonely columns of smoke, I felt myself moving between two very different Hindu myths, or visions of life. Shiva, the god of perpetual destruction and creation, rules Benares, where temple compounds secrete internet cafes and children fly kites next to open funeral pyres by the river. But the city’s aggressive affluence and chaos seem far away in Ayodhya, which is small and drab, its alleys full of the dust of the surrounding flat fields. The peasants with unwieldy bundles under their arms brought to mind the pilgrims of medieval Indian miniature painting; and sitting by the Saryu river at dusk, watching the devout tenderly set afloat tiny earthen lamps in the slow-moving water, I felt the endurance and continuity of Hindu India.

After that vision of eternal Hinduism, the numerous mosques and Mogul buildings in Ayodhya came as a surprise. Most of them are in ruins, especially the older ones built during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Ayodhya was the administrative centre of a major province of the Mogul Empire, Awadh. All but two were destroyed as recently as 6 December 1992: the day, epochal now in India’s history, on which a crowd led by politicians from the Hindu nationalist BJP demolished the mosque they claimed the sixteenth-century Mogul emperor Babur had built, as an act of contempt, on the site of the god Rama’s birthplace.

None of the mosques are likely to be repaired any time soon; the Muslim presence in the town seems at an end for the first time in eight centuries. This was the impression I got even in January 2002, a month before anti-Muslim rage exploded in the western Indian state of Gujarat, at Digambar Akhara, the large, straw-littered compound of the militant Sadhu sect presided over by Ramchandra Paramhans. In 1949, Paramhans initiated the legal battle to reclaim Babur’s mosque, or the Babri Masjid, for the Hindu community; in December 1992, he exuberantly directed the demolition squad.

The sect, Paramhans told me, was established four centuries ago in order to fight the Muslim invaders who had ravaged India since the tenth century AD, and who erected mosques over temples in the holy cities of Ayodhya, Benares and Mathura. The Sadhus had been involved, he added, in the seventy-six wars for possession of the site of the mosque in Ayodhya, in which more than 200,000 Hindus had been martyred.
...
In Ayodhya in January, Paramhans had told me, ‘Before we take on Pakistani terrorists, we have to take care of the offspring Babur left behind in India; these 130 million Muslims of India have to be shown their place.’ This message seems to have been taken to heart in Gujarat, where the Hindu nationalists displayed a high degree of administrative efficiency in the killing of Muslims. In Gujarat’s cities, middle-class Hindu men drove up in new Japanese cars – the emblems of India’s globalized economy – to cart off the loot from Muslim shops and businesses.

The rich young Hindus in Benetton T-shirts and Nike trainers appeared unlikely combatants in what Paramhans told me was a dharma yudh, a holy war, against the traitorous 12 per cent of India’s population. Both wealth and education separated them from the unemployed, listless small-town Hindus I met in Ayodhya, one of whom was a local convener of the Bajrang Dal (Hanuman’s Army), the stormtroopers of the Hindu nationalists, which has been implicated in several incidents of violence against Christians and Muslims across India, including the 1998 murder of a Australian missionary in the eastern state of Orissa. In response to a question about Muslims, he dramatically unsheathed his knife, and invited me to feel the sharpness of the triple-edged blade, in the form of the trident of the Hindu god Shiva.

But, despite their differences, the rich and unemployed Hindu Indians shared a particular world view. This was outlined most clearly for me, during my travels across North India in early 2002, by students at Saraswati Shishu Mandir, a primary school in Benares, one of the 15,000 such institutions run by the RSS. The themes of the morning assembly I attended were manliness and patriotism. In the gloomy hall, portraits of the more militant Hindu freedom fighters mingled with signboarded exhortations including, ‘Give me blood and I’ll give you freedom’, ‘India is a Hindu nation’, and ‘Say with pride that you are a Hindu’. For over an hour, boys and girls in matched uniforms of white and blue marched up and down in front of a stage where a plaster-of-Paris statue of Mother India stood on a map of South Asia, chanting speeches and songs about the perfidy of Pakistan, of Muslim invaders, and the gloriousness of India’s past. The principal watched serenely. He later explained to me how Joshi-ji – the education minister – was making sure that the new history textbooks carried the important message of Hindu pride and Muslim cruelty to every school and child in the country.
...
In the 1970s and 1980s when I heard about Hindu—Muslim riots, or the insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir, it seemed to me that religion was the cause of most conflict and violence in India. The word used in the newspapers and in academic analyses was communalism – the antithesis of the secularism advocated by the founding fathers of India, Gandhi and Nehru, and also the antithesis of Hinduism itself, which was held to be innately tolerant and secular.

Living in Benares in the late 1980s, I was unaware that this ancient Hindu city was also holy for Muslims – unaware, too, of the seventeenth-century Sufi shrine just behind the tea-shack where I often spent my mornings. It was one of many in the city which both Hindus and Muslims visited, part of the flowering of Sufi culture in medieval North India. It was only in 2003, after talking to Najam, the young Persian scholar I met in Benares, that I discovered that one of the great Shia philosophers of Persia had sought refuge at the court of a Hindu ruler of Benares in the eighteenth century. And it was only after returning from my most recent trip to Ayodhya that I read that Rama’s primacy in this pilgrimage centre was a recent development; that Ayodhya was for much of the medieval period the home of the much older and prestigious sects of Shaivites, or Shiva-worshippers (Rama is only one of the many incarnations of Vishnu, one of the gods in the Hindu trinity, in which Shiva is the most important); many of the temples and sects currently devoted to Rama actually emerged under the patronage of the Shia Muslims who had begun to rule Awadh in the early eighteenth century.

Ramchandra Paramhans in Ayodhya had been quick to offer me a history full of temple-destroying Muslims and brave Hindu nationalists. Yet Paramhans’s own militant sect had originally been formed to fight not Muslims but Shiva-worshipping Hindus; and it had been favoured in this long and bloody conflict by the Muslim Nawabs who later gave generous grants of land to the victorious devotees of Rama. The Nawabs, whose administration and army were staffed by Hindus, kept a careful distance from Hindu—Muslim conflicts. One of the first such conflicts in Ayodhya occurred in 1855, when some Muslims accused Hindus of illegally constructing a temple over a mosque, and militant Hindu sadhus (mendicants) massacred seventy-five Muslims. The then Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, a distinguished poet and composer, refused to support the Muslim claim on the building, explaining:

We are devoted to love; do not know of religion.
So what if it is Kaaba or a house of idols?

Wajid Ali Shah, denounced as effeminate and inept – and deposed a year later – by British imperialists, was the last great exponent of the Indo—Persian culture that emerged in Awadh towards the end of the Mogul empire, when India was one of the greatest centres of the Islamic world, along with the Ottoman and the Safavid empires. Islam in India lost some of its Arabian and Persian distinctiveness, blended with older cultures, but its legacy is still preserved – amid the squalor of a hundred small Indian towns, in the grace and elegance of Najam’s Urdu, in the numerous songs and dances that accompany festivals and marriages, in the subtle cuisines of North India, and the fineness of the silk saris of Benares – but one could think of it, as I did, as something just there, without a history or tradition. The Indo—Islamic inheritance has formed very little part of – and is increasingly an embarrassment to – the idea of India that has been maintained by the modernizing Hindu elite over the last fifty years.

~~Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond -by- Pankaj Mishra

Day 221: The Honourable Company

Although for much of the seventeenth century the Dutch and English were bitter rivals throughout the East, on the long voyage to and from Europe hostilities were usually suspended. At the Cape and at St Helena ships of the London Company amicably exchanged news and provisions with those of the V.O.C. Hadah was postman for both Companies; and occasionally Dutch and English ships actually sailed together.

This was not the case with the Portuguese. Anywhere outside European waters Spain/Portugal continued to regard the ships of the Protestant powers as little better than pirates and, peace treaties notwithstanding, they jealously maintained the exclusive character of their eastern bases. In the Arabian Sea further English endeavours at Surat and Swalley between 1612 and 1620 were seen as a direct challenge to Portugal’s maritime supremacy on the very threshold of its eastern metropolis at Goa. The Portuguese would respond vigorously. But once again a purely Indo-centric reading of these engagements is misleading. At stake was a dominant role not just in India’s external trade but in that of all the trading coasts of the Arabian Sea including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Naval battles in the Gulf of Cambay would have counted for little had not the Portuguese also been challenged at Hormuz, Goa, and a host of lesser ports from the coast of Mozambique to that of Malabar. Hostilities would last for twenty years; and they would embrace the whole trading world between Africa and India.

In 1612, blissfully ignorant of Sir Henry Middleton’s débâcles at Mocha and Surat, the Company had despatched two more ships for Surat, the Twelfth Voyage, under the command of Thomas Best, a highly experienced master mariner. The commander, or ‘General’, of an East India Company fleet controlled two distinct establishments, the one nautical and headed by his subordinate captains and masters and the other commercial and headed by one or more chief merchants. Almost invariably commanders were appointed on the strength of their performances during a previous voyage; and usually they were merchants who had thus acquired some knowledge of navigation. Hence the ideal commander should be part sailor, part merchant and, if possible, part ‘man of fashion and good respect’. But Thomas Best was just a sailor. Presumably the loss of the Ascension had convinced the directors that amongst Gujarat’s treacherous mud banks navigational skills were more important than social graces. The difference is evident in Best’s journal which triumphantly belies the idea that seventeenth-century travelogues were necessarily discursive and entertaining. True to his calling, Best merely kept a log.

Terse and laconic as it is, it is nevertheless odd that this document contains no mention of the fleet’s first contact with the Portuguese which occurred in the Mozambique channel north of Madagascar. In what may be a reference to it, Best elsewhere refers to ‘the goodliest ship thatt ever I sawe’ as being a Portuguese carrack ‘with a tower of ordnance beseeming a castell’. From the journal of one of his subordinates it appears that there were in fact two such ships off Madagascar, each of over 1500 tons and each intent on putting its tower of ordnance to good use. Broadsides were exchanged and at least three Portuguese killed before Best ‘steered away his course’. ‘For yt was contrarie to commission to meddle with them in respecte of peace we have with their king.’ But the English crews were ‘prepared to feight’ and if they felt somewhat cheated by Best’s delicacy, their rancour would be short-lived.

Best reached the mouth of the Tapti river in September 1612, only six months after Middleton had been ordered to sea by Mukarrab Khan. The news that all the English factors had been withdrawn was depressing enough but when word arrived of Middleton’s retaliatory activities in the Red Sea, Best despaired. The news affected him ‘like a drinke of cold water to a man on a cold and frostie morning’. Already two of his factors had been captured by the Portuguese. As soon as he could secure their release he was all for beating a hasty retreat towards Bantam.

But his remaining factors were more sanguine and Best, reckoning they knew their own business best, sensibly deferred to them. It seemed that for once the Moghul officials were being positively obliging. Perhaps they were worried that Best might follow Middleton’s example and blockade their shipping in the Red Sea. Perhaps they had simply reevaluated the advantages of a new trading partner and a new source of largesse. At all events a farman granting interim trading rights was immediately forthcoming, a promise was made that within forty days it would be ratified by Jehangir, and the English were invited to send another representative to Agra to negotiate a permanent agreement. It was as if the dismissals of Hawkins and Middleton had all been a terrible mistake. Within days of the fleet’s arrival new emissaries and a new letter from King James were on their way to Court. So were some of the presents known to please the dilettante emperor. There were paintings ‘espetially such as discover Venus’ and Cupid’s actes’ and there were various musical instruments in the care of Lancelot Canning, a virtuoso on the virginals, and Robert Trully, a cornettist. The latter found high favour with Jehangir. He converted to Islam and eventually blew his cornet in half the courts of India. Not so Lancelot Canning. The virginals proved too insipid for Moghul tastes and the mortified Canning, a distant kinsman of India’s future Viceroy, is described as having ‘dyed of conceitt’.

Best meanwhile repaired to Swalley to await Jehangir’s confirmation of the farman. As usual during any period in port the crews took to drinking and gambling. Even at ill-appointed Swalley Hole two men were ducked from the yard-arm for swimming ashore on the Sabbath and getting ‘drinking drunke with whores ashore’. Instructions issued to the commanders of all Company fleets proscribed such conduct in the most vigorous terms. But as with the injunctions against private trade, those against blasphemy, gaming and drunkenness were habitually ignored. They may be seen as implying not that the English seafarer of the seventeenth century was a God-fearing paragon of Puritan virtues but exactly the opposite.

It took the arrival of an impressive Portuguese fleet to bring the Swalley revellers to their senses. There were four galleons (warships, smaller than the cargo-carrying carracks but larger than any of the English vessels) and twenty-five inshore frigates. They had been dispatched from Goa and their instructions were to disperse the new English challenge by force of arms.

In the engagements that followed – and in those fought by ships of Richard Downton’s fleet two years later – the Portuguese were apparently the stronger. They had more ships and their ships had more men. They were also larger and, under full sail, faster. But they were of deeper draught, less manoeuvrable, poorly crewed, and under-gunned. Portuguese tactics still relied heavily on grappling-irons and fire-ships, the idea being to panic the enemy and then get alongside him for a full-blooded boarding in which higher superstructures and numerical superiority must prove decisive.

But all this assumed that men-of-war were just floating castles and that their defenders would always heave to and fight it out. This was not how the English had frustrated the Armada and, according to a disgruntled Portuguese account, it was not how Best chose to conduct his battles in the Gulf of Cambay.

~~The Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company -by- John Keay

Day 220: Polio

Thirty-five hundred years ago an Egyptian craftsman carved a bas relief stela depicting a young man with a crippled, withered leg. Egyptologists believe the young man represented in the stela was a priest. He is supporting himself with a staff held under his arm much as one might use a crutch. The deformity of his shrunken leg is typical of that seen following paralysis in childhood. The young man probably had the disease we call poliomyelitis- polio, for short as a child.   

Moving forward in time about 1500 years, the early depiction in stone of a paralyzed leg from Egypt is joined by descriptions of the famous Greek physician Hippocrates and his Roman disciple Galen, both of whom wrote about acquired club foot in terms that suggest they may have been describing polio. Across thousands of years, our ancestors tell us that polio is an ancient curse of humankind. Today, we stand on the threshold of a victory that will soon see this ancient curse banished from the earth.
   
If polio has been present among people since antiquity, it has kept a quiet profile during most of history. Sporadic accounts of paralysis undoubtedly due to polio appeared during the eighteenth century, and in 1813 the first clear medical description of polio was published by an Italian surgeon Giovanni Bartista Monteggia. However, the disease of that time was not that which swept across Europe and North America in more modern times. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, polio was an endemic infection, common and always present, occurring early in life, with paralysis as an infrequent complication. In fact, the infection may have been very common at that time, for paralysis in infants with polio is not usual, and only the few with paralysis were noted. Infantile paralysis, the name given to polio by a German orthopedist, Jakob Heine, in the mid nineteenth century, quite accurately denominated the disease as it was then seen by medical practitioners. Heine described this disease as one of infants between six and 36 months of age. Thus polio smoldered, by-and-large an unrecognized and unimportant but common infection of early childhood, a cause of fever, headache, and malaise, but only occasionally a cause of paralysis.   

It is important to distinguish between infection and disease, a point that comes up repeatedly in this discussion. Infection refers simply to the establishment and growth of the infectious agent within the body. This may or may not be associated with disease, which is a deviation from the normal state of health. Infection often occurs in the absence of disease. Infection without disease results in immunity.

During the nineteenth century, an increasing number of small outbreaks of polio occurred in which adults were affected. In 1887 a major epidemic hit Stockholm. Fourty-four cases of paralytic polio occurred in a city that had previously experienced one or two cases a year. Investigating this epidemic, Karl Oskar Medin realized for the first time that the paralytic cases were only a small part of the epidemic, and that persons with only mild illnesses were spreading the disease to others. About this time André Cornil, a French pathologist, performed the first autopsy on the brain and spinal cord of a patient who had paralytic polio. Subsequently, Jean Martin Charcot, his colleague and one of the founders of the science of neurology, extended that first autopsy study and demonstrated that the site of tissue destruction was in the part of the spinal cord known as the anterior horn, the area of origin of nerve cells controlling muscles.   

As the twentieth century dawned, epidemics became the usual pattern of polio in the industrialized countries of the temperate zones, with outbreaks occurring regularly every summer and early fall. The age of the persons afflicted also increased. Polio is a different disease in young children and in adults. In children, it is usually a mild illness, often unrecognized, and infantile paralysis is uncommon among those infected with poliovirus. However, this mild infection produces life-long immunity against further attacks by the same virus. Polio in adults is more severe, and paralysis occurs much more frequently in this age group.
   
Poliovirus is excreted in large quantity by infected individuals in their stools. In communities where sanitary systems are primitive, poliovirus circulates readily in the population, and almost all children are infected at a young age and become immune. This pattern of spread was usual throughout the world prior to the industrial revolution and continues to the present in developing countries. In modern times, improved sanitation has reduced transmission by the fecal-oral route and has left adults nonimmune in developed countries. Transmission of infection usually required close contact, and the source of virus was commonly the throat. With the shift to older patients, paralysis became a more frequent complication of polio. Even though fewer cases of infection were occurring, the disease's manifestations were more severe and more alarming. At the same time, polio became a seasonal disease, but it is not clear why.   

The mysterious seasonal occurrence of polio epidemics in the industrialized countries, the lack of a clear understanding of how the infection was transmitted, the crippling nature of the disease, the increase in the involvement of young adults, along with a greater number of patients requiring the use of the fearsome apparatus, the "iron lung" or Drinker-Collins respirator, all led to a great concern about the disease and sometimes panic among the public. Not surprisingly, control of poliomyelitis became a major priority during most of the early twentieth century. Swimming pools, beaches, playgrounds, and movie theaters were closed during summer months. School openings were delayed until each summer's epidemic had passed.   

An interesting feature of polio is the so-called provoked, or trauma-induced paralysis. It was observed that children who received inoculations such as DPT early in the course of poliovirus infection were more likely to become paralyzed and the paralysis more likely to occur in the limb that had received the inoculation. A particularly distressing form of this phenomenon was that which followed tonsillectomy and resulted in bulbar polio in which the nerves controlling the muscles of breathing and swallowing were affected. A dramatic example of this effect occurred in a family whose five children all had their tonsils removed on the same day. All of them developed polio, and one died. Once this phenomenon was recognized, tonsillectomies were not performed during the polio season.   

~~Polio -ed- Thomas M. Daniel and Frederick C. Robbins

Day 219: Population Wars

Why do we go to war? There are many answers, but part of this book concerns one of them: because war is an inevitable property of humankind, an inheritance from our distant ancestors, and as such it’s part of the interconnectedness of the biosphere throughout its long history. In other words, war is part of the symbiotic heritage of all life. Therefore we must look to coexisting populations and their interactions, historical as well as recent, human as well as other species’, if we ever want a serious answer to the question above. Behaviors akin to warfare are found in species across the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom, so it’s no surprise that humans exhibit them too.

Despite the ubiquity (and tacit inevitability) of population wars, a closer examination of some distantly related species reveals that there is as much interdependence in the biosphere as there is violence. The present is full of assimilations from populations of the past, and when we recognize some of these, it becomes apparent that there is hope for a less violent future for humankind. Hence the inevitability of population wars doesn’t mean that our future has to be violently catastrophic. In order to achieve such a result, however, humans have to come to terms with some basic facts of population biology, and we need to see a shift in consciousness away from some of our most deeply rooted prejudices and bad habits that have come from the rapid expansion of our species.

Today we exist as a globally distributed species with a particular nasty propensity: When we can’t see our enemies, we invent them. This illusory act of human nature allows us to justify attempts at eradicating, eliminating, or vanquishing other people or species. But such actions nearly always fail. A further goal of this book is to highlight those failures as a reason to take a fresh approach to one of the time-honored problems of human existence: defining “us” as distinct from “them.” This is ultimately a question of biology. How distinct are different groups of living things? I hope to show you that the answer is, A lot less than you previously thought. If I’m successful, you’ll see why we need to rethink the entire justification for war, not only the human military kind but also the thought of Darwin’s “war of nature” or “struggle for existence,” because war follows logically only from a notion of distinctness. If lines of distinction are blurred, whom (or what) are we fighting? In my view all types of conflict have to be recast in the light of coexistence and historical contingency. That is the message of this book.
...
There are four traditional categories of species interactions that fall under the heading of symbiosis: parasitism, predation, mutualism, and commensalism. The first two of these are antagonistic in the short term. Parasitism, the familiar situation where one species infests, infects, or inhabits the bodies of another species, and predation, where one species uses another as its source of food, usually make for dramatic storytelling. Familiar examples of these antagonistic types of population war include lice inhabiting the hair of schoolchildren (parasitism) or Canadian lynx chasing and killing snowshoe hares (predation).

The first of the two less antagonistic relationships between populations is mutualism, where two species derive benefits from and provide benefit to each other. Both species give up something in order to accommodate the other. This can be seen, for instance, in many species of ants (leaf-cutters) in the tropics. Huge colonies composed of thousands of individuals create elaborate underground caverns as part of their communal nests. Inside these subterranean burrows are gardens where the ants deposit leaf fragments they have harvested from the surrounding forest. Fungi grow on the leaf fragments in the gardens, and the ants make a meal of their vegetative parts. The fungi are not killed in the process; they just keep producing the vegetative portion as the ants feed over time. The ants benefit from having a convenient and predictable reserve of food growing in their nests, but the elaborate burrow construction and huge effort it takes to cut leaves and cultivate the gardens is a cost they must endure in the relationship. The fungi benefit from having a safe haven protected from other scavengers and parasitic bacteria of the forest floor, but have only restricted opportunities (gardens) to grow, thereby decreasing their opportunities to feed on and expand to other areas of the forest.

Commensalism is the second type of less antagonistic relationship. A commensal species is one that derives benefits from another species but doesn’t inflict any costs on the other. An example of this is the remora, a strange fish with a specialized sucking organ on the top of its head that allows it to attach to another species (usually a shark). Remoras “hitch a ride” on their hosts without actually providing any help in locomotion, or any benefits to speak of. There are no known negative effects caused by their freeloading. Usually the commensal individual is so small relative to the mass of the host that no significant friction or drag is caused to hinder transport. Another example of commensalism is the presence of possums, raccoons, suburban coyotes, or even bears that regularly eat the trash we throw away. These species opportunistically feed on our refuse, and there seems to be little or no cost to us associated with their commensal activity.

One chore I enjoy is cutting the grass. It just so happens that our “grass” is an alfalfa field nearly four acres in size. Every spring and summer I resign myself to a few days of driving my old tractor, mowing the tall grass. It’s hot, loud, and dusty work, and I’m pretty tired of the process after a few hours, even though the end result (hay) is a good thing. However, my mowing has a bloody side effect. The land is full of different small animal species, and as the blades cut the alfalfa they inadvertently slice scores of creatures unable to escape from under the mowing deck. Most are insects, but occasionally a field mouse or a vole runs the wrong way and can’t escape in time. This massacre is a boon to the crows that live in our woods, and they quickly swoop in to feast on the corpses. The birds are loud and obnoxious, and sometimes I have to swerve to miss them. I’d rather they go somewhere else. But I also know that they enjoy having me cut the grass, sometimes running over what will become their next meal. The crows have a commensal relationship with me, just like all the suburban commensals I mentioned above. I tolerate the crows, but they benefit more from the relationship than I do.

It’s easy to see how someone might construe the antagonistic relationship between a predator and its prey, or a parasite and its host, as that of a victor (the predator or parasite) and the vanquished (the prey or host). It’s important to remember that if the host or prey is exterminated, then the population of parasites or predators can’t last for long. The ways in which species interact is a more complex process than most people realize. If you haven’t studied the subject it’s easy to misinterpret Darwin and imagine that the natural world is in a constant state of high-stakes conflict. At the very least you might imagine a world where one population regularly dominates another into extinction, either by eating it or taking away its vitality. However, extinction in nature does not often result from the direct actions of other populations. Instead there is a spectrum of symbiotic relationships.

Even the most antagonistic relationship results in an equilibrium over the long term, which for our purposes can be viewed as a compromise between species. This is most glaringly illustrated when an incompatible pair of species comes together in a predator-prey relationship. The classic studies of predators and prey in the wild show oscillations of size for both populations. When predators are abundant, they reduce the prey population. Lower numbers of prey mean a limit on the predator’s reproduction rates, and their population size soon falls. This in turn makes for fewer predators, so the prey population increases once again. Over time these fluctuations reveal a stable equilibrium between predators and prey.

~~Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence -by- Greg Graffin

Day 218: The Nurture Assumption

Many immigrant parents see their children losing the language and culture of their homeland and try very hard to prevent it. My local newspaper ran a story about a woman from West Bengal, India, who started a Bengali language school for her children and the children of other Bengali-speaking immigrants.

Many immigrant parents see their children losing the language and culture of their homeland and try very hard to prevent it. My local newspaper ran a story about a woman from West Bengal, India, who started a Bengali language school for her children and the children of other Bengali-speaking immigrants.

Like many immigrants, Bagchi wants her children to understand their cultural background. To do that, she believes, they first must be fluent in Bengali, their parents’ native tongue and one of 15 languages spoken in India.... But learning a language isn’t easy if you study it for only a few hours each week. School, television and peer groups immerse children in English, and despite the best of efforts by both parents and children, it often is a challenge to become fluent in the parents’ language. “They dream in English. They do not dream in Bengali,” Bagchi said, describing Bengali children born in the United States.

They dream in English. It makes no difference whether the first language they learned from their parents was English or Bengali, English has become their “native language.” Joseph spoke nothing but Polish for the first seven and a half years of his life, but if he remains in the United States his “native language” will not be Polish. As an adult he will think in English, dream in English, do his arithmetic and his calculus in English. He may forget his Polish entirely.

Parents do not have to teach their children the language of their community; in fact—hard as it may be for you to accept this—they do not have to teach their children any language at all. The language lessons we give our infants and toddlers are a peculiarity of our culture. In parts of the world where people still live in traditional ways, no lessons are given and parents generally do very little conversing with their babies and toddlers—they consider learning the language the child’s job, not the parents’. According to psycholinguist Steven Pinker, mothers in many societies “do not speak to their prelinguistic children at all, except for occasional demands and rebukes. This is not unreasonable. After all, young children plainly can’t understand a word you say. So why waste your breath in soliloquies?” Compared to American toddlers, the two-year-olds in these societies appear retarded in their language development, but the end result is the same: all the children eventually become competent speakers of their language.

You are thinking, Yes, but even though the mother doesn’t speak to the baby, the baby hears her speaking to other people. True. But even this is unnecessary. There is an old story, told by the Greek historian Herodotus, of a king who wanted to find out what language children would speak if left to their own devices. He had a couple of babies reared in a lonely hut by a shepherd and gave instructions that no one was to talk to them or speak a word in their hearing. Two years later he visited the children and, the story goes, they ran up to him saying something that sounded like “bekos,” which is the word for bread in an ancient language called Phrygian. The king concluded that Phrygian must have been the world’s first language.

Would it shock you to learn that in the United States there are thousands of babies being reared like that? No, it is not an experiment. These are babies born to profoundly deaf couples. Most deaf people marry other deaf people, but more than 90 percent of the babies born to these couples have normal hearing. These babies miss out on some of the experiences we consider crucial to normal development. No one comes running when they scream in terror or in pain. No one encourages their coos and babbles or makes a big deal out of their “mamas” and “dadas.” Nowadays most deaf parents use sign language to communicate with their hearing children, but there was a period when the use of sign language was frowned upon, and during that period some deaf parents didn’t communicate with their young children at all, except in the most rudimentary ways. And yet, these children suffered no harm. Despite the fact that they didn’t learn any language at all from their parents, they became fluent speakers of English. Don’t ask them how they learned it; they can’t remember and many of them consider the question offensive. I assume they learned the same way Joseph did.

Socialization researchers are unlikely to study families in which the parents speak Polish or Bengali, much less families in which the parents communicate only in sign. They don’t worry about how and where children acquire their language because it is a constant: all the parents in their studies speak English and so do all the children, and the researchers assume that children must learn their language from their parents. They make the same assumption about other aspects of socialization. They are wrong about language and I believe they are wrong about other aspects of socialization. Bilingualism is simply the most conspicuous marker of context-specific socialization—socialization that is tied to a particular social context.

~~The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do -by- Judith Rich Harris

Day 217: The Rise Of Islamic State

The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qaeda is often misunderstood and understated. Saudi Arabia is influential because its oil and vast wealth make it powerful in the Middle East and beyond. But it is not financial resources alone that make it such an important player. Another factor is its propagating of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist, eighteenth-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to the status of second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as non-Muslims to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews.

This religious intolerance and political authoritarianism, which in its readiness to use violence has many similarities with European fascism in the 1930s, is getting worse rather than better. For example, in recent years, a Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison. The ideology of al-Qaeda and ISIS draws a great deal from Wahhabism. Critics of this new trend in Islam from elsewhere in the Muslim world do not survive long; they are forced to flee or are murdered. Denouncing jihadi leaders in Kabul in 2003, an Afghan editor described them as “holy fascists” who were misusing Islam as “an instrument to take over power.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of insulting Islam and had to leave the country.

A striking development in the Islamic world in recent decades is the way in which Wahhabism is taking over mainstream Sunni Islam. In one country after another Saudi Arabia is putting up the money for the training of preachers and the building of mosques. A result of this is the spread of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia. The latter find themselves targeted with unprecedented viciousness, from Tunisia to Indonesia. Such sectarianism is not confined to country villages outside Aleppo or in the Punjab; it is poisoning relations between the two sects in every Islamic grouping. A Muslim friend in London told me: “Go through the address books of any Sunni or Shia in Britain and you will find very few names belonging to people outside their own community.”

Even before Mosul, President Obama was coming to realize that al-Qaeda–type groups were far stronger than they had been previously, but his recipe for dealing with them repeats and exacerbates earlier mistakes. “We need partners to fight terrorists alongside us,” he told his audience at West Point. But who are these partners going to be? Saudi Arabia and Qatar were not mentioned by him, since they remain close and active US allies in Syria. Obama instead singled out “Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq” as partners to receive aid in “confronting terrorists working across Syria’s borders.”

There is something absurd about this, since the foreign jihadis in Syria and Iraq, the people whom Obama admits are the greatest threat, can only get to these countries because they are able to cross the 510-mile-long Turkish-Syrian border without hindrance from the Turkish authorities. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan may now be frightened by the Frankenstein’s monster they have helped to create, but there is little they can do to restrain it. An unspoken purpose of the US insistence that Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain take part or assist in the air strikes on Syria in September was to force them to break their former links with the jihadis in Syria.

There was always something fantastical about the US and its Western allies teaming up with the theocratic Sunni absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to spread democracy and enhance human rights in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. The US was a weaker power in the Middle East in 2011 than it had been in 2003, because its armies had failed to achieve their aims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Come the uprisings of 2011, it was the jihadi and Sunni-sectarian, militarized wing of rebel movements that received massive injections of money from the kings and emirs of the Gulf. The secular, non-sectarian opponents of the long-established police states were soon marginalized, reduced to silence, or killed. The international media was very slow to pick up on how the nature of these uprisings had changed, though the Islamists were very open about their sectarian priorities: in Libya, one of the first acts of the triumphant rebels was to call for the legalization of polygamy, which had been banned under the old regime.

ISIS is the child of war. Its members seek to reshape the world around them by acts of violence. The movement’s toxic but potent mix of extreme religious beliefs and military skill is the outcome of the war in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003 and the war in Syria since 2011. Just as the violence in Iraq was ebbing, the war was revived by the Sunni Arabs in Syria. It is the government and media consensus in the West that the civil war in Iraq was reignited by the sectarian policies of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. In reality, it was the war in Syria that destabilized Iraq when jihadi groups like ISIS, then called al-Qaeda in Iraq, found a new battlefield where they could fight and flourish.

It was the US, Europe, and their regional allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates that created the conditions for the rise of ISIS. They kept the war going in Syria, though it was obvious from 2012 that Assad would not fall. He never controlled less than thirteen out of fourteen Syrian provincial capitals and was backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the only peace terms he was offered at the Geneva II peace talks in January 2014 was to leave power. He was not about to go, and ideal conditions were created for ISIS to prosper. The US and its allies are now trying to turn the Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria against the militants, but this will be difficult to do while these countries are convulsed by war.

The resurgence of al-Qaeda–type groups is not a threat confined to Syria, Iraq, and their near neighbors. What is happening in these countries, combined with the growing dominance of intolerant and exclusive Wahhabite beliefs within the worldwide Sunni community, means that all 1.6 billion Muslims, almost a quarter of the world’s population, will be increasingly affected. It seems unlikely that non-Muslims, including many in the West, will be untouched by the conflict. Today’s resurgent jihadism, having shifted the political terrain in Iraq and Syria, is already having far-reaching effects on global politics, with dire consequences for us all.

~~The Rise Of Islamic State: ISIS And The New Sunni Revolution -by- Patrick Cockburn

Day 216: The Bullet And The Ballot Box

Most of the country knew Prachanda only through his statements and some grainy photographs. Some even doubted his existence. Nonetheless, his name evoked fear. Although most Maoist cadres had never met or seen Prachanda, they felt awe and reverence for him. Some worried that they would never meet him. Others remembered the pride and elation they had felt as they shook his hand at a party convention.

From the earliest days of the rebellion, Prachanda had enjoyed uncontested power over the party. His authority only increased over the years. Other senior Maoist leaders in the standing committee and the politburo could certainly challenge him on policy matters, but never once did they consider replacing him. The histories of the Soviet Union and China had convinced them that a leader with charismatic authority was necessary for the success of the revolutionary party.

The party made various efforts to buttress Prachanda’s position as supreme leader. In 2001, his title was changed from ‘general secretary’ to ‘chairman’, a term that reflected the power concentrated in his person. That same year, the party undertook a comprehensive re-evaluation of its ideology, its strategy and its official view of the history of the communist movement in Nepal. These ‘guiding principles of the party’ were collectively termed ‘Prachandapath’. The doctrine contained specific features such as the strategy of fomenting a popular uprising and demanding elections to a Constituent Assembly. Over time, however, the term lost its specificity and came to represent the Maoist struggle in general. If the Maoists destroyed an army position, for example, cadres would refer to it as a ‘victory of Prachandapath’.

In person, Prachanda exuded restlessness, often manifested in the way he jerked his shoulders while talking. He had boundless enthusiasm for meeting party members of all ranks. He usually convinced those he met that he had complete trust in them. But he constantly probed party members on their colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses, and used this information to reassign responsibilities. He was known to keep a close watch over the party’s finances. Prachanda was the party’s most effective public speaker. He had an acute sense of political theatre, and could project a variety of emotions depending on the mood of the crowd he was addressing. He would use fiery, even incendiary rhetoric to arouse passionate anger and hatred among the cadre. If necessary he would not hesitate to publicly criticize his own failings, thus dousing the potential resentment of his audience. He was also prone to sentimentality, shedding uninhibited tears if the occasion demanded it, as when addressing the families of party members killed during the conflict or while watching musicals depicting the suffering and martyrdom of Maoist fighters.

Prachanda’s power also derived from his role as one of the party’s chief military strategists and the supreme commander of the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army. Although he never participated in battle, he had studied the strategies and tactics of guerrilla war for decades and had personally trained many of the party’s field commanders. He had helped draft battle plans on a number of occasions. He commanded the fierce loyalty of some of the most important Maoist commanders, such as Pasang and Ananta.

In matters of ideology, Prachanda was a pragmatist. He was rarely the one to initiate the long debates on ideology and its relation to strategy during politburo or central committee meetings; instead he would listen carefully to all the views put forward, often for days on end. Sometimes he mediated disputes. His strategic choices were not constrained by a rigid ideology or by precedent. Rather, he would choose one of the available options based on how effectively it might increase the energy and commitment of the rank and file, the rebels’ power in relation to the state, and his own control over the party. Once he took a decision, he stuck to it with great confidence and tenacity, winning enthusiastic support and commitment from the entire party. But if circumstances changed, he shifted course without qualms or nostalgia for the older policy.

In 1991, for example, some of the radical Maoists argued that their party, at that time called the Unity Centre, should not compete in elections as that would entrench them in parliamentary politics and inhibit them from starting an armed rebellion. It was Prachanda, along with Baburam Bhattarai and some others, who advocated that the party should field a front organization that would participate in the parliamentary process. Only three years later, however, Prachanda pulled the party out of the parliamentary process and began serious preparations for the rebellion. Similarly, until 2001, the Maoists viewed the parliamentary parties as their chief enemy. After the massacre at the royal palace, they shifted their attack to the monarchy. Although a number of leaders, including Bhattarai, were in favour of this move, others felt misgivings about the new policy. Such a decisive policy shift would not have been possible without Prachanda’s firm backing.

When asked to evaluate the nature of his leadership, Prachanda once said, ‘I have never been firmly committed to any fixed position.’ He obviously considered this a strength. When Baburam Bhattarai was asked about Prachanda, he said something similar: ‘He has the ability to make swift decisions for the benefit of the party, even taking risks if necessary.’ According to Bhattarai, these were the qualities that enabled Lenin to steer the Russian revolution toward success. Prachanda would have appreciated this assessment. Lenin was, after all, his great personal hero.

But the same characteristics were also deplored within the party. Party members occasionally said that Prachanda showed dangerous signs of ‘instability’. This criticism came mostly from Maoist leaders who felt betrayed when Prachanda abandoned a particular line which they themselves were wedded to. It was also a more general criticism of Prachanda’s seeming lack of ideological commitment.

~~The Bullet And The Ballot Box : The Story of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution -by- Aditya Adhikari

Day 215: SuperCooperators

They’re among the most important fossils of all, mysterious monuments left by the very first organisms on Earth. Called stromatolites, some are smaller than a finger and others larger than a house. Among the most remarkable can be found in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, in the baking heat of what is jokingly called the North Pole Dome. There, white, red, and black rocks are dotted about in the grass. These stromatolites are thought to be little changed from when they first formed around communities of microbes an astonishing 3.43 billion years ago.

Some look like domes or upside-down ice cream cones. Others are small, conical shapes arranged a little like an egg carton. A few are crest-shaped, or even bear a passing resemblance to the ears of Mickey Mouse. Studies of their microbial descendants, known as cyanobacteria, suggest that these peculiar rocks slowly formed when mats of micro-organisms trapped sediments and precipitated carbonates. Because of their great and extraordinary old age, these stromatolites represent the first chapter in the rise of cooperation, a vestige of the ancient microbial communities that were among the first living things on Earth.

They are singular monuments. But as evolution shapes new kinds of cooperation, and cooperation heralds ever more inventive ways to construct an organism, novel ways to destroy and to defect also emerge. The stromatolites are a testament to cooperation among our ancient single-celled heritage, when they began to work together, and warn of the powerful and primitive forces that can be unleashed when that ancestry starts to reassert itself. I have come to think of these striking rocks as both milestones of the rise of living cooperation and as tomb-stones that warn of its potential fall.

Such single-celled creatures seem distant relations of modern life, yet in every sense, they are very much with us today. Their descendants are ubiquitous, clever, and unstoppable. They are able to eke out an existence in brutal conditions, from a subzero chill to the hell of scalding, acidic hot pools. They bask in the extreme saltiness of the Dead Sea and enjoy the caustic delights of soda lakes. They can be found in bone-dry deserts, such as Atacama. They thrive in the crushing depths of the ocean where temperatures are well in excess of 100 degrees Celsius. They lurk in the muds deep below the sea floor, along with toxic and radioactive sludges. Along the way, bacteria have invented all of biochemistry. And, at a stroke, they invented much of the machinery that turns in our bodies.

They also evolved ways to cooperate. Multicellular strings of bacteria were born around 3.5 billion years ago. Filamentous bacteria—so named because they form chains—kill themselves to yield precious nitrogen for the good of their sisters. Every tenth or so cell commits suicide for the benefit of this communal thread of bacterial life.

Another, quite different kind of microbial cooperation was revealed by the dogged efforts of Lynn Margulis at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She proposed that more complex “higher” cells were the result of symbiosis, when single-celled creatures became so closely associated that they worked as one. For example, around 1.8 billion years ago, there was an important moment when one kind of wriggling bacterium invaded another. Perhaps the former was seeking food. But this particular parasitic infestation suited both parties and evolved so that the participants formed a long, harmonious, and fruitful truce. This is what Margulis calls symbiogenesis and it led to the formation of higher cells, known as the Eukarya.

Thanks to this cooperation, a new, more complex kind of cell appeared on Earth. Whereas bacterial cells are relatively simple and known as prokaryotes, the newer cellular consortia, known as the eukaryotes, are the building blocks of plant and animal bodies, including our own. These cells contain organelles—which divide up the task of cellular life as organs do for a body—including a nucleus where their DNA resides. These organelles are the leftovers of earlier episodes of microbial mergers and acquisitions.

Peek inside your own cells and you will find these Russian doll coalitions. The most obvious example of symbiogenesis comes in the form of little lozenge-shaped structures called mitochondria. Not only do they look like bugs, they even have their own separate DNA that is passed down the maternal line, from mother to child. Our cells are driven by these descendants of bacteria that hundreds of millions of years ago traded chemical energy for a comfortable home. These organelles now power our muscles, our digestion, and our brains.

~~SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed -by- Martin A. Nowak