Day 278: Black Earth

Nothing can be known about the future, thought Hitler, except the limits of our planet: “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” Ecology was scarcity, and existence meant a struggle for land. The immutable structure of life was the division of animals into species, condemned to “inner seclusion” and an endless fight to the death. Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species. The highest races were still evolving from the lower, which meant that interbreeding was possible but sinful. Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seeking to kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain as the law of gravity. The struggle could never end, and it had no certain outcome. A race could triumph and flourish and could also be starved and extinguished.

In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, political thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.

“Nature knows,” wrote Hitler, “no political boundaries. She places life forms on this globe and then sets them free in a play for power.” Since politics was nature, and nature was struggle, no political thought was possible. This conclusion was an extreme articulation of the nineteenth-century commonplace that human activities could be understood as biology. In the 1880s and 1890s, serious thinkers and popularizers influenced by Charles Darwin’s idea of natural selection proposed that the ancient questions of political thought had been resolved by this breakthrough in zoology. When Hitler was young, an interpretation of Darwin in which competition was identified as a social good influenced all major forms of politics. For Herbert Spencer, the British defender of capitalism, a market was like an ecosphere where the strongest and best survived. The utility brought by unhindered competition justified its immediate evils. The opponents of capitalism, the socialists of the Second International, also embraced biological analogies. They came to see the class struggle as “scientific,” and man as one animal among many, instead of a specially creative being with a specifically human essence. Karl Kautsky, the leading Marxist theorist of the day, insisted pedantically that people were animals.

Yet these liberals and socialists were constrained, whether they realized it or not, by attachments to custom and institution; mental habits that grew from social experience hindered them from reaching the most radical of conclusions. They were ethically committed to goods such as economic growth or social justice, and found it appealing or convenient to imagine that natural competition would deliver these goods. Hitler entitled his book Mein Kampf—My Struggle. From those two words through two long volumes and two decades of political life, he was endlessly narcissistic, pitilessly consistent, and exuberantly nihilistic where others were not. The ceaseless strife of races was not an element of life, but its essence. To say so was not to build a theory but to observe the universe as it was. Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justified by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. Hitler’s point was not at all that the desirable end justified the bloody means. There was no end, only meanness. Race was real, whereas individuals and classes were fleeting and erroneous constructions. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed.

Hitler’s worldview dismissed religious and secular traditions, and yet relied upon both. Though he was no original thinker, he supplied a certain resolution to a crisis of both thought and faith. Like many before him he sought to bring the two together. What he meant to engineer, however, was not an elevating synthesis that would rescue both soul and mind but a seductive collision that destroyed both. Hitler’s racial struggle was supposedly sanctioned by science, but he called its object “daily bread.” With these words, he was summoning one of the best-known Christian texts, while profoundly altering its meaning. “Give us this day,” ask those who recite the Lord’s Prayer, “our daily bread.” In the universe the prayer describes, there is a metaphysics, an order beyond this planet, notions of good that proceed from one sphere to another. Those saying the Lord’s Prayer ask that God “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” In Hitler’s “struggle for the riches of nature,” it was a sin not to seize everything possible, and a crime to allow others to survive. Mercy violated the order of things because it allowed the weak to propagate. Rejecting the biblical commandments, said Hitler, was what human beings must do. “If I can accept a divine commandment,” he wrote, “it’s this one: ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.’ ”

~~Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning -by- Timothy Snyder

Day 277: A Philosophy Of Walking

I keep forgetting those short blessed moments, sometimes due to great tiredness, those brief ecstatic instants when the body, while walking, advances without being aware of itself, almost like a tumbling dead leaf. Especially after a long walk when the fatigue is immense, and you suddenly lose all sensation. Then, as long as the path is well enough laid out and not too steep, you stop looking down, stop thinking altogether, and let your feet find the right places and avoid the pitfalls.

On the walker’s side, there’s nothing left but an immense renunciation. The walk ends in a sort of dream, and the tread then gains in firmness and speed. As soon as you consent to stop thinking. After that, you can’t call it lightness because you no longer feel a thing: your legs are absorbed by the road and your mind floats overhead. Now, when you run for long enough, the time comes when you feel a huge impression of lightness, as if carried off in a race of your own. After a period, sometimes a long one, of ‘finding your pace’, at last the body finds its breathing rhythm and your feet answer the rhythmic call to rebound from the road, like a regular, repeated take-off. The experience of lightness when running is still wholly distinct from the feeling of induced lightness that walking can, on rare occasions, produce. It isn’t the intoxication you feel on a run, from the perfect tension of the muscles, but more a mental detachment produced by tiredness, a creeping anaesthesia. The lightness felt in running is really an unfatiguing victory over gravity, an easy and sovereign assertion of the body. The floating feeling derived from walking comes when the feet have ultimately become one with the road, and the mind through lassitude forgets to echo their fatigue.

The fact remains that, very broadly speaking, the experience of walking is always a perception of gravity. I don’t exactly mean that of a heavy, weighty body. Even if sometimes, truth to tell, when there are still several hours to go before the end of the stage, and the path steepens, your knees might just as well be carrying an anvil. What I am trying to get at is what runs all through those immense days in the open: at every step, contact, the foot endlessly falling back down; that support every time, the perpetual sinking down to lift up again. You have to take root each time so that you can depart anew. That is how the foot takes root, through that repeated enlacement with the earth. Each step forming another knot. There is no way of being more earthbound than by walking: the immeasurable monotony of the soil.

I think of those abstracted sedentary individuals who spend their lives in an office rattling their fingers on a keyboard: ‘connected’, as they say, but to what? To information mutating between one second and the next, floods of images and numbers, pictures and graphs. And after work it’s the subway, the train, always speed, the gaze now glued to the telephone screen, more touches and strokes and messages scrolling past, images … and night falls, when they still haven’t seen anything of the day. Television, another screen. What dimension do they live in, without dust raised by movement, without contact, in what featureless space, in what time, where neither rain nor shine count? Those lives, disconnected from roads and routes, make them forget our condition, as if erosion by changing weather over time didn’t exist.

A Taoist sage said: ‘Feet on the ground occupy very little space; it’s through all the space they don’t occupy that we can walk.’ Which means in the first place that people don’t keep still. Watch a man waiting on his feet, poorly set: he prances, tramples, quickly feels chafed. He doesn’t know what to do with his arms, swinging them weakly or clamping them against his body: he’s in unstable equilibrium. When he starts to walk it all comes back immediately: nature unfolds, expresses itself, the wellspring of being relaxes, the rhythm resumes. The foot finds the right balance.

Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.

In the end, to say that it’s through what remains to me of the journey that I can walk makes obvious reference to the Taoist void: that void that isn’t empty nothingness but pure virtuality, a void creating inspiration and play, like the play of letters and sounds that makes the life of words. Walking in that way articulates the depths of the space and brings the landscape to life.

To end, I would note that in many sporting activities, joy comes from the transgression of gravity, from victory over it through speed, height, vigour, the invitation to go ever higher. Walking on the other hand is to experience gravity at every step, the inexorable attraction of the earth’s mass. The passage from running to rest is a violence. You hold your sides, you pour with sweat, your face is scarlet. You stop because the body’s giving way, you’re out of breath. When you walk, on the other hand, stopping is like a natural completion: you stop to welcome a new perspective, to breathe in the landscape. And then when you start off again, there isn’t a break. It’s more like a continuity between walking and rest, not a matter of transgressing gravity, but completing it.

Thus, walking reminds us constantly of our finiteness: bodies heavy with unmannerly needs, nailed to the definitive ground. Walking doesn’t mean raising yourself, it doesn’t mean getting the better of gravity, or letting speed and height delude you on your mortal condition; it means reconciling yourself to it through that exposure to the mass of the ground, the fragility of the body, the slow, remorseless sinking movement. Walking means precisely resigning yourself to being an ambulant, forward-leaning body. But the really astonishing thing is how that slow resignation, that immense lassitude give us the joy of being. Of being no more than that, of course, but in utter bliss. Our leaden bodies fall back to earth at every step, as if to take root there again. Walking is an invitation to die standing up.

~~A Philosophy Of Walking -by-  Frédéric Gros

Day 276: Galileo’S Daughter

Most Illustrious Lord Father,

We are terribly saddened by the death of your cherished sister, our dear aunt; but our sorrow at losing her is as nothing compared to our concern for your sake, because your suffering will be all the greater, Sire, as truly you have no one else left in your world, now that she, who could not have been more precious to you, has departed, and therefore we can only imagine how you sustain the severity of such a sudden and completely unexpected blow. And while I tell you that we share deeply in your grief, you would do well to draw even greater comfort from contemplating the general state of human misery, since we are all of us here on Earth like strangers and wayfarers, who soon will be bound for our true homeland in Heaven, where there is perfect happiness, and where we must hope that your sister’s blessed soul has already gone. Thus, for the love of God, we pray you, Sire, to be consoled and to put yourself in His hands, for, as you know so well, that is what He wants of you; to do otherwise would be to injure yourself and hurt us, too, because we lament grievously when we hear that you are burdened and troubled, as we have no other source of goodness in this world but you.

I will say no more, except that with all our hearts we fervently pray the Lord to comfort you and be with you always, and we greet you dearly with our ardent love.

FROM SAN MATTEO, THE 10TH DAY OF MAY 1623.
Most affectionate daughter,
S. Maria Celeste

The day after his sister Virginia’s funeral, the already world-renowned scientist Galileo Galilei received this, the first of 124 surviving letters from the once-voluminous correspondence he carried on with his elder daughter. She alone of Galileo’s three children mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante.

Galileo’s daughter, born of his long illicit liaison with the beautiful Marina Gamba of Venice, entered the world in the summer heat of a new century, on August 13, 1600—the same year the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for insisting, among his many heresies and blasphemies, that the Earth traveled around the Sun, instead of remaining motionless at the center of the universe. In a world that did not yet know its place, Galileo would engage this same cosmic conflict with the Church, treading a dangerous path between the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic and the heavens he revealed through his telescope.

Galileo christened his daughter Virginia, in honor of his “cherished sister.” But because he never married Virginia’s mother, he deemed the girl herself unmarriageable. Soon after her thirteenth birthday, he placed her at the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, where she lived out her life in poverty and seclusion.

Virginia adopted the name Maria Celeste when she became a nun, in a gesture that acknowledged her father’s fascination with the stars. Even after she professed a life of prayer and penance, she remained devoted to Galileo as though to a patron saint. The doting concern evident in her condolence letter was only to intensify over the ensuing decade as her father grew old, fell more frequently ill, pursued his singular research nevertheless, and published a book that brought him to trial by the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

The “we” of Suor Maria Celeste’s letter speaks for herself and her sister, Livia—Galileo’s strange, silent second daughter, who also took the veil and vows at San Matteo to become Suor Arcangela. Meanwhile their brother, Vincenzio, the youngest child of Galileo and Marina’s union, had been legitimized in a fiat by the grand duke of Tuscany and gone off to study law at the University of Pisa.
   
Thus Suor Maria Celeste consoled Galileo for being left alone in his world, with daughters cloistered in the separate world of nuns, his son not yet a man, his former mistress dead, his family of origin all deceased or dispersed.

Galileo, now fifty-nine, also stood boldly alone in his world-view, as Suor Maria Celeste knew from reading the books he wrote and the letters he shared with her from colleagues and critics all over Italy, as well as from across the continent beyond the Alps. Although her father had started his career as a professor of mathematics, teaching first at Pisa and then at Padua, every philosopher in Europe tied Galileo’s name to the most startling series of astronomical discoveries ever claimed by a single individual.

In 1609, when Suor Maria Celeste was still a child in Padua, Galileo had set a telescope in the garden behind his house and turned it skyward. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations; the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely packed stars; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of the Moon; and a retinue of four attendant bodies traveled regularly around Jupiter like a planetary system in miniature.

“I render infinite thanks to God,” Galileo intoned after those nights of wonder, “for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries.”

The newfound worlds transformed Galileo’s life. He won appointment as chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke in 1610, and moved to Florence to assume his position at the court of Cosimo de’ Medici. He took along with him his two daughters, then ten and nine years old, but he left Vincenzio, who was only four when greatness descended on the family, to live a while longer in Padua with Marina.

Galileo found himself lionized as another Columbus for his conquests. Even as he attained the height of his glory, however, he attracted enmity and suspicion. For instead of opening a distant land dominated by heathens, Galileo trespassed on holy ground. Hardly had his first spate of findings stunned the populace of Europe before a new wave followed: He saw dark spots creeping continuously across the face of the Sun, and “the mother of loves,” as he called the planet Venus, cycling through phases from full to crescent, just as the Moon did.
All his observations lent credence to the unpopular Sun-centered universe of Nicolaus Copernicus, which had been introduced over half a century previously, but foundered on lack of evidence.

Galileo’s efforts provided the beginning of a proof. And his flamboyant style of promulgating his ideas—sometimes in bawdy humorous writings, sometimes loudly at dinner parties and staged debates—transported the new astronomy from the Latin Quarters of the universities into the public arena. In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.

Galileo obeyed their orders, silencing himself on the subject. For seven cautious years he turned his efforts to less perilous pursuits, such as harnessing his Jovian satellites in the service of navigation, to help sailors discover their longitude at sea. He studied poetry and wrote literary criticism. Modifying his telescope, he developed a compound microscope. “I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration,” he reported, “among which the flea is quite horrible, the gnat and the moth very beautiful; and with great satisfaction I have seen how flies and other little animals can walk attached to mirrors, upside down.”

Shortly after his sister’s death in May of 1623, however, Galileo found reason to return to the Sun-centered universe like a moth to a flame. That summer a new pope ascended the throne of Saint Peter in Rome. The Supreme Pontiff Urban VIII brought to the Holy See an intellectualism and an interest in scientific investigation not shared by his immediate predecessors. Galileo knew the man personally—he had demonstrated his telescope to him and the two had taken the same side one night in a debate about floating bodies after a banquet at the Florentine court. Urban, for his part, had admired Galileo so long and well that he had even written a poem for him, mentioning the sights revealed by “Galileo’s glass.”

The presence of the poet pope encouraged Galileo to proceed with a long-planned popular dissertation on the two rival theories of cosmology: the Sun-centered and the Earth-centered, or, in his words, the “two chief systems of the world.”

It might have been difficult for Suor Maria Celeste to condone this course—to reconcile her role as a bride of Christ with her father’s position as potentially the greatest enemy of the Catholic Church since Martin Luther. But instead she approved of his endeavors because she knew the depth of his faith. She accepted Galileo’s conviction that God had dictated the Holy Scriptures to guide men’s spirits but proffered the unraveling of the universe as a challenge to their intelligence. Understanding her father’s prodigious capacity in this pursuit, she prayed for his health, for his longevity, for the fulfillment of his “every just desire.” As the convent’s apothecary, she concocted elixirs and pills to strengthen him for his studies and protect him from epidemic diseases. Her letters, animated by her belief in Galileo’s innocence of any heretical depravity, carried him through the ordeal of his ultimate confrontation with Urban and the Inquisition in 1633.

No detectable strife ever disturbed the affectionate relationship between Galileo and his daughter. Theirs is not a tale of abuse or rejection or intentional stifling of abilities. Rather, it is a love story, a tragedy, and a mystery.

~~Galileo’S Daughter- A Historical Memoir of Science, faith, and love  -by- Dava Sobel

Day 275: Drumming for the Gods

I met Felipe García Villamil, a master Afro-Cuban drummer and craftsman, in 1992, several years after I began to do research on the music of the Afro-Cuban religious traditions, especially Santería. During my research, I frequently heard Felipe's name mentioned by drummers and students in the Afro-Cuban dance class I was attending at the Boys Harbor in New York. At that time I was struggling with the constraints and problems posed by research into a corpus of music linked to Santería, where the tradition of secrecy is still an imperative that many practitioners adhere to, and where musical knowledge is transmitted through long periods of apprenticeship and through a series of networks that are not easily accessed, especially by women. I thought that identifying a knowledgeable teacher who would agree to work with me was the best way to further my research. In January 1992, I went for the first time to Felipe's house in the Bronx to receive a chekeré lesson. This marked the beginning of weekly trips to the Bronx that lasted, but for a few breaks, until the end of 1994.

After a month of chekeré lessons, I decided to concentrate on collecting religious chants and to make this repertoire the focus of my dissertation. I explained to Felipe the nature of my work and asked him if he had any reservations. At that time Felipe's activities as a ritual drummer were limited; lacking connections with the network through which batá drummers customarily get hired to perform at religious rituals, he was quite isolated and had concentrated his musical activities on teaching. His aim was to train a group of drummers in the Matanzas style of batá drumming, a style almost unknown in New York, where all the batá drummers were familiar with the style from Havana. Teaching had also become for him a way to struggle against forgetfulness, a way to remember. He viewed our work together as an opportunity to ‘‘let people know the way things were done in Matanzas and back there in Cuba.”

Felipe and I conceived these sessions as classes and followed the etiquette of the student-teacher relationship. At the beginning of each session I would turn the tape recorder on, and Felipe would begin to sing. He gradually began to teach me the large body of chants used to praise or address the Santería deities—the orichas—in ritual. When he began to sing for a particular oricha, he would tell me some of the myths or legends—patakís—that narrate events of the lives of the orichas and tell of their idiosyncrasies, personalities, and demeanors. However, the chants and the music would always bring memories of Cuba back to Felipe, and he would then tell me stories about his family and his life “back there.” Sometimes he got so carried away that we would end up not working on the chants, and he spent most of the time reminiscing. He would then apologize and promise to organize “the lesson” better for the next meeting, making sure we went over a large number of chants. Most of the time I would let the train of his thought unwind without interrupting him. However, on some occasions, moved by concern that I would never “get my work done,” I would take advantage of a pause between stories to try to bring him back to the chants by asking him politely to sing for me a chant for this or that oricha.

As my work with the chants progressed, my relationship with Felipe and his family—Valeria, his wife, and his children Ajamu, Miguel, Atoyebi, and Tomasa—grew closer. My lessons in some way became part of the family life and were interrupted and enriched according to the unpredictable and sometimes hectic rhythms of Felipe's everyday routines. After several months of working in the repertory of chants, Felipe, who knew of my desire to learn to play batá drums, invited me to join the lessons he was giving to a woman drummer, Nanette García. He had already explained to me his position with respect to the prohibition that bans women from playing sacred batá drums. He believed that women should never be allowed to play a consecrated set of drums; yet, he saw no harm in teaching to women the music, the rhythms that are played for each oricha, as long as these were performed on unconsecrated drums or on congas. This marked the beginning of my involvement with the drums, which lasted until November 1994, the last time Nanette, Felipe, and I played batá drums together.

The stories that Felipe used to interpolate between chants or after having taught us a batá rhythm constitute the basis for my dissertation and for this book, and they cover Felipe's activities as a musician until 1994. Music carried powerful associations for Felipe, and it was music that triggered his reminiscences. Thus, even after I had decided to use his stories as the main focus of my dissertation, I eschewed formal interviews and limited my questions to clarifying the stories or arguments that arose out of a musical experience, be it a chant, a rhythm, or a performing technique. Yet aside from music, another stimulus would launch Felipe into long monologues and explanations. This happened typically after Valeria read to him from some of the books that began to be published and circulated in New York about the traditions and the music of the Afro-Cuban religions, or after he had an encounter with someone who had in any way questioned his knowledge or his credentials. Aware of the nature of my project, he wanted to explain to me his view about a particular issue, taking this as an opportunity to “set the record straight.”

~~Drumming for the Gods : The Life and Times of Felipe García Villamil -by- María Teresa Vélez

Day 274: Nomads of Eastern Tibet

My informants unanimously agreed that birth in Zilphukhog was a simple business. They were astonished by the apparent fuss and ado women in their new exile home of Nepal associate with child birth. During much of their pregnancy, women in Zilphukhog performed the normal daily chores, and only weak or under-nourished pregnant women took extra nourishment in the form of milk, tsampa, butter, etc. A quotation from an early 20th century Khampa man might give an inkling of the pre-modern Tibetan view of the casualness of birth: “The Tibetan woman is fortunate above others in accomplishing her childbirth easily. She may go to the mountain for wood and bring back a child in her gown”. This may be a far-fetched statement, but it does give a rough idea of the manner of and attitudes towards childbirth in pre-modern rural Kham. Despite the fact that birth was welcomed, especially the birth of boys, child delivery was considered to be somewhat defiling, thus efforts were made to separate it to a degree from the domestic space.

Delivery in Zilphukhog usually took place in an improvised hut for the well-to-do women, and under a simple shelter for the less well-off women. Yudrug-tsang, Druchung-tsang, Gechung-tsang, and other households of means usually built a dung-hut for the expectant mother in the winter camp, or pitched a small tent in the summer camp. When Sokey’s first child was born while working for Gechung-tsang, she delivered it under a yak wool blanket that was tied to one side of the tent. When she had established an independent household, she delivered her children in the household tent, but she had to cut the umbilical cord herself without her mother’s assistance. Delivering children in the household tent entailed two things: that (a) the family had neither the means nor the necessary manpower to segregate the mother when she delivered children, which in turn necessitated her to overlook the pollution element; and (b), because of (a) the mother could not afford to rest for many days unless she had grown up children who could take care of the family herds.

A dependent woman’s midwife was usually her own mother, and then perhaps only for the first birth, as was the case with Sokey. However, Yudrug-tsang, Gechung-tsang, and other affluent houses had a professional midwife. Such women advised the expectant mother what to do at the delivery, and they cut the umbilical cord and buried the placenta. The baby was rarely washed, but it was cleaned with a piece of soft cloth.

Those women who could afford it remained in bed for about a week to recuperate after delivery. However, they were not allowed to enter the main domestic space of the household tent until five to seven days had passed. On the seventh day, a ritual ceremony was performed by a monk to cleanse or purify the mother and the child from any birth defilement. The ceremony consisted of citing religious formulae and sprinkling tru-chu (khrus chu) or “cleansing-water” on the mother and the child from a silver vase. Now they became unpolluted members of the family. Some months later, the baby was usually taken to a high lama or a trulku (sprul sku)—an incarnate lama—to receive a name. Some fresh butter was applied to the crown of the child’s head which, apparently, was meant to invigorate it. The lama or trulku gave religiously inspired names, such as Chimi (“Immortal”), Sangye (“Buddha”), Tenzin (“Doctrine-Holder”), or Namgyal (“Victorious”) and Dolma (“Saviouress”). The average dependent could not afford to purify and name his child in the above manner. Consequently, many dependents never had lama-given names, and were known instead by the nick names they obtained. For instance, these were names like Shigo (“Birdhead”), Keyga (“Happy”), Pulu (“Round like a ball of butter”), which described the physical features or dispositions of the referent persons. Inviting a lama or going to him not only necessitated presenting a gift or donation, it entailed a break in the routine of domestic production, which dependents were often ill-prepared to do.

When a baby was able to eat solid food, it was given a mixture of tsampa, milk, and butter thrice daily. A mother might also chew tsampa first and then feed it to her child with her index finger. A baby was not weaned until it was approximately 2 or 3 years old. Goat’s milk and curds were given to the child, and he was not given meat, nor was he allowed even to look at it. The rationale behind this was to discourage children from becoming “addicted” to meat, as it was incompatible with the tenets of Buddhism. Although the mother did not use any kind of nappy to dispose of the wastes of the child and keep it dry, a very practical alternative method was employed. She made a triangular or v-shaped felt sleeping bag for her baby. The bag was half-filled with very fine dung-powder on which the child slept or sat. Every time the child soiled the dung-powder, the part that was made wet was taken out and the bag was replenished with fresh dung-powder. Shifting and replenishing the dung-powder aptly ensured that the child did not suffer from sores on its buttock. A well-to-do mother might use soft cloths for the same purpose. The baby’s felt sleeping bag could be moved around according to the mother’s convenience, as she had to be vigilant lest the baby fall out, get trampled by animals, or be suffocated by the pet animals living around the tent, such as dogs or cats. As the baby grew up, it was given more solid food, and when it was able to crawl or walk it was tethered to a rope so that it might not move beyond a given area, which could be dangerous as the mother might often be preoccupied with her daily domestic chores. During seasonal movements between camps, the baby was tucked in a spacious pocket of a gown (paktsag), or loaded on a harmless and hornless yak in a pannier whose weight was counterbalanced by another pannier containing an object of equal weight on the opposite side of the yak saddle.

At the age of five or six, children already began contributing to the household work, as can be seen clearly in figure 19, “Phases of pastoral working life in Zilphukhog”. These very young children were given the task of looking after cheese being dried in the sun, and helping to separate lambs from their mothers at milking time. Grandchildren and grandparents were jointly delegated the task of driving away crows, goats, sheep etc. from cheese and other food products which were being processed around the camp. As children grew bigger, the nature of their work became tougher and they had to become more responsible. In their early adolescence, they no longer dealt with lambs and cheese and instead they herded fully grown ovines such as sheep and goats. Children in their mid-teens were responsible persons who herded the main pastoral livestock, the yak and dri. At the age of 18 or 19 adolescents reached adulthood, which meant that they became marriageable.

Infanticide was not practiced in Zilphukhog. This is understandable in view of the fact that both Yudrug-tsang and the dependents were determined to increase the population. However, a discriminating attitude to the sex of the child was prevalent. The birth of sons was celebrated and that of girls was not equally appreciated. The birth of three, five or seven sons was prestigious and auspicious because the three numbers had religious connotations. The number three is associated with at least two triadic concepts in the Buddhist doctrine. One is the “Three Jewels” or Konchok Sum, which refers to the Buddha, his teachings known as the Dharma, and the Sangha or monastic community. The second derives from the Buddhist pantheon where three patron deities or gompo (mgon po) are identified together as a set, being Chenrezig, Chagna Dorjee, and Jambeyang, and collectively called Rigsum Gompo, meaning the “Three Protectors”, or more literally, “Lords of the Three [Buddha] Families”). The number five reflects the image of Gyalwa Ringnya (the “Five Dhyani Buddhas”), while seven is also sacred in the Buddhist pantheon. The assumed superiority of brothers born in the above numbers was related to such popular number symbolism among Tibetans.

I have already outlined above the reasons for the perceived and actual importance of men, and here I shall discuss why women were relegated to an inferior status. Giving birth to many girls was scorned, and being an infertile woman was stigmatized. Infertile women were considered to be innately threatening or defiling. They were not allowed to be in the vicinity of human or animal birthing. Their presence was believed to jeopardize the success of the event in progress. Neither were they allowed to enter the tent of a sick man for their intrinsic harmful nature would only exacerbate his illness. Infertile women were known as rab-cheg (rabs chad) or “lineage cutters”. The stigmatization of infertile women reflects a philosophical predicament or paradox of Tibetan society. They theoretically found themselves in a sort of double bind situation, where the precepts of Buddhism and the exigency of societal necessity were diametrically opposed. The former advocated the discontinuity of humanity, that is, the attainment of Nirvana through non-rebirth, while the latter demanded the perpetuity of society through successive reproduction. The paradox can be seen in the stigmatization of the infertile women whose sterility logically complies with the Buddhist tenets.

~~Nomads of Eastern Tibet -by- Rinzin Thargyal

Day 273: Atheist Manifesto

Enter the forgers. Clearly, Christ existed — like Ulysses and Zarathustra, of whom it is hardly important to know whether they were flesh-and-blood people living at a precise time and in an identifiable place. Jesus’s existence has not been historically established. No contemporary documentation of the event, no archaeological proof, nothing certain exists today to attest to the truth of a real presence at this meeting point between two worlds, abolishing one and naming its successor.

No tomb, no shroud, no archives, except for a sepulcher invented in 325 by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine. She must have been a woman of supreme gifts, since we are also indebted to her for the discovery of Golgotha and of the titulus, the wooden fragment bearing the charges brought against Jesus. Then there is that piece of cloth from Turin, which carbon-14 dating has situated in the thirteenth century CE, and which only a miracle could have wrapped around Christ’s corpse more than a thousand years earlier! Finally, there are of course two or three vague references in ancient texts — Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus — but in copies made several centuries after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus and — significantly — after the success of his supporters was assured.

On the other hand, how can we deny Jesus’s conceptual existence? For the same reason as Heraclitus’s Fire, Empedocles’s Friendship, Plato’s Ideas, or Epicurus’s Pleasure, Jesus functions wonderfully as an Idea on which a vision of the world is articulated, a conception of the real, a theory of a sinful past and of future salvation. We must leave it to lovers of impossible debates to decide on the question of Jesus’s existence and address ourselves to the questions that matter. What exactly is this construction named Jesus? What was its purpose? Its aims? To serve whose interests? Who created this fiction? How did the myth take shape? How did this fable evolve in the centuries that followed?

The answers to these questions require a detour via a hysterical thirteenth apostle, Paul of Tarsus (a “bishop of foreign affairs,” as he called himself), the author of a successful coup d’état (the emperor Constantine), and his successors (Justinian, Theodosius, Valentinian) who incited Christians to despoil, torture, and slaughter pagans and burn pagan libraries. From Jesus the invisible ectoplasm to Jesus the absolute master of an empire and then of the world, history evolves alongside the family tree of our civilization. It begins in a historical fog in Palestine, continues in Rome, and then settles into the gold, pomp, and purple of Christian power in Byzantium. It thrives even today in millions of minds formatted by the unbelievable story — built on the wind, on the improbable, on contradictions that the church has invariably dispelled through bouts of political violence.

So we know that most existing documents are skillfully executed forgeries. Burned libraries, repeated orgies of vandalism, accidental fires, Christian persecutions and autos-da-fé, earthquakes, the media revolution that replaced papyrus with parchment and presented the copyists, sectarian zealots of Christ, with a choice between the documents to be saved and those to be cast into outer darkness . . . Then there were the liberties taken by monks who established editions by ancient authors to which they added what they considered (with the hindsight of the conquerors) to be missing. It all added up to a philosophical nightmare.

Nothing of what remains can be trusted. The Christian archives are the result of ideological fabrication. Even the writings of Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, or Tacitus, who mention in a few hundred words the existence of Christ and his faithful in the first century of our era, obey the rules of intellectual forgery. When an anonymous monk recopied the Antiquities of the Jewish historian Josephus (arrested and turned into a double agent, a collaborator with Roman power), when that monk had before him the Annals of Tacitus or Suetonius’s Lives of Twelve Caesars (and was astonished to find no mention of the story he believed in), he added a passage in his own hand and in all good faith, without shame and without a second thought, without wondering whether he was doing wrong or committing a forgery. He could do it the more easily because in those days one did not approach a book with the eye of a modern reader, concerned with the truth and respectful of the authenticity of the text and the author’s rights . . . Even today we read these writers of antiquity in manuscripts copied several centuries after they were written, and contemporaneous with Christian copyists who redeemed their contents by arranging them to swim with the flow of history.

Hysteria crystallized. The ultra-rationalists — from Prosper Alfaric to Raoul Vaneigem — were probably right to deny the historical existence of Jesus. The closed corpus of texts, documents, and information we possess has been pored over for decades without ever producing a definitive conclusion or winning general approval. From Jesus the fiction to Jesus the Son of God the spectrum is broad, and the number of theories advanced offers equal justification to the aggressive atheism of the Rationalist Union and to the beliefs of Opus Dei.

What can be said is that the period in which Jesus supposedly appeared teemed with individuals of his kind, fire-breathing prophets, exalted madmen, hysterics convinced of the rightness of their grotesque truths, heralds of apocalypse. A history of that incandescent century would include countless such examples. The Gnostic philosophers themselves proceeded from the millenarian effervescence and fiery lunacy which marked that period of anguish, fear, and change in a world nobody understood. The old was crumbling, splintering, threatening to collapse. And that threatened collapse generated fears to which certain individuals responded with frankly irrational proposals.

On the banks of the Jordan, a region familiar to Jesus and his apostles, a man named Theudas claimed to be Joshua, the prophet of promised salvation (and also an etymon, or earlier form, of the name Jesus) . . . Arriving from his native Egypt with four hundred followers, all spoiling for a fight, he sought an end to Roman power and claimed the ability to divide a river with his words alone, thus allowing his men to advance and put an end to the colonial power. Roman soldiers beheaded this poor man’s Moses before he could display his hydraulic talents.

On another occasion, in 45, Jacob and Simon, sons of Judas the Galilean — yet another place-name familiar to Jesus — began an uprising that ended as badly as that led by their father in the year 6. The Romans crucified the rebels. Menahem, grandson of a family prolific in freedom fighters, followed in his ancestors’ footsteps and rebelled in 66, triggering the Jewish War that ended in 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem.

In this first half of the first century, prophets, messiahs, and bearers of good tidings abounded. Some invited their supporters to follow them into the desert, there to witness prodigies and manifestations of divinity. A visionary from Egypt with forty thousand followers occupied the Garden of Olives, another area associated with Jesus. He claimed that his voice alone could shatter the walls of Jerusalem and lay the city open to his men. Once again, the Roman soldiery dispersed them. Multitudes of stories describe this Jewish determination to unseat Roman power with the sole help of religious, mystical, millenarian, and prophetic discourse announcing the good tidings predicted in the Old Testament.

Their resistance was legitimate: the wish to eject occupying armies seeking to force their language, laws, and customs on the conquered always justifies resistance, rebellion, refusal, and struggle, even armed struggle. But to believe — spurred only by their belief in the impossible — that they could oppose the world’s most battle-tested troops, hardened in all the major conflicts of the day, trained and professional, possessing impressive equipment and full powers, merely transformed their magnificent struggle into battles lost in advance. Brandished like a battle flag before the Roman legions, God was outmatched.

Jesus thus embodied the period’s hysteria, its belief that with goodwill alone and with action undertaken in the name of God, one could conquer and triumph. Breaking down walls with one’s voice instead of with battering rams and siege artillery, crossing rivers with a word and not in military craft worthy of the name, opposing battle-hardened troops with hymns, prayers, and amulets and not with spears, swords, or cavalry: there was nothing there to trouble the Roman army of occupation. Mere scratches on the Roman hide.

The name of Jesus crystallized the diffuse and disparate energies wasted against the imperial machinery of the day. It furnished the emblematic patronymic of all Jews who (armed only with their will and the belief that their God could miraculously free them from the colonial yoke) refused to accept Roman occupation. But if God’s power and his love of his people were so great, surely he could have spared them from having to endure, even briefly, the occupiers’ unjust laws. Why would he tolerate such injustice before encompassing its abolition?

Thus, whether Jesus really lived or not must be reduced to the status of a mere hypothesis. This Jesus may well have been the son of a carpenter and a virgin. He may well have been born in Nazareth, he may well have given lessons as a child to the doctors of the law and spoken as a grown-up to fishermen, craftsmen, and other humble folk working on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He may well have had more trouble with Jewish communities than with the Roman authorities, accustomed as they were to these sporadic and unimportant rebellions. But he synthesized, focused, sublimated, and crystallized what roiled the period and the history of the first century of his era. Jesus gave a name to Jewish rejection of Roman domination.

Etymology supports this claim. “Jesus” means “God saves, has saved, will save.” There could be no clearer expression of the name’s symbolic freight: his very name pointed to his destiny. The patronymic heralded a future that was already known, and implied that the adventure ahead was written somewhere in a corner of heaven. Thenceforth, history was content to allow its revelation to unfold day by day. How could one imagine that such a given name did not mandate the fulfillment of these earlier prophecies and potentialities? Or what better way of saying that the construction of Jesus implies a forgery reaching down to the smallest details, itself serving as a pretext and an occasion for this ontological catalyst?

~~Atheist Manifesto- The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -by- Michel Onfray

Day 272: Anti-Capitalism- A Beginner’s Guide

In a book about anti-capitalism we are naturally enough going to hear all sorts of reasons why it is that we should be opposed to capitalism. Many of these arguments will differ in sometimes surprising and indeed conflicting ways; but one thing they will all have in common is that they know what they are against: ‘Capitalism’ – or, more likely, refinements of the same such as ‘neoliberal capitalism’, ‘transnational capitalism’, ‘economic globalisation’, ‘corporate capitalism’. Whilst anti-capitalist literature is replete with reasons why one should oppose capitalism, they are often less helpful on what capitalism is and how it differs from other forms of social organisation. They are often less than forthcoming, too, on why it is that capitalism is ‘hegemonic’, why it appears natural or normal to so many (as it does). Thus what the beginner to the subject might already have asked him or herself is how it is that anyone came to think that capitalism was worth defending in the first place. So, thinking in terms of how to initiate the beginner into the nature of anti-capitalism, it is as good a place as any to start with some brief thoughts on capitalism itself. In particular we need to think about how capitalism established itself as a dominant economic system, and one accepted as rational and desirable by many across both the developed and developing world.

First of all it will be helpful to think about the central term capitalism itself. What exactly is capitalism? There are two ways of answering this question. The first is to think of it in abstract terms, that is in terms of what it represents as a relationship between people. The second is to think in more historical terms, i.e. of how it is that capitalism came about, and how it developed into the system we see before us today. Why do we need two ways of thinking about the same object? The easy answer is that since the dawn of capitalism in the early modern period (roughly the seventeenth century onwards) capitalism has obviously changed a great deal. Indeed it has changed so much that it is remarkable to be talking about the same ‘thing’ at all, the world of the twenty-first century being radically different to that of even the nineteenth century, let alone the seventeenth. Yet economists and commentators still agree for the most part that there is a fundamental continuity between then and now. What then is the continuity? Fortunately there is little controversy over the matter. Capitalism is not in this sense a particularly contested term in itself. What is contested is whether it is just, rational or otherwise in the best interests of humanity. In abstract terms it is said that we have capitalism where we see the following:

• private ownership over the means of production: land, factories, businesses;
• paid employment or, to put it another way, ‘wage labour’;
• creation of goods – or the offering of services – for profit via a system of exchange, i.e. the market.

This is a pretty anodyne definition, which is to say that most of those who take some professional interest in the matter would regard it with a shrug of the shoulders. This is what is intended. We are looking for a base line here: something that can be agreed on, so that we can understand exactly what it is that pro-capitalists celebrate and anti-capitalists object to. Looking at the definition other questions will, however, arise. Beginners as well as cynics might think that capitalism looks in this view utterly basic to human experience. What other kinds of economic relations might there be?

There is some substance to the concern, the chief among these being the relationship between capitalism and the market, or ‘commodity production’. Hasn’t there always been a market, and thus capitalism? The market or commodity production is indeed much older than capitalism, and there are those who would insist that virtually every society known to us embraced some form of market exchange, whether that be the exchange of shark teeth, beetroot or gold pieces. This is actually a very important point in relation to questions raised in relation to anti-capitalism, and so the need for clarity here is acute. The point is that the market is not an invention of capitalism, nor does the market of itself lead to capitalism. Markets have existed alongside all manner of different economic regimes and different forms of ownership. The mere exchange of equivalents does not necessitate or make inevitable wage labour, which is in turn the key to understanding the distinctiveness of capitalist production. Nor is the market in this sense something new or confined to capitalist economies. Markets have existed for longer than human history itself, which is not to say that the market is inevitable or necessary to human life as such, only that markets frequently arise in the course of human interrelationships, and will probably go on doing so as long as people want to swap things. But the point is, the market is not capitalism, and capitalism is not the market. So what is?

Looking back at the definition what becomes apparent is that one of the distinctive features of capitalism is that it serves a particular kind of market, namely that for labour. In pre-capitalist times labour was sometimes bought, but more often than not it was procured by some other means, classically by the institution of slavery, and more recently by bondage, vassalage, or other arrangement that rendered individuals directly subservient to someone else. Through force of arms, conquest, or some other more or less violent process people were made subjects of a lord or noble. As a slave or serf a person had little or no control over his or her own life, but rather was a mere adjunct of an ‘estate’ to which he or she was personally tied. As feudalism and slavery were overthrown or displaced, so those who were liberated became ‘masterless’ men (and women), freed to try and procure a living for themselves, usually through selling their labour to someone who needed it for the factories, mines and workhouses that accompanied the process of industrialisation. Here, in short, we see a process by which the economic relation of feudalism, namely control over the person is transformed into the capitalist economic relation in which some people buy other people’s labour power. Whereas in the market place of Ancient Rome or of ante bellum America it was people who were bought and sold, in the capitalist market place it is our labour power that is bought and sold. But what is our labour power bought and sold for? Why do people need to buy and sell labour power?

~~Anti-Capitalism- A Beginner’s Guide -by- Simon Tormey