Part the First: Functional Art from the Enigmatic Daunians. William Morris famously wrote, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Of course, his beauty in response to the immiseration of the working class was for the English rich but nothing is perfect. Our old house is filled with books (my much better half is an indulgent, very patient woman), recycled furniture well made in North Carolina before the Neoliberal Dispensation, and functional pottery produced by local artists. We are nearing capacity for books but there is always room for more pottery. While catching up the other day I came upon Daunian kyathos: A 2,700-year-old ceramic cup from Italy decorated with an exuberant-looking, bug-eyed fellow. Indeed, bug-eyed and beautiful:
Centuries before the Romans took over southern Italy, the heel of the peninsula was occupied by the Daunians, whose unique pottery and grave markers are some of the only remains of this enigmatic group. One common archaeological discovery is the Daunian kyathos, a one-handled, painted piece of pottery that may have functioned as a ladle for mixing wine.
The Daunians did not leave any literary records, so much about their culture is unknown. They were first mentioned in ancient literature in the seventh century B.C., and they were taken over by the Romans around 275 B.C., after the end of the Pyrrhic War. The Daunians were mainly farmers and animal breeders who traded with the Greeks and the Illyrians across the Adriatic Sea in what is now Croatia.
Archaeologists excavated the Daunian city of Herdonia, in the present-day province of Foggia, for four decades and discovered that the city was one of the primary places where Daunian potters produced the “extraordinary” vessels “that rank among the finest products of pre-Roman Italian ceramics,” Popular Archaeology reported.
The Daunians’ unusual style of ceramic decoration can be seen in their take on the single-handled cup that art historians call a kyathos. The base is a small, rimmed plate about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) in diameter, and a human figure with raised arms and wide-open eyes has been attached to the side as a handle. The figure is decorated with geometric designs, and a stylized, bird-like figure is in the middle of the base. This kyathos was found at Herdonia and is in the collection of the Civic Museum of Foggia.
I would say these vessels “rank among the finest products” produced by any human at any time. We will never know what how the Daunians used this beautiful artifact, perhaps to mix wine or medicine, but that does not matter. I have seen a fair amount of Etruscan art. We now have a reason to visit Foggia, should the opportunity ever arise. Given the current state of the world, it makes me especially proud to be a member of the species that produced this kyathos.
And everyone has a bit of archaeologist in his or her soul. Not long ago I had reason to dig up a water line in my back yard (don’t ask). I cut my hand on a broken bottle that had been discarded along with other kitchen items more than 140 years ago, when the kitchen of my house was a small separate building according to the earliest tax map I have seen. This was a very minor thing, but a link to a living past, when the antebellum houses on my street were built of un-planed 2×12 heart-pine lumber milled on the site. No termite need apply…
Part the Second: All Life Is Local. And there is one more bookstore to visit, in Wichita, Kansas, described here, On Warren Farha, Cultural Renewal, and the (Too Few) Bookish Places Where They Happen:
Recently Warren Farha—a devout Orthodox Christian, a soft-spoken descendant of Lebanese immigrants and merchants, a lifelong Wichitan, and, most relevantly, the founder of the marvelous Eighth Day Books—passed away after a sudden illness. News of his death ricocheted throughout numerous churches, groups, and communities—religious, literary, cultural, ethnic, and more—both local and distant. In retrospect, that kind of interconnectedness is a manifestation of Warren’s whole ecumenical and intellectual vocation, a manifestation that was made clear on the evening of Memorial Day, a couple of days after his passing. To my recollection, never in any of my conversations with Warren, nor in anything I’d ever heard him say, did he ever identify himself as a Porcher or articulate anything like a theory of localism. Yet his deeply localized work—building up a bookstore that he turned to after a family tragedy, which inspired many to both the connecting work of the sharing of words and ideas as well as the creation of communities of interest, nodes in a network that Warren gave birth to—is the very ideal of local work par excellence.
…
In the space that Warren created, and in the connections those associated with him built both within and out from that space, those inputs were primarily presented in terms of God’s gifts, and the Christian writings and traditions which articulated them, and for people who struggle with the conservative elements found in such writings and traditions, there’s bound to be tension. But Warren himself once defined “ecumenism” as “a turning toward one another, looking one another in the eyes, recognizing each other as human beings made in the image of God, loving one another, and discussing our differences with respect and love”; once, when I was talking to him about the challenges of keeping Eighth Day going during the pandemic, he commented—and pointedly emphasized to me that his words had more than just an economic meaning—that when it comes to creating spaces for ideas as well as commerce, “the door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something larger than themselves.” (emphasis added) In this way of thinking, I cannot imagine a better metaphor for, and a better invitation to, the forming and renewing of cultural connections and communities, than bookish places—libraries and, of course, bookstores. (emphasis added)
This remembrance of Warren Farha brings to my mind one of the best diagnoses of our distemper, written by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. These did exist in my small coastal city when I was young, and as soon as possible one wanted to be admitted to them. There you could learn to be a human being in the company of adults. As they said at the time, “little pictures should be seen and not heard.” But once you had something to say, respectfully, you were welcome.
And one other thing about these places, which Wendell Berry described as being a living part of his Port William, Kentucky. They are where you learn who can be depended upon to be undependable. This local knowledge makes life go much better for all concerned. Oh, and some of these third places are reappearing around these parts, and even in the utter ugliness that is Greater Atlanta. But not in the suburbs of the Great American Dream Nightmare. Imagine that!
Part the Third: Continuing on a Theme, Books are Making a Comeback. Sort of, according to Kristine Roome in Engelsberg Ideas in her The New Bibliomaniacs. I am not sure that rich people, young and old, collecting rare books for the hell of it is something new, but I have noticed a slight uptick in interest in analog devices –– books, paper, pen ––among medical students as some of them realize that downloading an AI generated pdf is not the same as mastering the material. We do not rank students, but they know who they are. And that those at the top of the class are seldom connected to their digital “helpers” seems to be registering. Or maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part…
Anyway, this reminded me of a book from about ten years ago, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why they Matter by David Sax, which was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Bill McKibben. This was true then, and it remains true today. From McKibben:
The notion of imagination and human connection as analog virtues comes across most powerfully in Sax’s discussion of education. Nothing has appealed to digital zealots as much as the idea of “transforming” our education systems with all manner of gadgetry. The “ed tech” market swells constantly, as more school systems hand out iPads or virtual-reality goggles; one of the earliest noble causes of the digerati was the One Laptop Per Child global initiative, led by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, a Garibaldi of the Internet age. The OLPC crew raised stupendous amounts of money and created machines that could run on solar power or could be cranked by hand, and they distributed them to poor children around the developing world, but alas, according to Sax, “academic studies demonstrated no gain in academic achievement.” Last year, in fact, the OECD reported that “students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”
At the other end of the educational spectrum from African villages, the most prestigious universities on earth have been busy putting courses on the Web and building MOOCs, “massive open online courses.” Sax misses the scattered successes of these ventures, often courses in computer programming or other technical subjects that aren’t otherwise available in much of the developing world. But he’s right that many of these classes have failed to engage the students who sign up, most of whom drop out.
Are MOOCs still a thing? I am too lazy to look it up but even coming from MIT they seemed to be more than faintly ridiculous. I do know that very few of the online digital/AI helpmeets for medical students turn our students into physicians that I want to be my doctor one of these days. As for other analog things, the vinyl record store a mile down the hill on what would be a High Street in Great Britain has become another Oldenburgian Third Place. It has also taken over the storefront next to the original spot, a good sign. Something is happening, maybe for the better. We really do not have to eat the dogfood that is AI inevitability. Yes, this is being written on a MacBook Pro that is connected to the internet. But my notes are made with ink using pen and paper. Old fashioned but effective. And easier to keep track of. No printer, no cloud, no external hard drive necessary.
Part the Fourth: Back to the Actual World as We Know It. The attack on American science continues, as described in this article in Nature, Exclusive: NSF puts new research grants to top universities on hold:
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) — a major funder of basic research — has restricted the flow of new research grants to a group of elite universities, Nature has learnt.
Internal agency documents obtained by Nature’s news team reveal that on 9 April, the NSF’s Office of Award Management (OAM), which finalizes grants and handles their finances, put limits on new funding to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton University in New Jersey; and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. A note applied to these universities in an NSF database reads: “Future Awards to Organization on Hold.” Since then, little fresh funding has been made available to these institutions by the NSF. (A note added to the original points out that a few awards have been released to these institutions.)
Having spent a good bit of my career, such as it is, at one of those “elite universities” and more time at very good universities one level down in the pecking order, it is easy to see the utility of spreading the research money around. But this actually happens. Both NIH and NSF have (or had) programs to make sure of this (COBRE and EPSCoR). In any case, I have never noticed serious discrimination based on institution, although it probably does happen at the margin. On more than one occasion in a basic science review panel, such a comment has been slapped down immediately. In the short-to-medium term the only thing this will bring about is the further eclipse of American science. In the long run, this will not matter at all. Other nations will take up the slack, with China (already) in the lead. But American science? It was good while it lasted, and I was privileged for a long time to be a minor contributor. RIP.
Part the Fifth: Longevity Mavens Are So Precious. Are we just going to give up and die like every other generation? Give up? That depends on the meaning of “give up.” Die? Most assuredly. Nevertheless, these people continue to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” even as a vanishingly small number of them have ever read their Dylan Thomas:
BERKELEY, Calif. (I know, shocking) — On a sunny Thursday morning, around 100 people sat on folding chairs beneath a lawn tent preparing to do a mass blood draw. Standing onstage with a tangle of morning glories as his backdrop, Robby Wade, CEO of at-home testing company Rythm Health, warned that the process might be a little chaotic given the size of the crowd
Wade explained how to activate the heating pads by popping a small silver coin, prompting a chorus of admiring oohs from the audience as rays of warming crystallized gel spread like the sun. Within a few minutes, everyone, me included, had matching stick-on Tasso devices trickling blood from our upper arms into test tubes that promised to give insights into the health of our hormones, metabolisms, various organs, and biological age.
“It’s like Theranos, but it works,” said the gentleman sitting in front of me, who had recently given a talk on bodyoids — creating headless sacs of organs to replace aging people’s failing hearts and kidneys. (emphasis added)
Like Theranos, but it works. That is probably the best description of the Longevity Movement, except there is no significant evidence it works. Yes, Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud (another book to read; they just won’t stop coming) from Stanford, naturally, from her very beginnings, but these conventional medical tests do work. For example, it is easy to monitor plasma glucose levels in real time, but there are no significant correlates with overall health in the absence of frank metabolic disease:
As the field works to make the showdown against death and aging mainstream, the longevity community is now in the midst of shifting from “a movement to really more of an industry,” said Christine Peterson, co-founder of the Foresight Institute, which focuses on research on longevity and nanotechnology.
But they also know there’s more work to be done. Many longevity people at the conference identified as a major hurdle the widespread public skepticism that greets their mission, and the dismissive tone of headlines about “billionaires who want to live forever.” Even if some billionaires are in fact chasing immortality, they’re actually not investing enough in what’s still a comparatively small field, multiple people at Vitalist Bay told me. (In 2024, global investments in longevity companies more than doubled from the previous year, to $8.5 billion, according to the U.K. research organization Longevity.Technology.)
To longevity enthusiasts, the strange thing isn’t that they’re so focused on avoiding death. It’s why, given the brevity of human life and how quickly it can pass us by, everyone else doesn’t share their sense of urgency.
…
Most people in the longevity community are focused on preserving their health as long as they can — either to make it to the current outer limits of longevity, about 120 robust years or so, or to last long enough that science achieves what’s known as longevity escape velocity, where advancements keep piling up so that there’s no limit on how long life might last.
Whatever one’s goal, it was clear from the companies with booths set up at Vitalist Bay that there are ample opportunities in the business of longevity. Most of these were focused on personalized medicine. Along with Rythm ($79 a month), I spotted biological age testing company TruDiagnostic ($499 for a one-time test), brain age testing company NeuroAge ($1,398 for the most popular plan), and sleep testing company Empower Sleep ($1,200 for the basic plan).
Parked on the street outside the conference were BodySpec vans where attendees could get free DEXA scans (normally $59.95 for a one-time scan) to find out their body fat, bone density, and muscle metrics. Speaking onstage on Friday, venture capitalist Tim Chang outlined the health-testing business model: give people at least one “green” (or good) result so the overall picture isn’t too depressing; sell them on subscriptions, interventions, and coaching so they can work on improving areas in yellow and red. (emphasis added)
That last sentence sums up the entire grift. One doesn’t quite know what to do with these people, except ignore them. They will eventually and inevitably go away. Or start a religion in which the body is God, as the immortal wannabe Bryan Johnson is contemplating. I can’t be the only person who remembers that L. Ron Hubbard once said “Writing science fiction for about a penny a word is no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion.” Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding…We do have a winner!
If you want to read about the most freakish book I have ever read regarding our society’s puerile fear of death, The Future Loves You awaits (I read it so you really will not have to). I saw a copy in Topping & Company in St. Andrews earlier this month. I imagine it will still be on the shelf if and when I ever get back, unless a precocious neuroscience undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews feels the need to waste £25 to read how he can live forever.
And on that note: Pay attention but don’t doomscroll too much, eat well, exercise, take a walk in the woods or on the beach, listen to the birds, read books, talk to actual people who have other views in Third Places, and get a good night’s sleep every night. The life you live will be rewarding, however long it lasts. Your grandmother was right, and there is nothing “scientific” to add to her folk wisdom.
Thank you for reading! See you next week.
Is this a deliberate portmanteau of “Little pitchers have big ears” and “children should be seen and not heard”?
Or perhaps I have both our distemper and my own dropsy and brain fevers.
I can’t thank you enough for these Friday jewels. While the updates on the immediate threats in the world provided on this site are vital, this weekly anodyne is truly an ‘antidote’.
As for the longevity business, as someone in the ‘third stage’ of life, I’m content to enjoy each day as it comes in the full knowledge there will come a day which is the last.
– An analog dude in a digital world, still enjoying the turntable I bought in 1977
The healthy longevity advice you give is rather parallel to that at the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which a Lady Presenter (Michael Palin) reads off a card:
That’s the exoteric meaning of life, of course. The esoteric meaning is revealed in the middle of the film, in the boardroom of the Very Big Corporation of America:
John Cleese, of the Pythons, co-authored Life and How to Survive It (1993) with his shrink Robin Skynner, who was important in British Gurdjieff circles.
“What was that thing about hats?” :-)
Thank you for this post KLG. It is a good reminder of the small pleasures of life. My house may not be as old as yours, but it is still nineteenth century. Several years ago, I was looking for some vintage table lamps on FaceBook (which I succeeded in finding), but came across as well a 1914 Victor Victrola upright phonograph which I also bought thinking it too would look good in my old abode. Subsequently, I’ve become rather a fan of these machines and the recordings that accompany them. I write this as evidence of perhaps a growing interest in the analog. I mean, what can be more analog than recordings produced entirely acoustically (no microphones, only a horn to capture the sound being recorded), and likewise machines that reproduce the recording acoustically only as well. As for the stylus, I have come to prefer what were called ‘fibre needles’ usually made from bamboo rather than the more common steel needles. The sound quality is less harsh. And besides, the fibre needles can be re-used by using a needle cutter whereas the steel needles are one time use – unless of course you don’t care about destroying your shellac disk recordings. And rather a lot of engineering science went into producing recordings acoustically. Percussion, brass, string and vocalists had to be placed in optimal positions in relation to the collecting horn for these inputs not to overwhelm one another. Of course with the advent of the microphone (around 1925 to make recordings) mixing was done electronically. And a confession. Yes, my work is in the area of the hearing sciences and of course our apparati are electronic. Alas, these are no longer analog units. Instead (gasp) digital and as a result not as reliable IMHO.
As for those longevity enthusiasts wondering why there is not greater uptake, I say (as do I think many authorities both ancient and modern) facing our mortality is perhaps the most important aspect that makes us human.
Go well KLG. Your post today was most delightful.
KLG:
The “mestolo” (the all-purpose Italian word for dipper, scoop, or ladle) fascinates. Those eyes are significant. It is the wrong shape for wine, though. I wonder if it better suits olive oil.
Meanwhile, the Italians are always turning up things that reshape the story — like the discovery of the tavola calda / food shop at Pompeii.
And these wonderful sculptures. What a story. And what do they mean? And what do the offerings of eggs mean? ::
https://archaeologymag.com/2024/12/bronze-statues-and-coins-found-in-tuscany/
‘And everyone has a bit of archaeologist in his or her soul.’
With your experiences in your backyard, you might enjoy watching the videos from this guy in Wales. He found a 200 year old house in his back garden three years ago and as been slowly excavating it ever since. Here is his first one-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJw10rK4KZc (6:40 mins)
And if you look through the videos from his channel, you will find further ones giving more updates on this project-
https://www.youtube.com/@afontirs/videos
Every time I read one of these, KLG, a dozen thoughts are stimulated. In the interest of saving electrons, I’ll comment on three;)
1) Old Houses:
I grew up in an old antebellum house with walnut timbers. Can you imagine that much walnut? I rehabbed and live in a two-family house built in 1886 a half-mile from Lake Erie and three-quarters of a mile from the Federal Reserve. At the back of the lot is a 1 1/2 story cottage built first in 1881. Both are balloon-framed. The outer studs run from the sill to the rafters, and the second floor is hung from those studs. These are unplaned studs that run nearly 20′. In the ceilings were the gas lines used for lights.
2) Digital/Analog
Digital is always a “rounding” of reality into “0s” and “1s.” MP3 is not sitting in Severance. CDs and DVDs are not LPs.
3) Death and the West:
I doubt that any of these Methusaleh wannabees would acknowledge that the idea that death is an enemy to be conquered is an Ancient Near Eastern idea that tied death to the blistering “east wind” that came out of the desert, like the Santa Ana winds do today in California. “Mot” is personified as the evil brother of Ba’al in Ugaritic mythology, who manages to kill Ba’al, only to be vanquished by Anat, Ba’al’s sister, who then resurrects Ba’al. Thus does the rainy season always overcome the dry, east wind.
Paul picks up on it in 1 Corinthians 15:55, a verse read at countless Christian funerals.
That’s a verse that is itself Paul’s loose quote of Hosea 13:14, and that takes us back to the 8th century BCE prophet from the northern kingdom of Israel, a poor guy with a lot of marital problems.
So the idea that death is an enemy to be conquered (for Paul, by Jesus), predates Cartesian Dualism and Bacon tying down Nature and the rest of the Enlightenment by a long shot. It’s in contrast to the East Asian concept of death as part of the natural order of things, rather than the Apple’s curse.
Tao te Ching # 16 (Le Guin Rendition)
So a modest hypothesis that the roots of the insanities of transhumanism and the “Longevity Movement” lie in an Ancient Near Eastern desert wind that withered the crops and dried out the pastures.
The focus on immortality probably comes from Persia, not Semitic cultures. The resurrection of the dead is one of many things that becomes prominent in Judaism after their time in the Persian Empire.
Maybe it is more a case of the Peter Pan syndrome. They want to be forever young. Those billionaires can’t stand the thought of dying just like the common plebs do. It’s not fair! Panic set in when their hair starts getting gray and those wrinkles and flab rolls appear. They forget that the price of having a life is owing a death. It comes to all of us.
Well, modern Western culture, with its aggressive individualism and materialism, is maybe unique in having no place for death, which is the vanishing of the individual in his materiality.
Atheism and humanism do entail not liking death. That said, much more theistic and/or traditionalist cultures generally aren’t too happy about death either. Any culture would prevent death if it could. Nobody is happy about death except for some of those who believe in a good afterlife, and even they usually seem to react to death in a way that wouldn’t make sense if they were genuinely convinced that their beliefs are correct.
They are not happy about death (as I would have said in my youth, duh), but they have a place for it. Lots of people are happy about death, if it comes at the proper time in the proper way.
As a matter of fact, archaic societies, which are as close to the default position of human psychology as exists, do not really believe in death at all, as they do not draw a rigid distinction between animate and animate objects and society and nature.
Modern Western society is in fact EXTREMELY STRANGE, and this is one of its weird features.
Well, nobody wants to grow old and die, and everyone is trying to avoid it for as long as possible; billionaires are just in a slightly better position to do so. There are more than enough things to criticise billionaires for – their not wanting to die is not one of them IMO. I don’t mind their living longer than they otherwise would, and their growing old in no way makes me happier. What I do mind is their not sharing the resources that would allow the rest of us to live longer, too.
The Ugaritic Ba’al Cycle comes from 1,100 BCE, and predates Persian culture. As mentioned above, that myth includes Anat raising Ba’al from the dead.
The Persians obviously had a great deal of influence on Second Temple Judaism as they were its primary sponsors, but that takes place more than 1,500 years after the Ba’al Cycle. And it’s clear that the Ba’al Cycle influenced the Hebrew bible and Judaism from Psalm 68 where Ba’al’s epithet, “rider on the clouds,” is applied to YHWH to Psalm 29, which appears to be a reworking of a Ba’al hymn to honor YHWH instead. John Collins pointed out the Ugaritic imagery in Daniel 7. First Isaiah is writing about YHWH swallowing up Mot (Death) in the 8th century BCE, a long time before Ezra and the boys set to work.
So I’d dispute your assertion that the strain of the Hebrew bible that sees death as an enemy to be defeated comes mostly from Ugaritic, western Semitic sources rather than Persia.
Ahem, the quest for a means to attain longevity and immortality has been a key part of Taoism for millennia, with so-called Immortals (Xiān, 仙) playing a major role in its beliefs.
Buddhism sees death as part of suffering (dukkha), and seeks to end the cycle of deaths and rebirths. Indeed, distress upon seeing death is a great part of what is claimed to have driven the Buddha to renounce secular life and start seeking spiritual enlightenment.
In Shinto, death is seen as causing impurity, much as in Zoroastrianism. The condition of death is described as anything but attractive and desirable in the Kojiki, when the creator goddess Izanami dies. Sheol in ancient Hebrew religion was an unattractive place to be, just as the Greek Hades. Immortality was seen as an enviable condition by the Ancient Greeks, too.
All in all, few traditional religions and cultures in the world are particularly happy about death. Which is understandable, if you ask me, because it isn’t a very nice thing. Nothing odd or insane about that attitude.
Conversely, the West’s Christianity does have a long tradition of seeing (literal) death as a way to Heaven, unity with God, eternal bliss, release from all the sufferings of this Valley of Tears, etc. (So Westerners who seek to eliminate literal death are breaking with that tradition rather than continuing it.) Manichaeism had a somewhat similar view, since the release of (good) spirit from (evil) matter required it to be permanently separated from the body. Pure Land Buddhism has an attitude reminiscent of Christianity, albeit with a somewhat different theological justification. All of these views crucially depend on very optimistic ideas of what can come after death. I don’t think that not sharing that optimism needs a special explanation.
You’ll note that I only quoted Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao te Ching without attributing anything to “Taoism.” Le Guin herself says this about Taoism:
Le Guin’s commentary to Tao te Ching #4 in her rendition.
The comments you make about the attitude of various religions are quite eclectic, with perhaps a theme of “Death is yucky.” My point was quite focused. Ugaritic mythology, drawn upon by some of the older portions of the Hebrew bible, considered death, i.e. Mot, both the west-Semitic word for death and the name of the devouring god Mot, to be an enemy to be overcome or vanquished. This picture of Death as a monster in the Hebrew bible, is picked up by Paul and used to paint Jesus as Death’s conqueror.
On top of that, Christianity, and to some extent Judaism, don’t regard Death to be part of the natural order of things, which it is whether we like it or not, and instead turns it into something introduced into the world only upon the eating of the apple:
Romans 5:12 (NRSVU)
It is the ancient idea that death is an enemy to be conquered rather than part of the natural order that has been picked up by the billionaires.
Well, you explicitly quoted Laozi as proof that the wise East embraces death (‘the East Asian concept of death as part of the natural order of things’), and your convoluted explanation also implied that only the weird West, due to the idiosyncrasies of its Ugaritic heritage, opposes it. So what I said about Taoists seeking immortality is quite relevant and refutes your claim about East Asians, as well as the implication of your comment about non-Westerners in general. Again, the billionaires trying to avoid death are no different from the Taoists of yore trying the same. You might as well claim that they are influenced by Taoism. Whether death is described metaphorically as a monster, an enemy to be conquered or something else and the exact story about how it appeared is hardly decisive. Everyone is trying to avoid death and would do so if they could, no special cultural explanation is necessary.
One of those places, now relics,
/when I was young, and as soon as possible one wanted to be admitted to them. There you could learn to be a human being in the company of adults.\
was the small town pool hall. Every town with a Main Street had one usually at the end where the “shops” tailed off. Never really part of the mainstream they were nevertheless integral to the workings of the town. A clearing house for those who were often detached from the routine economy but who were important, even vital at times, to the overall prosperity.
I was allowed to frequent one as a protege of stock car enthusiasts who were, if not kind, at least tolerant of my inexperience. (I maintained and raced a stock car even though I was too young for a drivers license,)
This is where one learned who to trust, who was unreliable and how to tell the difference; that there were rules that were rules and others that were open to interpretation and where the line between them was; when to stand up and when to walk away without offense.
This was where the truths of the Town were circulated; where work was available or when it might be upcoming (most small towns served a wider economy like farming, fishing, etc); whether to apply or avoid an unreasonable employer; who to exclude for cause; who in the mainstream was cheating on a spouse, taxes or commodities.
A man passing through, which was still not uncommon for quite a number of years after WWII, would almost inevitably find this place where he could find out about what he needed whether food, shelter, work or the broad category of “whatever”. The trope of the pool shark, out-of-town grifter, confidence man and other imaginary outsiders are cliches. The “membership” so to speak, were certainly sophisticated enough to assess the newcomer and, at the least, would provide information and whatever assistance they believed reasonable.
These establishments are long gone with their dark floors and furniture, grubby windows and counters, dusty lights and worn down tables. While not always convivial, the raised voices and fists were equally balanced by laughter and inclusion.
I cannot express it better than “learn to be a human being in the company of adults”.
Seconded.
That bit about MOOCs reminded me of this recent Freddie de Boer post, in which he compares the prospects for the use of AI in education to past overhyped educational technologies: LLMs and the Library Card Fallacy
I agree with the criticism of MOOCs. There was this belief that video was somehow revolutionary – when books already had better pacing, random access, structure and engagement. For intellectual material that is: video really is revolutionary when it comes to working with your hands. Enough that I wonder if there might be a statistically detectable uptick in various crafts. The scholars I knew said the real purpose of MOOCs was to increase profits and the power of administrators by replacing teachers with intellectual property.
Here’s what deBoer says on his Library Card Fallacy:
But… do universities do that? In my experience not so much. Years ago as a TA I asked my students whether they completed the assigned readings. No. Had they read any? A few. Did they choose the course (rhetoric) out of interest or to get a degree? Everyone: the degree. They were not interested, they did not see the point, they barely did the work. Why would they? They didn’t want Marx or Aristotle: they wanted a job.
Elsewhere deBoer has said that education does not reduce inequality because it does not change relative outcomes. Almost none of my students in this upper-year university course could write English adequately. What is being gained here?
What I see is that university fees are effectively a tax on employees while wasting their most productive years on make-work. The one thing that university makes sure to teach is political consciousness – a curse of that makes people miserable. Power burrows into your consciousness. Does he like me, or is he oppressing me? Should I enjoy this story – what’s the hidden message? (My wife: can’t we just watch the movie?) When you think about power the beauty drains out of the world. The lesson of political consciousness is not justice but survival of the strongest: acquire power or be its victim.
What makes us think that telling people about injustice will make them side with the oppressed? Most fight harder for themselves, as Vivek Chibber explains. When 20% of the population go to university the 80% who don’t are in good company. When 50% attend those who don’t are left behind. Integrating university into employment creates two angry groups: the excluded, and resentful overproduced elites.
deBoer is quite right about the library card fallacy. Those who wish to learn were always free to do so. Those who don’t must be forced. The question is, does it profit anyone to force them? I doubt it. It makes them miserable, is politically counterproductive, economically expensive, and their presence cripples the ability of the universities to deliver for those who would benefit – while doing nothing (or worse) for inequality.
In Brave New World the protagonist revolts against the system. Caught, he is given two choices: join the elite or be exiled to an island of like minds. As I see it, universities should be like that island, insulated rather than integrated into the power structure. But while in Huxley’s dystopia the purpose of this resource is to buttress elite power, universities have traditionally also preserved the role of critique and the potential that, as the left say, another world is possible.
Instead of finding more ways to shoehorn “education” into unwilling minds, I think we should slash enrolments and lower the status of universities. Let them again be the refuge of freaks and weirdos and grant normal people dignity for productive work.
Mario Savio had the role of American universities pretty well figured out more than 60 years ago:
Malvina Reynolds saw class reproduction in California’s ‘burbs and the role played by universities:
Malvina Reynolds, “Little Boxes”
Joni wasn’t going along with the cog thing:
Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”
A concurring snippet from Wendell Berry:
― Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
And Dylan gives us the big picture:
Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma”
Naturally, if the board of directors and the CEO can save those faculty salaries by using AI to mold those Johnnys and Janes into good, corporate Beta Pluses, then it would be irresponsible to do otherwise.
Frankly, I don’t get the scoffing at the fear of death as being somehow childish, a billionaire thing or a modern Western pathology. It’s a perfectly normal and more or less universal human thing to fear death – there’s no use pretending otherwise. Fear of death is about as inevitable as death itself. This is especially true if you don’t believe in an afterlife – a disbelief that is perfectly justified. Accordingly, trying to avoid death is something that humans generally do.
As living beings, we spend most of our lives keeping ourselves alive, so it is only logical that we are unhappy about our eventual failure to do so; and, more importantly, we generally value our selves and our experience of the world, so it makes sense that we are unhappy about their disappearance. Admittedly, this is partly due to our minds not being equipped to adequately evaluate scenarios under the conditions of our own non-existence – we imagine it as the ultimate loss and deprivation, although there will actually be no subject that can be deprived of anything. Still, the fact remains that we can’t help perceiving it in this way, and this causes suffering, which is undesirable. Moreover, valuing existence over non-existence is probably a natural and inevitable feature of the standpoint of beings that, well, exist. And, finally, human individuality is valuable from the standpoint of humanity, too, so its disappearance is unfortunate.
So death is a regrettable feature of our existence and it’s only natural to try to avoid it as far as possible. If we could ‘get rid of it’, that would be great; it’s just that, unfortunately, we currently happen to be very far from having the technical ability to do so. In fact, it seems to me that entirely avoiding death is incompatible with the very nature of material reality, at least for some senses of ‘avoiding’ – even barring diseases, it would be statistically inevitable in the long run that some accident would eventually destroy the material carriers of our psyches. At most, it might become possible in the far future to maintain some sort of ‘backup copies’ of our individualities, but, closely considered, I believe that we still wouldn’t perceive these copies exactly as ‘ourselves’. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t dismiss the idea as pointless – it would certainly be a significant improvement over the current situation.
Overall, I wouldn’t blame anyone for seeking to ‘live forever or die trying’, as Groucho Marx put it and as I think most of us are doing in one way or another. Of course, spending too much time avoiding death instead of enjoying life defeats the purpose of the endeavour, so it’s a bit of a balancing act. It’s hard to say what the right proportion between the two is.
Yeah, the black dog sitting on my chest all these years is: Life is relatively short and large sections of it will require assistance from other people (parenting/elder care) — and this assumes an optimistic scenario where you aren’t cut down sooner. I may not be able to prevent death, it may not even be desirable, but that only suggests that we should all do our best to make sure that the one life a person has is mostly spent being in existence. So food/water/clothing/shelter — we all need them to live so let’s make sure we can get that to people. Injury and mishap occur so let’s make sure that we have a medical system that can help people recover from these accidents. All of this does require that we do work, but let’s try and make sure the work/life balance is tilted hard towards life. At the very end, let’s try and make sure people have hospice care and their passing is gentle and celebrated and mourned. I would settle for a much lower standard of living (by first world terms) if I lived in a society that had a focus on making sure the basics are well covered for everyone.