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manhefnawi

Gustav III of Sweden: The Forgotten Despot of the Age of Enlightenment | History Today - 0 views

  • In the seventeenth century, under a succession of outstandingly able soldier kings, Sweden had been a great power but after the death in 1718 of Karl XII, the last and most monomaniacal of the line, the country had become a by-word for weak government, corruption and impotence. Gustav III set himself the task of making Sweden great again. He was assassinated in March 1792 – the third Swedish monarch in 160 years to die of gunshot wounds
  • Under Karl XII’s successors, his central-German brother-in-law Fredrik I and his north-German second-cousin-once-removed Adolf Fredrik (Prince Bishop of Lubeck before the Swedish Riksdag chose him to be Fredrik’s heir) the country passed through the so-called Age of Liberty
  • When, shortly after his father’s death in February 1771, Gustav III met his uncle Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great), the latter sneered, ‘If there were Swedes in Sweden they would soon agree to bury their differences; but foreign corruption has so perverted the national spirit that harmony was impossible’. Gustav’s new kingdom was then the second largest in Europe after Russia. It comprised present-day Finland as well as Sweden, and a toe-hold in Germany in northern Pomerania.
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  • Adolf Fredrik, Gustav III’s father, was described by one English contemporary as having ‘the title of king, with hardly the privileges of a subject’. Unlike his British counterpart George II, he had no power to summon or dissolve his parliament.
  • all radical improvements in national character take place during the severest wars’. Russia, having annexed the Crimea, had embarked on a titanic struggle with the Ottoman Empire which was absorbing stupendous quantities of manpower and treasure. At the beginning of 1788 he began making plans to attack Russia from the rear.
  • The new constitution that Gustav now promulgated, in place of that of 1720-72, brought Sweden more into line with contemporary Britain.
  • The main difference between the British and Swedish systems was that, whereas in Britain the monarch’s executive power was in practice delegated to ministers more industrious, more  proficient and, for the most part,  more intellectually gifted than their royal master, in Sweden it was Gustav III himself who was indisputably in day to day charge
  • No other of the Enlightened Despots was more fond than Gustav of the time-wasting rituals of court life, the levées, formal audiences and ceremonial entries and exits.
  • Whereas Napoleon, in his coup d’etat of 19e Brumaire 1799 broke down and began mumbling in front of the popular assembly he was trying to overawe, Gustav III easily faced down his opponents in the Riksdag
  • Gustav III may well have held a record among monarchs prior to the nineteenth century for the number of other crowned heads he met. What Louis XV and Louis XVI of France or Ferdinand IV of Naples thought of him is uncertain, though none of these Bourbons were exactly noted for their insight into character. Pope Pius VI pretended to be delighted with Gustav (the first Protestant monarch ever to meet a pope) and made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. The other Enlightened Despots, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, agreed in thinking Gustav charming in a wearying sort of way, and faintly ridiculous. Leopold II, Joseph II’s brother and successor, perhaps the ablest politician among the Enlightened Despots – he was still only Grand Duke of Tuscany when Gustav met him
  • the Swedish king was a positive menace with his incessant scheming and readiness to interfere in other governments’ affairs
  • Gustav was an unimpressive figure physically, weedy and foppish, and slightly lame since birth, but when he addressed the members of the Riksdag he made them flinch with his phrases of masterful contempt
  • Gustav found himself far from his capital, stuck with an army that would not obey him. He was rescued  by the Danish government declaring war on him. Hurrying back to Sweden, Gustav rode to Gothenburg, 250 miles cross country in forty-eight hours – the last sixty miles quite alone and on borrowed farm horses, in blinding hailstorms – to rally the defences of the city against the invading Danes
  • The senior Swedish officers rejected all the courses of action proposed by Gustav and his latest discovery, William Sidney Smith, a British naval captain who had turned up without the permission of his own government; they even, according to Smith, talked of ‘proposing terms of Capitulation independent of the King’.
  • Catherine, still preoccupied with the war with Turkey, was glad to patch up a compromise peace
  • While the Stockholm crowds stood outside cheering him, Gustav confronted the chamber of nobles with a new constitution, and when they howled it down he coolly ordered the secretary of the chamber to record their vote as yes: a piece of blatant illegality combined with intimidation that anticipates the tactics of twentieth-century dictators. In fact, apart from giving the King the power to make war without the Riksdag’s consent, the new constitution marked little advance on that of 1772
  • Eleven weeks after Gustav rammed his new constitution down the throats of the nobles, the Estates General met at Versailles and by the time of the peace settlement with Russia the French ancien régime was well on the way to dissolution.
  • I cannot allow that it is right to support rebels against their Lawful King
  • Despite the fact that Sweden was virtually bankrupt in the aftermath of the Russian war he now offered to land 16,000 Swedish and 8,000 Russian troops at Ostend, in Austrian territory, and to march on Paris to overthrow the Constituent Assembly, with the support of an Austrian army advancing from the Rhine. In June 1791 he went to Aachen and was greeted there as a saviour by the French royalist exiles. While he was there Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette made their bid to escape from Paris
  • Marie Antoinette’s brother Leopold, who had succeeded Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria the year before, was enraged by Gustav’s interference: there were some too, including Gustav’s uncle Henry of Prussia, who believed that his schemes for an armed intervention in France were merely a cover for a secret plan to seize Norway from the Danes
  • On March 1st, 1792, Leopold died – poisoned, it is said, by an aphrodisiac of his own concoction – but Gustav was destined never to learn that there was no longer any challenge to his self-appointed role as leader of the monarchist opposition to the French Revolution
  • Gustav III was only forty-six when he died. That was at least eight years older than the most brilliant of his predecessors on the Swedish throne, Gustav II Adolf, Karl X and Karl XII – and if he had lived a normal span he would still have been king at the time of Waterloo.
  • The economic weakness of his country, the inveterate opposition of the social class that elsewhere might have been a king’s chief support, and the increasing influence of the revolutionary ferment in France may have meant that, even if he had lived, he would not have been able to go as far as he dreamed: he is one of the great might-have-beens of history.
manhefnawi

Gustav II Adolf | king of Sweden | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • made it a major European power
  • Gustav was the eldest son of Charles IX and his second wife, Christina of Holstein.
  • Charles IX had usurped the throne, having ejected his nephew Sigismund III Vasa (who was also king of Poland) in 1599, and the resulting dynastic quarrel involved Sweden and Poland in a war that continued intermittently for 60 years.
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  • Not only had Charles placed Sweden in a calamitous situation internationally but he had left behind him a legacy of domestic troubles. His usurpation of the throne had meant not only the expulsion of a Roman Catholic sovereign whose rule seemed to threaten Sweden’s Lutheranism but also the defeat of the aristocratic constitutionalism of the Council of State, and it had been followed by the execution of five leading members of the high aristocracy.
  • Charles IX had intervened in Russia to prevent the Poles from placing their own candidate on the Russian throne;
  • The king observed the spirit of the charter. The aristocracy found in Gustav a king favourable to their interests. He enlisted the nobility in the service of the state and thus provided them with numerous economic benefits.
  • The first decade of the reign, therefore, saw the creation of the Supreme Court (1614) and the establishment of the Treasury and the Chancery as permanent administrative boards (1618), and by the end of the reign an Admiralty and a War Office had been created—each presided over by one of the great officers of state.
  • And in the 1620s a thorough reform professionalized local government and placed it securely under the control of the crown. The Council of State became, for the first time, a permanent organ of government able to assume charge of affairs while the king was fighting overseas.
  • Thus, the fate of Europe was bound up with what happened in Livonia or Prussia. Protestant Europe was slow to appreciate the connection, but as the Protestant cause plunged to disaster in Germany, its leaders increasingly turned their eyes to Gustav as a possible saviour.
  • The disastrous defeat (1626) of Christian IV of Denmark, who had intervened in Germany without such an assurance, justified his caution, but it also made Swedish intervention inevitable.
  • Gustav landed in Germany without allies. Whatever the feelings of the Protestant populations, the Protestant princes resented Swedish interference, and the refusal of George William of Brandenburg to cooperate with the Swedes thwarted Gustav’s attempts to save Magdeburg from capture and sack at the hands of Tilly’s armies. In September John George of Saxony, provoked by violations of his neutrality, formally allied himself with Sweden.
  • the old security had become the new indemnity. Many Germans feared, and some Swedish diplomats now believed, that a final settlement must probably entail the deposition of the German emperor Ferdinand II and the election of Gustav as emperor in his place. It was a solution he must certainly have contemplated, but there is no firm evidence of his attitude; probably he considered it only as a last resort. Certainly it would have alienated those German allies who had no wish to exchange a Habsburg domination for a Swedish one.
  • His death came at a moment when it had already begun to appear that the victory he believed to be essential to the stability of Germany and the security of Sweden might be more difficult to achieve than he had imagined. But he had lived long enough to deflect the course of German history. His intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, at a moment when the armies of the Habsburg emperor and the German princes of the Catholic League controlled almost the whole of Germany, ensured the survival of German Protestantism against the onslaughts of the Counter-Reformation.
  • By supporting the German princes against the emperor, Gustav Adolf defeated the attempts of the Habsburgs to make their imperial authority a reality and thus played a part in delaying the emergence of a united Germany until the 19th century.
manhefnawi

Charles XIV John | king of Sweden and Norway | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • original name Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
  • French Revolutionary general and marshal of France (1804), who was elected crown prince of Sweden (1810), becoming regent and then king of Sweden and Norway (1818–44).
  • formed Swedish alliances with Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig (1813)
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  • he enlisted in the French army
  • supporter of the Revolution
  • Bernadotte first met Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 in Italy. Their relationship, at first friendly, was soon embittered by rivalries and misunderstandings
  • In November 1799 Bernadotte refused to assist Bonaparte’s coup d’état that ended the Directory but neither did he defend it
  • When, on May 18, 1804, Napoleon proclaimed the empire, Bernadotte declared full loyalty to him and, in May, was named marshal of the empire
  • he was invited to become crown prince of Sweden. In 1809 a palace revolution had overthrown King Gustav IV of Sweden and had put the aged, childless, and sickly Charles XIII on the throne. The Danish prince Christian August had been elected crown prince but died suddenly in 1810, and the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice.
  • Bernadotte was elected Swedish crown prince. On October 20 he accepted Lutheranism and landed in Sweden; he was adopted as son by Charles XIII and took the name of Charles John (Karl Johan). The Crown Prince at once assumed control of the government and acted officially as regent during the illnesses of Charles XIII. Napoleon now tried to prevent any reorientation of Swedish foreign policy and moreover sent an immediate demand that Sweden declare war on Great Britain
  • he respected his military ability, his skillful and humane administration of Hanover and the Hanseatic towns, and his charitable treatment of Swedish prisoners in Germany
  • Charles John was anxious to achieve something for Sweden that would prove his worth to the Swedes and establish his dynasty in power. He could, as many Swedes wished, have regained Finland from Russia, either by conquest or by negotiation
  • the conquest of Norway from Denmark, based on a Swedish alliance with Napoleon’s enemies. An alliance was signed with Russia in April 1812, with Great Britain in March 1813—with the British granting a subsidy for the proposed conquest of Norway—and with Prussia in April 1813. Urged by the allies, however, Charles John agreed to take part in the great campaign against Napoleon and to postpone his war with Denmark. The Crown Prince landed his troops at Stralsund, Ger., in May 1813 and soon took command of the allied army of the north
  • conserve his forces for the war with Denmark, and the Prussians bore the brunt of the fighting
  • After the decisive Battle of Leipzig (October 1813), Napoleon’s first great defeat, Charles John succeeded in defeating the Danes in a swift campaign and forced King Frederick VI of Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel (January 1814), which transferred Norway to the Swedish crown. Charles John now had dreams of becoming king or “protector” of France, but he had become alienated from the French people, and the victorious allies would not tolerate another soldier in charge of French affairs
  • Charles John conducted an efficient and almost bloodless campaign, and in August the Norwegians signed the Convention of Moss, whereby they accepted Charles XIII as king
  • At the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), Austria and the French Bourbons were hostile to the upstart prince, and the son of the deposed Gustav was a potential pretender to the throne. But, thanks to Russian and British support, the status of the new dynasty was undisturbed
  • Upon the death of Charles XIII on Feb. 5, 1818, Charles John became king of Sweden and Norway, and the former republican and revolutionary general became a conservative ruler.
  • His foreign policy inaugurated a long and favourable period of peace, based on good relations with Russia and Great Britain
manhefnawi

Sweden - The reign of Charles XII | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • The Russian army, which had invaded Sweden’s Baltic provinces, was shortly afterward overwhelmingly beaten by Charles’s troops at the Battle of Narva.
  • Charles spent the next five years in Bender (now Bendery, Moldova), then under Turkish rule, attempting in vain to persuade the Turks to attack Russia.
  • Charles XII had no successor. In 1718 his sister Ulrika Eleonora had to convene the Diet in order to be elected. In 1720 she abdicated in favour of her husband, Frederick of Hessen (ruled 1720–51).
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  • When Frederick of Hessen died in 1751, he was succeeded by Adolf Frederick, who ruled until his death in 1771. While visiting Paris, Gustav III (ruled 1771–92) acceded to the throne.
  • But Gustav’s politics were unstable. Until 1786 he put into effect social reforms that belonged to enlightened despotism, thus enmeshing himself in its traditional dilemma: alienating the “haves” without satisfying the “have nots.”
  • After Turkey attacked Russia in 1787, Gustav went to war against Russia in 1788 to recapture the Finnish provinces. The Swedish attack failed, partly because of a conspiracy by noble Swedish officers—the Anjala League—who, during the war, sent a letter to Catherine II (the Great) of Russia, proposing negotiations.
  • In 1731 the Swedish East India Company was founded, which was extremely successful until it was forced out of business during the Napoleonic Wars.
manhefnawi

Charles XI | king of Sweden | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • Charles, the only son of Charles X Gustav and Hedvig Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp
  • they drew Sweden into the Dutch War of 1672–78 at the behest of King Louis XIV of France, with whom they had signed a treaty of alliance. Charles assumed control of the armies and the administration after the Swedish defeat
  • The alliance of the two nations in opposition to Dutch commercial influence in the Baltic was sealed by Charles XI’s marriage to Ulrika Eleonora (1680), sister of King Christian V of Denmark. By the treaties of Nijmegen (1678–79), which marked the end of the Dutch War, Sweden was able to keep nearly all of its German possessions
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  • Charles also felt threatened by the personal union of England and the United Provinces begun under William III in 1688, and he maintained Sweden’s virtual neutrality during the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97).
krystalxu

Eiffel Tower - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com - 0 views

  • In 1889, Paris hosted an Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) to mark the 100-year anniversary of the French Revolution.
  • The commission was granted to Eiffel et Compagnie, a consulting and construction firm owned by the acclaimed bridge builder, architect and metals expert Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel.
  • it was one of his employees—a structural engineer named Maurice Koechlin—who came up with and fine-tuned the concept
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  • March 1889 stood nearly 1,000 feet high and was the tallest structure in the world—a distinction it held until the completion of New York City’s Chrysler Building in 1930.
  • Initially, only the Eiffel Tower’s second-floor platform was open to the public; later, all three levels, two of which now feature restaurants, would be reachable by stairway or one of eight elevators.
  • Not all of the city’s inhabitants were as enthusiastic, however: Many Parisians either feared it was structurally unsound or considered it an eyesore.
  • The Eiffel Tower Becomes a Permanent Feature of the Paris Skyline
  • the Eiffel Tower was almost torn down and scrapped in 1909.
  • Several years later, during World War I, the Eiffel Tower intercepted enemy radio communications, relayed zeppelin alerts and was used to dispatch emergency troop reinforcements.
  • Over the years, the Eiffel Tower has been the site of numerous high-profile stunts, ceremonial events and even scientific experiments.
  • The Eiffel Tower has also inspired more than 30 replicas and similar structures in various cities around the world.
  • Now one of the most recognizable structures on the planet, the Eiffel Tower underwent a major facelift in 1986 and is repainted every seven years.
Javier E

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Jordan B. Peterson) - 0 views

  • RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?
  • “I’ve got some good news…and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?” “The good news!” the hedonists reply. “I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!” “Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?” “Adultery is still in.”
  • Maps of Meaning was sparked by Jordan’s agonized awareness, as a teenager growing up in the midst of the Cold War, that much of mankind seemed on the verge of blowing up the planet to defend their various identities. He felt he had to understand how it could be that people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,”
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  • the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
  • And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way.
  • Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.
  • Peterson wasn’t really an “eccentric”; he had sufficient conventional chops, had been a Harvard professor, was a gentleman (as cowboys can be) though he did say damn and bloody a lot, in a rural 1950s sort of way. But everyone listened, with fascination on their faces, because he was in fact addressing questions of concern to everyone at the table.
  • unlike many academics who take the floor and hold it, if someone challenged or corrected him he really seemed to like it. He didn’t rear up and neigh. He’d say, in a kind of folksy way, “Yeah,” and bow his head involuntarily, wag it if he had overlooked something, laughing at himself for overgeneralizing. He appreciated being shown another side of an issue, and it became clear that thinking through a problem was, for him, a dialogic process.
  • for an egghead Peterson was extremely practical. His examples were filled with applications to everyday life: business management, how to make furniture (he made much of his own), designing a simple house, making a room beautiful (now an internet meme) or in another, specific case related to education, creating an online writing project that kept minority students from dropping out of school by getting them to do a kind of psychoanalytic exercise on themselves,
  • These Westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors, manipulating symbols on computers. This cowboy psychologist seemed to care about a thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone.
  • I was drawn to him because here was a clinician who also had given himself a great books education, and who not only loved soulful Russian novels, philosophy and ancient mythology, but who also seemed to treat them as his most treasured inheritance. But he also did illuminating statistical research on personality and temperament, and had studied neuroscience. Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life. He was also an outlier in being the only member of the research-oriented Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto who also kept a clinical practice.
  • Maps of Meaning, published nearly two decades ago, shows Jordan’s wide-ranging approach to understanding how human beings and the human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our daily lives, must face something we do not understand.
  • The brilliance of the book is in his demonstration of how rooted this situation is in evolution, our DNA, our brains and our most ancient stories. And he shows that these stories have survived because they still provide guidance in dealing with uncertainty, and the unavoidable unknown.
  • this is why many of the rules in this book, being based on Maps of Meaning, have an element of universality to them.
  • We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?
  • And he felt he had to understand the ideologies that drove totalitarian regimes to a variant of that same behaviour: killing their own citizens.
  • Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.
  • Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
  • Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
  • To understand ideology, Jordan read extensively about not only the Soviet gulag, but also the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism. I had never before met a person, born Christian and of my generation, who was so utterly tormented by what happened in Europe to the Jews, and who had worked so hard to understand how it could have occurred.
  • I saw what now millions have seen online: a brilliant, often dazzling public speaker who was at his best riffing like a jazz artist; at times he resembled an ardent Prairie preacher (not in evangelizing, but in his passion, in his ability to tell stories that convey the life-stakes that go with believing or disbelieving various ideas). Then he’d just as easily switch to do a breathtakingly systematic summary of a series of scientific studies. He was a master at helping students become more reflective, and take themselves and their futures seriously. He taught them to respect many of the greatest books ever written. He gave vivid examples from clinical practice, was (appropriately) self-revealing, even of his own vulnerabilities, and made fascinating links between evolution, the brain and religious stories.
  • Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering.
  • chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
  • focused on triumphant heroes. In all these triumph stories, the hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage, something rarely discussed in a psychology class or textbook.
  • Jordan
  • views of his first YouTube statements quickly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But people have kept listening because what he is saying meets a deep and unarticulated need. And that is because alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure.
  • the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically, deprived of riches they don’t even know exist.
  • morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity, one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical…
  • The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a…
  • So, the decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and…
  • for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can…
  • That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an…
  • And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually…
  • professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé, “…
  • They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears…
  • The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was…
  • Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something…
  • By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no…
  • Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called…
  • Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are…
  • But it turns out that many people cannot tolerate the vacuum—the chaos—which is inherent in life, but made worse by this moral relativism; they cannot live without a moral compass,…
  • So, right alongside relativism, we find the spread of nihilism and despair, and also the opposite of moral relativism: the blind certainty offered by ideologies…
  • Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, is the author of The Brain That Changes Itself
  • so we arrive at the second teaching that millennials have been bombarded with. They sign up for a humanities course, to study the greatest books ever written. But they’re not assigned the books; instead they are given…
  • (But the idea that we can easily separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine what one will pay…
  • For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.
  • Modern moral relativism has many sources. As we in the West learned more history, we understood that different epochs had different moral codes. As we travelled the seas and explored the globe, we learned of far-flung tribes on different continents whose different moral codes made sense relative to, or within the framework of, their societies. Science played a role, too, by attacking the religious view of the world, and thus undermining the religious grounds for ethics and rules. Materialist social science implied that we could divide the world into facts (which all could observe, and were objective and “real”) and values (…
  • it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.
  • given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not. It is a mask, but a strange one, for it mostly deceives the one who wears it.
  • Far better to integrate the best of what we are now learning with the books human beings saw fit to preserve over millennia, and with the stories that have survived, against all odds, time’s tendency to obliterate.
  • these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.
  • Jordan’s message that each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear; that if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.
  • if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.
  • And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.
  • Instead of despairing about these differences in moral codes, Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs.
  • Freud never argued (as do some who want all culture to become one huge group therapy session) that one can live one’s entire life without ever making judgments, or without morality. In fact, his point in Civilization and Its Discontents is that civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place.
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.”1 In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.
  • I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act.
  • I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come
  • to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.
  • Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine.
  • Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.
  • As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction,
  • Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
  • For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. And that’s much better than happiness.
  • trying to address a perplexing problem: the reason or reasons for the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.
  • People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.
  • Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.
  • It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone
  • There’s more to it, too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value—a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued.
  • We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.
  • Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being.*2 We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.
  • So: no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of conflict. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places:
  • loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable.
  • In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
  • While writing Maps of Meaning, I was (also) driven by the realization that we can no longer afford conflict—certainly not on the scale of the world conflagrations of the twentieth century.
  • I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual.
  • It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.
  • How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world.
  • We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.
  • the alternative—the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless
  • individual—is clearly worse.
  • a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.
  • We require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.
  • I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life.
  • RULE 1   STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK
  • Because territory matters, and because the best locales are always in short supply, territory-seeking among animals produces conflict. Conflict, in turn, produces another problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost.
  • It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent11—and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.
  • This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal.
  • Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top.
  • The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.
  • dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.
  • evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection. Variation exists for many reasons, including gene-shuffling (to put it simply) and random mutation. Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them, across time. That theory, as stated, appears to account for the continual alteration of life-forms over the eons.
  • But there’s an additional question lurking under the surface: what exactly is the “nature” in “natural selection”? What exactly is “the environment” to which animals adapt?
  • Nature “selects.” The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is “fitness” that is “selected.” Fitness, roughly speaking, is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The “fit” in “fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.
  • But nature, the selecting agent, is not a static selector—not in any simple sense.
  • As the environment supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. Thus, the theory of natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature, albeit one that is deadly.
  • Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly (music
  • It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest.
  • It is also a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically.
  • Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague.
  • It is because of the existence of such things, of course, that we attempt to modify our surroundings, protecting our children, building cities and transportation systems and growing food and generating power.
  • this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it.
  • It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years.
  • The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence.
  • We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.
  • The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.17 It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike.
  • The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources.
  • It will leave you far more likely to live, or die, carelessly, for a rare opportunity at pleasure, when it manifests itself. The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.21
  • If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive
  • You can delay gratification, without forgoing it forever. You can afford to be a reliable and thoughtful citizen.
  • Sometimes, however, the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. Uncertainty can throw it for a loop. The body, with its various parts,
  • needs
  • to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
  • It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day?
  • The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars,
  • I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.
  • Other bad habits can also interfere with the counter’s accuracy.
  • There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.
  • If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge.
  • With their capacity for aggression strait-jacketed within a too-narrow morality, those who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naïve and exploitable) cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves. If you can bite, you generally don’t have to. When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.
  • Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of
  • individuals who are genuinely malevolent.27
  • I have had clients who were terrified into literally years of daily hysterical convulsions by the sheer look of malevolence on their attackers’ faces. Such individuals typically come from hyper-sheltered families, where nothing
  • terrible is allowed to exist, and everything is fairyland wonderful (or else).
  • When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise,
  • There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.
  • even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school28—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number.
  • the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.
  • Some of these upwardly moving loops can occur in your own private, subjective space.
  • If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression.29
  • To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.
  • It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
  • So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
  • Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.
  • RULE 2   TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING
  • People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That
  • It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves?
  • To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel).
  • those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.
  • Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person.
  • subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real—ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being.
  • In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality.
  • The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters
  • the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.
  • Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time,
  • It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
  • Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order using language at the beginning of time. It’s the same potential from which we, made in that Image, call forth the novel and ever-changing moments of our lives. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too.
  • Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country.
  • Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to.
  • But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.
  • In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we
  • understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally.
  • When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. That’s the same move you make, and the same place you visit, when the company you work for starts to fail and your job is placed in doubt.
  • Before the Twin Towers fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell? Wrong question. What exactly remained standing? That was the issue at hand.
  • Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world.
  • Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances.
  • Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.32 After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes thinking, of the higher order, which can extend over seconds, minutes or years. All that response is instinctive, in some sense—but the faster the response, the more instinctive.
  • Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice.
  • Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others,34 living others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and intent.
  • This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us.35 We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations.
  • The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes. They have been…
  • the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s longer than flowers have grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very long time. It’s plenty long enough for male and female and parent and child to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the environment to which we have adapted. This means that male and female and parent and child are…
  • Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were…
  • From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A…
  • as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective…
  • “outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with…
  • when we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere…
  • Our most…
  • category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and…
  • Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the primary…
  • Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.
  • In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road.
  • Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection.
  • Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.40
  • Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”
  • Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect.
  • And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive, as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being—it also tells you how to act.
  • The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
  • We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not to the world of objects, but to the meta-realities of order and chaos, yang and yin. Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.
  • To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.
  • Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both.
  • you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
  • The serpent in Eden therefore means the same thing as the black dot in the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality—that is, the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm.
  • The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake.
  • We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls.
  • The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within.
  • I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no
  • business being there.”50
  • Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.
  • What does it mean to know yourself naked
  • Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. They could see—and what they first saw was themselves.
  • In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God.
  • Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.
  • He tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s merely descriptive.
  • women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.
  • then God banishes the first man and the first woman from Paradise, out of infancy, out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself. And then He puts cherubim and a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, just to stop them from eating the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
  • Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.
  • so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself?
  • Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?
  • We know how we are naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited—and that means we know how others are naked, and how they can be exploited. We can terrify other people, consciously. We can hurt and humiliate them for faults we understand only too well. We can torture them—literally—slowly, artfully and terribly. That’s far more than predation. That’s a qualitative shift in understanding. That’s a cataclysm as large as the development of self-consciousness itself. That’s the entry of the knowledge of Good and Evil into the world.
  • Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.
  • with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin.
  • Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise?
  • The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous) produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good.
  • The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned.
  • Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters.
  • here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil.
  • The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself—that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean?
  • And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.
  • Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted
  • We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
  • If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures.
  • If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for.
  • We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.
  • Then, the primary moral issue confronting society was control of violent, impulsive selfishness and the mindless greed and brutality that accompanies it.
  • It is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always looking out for themselves. The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is widespread and fashionable.
  • But such an orientation to the world is not at all characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill.
  • Christ’s archetypal death exists as an example of how to accept finitude, betrayal and tyranny heroically—how to walk with God despite the tragedy of self-conscious knowledge—and not as a directive to victimize ourselves in the service of others.
  • To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves.
  • I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.”
  • The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions.
  • If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs.
  • there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else.
  • you do not simply belong to yourself. You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. This is partly because your Being is inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic consequences for others.
  • metaphorically speaking, there is also this: you have a spark of the divine in you, which belongs not to you, but to God. We are, after all—according to Genesis—made in His image.
  • We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either.
  • In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running.
  • It is this sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which has its justification, but is only half the full and proper story. Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what normal, everyday people accomplish
  • You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.
  • To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.” It is also not “what would make you happy.”
  • You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself?
  • You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world.
  • You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person.
  • Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.
  • Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your
  • own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that.
  • You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence.
  • That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.
  • RULE 3   MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU
  • It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it’s not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and Air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us tried to organize. Doing anything wasn’t cool.
  • When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts. You can make new, better ruts, with people aiming at better things. I thought this was just a natural development. I thought that every person who moved would have—and want—the same phoenix-like experience.
  • What was it that made Chris and Carl and Ed unable (or, worse, perhaps, unwilling) to move or to change their friendships and improve the circumstances of their lives? Was it inevitable—a consequence of their own limitations, nascent illnesses and traumas of the past?
  • Why did he—like his cousin, like my other friends—continually choose people who, and places that, were not good for him?
  • perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past
  • People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.
  • It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly…unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?
  • People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too. Sometimes it’s because they want to rescue someone.
  • it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper. The distinction is difficult even for the person who is wanting and needing and possibly exploiting.
  • When it’s not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.
  • But Christ himself, you might object, befriended tax-collectors and prostitutes. How dare I cast aspersions on the motives of those who are trying to help? But Christ was the archetypal perfect man. And you’re you.
  • How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down?
  • The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.
  • maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace. Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.
  • Or maybe you have no plan, genuine or otherwise, to rescue anybody. You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier.
  • You know it. Your friends know it. You’re all bound by an implicit contract—one aimed at nihilism, and failure, and suffering of the stupidest sort.
  • Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable.
  • Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well).
  • It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced with such a situation.
  • failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required. In the same manner, fear, hatred, addiction, promiscuity, betrayal and deception require no explanation. It’s not the existence of vice, or the indulgence in it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy.
  • Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today,
  • Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.
  • I am not saying that there is no hope of redemption. But it is much harder to extract someone
  • from a chasm than to lift him from a ditch. And some chasms are very deep. And there’s not much left of the body at the bottom.
  • Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The
  • none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.
  • Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?
  • You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you.
  • It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.”
  • Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person.
  • RULE 4   COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY
  • IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor.
  • Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.
  • No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.
  • We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything.
  • People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition.
  • It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health.69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined:
  • Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening.
  • There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
  • Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action.
  • Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse. To do anything at all is therefore to play a game with a defined and valued end, which can always be reached more or less efficiently and elegantly.
  • We might start by considering the all-too-black-and-white words themselves: “success” or “failure.” You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing.
  • There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.
  • there is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many games and, more specifically, many good games—
  • if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one. I
  • and athletic pursuits. You might consider judging your success across all the games you play.
  • When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We have not had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary.
  • As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. Symbolically speaking, this means we must leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the chaos of our individual Being.
  • We must then rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance, hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our own lives. This is what gives existence its full and necessary meaning.
  • What is it that you actually love? What is it that you genuinely want? Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know yourself. What
  • Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life.
  • Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up.
  • Be cautious when you’re comparing yourself to others. You’re a singular being, once you’re an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise.
  • Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence. Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it does so in a unique interplay with the other specifics of your life.
  • We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming. Our minds are built on the hunting-and-gathering platforms of our bodies. To hunt is to specify a target, track it, and throw at it.
  • We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.
  • The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort. Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have to aim at what could be.
  • The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.
  • Called upon properly, the internal critic will suggest something to set in order, which you could set in order, which you would set in order—voluntarily, without resentment, even with pleasure.
  • “Excuse me,” you might say to yourself, without irony or sarcasm. “I’m trying to reduce some of the unnecessary suffering around here. I could use some help.” Keep the derision at bay. “I’m wondering if there is anything that you would be willing to do? I’d be very grateful for your service.” Ask honestly and with humility. That’s no simple matter.
manhefnawi

Battle of Poltava | Summary | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • Battle of Poltava, (8 July 1709), the decisive victory of Peter I the Great of Russia over Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War
  • In spite of his previous success against the Russians, Charles XII had not been able to challenge Moscow
  • Although he recovered, he was unable to lead his army in person. Command was transferred to Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld and General Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt
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  • the Swedish army had ceased to exist. Charles managed to flee southward to the Ottoman Empire, where he spent five years in exile. Poltava was a major turning point. Russia could now dominate the Polish and Baltic lands without any Swedish opposition, and Peter became the leading ruler in the region
manhefnawi

The Eagle and Three Crowns | History Today - 0 views

  • In the middle of the sixteenth century Poland was a wealthy country governed by the Jagiellon Kings, whose riches had been built upon a monopoly of the Baltic Sea trade around Gdansk. By the end of the eighteenth century, Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided the country between them and Poland was wiped off the map for 123 years.
  • The abolition of the hereditary monarchy placed the election of the king in the hands of the nobles. If no Polish heir to the throne was available, foreigners were eligible to stand.
  • After suffering several devastating defeats at the hands of the Swedes, including a period of five years, 1655-60, known as ‘the Deluge’, Poland was severely weakened and could offer little resistance to the combined power of Russia, Prussia and Austria
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  • In a manner similar to the Viking raids, the Swedes made themselves masters of the Baltic like their distant ancestors, and struck at the heart of Polish  trade, by attacking the sea port of Gdansk.
  • Gustav III and Stanislaus Augustus. Both were keen patrons of the arts and sciences and in the latter half of the eighteenth century the Warsaw Royal Castle became a centre for artistic activity
  • The hereditary monarchy was re-established, removing the threat of foreign interference.
  • Yet the fate of the country was sealed. Stanislaus Augustus, the last Polish king, was an unrealistic ruler who angered the gentry by trying to appease the Russian Empress Catherine the Great.
  • the country was divided up and the name of Poland, wiped from the map for over a hundred years. Neither the Polish kings nor the Swedish kings could do anything to reverse the situation
manhefnawi

Charles IX | king of Sweden | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • virtual ruler of Sweden
  • Charles in 1568 was one of the leaders of a rebellion against the rule of his half brother Erik XIV that placed his other brother on the throne as John III.
  • The brothers were reunited in 1587, however, when both opposed the nobles’ state council, which promoted the candidacy of John’s son Sigismund (king of Poland as Sigismund III Vasa) for the Polish throne.
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  • Defeated at Stångebro (1598), Sigismund was deposed the following year and replaced by Charles as virtual ruler of Sweden.
  • By playing on the nobles’ fear of absolutist rule by an absentee monarch, Charles won their support in forcing Sigismund to accept the decisions of the Convention of Uppsala and to recognize Charles as regent in conjunction with the nobles’ state council.
  • Catholic Sigismund also succeeded to the Swedish throne in 1592
  • He was declared king in 1604
  • Charles’s overthrow of Sigismund led to hostilities with Poland
  • Charles’s forces then intervened in Russia, attempting to prevent a Polish conquest of the country and to install his son Gustavus (later king of Sweden as Gustav II Adolf) as ruler.
  • tried to rule by a diet subordinated to his will and a system of terror
aidenborst

Despite Trump administration promise, government has no more 'reserve' 2nd vaccine dose... - 0 views

  • Hopes of a surge in Covid-19 vaccine shipments under a new policy to release second doses held in reserve appear to be evaporating -- with the revelation that those doses have already been distributed, contrary to recent indications by the Trump administration.
  • When Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was asked Friday whether there is in fact a reserve of second doses left to release, he said, "No. There's not a reserve stockpile."
  • The revelation appears to contradict what Azar announced on Tuesday at an Operation Warp Speed briefing, where he said the administration would be "releasing the entire supply for order by states, rather than holding second doses in reserve."Read MoreAnd it adds another level of confusion for state officials, who have scrambled to distribute the vaccines after being tasked to do so by the federal government.
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  • Michael Pratt, a spokesman for Operation Warp Speed, also denied the notion the reserve was "exhausted" in a statement to CNN.
  • "It's just so disappointing," he added. "People are desperate for the vaccine, and we have worked so hard to be able to expand who's eligible, and to not be able to do it is just crushing right now."
  • Oregon Health Director Patrick Allen, in a letter to Azar in which he recounted a call with Brown and Operation Warp Speed CEO Gen. Gustave Perna on Thursday, demanded that the HHS chief reconcile his statement about "releasing the entire supply" with this revelation.
  • "I do not believe I misunderstood," Allen said. Allen confirmed that Oregon will have to delay its plan to start vaccinating seniors January 23, since no surge in vaccine is coming.
  • "I am demanding answers from the Trump Administration. I am shocked and appalled that they have set an expectation on which they could not deliver, with such grave consequences," Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, tweeted Friday. "This is a deception on a national scale. Oregon's seniors, teachers, all of us, were depending on the promise of Oregon's share of the federal reserve of vaccines being released to us."
  • Vaccine maker Pfizer says it has second doses of coronavirus vaccines ready to ship as needed.
  • "We are hearing there is not a stockpile of vaccine for second dose but that it was more of a 'paper exercise,' " said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. "The stockpile appears to be all on paper; they were tracking anticipated need but not actually holding back product."
  • "I think the original message got lost in a lot of overpromising," Plescia said. "Until there is a more robust supply we need to be clear with the public that opportunity to get the vaccine is limited."
  • "It was a complete surprise," Freeman told CNN on Friday, adding, "To hear that this had been done for several weeks was actually shocking to us."
  • "I don't know if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing here," she said, adding that there's a risk that people will not be inoculated correctly if the federal government isn't providing reliable numbers for its vaccine supply.
  • While vaccines were developed in record time, the process of getting them into Americans' arms has moved far more slowly than officials promised. That's largely because the Trump administration left it up to each state to figure out the herculean task of vaccinating its population. But the administration's constantly fluctuating estimates about how much vaccine will be available have also made it difficult for states to craft vaccination plans, state officials have said.
katherineharron

US Coronavirus: A top official says hospitalizations and deaths will keep climbing as C... - 0 views

  • An end to the Covid-19 pandemic may be in sight with more good news on vaccine candidates, but for now "this will get worse," a top US official said Wednesday.
  • "We have had one million cases documented over the past week, our rate of rise is higher than it even was in the summer, we have hospitalizations going up 25% week over week,"
  • "There are so many more cases that we have, that deaths are going up."
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  • Infection numbers in Massachusetts are eight times what they were on Labor Day and hospitalizations have quadrupled.
  • In Illinois, the virus is now the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
  • More than 250,000 Americans have so far died of the virus -- a higher death toll than any other country -- and a forecast by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that number could rise up to 298,000 by December 12.
  • "It's all about absolute adherence to wearing a mask, avoiding crowds, and yes, we can keep the economy open but we're going to have to diminish indoor places like indoor dining and restaurants."
  • Only one US state, Hawaii, is showing a decrease in new cases greater than 10% compared to the previous week. Five others -- Idaho, North Dakota, Iowa, Illinois and Arkansas -- are holding steady, while the remaining 44 states are showing increases in new cases greater than at least 10% compared to the week prior.
  • the 7-day average of new cases is at its highest ever: 161,165 cases a day. That's up 27% compared to last week.
  • "Virtual gatherings remain the safest way to bring friends and family together from distant points. Outdoor settings can reduce the risks of gatherings with people outside of your household," the group said, also highlighting the importance of face coverings.
  • New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy told CNN he wanted people to stay with their immediate family on Thanksgiving and to keep gatherings small -- "not just for next Thursday ... but for the next couple of months."
  • "This is not a normal year, it's not a normal Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's. Folks have got to stay small, stay within the bubble of their own loved ones, and if we do that, that will be a down payment on a back-to-normal holiday season next year."
  • There were 79,410 hospitalizations reported on Wednesday, a record high for the United States, according to the Covid Tracking Project. The country is now averaging 72,120 hospitalizations over the last 7 days -- a 19.76% increase compared to last week.
  • "As a health care provider we are on 250 days of having a Covid patient in our ICU right now,"
  • "So every day, you walk into work, someone is super sick, someone is potentially dying that day."
  • "On a normal day, I don't have people dying every day," she said, adding that first week she had three people die in one day -- two of them, from Covid-19.
  • Students in the country's largest school district are transitioning to remote learning on Thursday following the closure of New York City schools. The decision came after the city's test infection rate reached 3%, a threshold Mayor Bill de Blasio said would trigger such a closure.
  • Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also announced new measures that will go into effect Friday, including limiting social gatherings to a maximum of two people from no more than two households, and prohibiting indoor service for restaurants and bars. And starting Monday, schools should begin remote learning, the governor said.
  • In Minnesota, the governor said the state is at a "breaking point" and announced a four-week dial back that will "help prevent more families from losing a loved one and ensure our hospitals can treat those who fall ill."
  • "As hospitals near the crisis of turning away new patients, continuing as things are is simply not sustainable," Gov. Tim Walz said.
  • A final analysis of the Phase 3 trial of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine shows it was 95% effective in preventing infections, even in older adults and caused no serious safety concerns, the company said Wednesday. It said it will seek a US Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization "within days."
  • The Pfizer analysis came just days after a separate vaccine maker, Moderna, released early data showing its vaccine was about 95% effective.
  • Distribution is expected to begin within 24 hours after a vaccine receives the green light, according to Gen. Gustave Perna, who is helping oversee Operation Warp Speed.
  • "We'll be more ready next week, and if the vaccine is available, we have to go with what we have. We may not be perfect, but every day we're more prepared than we were the day before," he added.
katherineharron

While Trump harps on the past, Covid-19 vaccine meeting offers glimmer of hope for the ... - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump has abdicated his leadership role on the pandemic as he pursues his undemocratic quest to overturn the election, but Americans could get the first real glimmer of hope that their lives will return to normal Thursday when a key advisory panel meets to discuss greenlighting the first Covid-19 vaccine.
  • On Wednesday, the US recorded the highest single day tally of more than 3,000 deaths -- and some communities continue to resist precautionary measures like mask mandates as a vocal few falsely claim that the pandemic does not exist.
  • Trump answered a question this week about why he wasn't including Biden aides in a vaccine summit by insisting the election still wasn't settled.
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  • President-elect Joe Biden's team has magnified the giant hurdles that loom for government officials as they try to ensure the smooth delivery of millions of vaccine doses within the 50 states and cities with different ideas about the best way to administer them.
  • Trump told guests that with the help of "certain very important people -- if they have wisdom and if they have courage -- we're going to win this election." The crowd chanted "four more years."
  • the crucial question is whether Trump and his administration are equipping the incoming Biden administration with the knowledge and tools they need to carry out an unprecedented vaccination operation as Trump's White House grudgingly passes the baton.
  • Trump is pursuing a new round in his quixotic bid to overturn the November election by attempting to intervene in a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court.
  • There were signs Wednesday, however, that cooperation is slowly beginning to take shape behind the scenes. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that he has met with Biden's team -- a rare acknowledgment of the former vice president's victory from a top Trump official -- and he insisted that he wants "to make sure they get everything that they need."
  • "Twenty million people should get vaccinated in just the next several weeks, and then we'll just keep rolling out vaccines through January, February, March as they come off the production lines," Azar said, trying to offer a note of reassurance about continuity during an interview on CNN's New Day.
  • The vaccine distribution challenges surrounding a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic would normally be at the top of the agenda for any commander-in-chief. But unsurprisingly, Trump is refusing to acknowledge the potential problems as he spreads disinformation to his supporters, and his administration -- at his behest -- continues to target Biden's son Hunter, who revealed Wednesday that his taxes are under federal investigation.
  • "Unless a court makes some other decision, the Electoral College is the defining outcome of the presidential race," Moran said. Asked what would be next if Trump doesn't concede, Moran said: "There is a transition that just occurs -- occurs under our laws under the Constitution."
  • Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican, said "it is unhealthy for the well-being of the country" to continue debating the outcome of the election "once the presidential race has been determined."
  • The attorney representing Trump, John Eastman, is known for recently pushing a racist conspiracy theory -- that Trump himself later amplified -- claiming Vice President-elect Kamala Harris might not be eligible for the role because her parents were immigrants.
  • With hopes riding on the vaccine authorization discussion Thursday, the country continued to grapple with an alarming rise in cases around the country as medical professionals began to see the post-Thanksgiving spike materialize and some regions reverted to shutdowns to try to preserve hospital capacity.
  • "This is by far, the worst surge to date," Colfax said. "The reality is unfortunately proving to be as harsh as we expected. ... The vaccine will not save us from this current surge -- there is simply not enough time."
  • "The more terrible truth is that over 8,000 people, ... who were beloved members of their family, are not coming back. And their deaths are an incalculable loss to their friends and their family, as well as our community."
  • Though Trump has said that the vaccination program will "quickly and dramatically reduce deaths," a new White House task force report warns that the vaccine "will not substantially reduce viral spread, hospitalizations, or fatalities until the 100 million Americans with comorbidities can be fully immunized, which will take until the late spring."
  • The FDA is expected to conduct its authorization review between December 11 and the 14, with first shipment of the vaccine going out by December 15. Needles, syringes and other materials to deliver the vaccines are already on their way to states.
  • Gen. Gustave Perna, said that 2.9 million doses of vaccine will go out in the first shipment from Pfizer once the FDA grants emergency use authorization.
  • Initially the federal government expected to receive 6.4 million doses from Pfizer as the first shipment. But because the vaccine is administered in two doses, the math is more complicated. About 500,000 doses will be set aside as a reserve supply, and the remaining number was divided in half to set aside what is needed for the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, which brought down the total in the first shipment to 2.9 million doses.
  • "We just want to make sure that Americans understand exactly the science that went into this, understand the gold standard of the FDA and the approval process. We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that that won't happen," Ostrowski said.
katherineharron

Here's what we know about Pfizer's vaccine - CNN - 0 views

  • A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee has voted to recommend the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for people 16 and older a day after the US Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization (EUA) for the vaccine.
  • CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield must accept the committee's recommendation before the vaccine can be administered. But on Sunday morning, the first shipments had left a Pfizer plant in Michigan, bound for all 50 states.
  • Once the CDC accepts the recommendation, vaccinations can begin.
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  • This CDC advisory group had previously recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities should be the first to receive a vaccine when it receives EUA. The first shipments of the vaccine will be limited, so states will have to prioritize who should receive the vaccine first.
  • Keeping doctors and nurses healthy will be important for the continuing fight against the virus, which will stretch on for months, even after a vaccine is authorized. But Romero said that first group includes other people working in health care institutions, like those who deliver food and perform housekeeping.
  • Residents of long-term care facilities like nursing homes also need the protection. So far, they account for about 40% of coronavirus deaths in the US.
  • "I would project by the time you get to April, it will be ... 'open season,' in the sense of anyone, even the non-high priority groups could get vaccinated," Fauci said.
  • "We'll be in facilities that day in states that choose to begin as soon as possible," spokesman Ethan Slavin said.
  • The FDA is set to make a decision on a separate vaccine candidate by Moderna in the coming days
  • it's possible that 20 million people could get vaccinated in the next several weeks
  • Phase 1a would be followed by Phases 1b and 1c, which could include essential workers at high risk of infection, other emergency personnel and people with underlying conditions who are at a higher risk of Covid-19 complications and death.
  • Army Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of the federal government vaccine initiative Operation Warp Speed, previously said he believed vaccine administration will be able to begin vaccinations within 96 hours of authorization.
  • In the meantime, it's important that people continue to wear masks and social distance. JUST WATCHEDDr. Fauci explains importance of vaccine approval processReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH Play</
  • It's important to note, however, that Pfizer's vaccine requires two doses administered several weeks apart to reach 95% efficacy. So 100 million doses would vaccinate half the number of people.
  • Azar said earlier this month that 6.4 million doses of Pfizer vaccine would be allocated for shipment the first week. The initial shipment would include half of the doses, followed by the second half three weeks later.
  • Slaoui said he believes most doses will be injected within three to four days, but after that, "I think it will take a week."
  • The first shipments of the vaccine departed a Pfizer plant in Michigan on Sunday morning. A total of 189 boxes of vials are expected to arrive in all 50 states Monday. Another 3,900 vials are expected to ship later Sunday to US territories. Another 400 boxes packed with about 390,000 vials are expected to ship Monday and arrive at their destinations on Tuesday.
  • The vaccines will then be flown across the country, and the Federal Aviation Administration has said its air traffic controllers will prioritize flights carrying the vaccines.
  • But Pfizer's vaccine needs to be stored at incredibly cold temperatures, making the logistics of delivery even more complicated.
  • According to a briefing document released by the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, the most common side effects were reactions at the point of injection on the body, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain and fever.
  • Health authorities in the UK, where the vaccine roll out began earlier this week, said Wednesday that people with "significant history of allergic reactions" should not receive the vaccine. The advice came after two health care workers "responded adversely" following their shots.
katherineharron

US Coronavirus: States ready for first Covid-19 vaccinations as America nears 300,000 d... - 0 views

  • Eleven months after the earliest recorded case of coronavirus in the United States, medical workers are preparing to give the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, with deliveries set to arrive at administration sites from around 8 a.m. ET Monday.
  • "We expect 145 sites across all the states to receive vaccine on Monday, another 425 sites on Tuesday, and the final 66 sites on Wednesday, which will complete the initial delivery of the Pfizer orders for vaccine," Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, said Saturday.
  • More than 30,000 Americans died due to Covid-19 in the first 13 days of December, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. It put the country's death toll since the beginning of the pandemic at nearly 300,000 as of Sunday night, with more than 16.2 million reported cases.
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  • And hospitalizations have remained above 100,000 for 12 consecutive days
  • all of the flights carrying the vaccine had taken off from the Louisville, Kentucky, airport and nearly all of the ground deliveries had departed.
  • One of the biggest challenges the carrier faces is maintaining the temperature needed for the vaccine, he said.
  • "The minus-100-degree requirement with dry ice, making sure it moves, making sure the temperature is maintained, making sure the dry ice that follows the shipment after the vaccine arrives, that's important also," he said. "Making sure that we coordinate the kits that are going out ahead of the vaccine so the administration sites have everything they need to do the dosing as soon as tomorrow morning."
  • The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center expects the first doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to be delivered between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, hospital spokesperson, Alexis Shaw said in a statement to CNN.
  • they plan to begin vaccinating about 20 to 30 of the hospital's "prioritized, high risk frontline health care workers" within 1 to 1.5 hours.
  • Sisolak said plans are in place to distribute the first allocation to frontline health care workers and staff and residents in the nursing facilities for "immediate vaccination."
  • More than 90% of California residents are under orders to stay at home, except for essential needs like grocery shopping, banking, and doctor appointments. The state mandated residents to stay at home once ICU capacity for the region fell below 15%.
  • "We are at a critical point," Sisolak said, "We will be monitoring and evaluating our current situation day to day and week by week will remain under the current restrictions for now, with the goal of getting through the next month."
  • Sunday marked the third consecutive day California had over 30,000 daily new positive coronavirus cases, according to data released by the California Department of Public Health.
  • An initial 62,000 doses will be distributed to 40 facilities and 29 counties, Michele Roberts, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Washington Department of Health said.
  • "Today's news means we will see an end to this pandemic," Inslee said. But he warned that residents should continue heading safety precautions despite the start of vaccinations. "I want to be clear, this does not change the importance of our safety precautions. Masking, physical distancing and limiting interactions is just as important tomorrow as it was yesterday."
  • "You still need to think of yourself as potentially contagious even though you are protected from getting sick at a very high percentage of certainty," Dr. Francis Collins told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press."
  • "Masks are still going to be part of our life. We need to recognize that and not step away or start to drop our guard," said Collins.
  • "I think all reasonable people, if they had the chance to sort of put the noise aside and disregard all those terrible conspiracy theories, would look at this and say, 'I want this for my family, I want it for myself,'" he said of the vaccine. "People are dying right now. How could you possibly say let's wait and see if that might mean some terrible tragedy is going to befall," he said.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: As vaccines trickle across the US, more Americans are now hospitalized ... - 0 views

  • A record 110,549 Covid-19 patients were hospitalized Monday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
  • And while more doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine get sent across the country this week, there won't be enough for everyone for months.
  • "This vaccine, as wonderful as it is, is not going to change the trajectory of what we experience this winter," said Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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  • If authorized, the US plans to start by shipping about 6 million doses across the country, said Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed.
  • "We're going to have enough for 20 million people to get vaccinated by the end of December," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said.
  • About 2.9 million doses of the vaccine either have been or will be received nationwide this week. That's enough to start vaccinating 1.45 million people, since each person needs two doses.
  • The CDC has recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities get the vaccine first.
  • In the past week, the US has reported an average of more than 215,000 new infections a day, according to Johns Hopkins University.
  • More than 300,000 people in the US have died from coronavirus in 10 months, according to Johns Hopkis.
  • And another 186,000 are projected to die over the next three months, according to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. "
  • "There are tens of thousands of Black and brown people dying every year because they are distrustful of the system," Adams said. "In many cases, rightly so, but also because they're not getting the facts to help restore their trust in the system."
  • In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said that while the vaccines offered a moment of hope, he added "we are in the midst of the worst moment of this pandemic."
  • Los Angeles County health officials said Monday new cases have increased 625% since November 1, with "younger people continuing to drive the increase in community transmission."
  • "Our reality is frightening at the moment," they said in a statement. "By next weekend, there are likely to be over 5,000 patients hospitalized and more than 50% of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients."
  • In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted at tighter restrictions in the coming weeks, saying the city was on a "very troubling" trajectory, "in terms of the number of people who get sick, the number of people we would lose ... and obviously the impact on hospitals, their ability to treat people."
  • "We will be monitoring and evaluating our current situation day to day and ... (we) will remain under the current restrictions for now, with the goal of getting through the next month."
  • "If officials and experts agree that our trends are going beyond our ability to respond, I will be forced to come in front of you all again with tougher actions."
Javier E

Opinion | Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,”
  • It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week. It’s all there: The ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth. The ways in which tribalism — referred to in “The Oppermanns” as “anthropological and zoological nonsense” — is easily roused to demonize others. The ways in which warring factions can be abetted by the media and accepted by a credulous populace.
  • The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time.
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  • The result, Fred T. March noted in his 1934 review in The Times, “is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.’
  • “How do you know when to sound the alarm?” asked Cohen, who also wrote an introduction to the new edition, when I reached him by phone on book tour in Italy. It’s easy to slam someone for overreacting, he explained. But we would do well to remember the instances in which a strong reaction is justified: “There’s an enormous bravery that comes with writing about the present, an enormous risk and an enormous thrill. You have to ask yourself: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ And also: ‘What if I’m right?’”
  • the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.
  • Populist ignorance cannot prevail in an enlightened world. Just as New Yorkers scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump, lead buffoon of the tabloid ’80s, could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, so do the bourgeois intelligentsia of “The Oppermanns” chortle over “Mein Kampf,” a work they find impossible to reckon with in the land of Goethe: “A nation that had concerned itself for centuries so intensively with books, such as those they saw around them, could never allow itself to be deceived by the nonsense in the ‘Protocols’ and in ‘Mein Kampf.’”
  • Consider the misbegotten assumptions Feuchtwanger took on then that continue to threaten today:
  • Direct engagement confers legitimacy. When Edgar Oppermann, a doctor, faces antisemitic attacks in the newspapers, his boss advises silence. “The whole of politics is nothing but a pigsty. Unless one cannot help doing otherwise, one should simply ignore them. That’s what annoys the pigsty crowd most.” To confront the forces of illiberalism is only to sully oneself, Edgar believes. Those in the press who propagate such lies “ought to be put into an asylum, not brought before a court of law.”
  • Technology will out disinformation. At each turn, the Oppermanns and their milieu have trouble believing that propaganda will take hold. “How could they expect to get away with such a monstrous, clumsy lie?” Gustav Oppermann, the central figure in the novel, asks himself after the Nazis blame the burning of the Reichstag on communists. “Nero might have put over such cheap stuff in burning Rome. But things like that were impossible today, in the era of the telephone and printing press.” Of course, the era of Twitter and TikTok has shown that advances in technology still amplify falsehoods
  • If you ignore it, it will go away. In the novel, two bourgeois Germans foresee a grim future but fall back on complacency. One describes the first world war as “only a curtain-raiser” with “a century of destruction” to follow, predicting, as he puts it, “a military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice.” His companion merely replies: “All right, if that’s your opinion. But perhaps you’ll have another cognac and a cigar before it happens.”
  • It’s up to the next generation. The novel’s most tragic figure is the teenage Berthold Oppermann, a student guilty only by ethnicity and familial association. Berated by a Nazi schoolteacher for delivering an allegedly anti-German paper, Berthold says he is “a good German” and refuses to apologize. “You are a good German, are you?” his Nazi teacher sneers. “Well, will you be so good as to leave it to others to decide who is a good German and who is not?”
  • While classrooms today are a far cry from those in Nazi-era Germany, one needn’t reach far for contemporary parallels, with students increasingly operating in an atmosphere of fear and conformity — of their peers, depending on location, on the right or the left — while the adults too often abdicate responsibility, whether out of complicity or fear.
  • The situation was inevitable. In the Oppermanns’ world, escalating problems are viewed as uniquely German, unique to their time and to a particular regime. “Our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness,” explains a lawyer at one point. “That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country.”
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