[Thespiritexpress] Alan Watts on love, the essence of freedom, and the antidote to fear
Danleigh
grokme at mcn.org
Sun Mar 21 19:47:38 PDT 2021
Marc -- I recently watched (listened to) an interview of Alan Watts by
Studs Turkel
on Youtube.
Turns out it was his last interview as he (Watts) died a short while later
He had some very interesting views on events of the time. For instance,
he thought
that Ghandi was one of the most violent men ever. You may want to check
it out.
On 3/21/21 12:59 PM, Yasskin Marc wrote:
> Thank you Dani ~ one of the all-time greats.~ !!!
> His book The Way of Zen is probably my first true experience of really
> “grokking” spirituality and consciousness.”
> I remember reading that book in the bathtub and laughing harder and
> louder than I ever had in my life ~ or maybe have since.
>
> Namaste,
> ~ m.🙏🌟
>
>> On Mar 21, 2021, at 11:14 AM, Danleigh via Thespiritexpress
>> <thespiritexpress at lists.mcn.org
>> <mailto:thespiritexpress at lists.mcn.org>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I have recently rediscovered him -- you may resonate with his philosophy.
>> Dani
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Brain Pickings
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=86833c7874&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>>
>> Alan Watts on Love, the Meaning of Freedom, and the Only Real
>> Antidote to Fear
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8064eba967&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>> alanwatts_thewisdomofinsecurity.jpg?fit=320%2C494
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=50011a84cc&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>> “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb
>> 1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of
>> loss
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=08b170b74a&e=abb58e6917>.
>> “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no
>> longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only
>> valid tense is the present, the Now.”
>>
>> Half a century before her, Leo Tolstoy — who befriended a Buddhist
>> monk late in life and became deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy
>> — echoed these ancient truths as he contemplated the paradoxical
>> nature of love
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d4c4605db9&e=abb58e6917>:
>> “Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only.”
>>
>> That in love and in life, freedom from fear — like all species of
>> freedom — is only possible within the present moment has long been a
>> core teaching of the most ancient Eastern spiritual and philosophical
>> traditions. It is one of the most elemental truths of existence, and
>> one of those most difficult to put into practice as we move through
>> our daily human lives, so habitually inclined toward the next moment
>> and the mentally constructed universe of expected events — the
>> parallel universe where anxiety dwells, where hope and fear for what
>> might be eclipse what is, and where we cease to be free because we
>> are no longer in the direct light of reality.
>>
>> The relationship between freedom, fear, and love is what *Alan Watts*
>> (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) explores in one of the most
>> insightful chapters of */The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an
>> Age of Anxiety/*
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=49b4b4223e&e=abb58e6917>
>> (/public library/
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3df3be0320&e=abb58e6917>)
>> — his altogether revelatory 1951 classic, which introduced Eastern
>> philosophy to the West with its lucid and luminous case for how to
>> live with presence
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2739f6814e&e=abb58e6917>.
>>
>>
>> alanwatts.jpg?zoom=2&w=680
>>
>> Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection)
>>
>> Drawing on his admonition against the dangers of the divided mind
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f55fa02389&e=abb58e6917>
>> — the mindset that divides us into interior self-awareness and
>> external reality, into ego and universe, which is the mindset the
>> whole of Western culture has instilled in us — he writes:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe meaning of freedom
>> can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from
>> my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the
>> extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent
>> to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there
>> is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process
>> acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little
>> finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that
>> way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one
>> fates and no one is being fated.
>>
>> This model of freedom is orthogonal to our conditioned view that
>> freedom is a matter of bending external reality to our will by the
>> power of our choices — controlling what remains of nature once the
>> “I” is separated out. Watts draws a subtle, crucial distinction
>> between freedom and choice:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngWhat we ordinarily mean
>> by choice is not freedom. Choices are usually decisions motivated
>> by pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole
>> purpose of getting “I” into pleasure and out of pain. But the
>> best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst
>> part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when
>> it has come. You cannot plan to be happy. You can plan to exist,
>> but in themselves existence and non-existence are neither
>> pleasurable nor painful.
>>
>> thomaswright6.jpg?resize=680%2C753
>>
>> Art by Thomas Wright from his /Original Theory or New Hypothesis of
>> the Universe/
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=340930c33b&e=abb58e6917>,
>> 1750. (Available as a print
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=775e320975&e=abb58e6917>
>> and as a face mask
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=540b915573&e=abb58e6917>.)
>>
>> Stripped of the paraphernalia of circumstance and interpretation, our
>> internal experience of being unfree stems from attempting impossible
>> things — things that resist reality and refuse to accept the present
>> moment on its own terms. Watts writes:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe sense of not being
>> free comes from trying to do things which are impossible and even
>> meaningless. You are not “free” to draw a square circle, to live
>> without a head, or to stop certain reflex actions. These are not
>> obstacles to freedom; they are the conditions of freedom. I am
>> not free to draw a circle if perchance it should turn out to be a
>> square circle. I am not, thank heaven, free to walk out of doors
>> and leave my head at home. Likewise I am not free to live in any
>> moment but this one, or to separate myself from my feelings.
>>
>> Without the motive forces of pleasure and pain, it might at first
>> appear paradoxical to make any decisions at all — a contradiction
>> that makes it impossible to choose between options as we navigate
>> even the most basic realities of life: Why choose to take the
>> umbrella into the downpour, why choose to eat this piece of mango and
>> not this piece of cardboard? But Watts observes that the only real
>> contradiction is of our own making as we cede the present to an
>> imagined future. More than half a century before psychologists came
>> to study how your present self is sabotaging your future happiness
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c7b41a9f2b&e=abb58e6917>,
>> Watts offers the personal counterpart to Albert Camus’s astute
>> political observation that “real generosity toward the future lies in
>> giving all to the present,”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1153a0c55f&e=abb58e6917>
>> and writes:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngI fall straight into
>> contradiction when I try to act and decide in order to be happy,
>> when I make “being pleased” my future goal. For the more my
>> actions are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am
>> incapable of enjoying any pleasures at all. For all pleasures are
>> present, and nothing save complete awareness of the present can
>> even begin to guarantee future happiness.
>>
>> […]
>>
>> You can only live in one moment at a time, and you cannot think
>> simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are
>> enjoying listening to the waves. Contradictions of this kind are
>> the only real types of action without freedom.
>>
>> margaretcook_leavesofgrass25.jpg?resize=680%2C851
>>
>> Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e8901b4feb&e=abb58e6917>
>> of Walt Whitman’s /Leaves of Grass/. (Available as a print
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=62b84a9a80&e=abb58e6917>)
>>
>> Only with such a recalibration of our reflexive view of freedom does
>> James Baldwin’s insistence that “people are as free as they want to
>> be”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bf28356050&e=abb58e6917>
>> begin to unfold its layered meaning like a Zen koan, to be turned
>> over in the mind until the deceptively simple shape unfolds its
>> origami-folded scroll of deep truth.
>>
>> In what may be the most elegant refutation of the particular strain
>> of hubris that embraces determinism in order to wring from it the
>> self-permission for living with delirious freedom from
>> responsibility, Watts writes:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThere is another theory
>> of determinism which states that all our actions are motivated by
>> “unconscious mental mechanisms,” and that for this reason even
>> the most spontaneous decisions are not free. This is but another
>> example of split-mindedness, for what is the difference between
>> “me” and “mental mechanisms” whether conscious or unconscious?
>> Who is being moved by these processes? The notion that anyone is
>> being motivated comes from the persisting illusion of “I.” The
>> real man*
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f2aef5b3ec&e=abb58e6917>,
>> the organism-in-relation-to-the-universe, /is/ this unconscious
>> motivation. And because he /is/ it, he is not being moved /by/ it.
>>
>> […]
>>
>> Events look inevitable in retrospect because when they have
>> happened, nothing can change them. Yet the fact that I can make
>> safe bets could prove equally well that events are not
>> /determined/ but /consistent/. In other words, the universal
>> process acts freely and spontaneously at every moment, but tends
>> to throw out events in regular, and so predictable, sequences.
>>
>> Only by such a misapprehension of freedom, Watts observes, do we ever
>> feel unfree: When we enter a state that causes us psychological pain,
>> our immediate impulse is to get the “I” out of the pain, which is
>> invariably a resistance to the present moment as it is; because we
>> cannot will a different psychological state, we reach for an easy
>> escape: a drink, a drug, a compulsive scroll through an Instagram
>> feed. All the ways in which we try to abate our feelings of abject
>> loneliness and boredom and inadequacy by escaping from the present
>> moment where they unfold are motivated by the fear that those
>> intolerable feelings will subsume us. And yet the instant we become
>> motivated by fear, we become unfree — we are prisoners of fear. We
>> are only free within the bounds of the present moment, with all of
>> its disquieting feelings, because only in that moment can they
>> dissipate into the totality of integrated reality, leaving no divide
>> between us as feelers and the feelings being felt, and therefore no
>> painful contrast between preferred state and actual state. Watts writes:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngSo long as the mind
>> believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this
>> moment, there can be no freedom.
>>
>> […]
>>
>> It /sounds/ as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to
>> admit that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is
>> possible. It seems that if I /am/ afraid, then I am “stuck” with
>> fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am
>> trying to get away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try
>> to get away I discover that there is nothing “stuck” or fixed
>> about the reality of the moment. When I am aware of this feeling
>> without naming it, without calling it “fear,” “bad,” “negative,”
>> etc., it changes instantly into something else, and life moves
>> freely ahead. The feeling no longer perpetuates itself by
>> creating the feeler behind it.
>>
>> thomaswright_galaxies3.jpg?resize=680%2C977
>>
>> Art by Thomas Wright from his /Original Theory or New Hypothesis of
>> the Universe/
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7ca02fcd7d&e=abb58e6917>,
>> 1750. (Available as a print
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=dfe603dab1&e=abb58e6917>
>> and as a face mask
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c13afde82e&e=abb58e6917>.)
>>
>> To dissolve into this total reality of the moment is the crucible of
>> freedom, which is in turn the crucible of love. In consonance with
>> Toni Morrison’s insistence that the deepest measure of freedom is
>> loving anything and anyone you choose to love
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cc38ed491b&e=abb58e6917>
>> and with that classic, exquisite Adrienne Rich sonnet line — “no
>> one’s fated or doomed to love anyone”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e2119d37e4&e=abb58e6917>
>> — Watts considers the ultimate reward of this undivided mind:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe further truth that
>> the undivided mind is aware of experience as a unity, of the
>> world as itself, and that the whole nature of mind and awareness
>> is to be one with what it knows, suggests a state that would
>> usually be called love… Love is the organizing and unifying
>> principle which makes the world a /uni/verse and the
>> disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and
>> character of mind, and becomes manifest in action when the mind
>> is whole… This, rather than any mere emotion, is the power and
>> principle of free action.
>>
>> Complement this fragment of the timelessly rewarding */The Wisdom of
>> Insecurity/*
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=464ef1fa8c&e=abb58e6917>
>> with Watts on learning not to think in terms of gain and loss
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aec3eaf38f&e=abb58e6917>
>> and finding meaning by accepting the meaninglessness of life
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=564cf7ee4d&e=abb58e6917>,
>> then revisit Seneca on the antidote to anxiety
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6da9acbfe8&e=abb58e6917>
>> and astronomer Rebecca Elson’s almost unbearably beautiful poem
>> “Antidotes to Fear of Death.”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a30c3b8496&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>>
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>> donating=loving
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>>
>> The Herd, the Hive, and the Human Spirit: Eula Biss on Immunity,
>> Sanity, and Health as Communal Trust
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f7b3681d59&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>> eulabiss_onimmunity.jpg?fit=320%2C480
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2793d38d1e&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>> Months after Rachel Carson’s /Silent Spring/ awakened humanity to the
>> delicate interdependence of nature
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bfa200c961&e=abb58e6917>,
>> Dr. King awakened humanity to our delicate dependence on each other.
>> “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality [and] whatever
>> affects one directly, affects all indirectly,”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f7e554fa6e&e=abb58e6917>
>> he wrote from his cell at the Birmingham City Jail.
>>
>> When Robert Hooke looked at a piece of cork through an early
>> handcrafted leather-and-gold microscope in 1665, he named the strange
>> irregular “pores” of its honeycomb-like tissue structure /cells/,
>> after the small adjacent spaces in which monks spend their voluntary
>> solitary confinement. It would take another two centuries for
>> scientists to discover that cells are the basic biological units of
>> life, that they are in constant osmotic communication with one
>> another, and that they replicate themselves to become new cells, each
>> a whispered word from the language in which life talks to the future.
>>
>> RobertHooke_Micrographia_cork.jpg?resize=680%2C1007
>>
>> Cork structure from Robert Hooke’s /Micrographia/, 1665. (Available
>> as a print
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6042f0ccfe&e=abb58e6917>.)
>>
>> Biological and social, our interdependence is a defining feature not
>> only of our civilization, not only of our species and all living
>> species, but of life itself — life the physiological process and life
>> the psychosocial phenomenon. “Every atom belonging to me as good
>> belongs to you,”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=055786d7c2&e=abb58e6917>
>> Walt Whitman exulted in the golden age of chemistry — the new science
>> he saw as “the elevating, beautiful, study… which involves the
>> essences of creation.” Meanwhile, the development of cell theory was
>> revolutionizing biology, making of this philosophical field as old as
>> Aristotle an even newer science that illuminated the essence of life.
>> Cells became to biology what atoms were to chemistry. Biology ushered
>> in the revelation that every cell belonging to me as good — as
>> healthy, as vital, as fit for replication — belongs to you.
>>
>> That delicate interdependence of life and lives, with its tangled
>> roots in biology and cultural history, is what *Eula Biss* explores
>> in */On Immunity: An Inoculation/*
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e4d6f47d38&e=abb58e6917>
>> (/public library/
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1e70ed4014&e=abb58e6917>)
>> — a book of penetrating and poetic insight, drawn with that rare
>> scholarship capable of correcting the warped cultural hindsight we
>> call history; a book of staggering foresight, conceived in the wake
>> of the H1N1 flu pandemic, yet speaking with astonishing prescience to
>> the complex epidemiological realities and social dynamics of the
>> COVID-19 pandemic unfolding more than five years after its publication.
>>
>> For Biss — the daughter of a medical scientist and a poet — even her
>> own biological inheritance as a universal donor with type O negative
>> blood becomes a potent metaphor for the mechanism of vaccination, a
>> lens through which to view the permeable membrane between the
>> biological and social realities of immunity. With an eye to the blood
>> banks that collect her donations to save other lives, she writes:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIf we imagine the action
>> of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body,
>> but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a
>> community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of
>> banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to
>> those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity.
>> This is the principle of /herd immunity/, and it is through herd
>> immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than
>> individual vaccination.
>>
>> It is a rather unfortunate term for an unassailable scientific
>> principle — we humans, especially in this culture of rugged
>> individualism nursed on the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3e4cd26a21&e=abb58e6917>,
>> bristle at thinking of ourselves as members of a herd. In our long
>> history of thinking with animals
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0f74059735&e=abb58e6917>,
>> herd animals have been the butt of our derogatory metaphors for
>> mindless conformity.
>>
>> louisi_tallec00.jpg?zoom=2&w=680
>>
>> Art by Olivier Tallec from /Louis I, King of the Sheep/
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=593bf1aeac&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>> And yet inside the unfortunate linguistic container, an unfaltering
>> biological reality resides: On large enough a scale, even a fairy
>> ineffective vaccine that fails to produce immunity in some
>> individuals will slow down the spread of infection in the community;
>> as the virus fails to replicate itself in more and more new hosts,
>> the vaccine will eventually halt it altogether. In consequence, even
>> such a mediocre vaccine will protect all members of the community,
>> even those for whom inoculation has not worked as intended on the
>> individual level. This is why it is more dangerous to be the
>> vaccinated animal amid a largely unvaccinated herd than the other way
>> around. Biss writes:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe unvaccinated person
>> is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which
>> disease is not circulating. But a vaccinated person surrounded by
>> bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or
>> fading immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin,
>> but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin
>> to dissolve here. Donations of blood and organs move between us,
>> exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity,
>> which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those
>> of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our
>> neighbors.
>>
>> With an eye to the origin of herd immunity theory — a theory
>> developed in the 1840s by a doctor treating smallpox, which has taken
>> manyfold more human lives than any other infectious disease in the
>> history of our species and which has since been eradicated — Biss
>> proposes an alternative, both more poetic and more precise, to the
>> imperfect term that so perfectly describes the biosocial reality:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngHerd immunity, an
>> observable phenomenon, now seems implausible only if we think of
>> our bodies as inherently disconnected from other bodies. Which,
>> of course, we do.
>>
>> The very expression /herd immunity/ suggests that we are cattle,
>> waiting, perhaps, to be sent to slaughter. And it invites an
>> unfortunate association with the term /herd mentality/, a
>> stampede toward stupidity. The herd, we assume, is foolish. Those
>> of us who eschew the herd mentality tend to prefer a frontier
>> mentality in which we imagine our bodies as isolated homesteads
>> that we tend either well or badly. The health of the homestead
>> next to ours does not affect us, this thinking suggests, so long
>> as ours is well tended.
>>
>> If we were to exchange the metaphor of the herd for a hive,
>> perhaps the concept of shared immunity might be more appealing.
>> Honeybees are matriarchal, environmental do-gooders who also
>> happen to be entirely interdependent. The health of any
>> individual bee, as we know from the recent epidemic of colony
>> collapse, depends on the health of the hive.
>>
>> sougy_bee.jpg?resize=680%2C879
>>
>> Diagram of bee anatomy by French artist Paul Sougy, 1962. (Available
>> as a print
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ff1df1b8e5&e=abb58e6917>.)
>>
>> Biss quotes a succinct summation by her father, a doctor:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngVaccination works by
>> enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.
>>
>> No one person has done more to undermine this vital mutuality of
>> protection than Andrew Wakefield — the British gastroenterologist
>> who, in the 1990s, infected the hive mind with his causal claims
>> linking vaccines and autism. Preying on the understandable human
>> impulse toward concretizing blame for amorphous and ambiguous
>> problems, the theory went viral before multiple subsequent studies
>> debunked his results, before it was exposed that Wakefield was paid
>> for his research by a lawyer readying a lawsuit against a vaccine
>> maker, before the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom
>> concluded its investigation with the verdict that Wakefield had been
>> “irresponsible and dishonest” in conducting and publishing his work.
>>
>> Despite the scientific and ethical denunciation of Wakefield’s study,
>> its ideological meme had already spread beyond retrieval. (Richard
>> Dawkins coined the word /meme/ in 1976 by borrowing from biology
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1a61935e8d&e=abb58e6917>
>> — a word that came alive anew a quarter century later in the context
>> of “viral” content on the internet, which has its own roots in
>> epidemiology.) A quarter century later, echoes of Wakefield’s
>> disproven falsehoods bellow with formidable vocality. That group of
>> voices is often referred to as the anti-vaccination movement, but I
>> find the term /movement/ extremely ill-suited — such groupthink is
>> not in movement but static, frozen in time and frozen with fear,
>> petrified in the cultural amber of a time before the Age of Reason
>> and lashed about by the same errors of magical thinking, willful
>> blindness, and confusion of causation and correlation that made our
>> medieval ancestors take comets for indisputable omens of future
>> events and left-handedness for indisputable evidence of possession by
>> the Devil.
>>
>> comet9.jpg?resize=680%2C798
>>
>> Art from /The Comet Book/
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=50a05a98fd&e=abb58e6917>,
>> 1587. (Available as a print
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ca6d7a96ec&e=abb58e6917>).
>>
>> Biss is more generous in her own assessment of anti-vaccination:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThose who went on to use
>> Wakefield’s inconclusive work to support the notion that vaccines
>> cause autism are not guilty of ignorance or science denial so
>> much as they are guilty of using weak science as it has always
>> been used — to lend false credibility to an idea that we want to
>> believe for other reasons.
>>
>> Writing shortly after the birth of the Occupy movement — the
>> self-described “99%” launching “an ongoing global protest of
>> capitalism” — she considers a friend’s half-joke, half-koan about
>> vaccination as a matter of “occupy immune system,” and reflects on
>> the basic moral syllogism of anti-vaccination as a political stance
>> claiming to protest the capitalist forces behind modern medicine:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngImmunity is a public
>> space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry
>> immunity. For some… a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader
>> resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of
>> civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very
>> structure the Occupy movement seeks to disrupt — a privileged 1
>> percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from
>> the other 99 percent.
>>
>> […]
>>
>> We are justified in feeling threatened by the unlimited expansion
>> of industry, and we are justified in fearing that our interests
>> are secondary to corporate interests. But refusal of vaccination
>> undermines a system that is not actually typical of capitalism.
>> It is a system in which both the burdens and the benefits are
>> shared across the entire population. Vaccination allows us to use
>> the products of capitalism for purposes that are counter to the
>> pressures of capital.
>>
>> honeybee_MariaPopova.jpg?resize=680%2C680
>>
>> /Emissary/ by Maria Popova
>>
>> In a lovely antidote to the tragic human tendency toward cynicism —
>> that touchingly misguided and ineffective effort at self-protection
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aa5b8aec46&e=abb58e6917>,
>> that particularly virulent strain of cowardice
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=efa1ffb65f&e=abb58e6917>
>> to which our culture has grown increasingly hospitable as it has
>> grown increasingly impatient with the slow and vulnerable work of
>> nuance — Biss adds:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThat so many of us find
>> it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and
>> health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm
>> children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really
>> taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working
>> people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already
>> impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its
>> value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as
>> innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that
>> everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished.
>>
>> Complement */On Immunity/*
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3b3663b4e0&e=abb58e6917>
>> — a redemptive and salutary read in its entirety — with Virginia
>> Woolf on illness as a portal to self-understanding
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2aee7a9cb0&e=abb58e6917>
>> and Bessel van der Kolk on the science of how our minds and our
>> bodies converge in healing
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c124318721&e=abb58e6917>,
>> then revisit Adrienne Rich on resisting capitalism through the arts
>> of the possible
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e63d66c5f9&e=abb58e6917>.
>>
>>
>> Forward to a friend
>> <http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b3f29a7027&e=abb58e6917>/Read
>> Online
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=48a80f1d24&e=abb58e6917>/
>> Like
>> https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/19/eula-biss-on-immunity/
>> on Facebook
>> <https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/alan-watts-eula-biss-newton?fblike=fblike-bbe18e98&e=abb58e6917&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Db3f29a7027%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2021%252F03%252F19%252Feula-biss-on-immunity%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2021%252F03%252F19...>
>>
>>
>>
>> A Cenotaph for Newton: The Poetry of Public Spaces, the
>> Architecture of Shadow, and How Trees Inspired the World’s First
>> Planetarium Design
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3a1e0fbdbd&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>> boullee_architectureart.jpg?fit=320%2C417
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8bfb31be84&e=abb58e6917>
>>
>>
>> Nineteen years after the publication of Isaac Newton’s epoch-making
>> /Principia/ — in England, in Latin — the prodigy mathematician Émilie
>> du Châtelet
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=531b3dd63a&e=abb58e6917>
>> set out to translate his ideas into her native French, making them
>> more comprehensible in the process. Her more-than-translation — which
>> includes several of her mathematical corrections and clarifications
>> of Newton’s imprecisions, and which remains the only comprehensive
>> edition in French to this day — popularized his ideas in France and,
>> from this epicenter of the Enlightenment, spread them centripetally
>> throughout the rest of the Continent, rendering Newton himself an
>> emblem of the Enlightenment the sweep of which he never lived to see.
>>
>> blake_newton.jpg?zoom=2&w=680
>>
>> /Newton/ by William Blake (Tate Britain)
>>
>> Not long after Du Châtelet’s untimely death, her legacy reached one
>> of her most gifted compatriots — the visionary architect
>> *Étienne-Louis Boullée* (February 12, 1728–February 4, 1799), who
>> fell under Newton’s spell. Determined to honor Newton with a worthy
>> cenotaph — a memorial tomb for a person buried elsewhere — he
>> designed a sphere 500 feet in diameter, taller than the Pyramids of
>> Giza, nested into a colossal pedestal and encircled by hundreds of
>> cypress trees, giving it the transfixing illusion of being both
>> half-buried into the Earth and hovering unmoored from gravity. It was
>> also, in essence, the world’s first domed planetarium design.
>>
>> boullee_newtoncenotaph7.jpg?resize=680%2C411
>>
>> Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
>>
>> The cenotaph was a touching gesture in the first place — a Frenchman
>> honoring a genius born of and interred in England, a nation with
>> which Boullée’s own had been in near-ceaseless war for centuries,
>> with those tensions at an all-time high at the time of his design,
>> thanks to the American Revolutionary War. Doubly touching was his
>> choice of a sphere: One of Newton’s most revolutionary contributions
>> — the mathematical inference that because gravity is weaker at the
>> equator, the shape of the Earth must be spherical — had defied
>> France’s greatest son, René Descartes, who maintained that the Earth
>> was egg-shaped. When Boullée was still a boy, a young Frenchman —
>> Émilie du Châtelet’s mathematics tutor — had joined a perilous Arctic
>> expedition to prove Newton correct. Two centuries later, in the wake
>> of the world’s grimmest war yet, a queer Quaker Englishman would do
>> the same
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9096933894&e=abb58e6917>,
>> risking his life to defend the epoch-making theory of a German Jew —
>> the theory of relativity that ultimately subverted Newton. Another
>> world war later, Einstein himself would appeal to what he called “the
>> common language of science”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cc7d3ebeb1&e=abb58e6917>
>> — that truth-seeking contact with nature and reality that transcends
>> all borders and all nationalisms, the impulse that animated Boullée’s
>> bold homage to Newton.
>>
>> boullee_newtoncenotaph5.jpg?resize=680%2C655
>>
>> Cenotaph side cross-section. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale
>> de France.
>>
>> While governed by the credo that “our buildings — and our public
>> buildings in particular — should be to some extent poems,” Boullée
>> also believed that science could magnify the poetry of public spaces,
>> which must at bottom reflect the principles of the grand designer:
>> Nature. A century before the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote that “all
>> the Arts… imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can
>> see,”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8427116b16&e=abb58e6917>
>> Boullée insisted:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngNo idea exists that does
>> not derive from nature… It is impossible to create architectural
>> imagery without a profound knowledge of nature: the Poetry of
>> architecture lies in natural effects. That is what makes
>> architecture an art and that art sublime.
>>
>> Architecture in the modern sense was then a young art, because the
>> art-science of perspective was so novel
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=af86805e4f&e=abb58e6917>.
>> Newton’s optics, derived directly from the laws of nature, had
>> revolutionized it all. Boullée came to define architecture as “the
>> art of creating perspectives by the arrangement of volumes,” but a
>> highly poetic art:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe real talent of an
>> architect lies in incorporating in his work the sublime
>> attraction of Poetry.
>>
>> The poetry of architecture, he argued, resides in using perspective
>> and light in such a way that “our senses are reminded of nature.” He
>> interpreted the laws of nature, as clarified by Newton’s optics and
>> mathematics, to intimate that no shape embodies this serenade to the
>> senses with greater power and precision than the sphere:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngA sphere is, in all
>> respects, the image of perfection. It combines strict symmetry
>> with the most perfect regularity and the greatest possible
>> variety; its form is developed to the fullest extent and is the
>> simplest that exists; its shape is outlined by the most agreeable
>> contour and, finally, the light effects that it produces are so
>> beautifully graduated that they could not possibly be softer,
>> more agreeable or more varied. These unique advantages, which the
>> sphere derives from nature, have an immeasurable hold over our
>> senses.
>>
>> boullee_newtoncenotaph2.jpg?resize=680%2C404
>>
>> Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
>>
>> And so Boullée predicated his cenotaph for Newton on an enormous
>> sphere that would convey his ultimate intent for the temple — to
>> arouse in the visitor’s soul “feelings in keeping with religious
>> ceremonies,” a sense of grandeur leaving them “moved by such an
>> excess of sensibility… that all the faculties of our soul are
>> disturbed to such an extent that we feel it is departing from our
>> body” — an effect always best achieved not by an enormity of sheer
>> size and space but by a considered contrast of scales. No building,
>> he observed, “calls for the Poetry of architecture” more than a
>> memorial to the dead. Believing that architecture, like all art,
>> should ultimately serve to enlarge our sense of aliveness, and that
>> we are never more alive than when we are rooted in our creaturely
>> senses, Boullée insisted that the key to this sense of grandeur lies
>> in applying the principles of nature’s mathematics with poetic
>> subtlety — the principles laid bare in the /Principia/, the
>> principles that “derive from order, the symbol of wisdom.” He wrote:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngSymmetry… is what results
>> from the order that extends in every direction and multiplies
>> them at our glance until we can no longer count them. By
>> extending the sweep of an avenue so that its end is out of sight,
>> the laws of optics and the effects of perspective given an
>> impression of immensity; at each step, the objects appear in a
>> new guise and our pleasure is renewed by a succession of
>> different vistas. Finally, by some miracle which in fact is the
>> result of our own movement but which we attribute to the objects
>> around us, the latter seem to move with us, as if we had imparted
>> Life to them.
>>
>> boullee_newtoncenotaph1.jpg?resize=680%2C667
>>
>> Aerial cross-section. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
>>
>> But my favorite part of the story is that Boullée found his formative
>> inspiration, not only for the Newton cenotaph and but for his entire
>> creative philosophy, in an unusual encounter with trees — those
>> profoundest of teachers
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c491abed79&e=abb58e6917>.
>>
>> One evening, heavy with grief, Boullée went for a walk along the edge
>> of a forest. Under the moonlight, he noticed his shadow. He had seen
>> his shadow a thousand times before, but the peculiar lens of his
>> psychic state rendered it entirely new — a living artwork of “extreme
>> melancholy.” Looking around, he saw the shadows of the trees in this
>> new light, too, etching onto the ground the profound drama of life.
>> The entire scene was suddenly awash in “all that is sombre in
>> nature.” He had seen the state of his soul mirrored back by the
>> natural world, as we so often do in those rawest moments when we are
>> stripped to the base of our being, grounded into our creaturely senses.
>>
>> This was the moment of Boullée’s artistic awakening — that moment of
>> revelation when, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her exquisite account of
>> her own artistic awakening
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9d88eef4bc&e=abb58e6917>,
>> something lifts “the cotton wool of daily life” and we see the
>> familiar world afresh. Boullée recounted:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe mass of objects stood
>> out in black against the extreme wanness of the light. Nature
>> offered itself to my gaze in mourning. I was struck by the
>> sensations I was experiencing and immediately began to wonder how
>> to apply this, especially to architecture. I tried to find a
>> composition made up of the effect of shadows. To achieve this, I
>> imagined the light (as I had observed it in nature) giving back
>> to me all that my imagination could think of. That was how I
>> proceeded when I was seeking to discover this new type of
>> architecture.
>>
>> He called this new architecture “the architecture of shadow.” His
>> vision for Newton’s cenotaph was its grand testament:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngI attempted to create the
>> greatest of all effects, that of immensity; for that is what
>> gives us lofty thoughts as we contemplate the Creator and give us
>> celestial sensations.
>>
>> He attempted, more than that, to honor Newton on his own terms, by
>> the essence of his genius:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngO Newton! With the range
>> of your intelligence and the sublime nature of your Genius, you
>> have defined the shape of the earth; I have conceived the idea of
>> enveloping you with your discovery… your own self. How can I find
>> outside you anything worthy of you?
>>
>> boullee_newtoncenotaph4.jpg?resize=680%2C411
>>
>> Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
>>
>> In a further homage to Newton’s legacy, with Boullée regarded as a
>> “divine system” of laws, he chose to suspend a sole spherical lamp
>> over the tomb as the only decoration in the entire monument —
>> anything else, he felt, would be “committing sacrilege.” The contrast
>> of scales — the smaller sphere of the lamp inside the enormous sphere
>> of the building — would dramatize the contrast of light and shadow,
>> just as the moonlight had done that fateful night of artistic
>> revelation by the trees. This would give the visitor the sense that
>> they are “as if by magic floating in the air, borne in the wake of
>> images in the immensity of space.” Boullée considered the play of
>> light the vital element in this enchantment:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIt is light that produces
>> impressions which arouse in us various contradictory sensations
>> depending on whether they are brilliant or sombre. If I could
>> manage to diffuse in my temple magnificent light effects I would
>> fill the onlooker with joy; but if, on the contrary, my temple
>> had only sombre effects, I would fill him with sadness. If I
>> could avoid direct light and arrange for its presence without the
>> onlooker being aware of its source, the ensuing effect of
>> mysterious daylight would produce inconceivable impression and,
>> in a sense, a truly enchanting magic quality.
>>
>> At a time long before readily available electric light and
>> light-projection, he leaned on Newton’s optics to envision something
>> that was part Stonehenge and part Hayden Planetarium. A century and a
>> half before the first modern planetarium dome, Boullée dotted the
>> black interior of his dome with an intricate arrangement of tiny
>> holes reflecting the positions of the constellations and the planets,
>> streaming in daylight to create an enchanting nightscape inside. But
>> unlike the modern counterpart, Boullée’s was a reversible planetarium
>> — at night, the sole spherical light would irradiate the tiny holes
>> from the other direction, making the dome appear as a self-contained
>> universe if viewed from above. This, lest we forget, was the golden
>> age of aeronautics, when hot-air balloons first defied gravity to
>> lift the human animal into the sky.
>>
>> boullee_newtoncenotaph6.jpg?resize=680%2C412
>>
>> Side cross-section. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
>>
>> Too visionary for its era, the cenotaph was never built, but
>> Boullée’s ink-and-wash drawings circulated widely in the final decade
>> of his life, eliciting both gasping admiration and merciless derision
>> — the fate of the true visionary. With the publication of his
>> impassioned and insightful writings
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=609b62cf49&e=abb58e6917>
>> nearly two centuries after his death, translated by Helen Rosenau,
>> his vision went on to inspire generations of modern artists and
>> architects with a new way of thinking about the poetry of public
>> spaces and the relationship between nature and human creativity.
>>
>> In a sentiment evocative of another pioneer’s lamentation — Harriet
>> Hosmer’s astute remark that “if one knew but one-half the
>> difficulties an artist has to surmount… the public would be less
>> ready to censure him for his shortcomings or slow advancement”
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=570a920527&e=abb58e6917>
>> — Boullée wrote of his critics:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngNo one is more exacting
>> than a man who is not conversant with a given art for he is
>> unable to imagine all the difficulties the artist has to overcome.
>>
>> His ultimate satisfaction was not the reception or execution of his
>> designs, but the inexhaustible source of their inspiration — the
>> elemental wellspring of the creative impulse behind all art and all
>> science, that richest and readiest reward of our aliveness:
>>
>> 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe artist… is always
>> making discoveries and spends his life observing nature.
>>
>>
>> Forward to a friend
>> <http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b3f29a7027&e=abb58e6917>/Read
>> Online
>> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=dd3984a204&e=abb58e6917>/
>> Like
>> https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/18/etienne-louis-boullee-newton-cenotaph/
>> on Facebook
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>>
>>
>>
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