The End of Hope?

I’ve just finished reading Dahr Jamail’s alarming (to say the least) book, The End of Ice. And though there are dire surveys aplenty in the latter half of the book (chapters on the terrifying loss of biodiversity in the Amazon which is being clear cut rapidly, on the loss of critical sea ice in the Bering Sea, on the already-threatening sea level rise in Florida which threatens not only the Everglades but Miami Beach itself, and on what may be the greatest threat of all, the melting of the permafrost in the Arctic and thereby the release of methane—a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂), I’d like to focus on Jamail’s last chapter. Here is where Dahr Jamail tries to conclude with some prospects for what we can do in the face of collapse on every meaningful front and the threat of warming which is so far underway that nothing we can do can forestall the warming that is already locked into the system. As Jamail puts it, “Given the fact that a rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coincided with previous mass extinctions and that we could well be facing our own extinction,” we should be asking ourselves, 

“How shall I use this precious time?” (216).

This is really the question. Jamail admits that his close scrutiny of the calamitous events happening all over the globe—something he is deeply committed to—caused him to fall into a “deep depression.” And it is no doubt this, fear of this fall into deep depression, that leads most of us to turn our eyes and our thoughts away from the catastrophe that looms. We don’t want to think of millions of people displaced from their homes, of the entire Middle East being too hot for human habitation, of our coastal cities inundated by sea level rise and lower Manhattan under water, of so much disruption to the ocean currents that London turns into a frigid zone that people accustomed to the warming Gulf Stream are unequipped to endure. We do not want to face global food shortages, of starving millions perishing as they are forcibly turned away from places where the food supply still exists for a time. So, we bury our heads in the sand, hoping that someone, some wiser political savior or saviors, or perhaps some technology will emerge to finally save us from disaster. But for people like Dahr Jamail, this simply won’t do. He is compelled to face, and he has traveled the planet in the effort to face, the warming future squarely. And to finally realize that his writing, no matter how well shaped and researched, will not fulfill his hopes that people would be roused from their slumber and take, or at least demand, action. And even beyond that, Jamail 

“came to understand that hope blocked the greater need to grieve, so that was the reason necessitating the surrendering of it” (217). 

For Jamail, the way to use his time is to continue to trek in his beloved mountains, to be revivified by the healing power of nature, but also and thereby to remain “connected to my sorrow for what is happening..” (218). For what is happening is terrible and inevitable in all its senses and he, above all, knows it:

We are already facing mass extinction. There is no removing the heat we have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming. How, then, shall we meet this? (218).

Jamail then quotes Stephen Jenkinson, a storyteller who works in palliative care and gave a recent lecture at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, that focused on grief:

“Grief requires us to know the time we’re in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are (un)willing to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless.  They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed” (218). 

For Jamail, this involves surrendering “any attachment to any results that might stem from my work. I am hope-free” (219).  

            Does this acceptance of grief and the surrender of hope mean ignoring what is happening, ignoring the planet that is dying for us humans? Anything but. 

A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing (219). 

For Jamail and, he suggests, for all of us, grief is something to fully embrace and then move through to whatever exists on the other side. This other side of grief reveals something unexpected: 

This means falling in love with the Earth in a way I never thought possible. It also means opening to the innate intelligence of the heart. I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace…(219).

But again, for Jamail this means not so much ignoring the terrible things we humans have done to the natural world, or giving up on whatever can be done to salvage it. Rather, it means doing whatever we can without any vain hope that calamity will be ameliorated or avoided thereby. It means doing everything possible, in communion with like-minded people, no matter the outcome.

“I am committed in my bones to being with the Earth, no matter what, to the end.”

This means, for Dahr Jamail, and by extension for all of us, becoming newly aware, again and again, of not so much our rights as top predators or God’s chosen ones, but of our obligations to the Earth that nurtures us and the beings with whom we share it. This is what many indigenous cultures have tried repeatedly to teach us. And Jamail ends his alarming, sorrowful, determined book with exactly this: “What are my obligations? From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?”

            It is a profound question, and one we would all do well to ask ourselves.

Lawrence DiStasi

Virgin Birth

This being Christmas, it occurred to me to contemplate the old Catholic doctrine I learned as a child. Not only is Jesus of Nazareth said to be the Son of God (he apparently never actually referred to himself with this term; he said “Son of Man” something else entirely, but nevermind), but also he is said to have been born to Mary, who “has not known a man.” That is, Jesus is supposed to have been conceived and born to a virgin, who was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, or God. In the gospel of Luke, this is made very clear by the dialogue between Mary and the Angel in the so-called Annunciation. In verse 31, the Angel tells Mary that she is to have a child, and she asks how this could be possible since she is still a virgin. The Angel then tells her that she will conceive “by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Then comes a reference to the Old Testament, to the verse of Isaiah 7:14, where it says “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” The same is asserted in Matthew 1:18 where it is written that Jesus is born to Mary, who has become pregnant before having sex with Joseph (Italian popular culture has fun with this by referring to Joseph as cornuto, the cuckolded husband), before they even live together.  

            It should be noted that this alleged virgin birth differs from the other mystery attributed to Mary, the “immaculate conception.” I always thought the two terms referred to the same phenomenon, the conception by virgin Mary which results in the birth of Jesus.  But that is decidedly not the case. The immaculate conception refers exclusively to Mary before she was a mother, that is, to her own birth free of original sin. Her birth to her mother, St. Anne, is made to fit with Mary’s exalted position as the mother of God, when Mary is declared by Pope Pius IX to have been born, alone among humans, free of original sin:

In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and stated: “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin’” (Caroline Bologna, Huffington Post, 12/21/18). 

Several things deserve comment here. To begin with, this dogma was issued very much later than the events referred to and appear nowhere in the New Testament. Second, the Pope who proclaimed this dogma was Pius IX, known to Italians as Pio Nono. He it was who reigned over Rome when the Italian revolution for independence, the Risorgimento, was gathering steam, and resulted in the assassination of his Minister of the Interior, Pellegrino Rossi. Following this, the Pope fled to Naples in fear, and this, in turn, was followed by widespread revolutions in 1848 and the establishment of the brief, but deeply significant Roman Republic of 1849, which Pio Nono bitterly opposed. In fact, he actually called for aid from the French monarch, whose army laid siege to and eventually bombarded Rome. The defeated Italian patriots excoriated Pio Nono for his perfidy, and this probably contributed to his being known as a gettatura, or one whose glance sowed misfortune (in the form of malocchio, or evil eye) wherever it fell. In sum, any dogma promulgated by a guy like this could be looked upon with more than normal scorn or suspicion. 

            But to return to the virgin birth. There has been much speculation about whether a woman could actually conceive without intercourse and/or the male sperm that is necessary for normal conception. Though there are now numerous recorded instances where some species—a python, several species of sharks, and recently, in the lab, artificially-fertilized mice—can reproduce without sex or fathers, it would be virtually impossible for a human to do so. Especially for a woman to give birth to a son. This is because in order to conceive, there have to be XX chromosomes from the female, and XY chromosomes from the male. This means that even if a woman could spontaneously conceive by herself, she could never provide the necessary Y chromosomes needed to engender a son. Those Y chromosomes could only come from a father. And though there can be the rare instance where a woman has a condition called testicular feminization, it would mean that Mary, carrying both an X and a Y chromosome, would have been a woman with ambiguous genitals that could have supplied that X chromosome. But she would have been sterile. In short, a highly unlikely pregnancy. 

            But there is one even more fatal problem with this whole business. Recall that both evangelists, Matthew and Luke, who wrote 70 years after Christ lived, wrote about his virgin birth to Mary not based on any eyewitness truth, but so that Jesus would be the fulfillment of that prophecy in Isaiah—the one where Isaiah said that “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” There is a major problem with this line, however. Matthew is using the wording of the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint (translated some time in the third century BCE). And there is a serious mistranslation in Isaiah 7:14. The Hebrew word Isaiah used for the woman who is to conceive and give birth to Emmanuel is alma (Joel Hoffman, Salon.com, 3/13/16). Scholars know from other uses that this word does NOT mean “virgin” but simply a “young woman.” So where the Hebrew text refers to alma, a young woman, the Greek translation makes her a virgin, parthenos. And from this simple mistranslation stems a whole tradition that became dogma and has come down to us today: the Blessed Virgin Mary, who became the mother of Jesus, did not have to succumb to that degrading act of sexual intercourse with Joseph to conceive Jesus. She was kept free from that stain because God himself impregnated her. Though since Jesus had a brother James, one has to infer that she eventually did have intercourse with poor, patient Joseph. But I suppose that is another matter.

            Of course, the mass of people love miracles, and the virgin birth is one of the humdingers in Christianity. The Roman church was only too happy to supply it, and elevate it to the level of dogma. Perhaps it even has relevance to our own time as well. For isn’t a similar syndrome operating with Donald Trump? Don’t his most rabid followers actually believe in miracles—that this most boorish and vulgar and lawless of con men, this self-described pussy grabber, is in fact god’s instrument to bring about all that Christian fundamentalists long for: the defeat of science, of all the liberal atheists who scorn them and ridicule their beliefs, and the fulfillment, perhaps, of the end of days? The resemblances seem too suggestive to dismiss. 

In any case, Christmas has now passed, and with it another season of paying tribute, however preposterous it might be, to the virgin birth. And it does make for some nice music. 

Lawrence DiStasi

The End of Ice (and Coral Reefs etc.)

Dahr Jamail is perhaps the world’s premier reporter on climate change (he uses the more vivid and accurate term, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, ACD), and his latest book, The End of Ice, may be his most dire. I haven’t yet finished reading it, but the chapter on coral reefs, “Farewell Coral,” is so alarming that I felt compelled to write about it now. 

            Let me begin with the ice story, though. Jamail is a long-time mountain climber and he has spent a good deal of time climbing and enjoying Alaska’s mountains and glaciers. He notes that Alaska has 100,000 glaciers that cover “approximately 79,000 square kilometers,” the largest glaciation area outside of Greenland and the Antarctic. Interviewing Louis Sass, a USGS glaciologist in Alaska, he quotes Sass as saying that “On average, we’re probably losing 50 glaciers each year now” (28). Does this incredible loss of ice matter? It does for two reasons. First, mountain ecosystems are sensitive indicators of climate disruption, so their melting should be taken as a warning that the heating of the planet is truly dangerous and getting moreso every year.  Second, these mountain systems “provide up to 85 percent of all the water humans need…Globally, glaciers contain 69 percent of all the fresh water on the planet” (45). So on a planet where humans in the U.S, China and India are rapidly depleting the underground aquifers that we need for farming and drinking, to be losing simultaneously the immense water supply that comes from mountains and glaciers is alarming indeed. And warming, and the consequent glacial melting, is only increasing, with each of the last four years being hotter than the last. Humans are in trouble, water-wise. 

            Then comes the coral reef story, a story about what is happening to the oceans. Aside from the pollution that we’ve dumped into the oceans—literally “the lungs and food source of our existence” (95)—the warming from excess CO² in the atmosphere is also being dumped primarily into the oceans. Here is how Jamail makes this vivid: 

If you took all of the heat humans generated between the years 1955 and 2010 and placed it in the atmosphere instead of the oceans, global temperatures would have risen by a staggering 97° F (94).

In other words, by absorbing this massive amount of the heat from the warming we humans have created, the oceans have saved us from thermal disaster so far. And what is our response? to treat them like a garbage dump. But that’s not all. All this warming of the oceans is having a catastrophic effect on coral reefs. Briefly, warming waters cause what oceanographers call ‘bleaching.’ That’s where corals turn ghostly white because they expel the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues; they also cease being able to reproduce. This bleaching has been accelerating in recent years. Jamail has figures for this and they’re sobering to say the least. He writes:

Sixteen percent of global corals perished during the first ever global bleaching event which happened in 1998. According to the Associated Press, the largest bleaching event ever recorded occurred in 2015 to 2016 “amid an extended El Nino that warmed Pacific waters near the equator.” Twenty-two percent of the Great Barrier Reef was killed and 73 percent of coral surveyed in the Maldives…suffered bleaching, with other areas in the central Pacific experiencing a 90 percent loss of their coral reefs (77).

These are big numbers. But, one might say, so what. Do corals really matter? They do indeed, and not just so scuba divers can admire the colorful fish that hang out there. Though coral reefs only cover around 2 percent of the ocean bottom, they provide a home for a full one-fourth (1/4) of all marine species, says Jamail. And he again gives us statistics:

A report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN shows that coral reefs are responsible for producing fish that contribute significantly to what is 17 percent of all globally consumed animal protein. That rises to more than 70 percent in island and coastal communities like Micronesia (79).

So if those reefs go, as in the Caribbean up to 80 percent of reefs have gone, disappeared, much of the fish that humans rely on for food goes with them. 

            The largest coral reef assemblage lies off the coast of Australia. It’s known as the Great Barrier Reef, and Jamail recounts his conversations with some of the oceanographers monitoring what’s happening there. Dr. Dean Miller, director of science and research for Great Barrier Reef Legacy is quoted as follows:

“Corals need many years to adjust to the warmer ocean waters, and we don’t have that kind of time anymore. The warming we are seeing now is happening far too fast for evolution…So what we’re seeing now is death. That’s what bleaching is” (92, emphasis mine).

This comes close to saying that one of the oldest ecosystems on the planet, some as old as 20 million years, are nearing extinction. In fact, Miller does say that “we might see ecosystem collapse as we know it. We’ll lose the reef fish from the bleaching, then all the fish that depend on them, then all the way up the food chain to the biggest fish. Everything is affected” (92).

            Nor are the coral reefs alone in their plight. Jamail cites another 2015 study showing that plankton, “the basis of the entire oceanic food chain” is threatened by acidification—itself also caused by uptake of excess CO² from the atmosphere. If the plankton die out, that will constitute a very BIG problem, according to the report’s authors “given that phytoplankton photosynthesis produces half the total oxygen supply for the planet” (94). Yes, you read that right. Not only are plankton the base of the entire marine food chain, but they supply half the oxygen we humans need to breathe and survive. 

            So we are in serious trouble due to the CO²-caused warming of the planet, and specifically of the oceans where most of the warming is occurring. The problem is, most humans are oblivious to what’s happening. As Dr. Miller puts it, “oceans are more vulnerable to apathy because they are easy to ignore since they are an unseen world” (95). But we all depend ultimately on the oceans and those rapidly-bleaching reefs. Again, Dr. Miller puts it baldly: “Right now, the largest ecosystem on Earth is undergoing its death throes and no one is there to watch it” (96). Except, of course, for Dahr Jamail, whose book is clanging the alarm bells in the night. The question is, will anyone pay attention, and more than that, finally take action that is meaningful? The governments attending the COP25 climate summit that just ended did not. Like the Australian government, which had a plan to save the Great Barrier Reef but which it has now declared to be “no longer achievable,” the governments of the world, led by the United States, are burying their collective heads in the sand and still striving hardest to amp up their fossil-fuel-driven economies. And with them, climate disruption. 

Will they ever learn, and will it be in time? We all better hope so.

Lawrence DiStasi

PBA

I was playing some music the other day. I don’t usually do this in the middle of the day because music for me is not a suitable background for reading or, especially, writing, but rather something I have to fully attend to. But this day I had decided that I wanted to hear a piece that I had first delved deeply into in college—the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven. It’s his third symphony and a pathbreaker, one I learned intimately in a freshman music-appreciation course, and hence came to love. So I searched it out on youtube and found what seemed to be a decent rendering by Daniel Barenboim leading a BBC orchestra. Though he took the first movement a bit too slow for my taste, the rest was splendid. And then came the surprise. When I heard the third movement, it brought me to tears. I don’t mean that in a figurative sense. I mean real tears; I was bawling. And when I got over that, some parts of the fourth movement did the same thing: tears, real crying. In the course of listening, I noticed another Beethoven piece I thought I’d also like to hear: the Sonata Pathetique (#8 in C minor). This is one that I also knew well, having practiced and learned to play it moderately well. It was first played for me by a cousin, and my brother also played it, especially the lovely, slow second movement. So I found a rendering by Valentina Lisitsa, a pianist I’d never before heard of, and it was equally gorgeous. She is a wondrous artist, with flawless technique and expressiveness. But that isn’t the real point. Once again, I cried like a baby. Especially during that luscious, slow second movement. My emotions were simply out of control. And I could perhaps see why that movement might affect me, since it brought back memories of my older brother who died some years ago. 

            Now, I have been moved to tears by music before. I used to sing with the Berkeley Community Chorus, and near the end of my stint with them, we sang the Bach B-Minor Mass, one of the most transcendent pieces of music ever written. I loved doing it, but sometimes, even in rehearsal, I found myself focusing not on my bass part exclusively but on the other parts, all of them, sopranos soaring at the top, with tenors and altos beautifully complementing them—the whole of the profound, intricate interweaving of voices. And at such times, I found that the sound of all those voices soaring in counterpoint together was so stirring that I couldn’t sing my part. The emotional involvement in what I was hearing was so great that I choked up and tears came to my eyes. So I know what emotional involvement in music feels like. But this was different. This was not just being choked up and unable to sing. This was deep racking and grimacing sobs—and I knew not whether it was joy or pain or regret.   

            Actually, I have experienced this sudden upwelling before—recently. When I was in the hospital not long ago, I found that when I tried to explain to visitors that some nurse or therapist had been particularly comforting or solicitous for my care, I would get so choked up that I could not speak. Several times I was racked with that same kind of sobbing that went on for long minutes, and I would have to stop relating whatever event it was. Sometimes I would try to explain what was happening, but would usually have to stop that too, and then apologize for the strange outburst. And when I had to say goodbye to my therapists at CPMC, I was again struck dumb with tearful emotion. At other times I had outbursts of laughter that seemed out of proportion to the stimulus, embarrassingly strange laughter that I’d never had before. Those who have worked with stroke patients—I had had a stroke in August—reassured me that these outbursts were a kind of side effect stemming from what they called the ‘emotional lability’ following a stroke. I accepted that explanation at the time, but after my music-listening episode, I searched online for more specific information about the phenomenon. 

It’s called PBA, which stands for Pseudobulbar Affect. The word ‘bulbar’ itself means what it sounds like: a bulb-shaped organ, specifically the medulla oblongata portion of the brain. And the bulbar area of the brain is said to be “composed of the cerebellum, medulla and pons.” Further explanation on Wikipedia notes that “the bulbar region is made up of the brain stem minus the midbrain and plus the cerebellum…and is responsible for many involuntary functions that keep us alive.” That means that the pseudobulbar affect (PBA) has something to do with brain injury, often from stroke, but also affecting patients with other brain debilities such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. PBA is said to be characterized by “episodes of sudden uncontrollable and inappropriate laughing or crying.” Of course, that’s not exactly what I have—responding emotionally to music is not always inappropriate—but it pretty much describes my situation in general. Especially the involuntary part. 

So now, I had the explanation I sought. My stroke(s) were located in the left pons area of my brain, right above the medulla, as it happens. It affected mostly my motor functions, mainly my left arm and left leg, both of which were, and still are partly disabled. The function of both is coming back with lots of rehabilitation therapy, but I’ve still got a long way to go. I’m prepared for that. What I was not prepared for was the emotional stuff. My emotions have usually been held mostly in check, consistent with our emotionally-constrained culture. Big boys don’t cry. Or laugh inappropriately. And certainly not in response to the kindness of strangers, or to music. But since my stroke, I have been doing all of that. And it’s not clear to me if this is a good thing or a bad thing. 

            Perhaps I don’t need to know whether it’s good or bad. Perhaps I don’t even need to know when I’m going to get over this affect, or whether I’ll get over it at all. This makes me think of Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neuroscientist who, at age 37, had a massive stroke and lost most of her cerebral and muscular functions. So severe was her disability that it took her a full eight years of intense rehab to fully recover. But recover she did, and then wrote a best-selling book, My Stroke of Insight, in which she recounted the details of her stroke and recovery, and her gratitude for what the stroke revealed and did for her. As she put it in a recent interview,

It took away all my stress circuitry. Who doesn’t want that? My left-brain emotional system went offline, and with that went all my negative judgment. It took away all my emotional baggage from the first 30 years of my life. And it set me on a new path of possibilities. (cited from www.thecut.com, 9/25/19 interview by Erica Schwiegershausen.)

In her book, Bolte Taylor is even more specific about how her stroke changed her:

I shifted from the doing-consciousness of my left brain to the being-consciousness of my right brain. I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive…All I could perceive was right here, right now, and it was beautiful (68).

I also think of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad and how Homer repeatedly sings of the Greek heroes like Odysseus as yielding to the relief of shedding hot tears. It is clear that for the ancient Greeks, there was nothing unmanly about this. Rather than indicating weakness, tears are treated as natural to men, even men at war, as a natural part of the male domain of passionate emotion. 

            So perhaps this side effect of stroke is not so shameful or embarrassing after all. Perhaps it is serving to clear away the stroke victim’s “stress circuitry” and opening up some more ancient circuits in the brain that have been covered over by cultural inhibition. Perhaps music and the kindness and love of strangers is meant to be met with emotion. Whether it is or not may not be the issue in any case. For that is what is happening to this stroke survivor, and so far, he seems none the worse for it. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Can We Save Ourselves?

Not much gives me cause for hope these days. What with the paralysis in our political systems exacerbated now by impeachment hearings, the growing authoritarianism/fascism in governments around the globe, the environmental threats including most prominently global warming and species extinction, and the still-present threat of nuclear annihilation, we humans seem to be on a path to catastrophe, chaos, and general collapse. But recently, I have been made aware of some thinkers and movements that do give me hope that perhaps humanity can, in fact, deal with these problems and move to a more sustainable level. These thinkers—most prominently for me, Daniel Schmactenberger—are actually probing deeply into what humans need to do economically, politically, psychologically and spiritually, to save ourselves and our institutions from annihilation. To put it in the way that Schmactenberger does, we need to move out of our current ways of thinking and organization—in short, our civilization—to a wholly new phase that does not lead to self-termination. We need a fundamental and complete phase shift. Partial solutions, half measures like voting new people into office in Washington, for example, or short-term coups, simply won’t do. Because the same systems, the same dynamics that are causing humans to move swiftly towards self-termination, will remain in place.

            That phrase that I used—self-termination—is one that I find particularly vibrant, and it is one Schmactenberger uses a lot. By it he means that the peculiarly human gifts that have allowed us to exponentially increase our killing power, say, from simple clubs to arrows to guns to now nuclear weapons, have allowed us to not just out-gun our enemies and predatory animals, but to so decimate our natural prey both on land and in the air and in the oceans that we are well on the way to destroying the fauna and flora that we utterly depend on to survive. We have become capable of clearing away the trees and forests that supply a good portion of the oxygen we need to breathe. We have already destroyed the fish many of us need to nourish ourselves. We have tried to replace these with fish farms, as we have replaced natural game animals with domesticated herds, but the nutritional value of both is inferior, not to mention the waste problems they generate. The same is true of our agriculture, with its use of monocrops and artificial fertilizers that strip and decimate the soil and poison our water supply and us. The side-effects, or externalities that derive from these industrial practices add another unsolved problem: driven mainly by petroleum power, they add to the CO2 that is now generally agreed to be driving the most intractable problem of all—human-caused climate change. 

            What Schmactenberger and others analyze are the deep substrates upon which all these insults to the natural world depend. It is not just that industrialized farming or fishing or resource extraction are wasteful and short-sighted. It is that they, like the move to systems of destruction such as nuclear weapons, are the natural, inevitable outcome of ways of thinking and acting that have been with us for millennia. These ways are summarized by the words Schmactenberger repeatedly uses: rivalrous dynamics; open- rather than closed-loop systems; reliance on complicated rather than complex systems; capitalism and the madness of constant growth that it demands on a finite planet; and the regarding of the individual self as totally independent rather than an integral part of a planetary and universal whole. All these and more need to be changed or phase-shifted to a new level if we are to survive.

            Take the arms race. As Schmactenberger points out, a lion does not, via evolution, improve its killing capacity in isolation. As it gets bigger and faster, the gazelle that is its prey also gets faster, so that the system stays in rough balance. The lion does not kill so many gazelles that its species starves. It is not self-terminating. But humans, with our big brains, accelerate change faster than evolution allows. And so we have wiped out whole species like the bison or the carrier pigeon or cod because of our ability to invent technologies with which bison or pigeon or cod could not respond via evolution. The same is true in countless areas. With our capitalist value system, we are faced with the situation where a live whale is worth nothing to most humans, whereas a dead whale is worth millions. So are tons of dead tuna, or cod, or salmon. And so the incentive is to hunt and catch as many as possible (and with factory ships, this is a lot) because if we don’t, some other nation with equally lethal ships, will. Ditto with forests. Ditto with anything you can name. Rivalrous dynamics dictate that our side must be bigger and faster and more ruthless, because if we aren’t, we’ll be wiped out by our rivalrous neighbors. And so we have the insane situation of mutually-assured destruction, where we have far more nuclear weapons at the ready than we need to wipe out all Russian or Chinese cities, while at the same time, they feel the need to have equivalent arsenals because if they don’t, they risk being overwhelmed by ours. All on hair trigger alert and susceptible to the whims or mistakes of some zealot in charge. And it is almost guaranteed that it will be a defective in charge because the system favors the rise of sociopaths as leaders—not just in government but in corporations as well. They, sociopaths, are the only ones with enough disregard for their fellow humans and the planet to be able to make the “tough” decisions. To be willing to tolerate deadly “externalities” like mutually-assured destruction, like global warming. 

            So what Schmactenberger and others are trying to figure out is whether, or how we can get to a planet where the opposite of these things can prevail. Must prevail—before we self terminate. Humans must somehow come up with societies, that is, and economies and political systems that foster selves that are not incentivized to be narcissistic and sociopathic, but rather to be aware of our connection to the whole—including all the bacteria that we depend on, without which we are literally nothing. Humans who are not driven by rivalrous dynamics to always beat the other guy and win, but who act in concert with others and do what makes sense on its own; what helps the community of all others, or at least no longer ignores them. This would involve creating systems that are not complicated so much as complex—like the systems that nature evolves.  Consider this one difference that Schmactenberger highlights—the difference between complicated and complex. A forest in its natural state is complex. Trees have immense root systems that keep them in contact not only with the soil nutrients and bacteria and fungi that keep them healthy, but often with each other to ward off invading insects. The forest system is amazingly complex. By contrast, a house built by humans is complicated—containing a foundation, siding, windows, roofing, a complicated support system of rafters and electrical wiring and plumbing and so on. But if a fire destroys much of the forest, it eventually grows back. It reconstitutes itself. Its complexity contains within it the seeds for its renewal. A house, by contrast, if burned down by the same fire, does notgrow back. It is only complicated. Once destroyed, its stays destroyed and another must be totally rebuilt by an outside entity, a human. What those anticipating the phase shift look to is making more of our systems complex. Making them more like natural systems. Following nature. Making our world more self-sustaining like the natural world.

            This is where closed loops come in. Most of our human-created systems now are open-loop systems. We just forge ahead with no concern for the externalities like the waste and pollution they produce. If hog farms produce tons and tons of manure that eventually flows into nearby rivers and pollutes them, so be it. That polluting waste is simply an externality that doesn’t have to be accounted for. If my manufacturing process produces tons of plastic packaging waste that eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean vortex, so be it; it’s an externality that someone else has to pay for or solve. And if the transportation system that the whole world is induced to use ends up not only producing tons of tires and metal and plastic that cannot be disposed of, and along the way billions of tons of CO2 as air pollution that leads to global warming, so be it. It’s not my problem as an oil company or car manufacturer and in fact I will try every trick I can think of to prevent people from becoming aware of it. This is open loop—the open loop that allows capitalist systems to thrive. 

            What Schmactenberger is calling for is a phase shift, and soon, to closed-loop systems. Systems that pattern themselves after nature, where nothing is wasted; where that which is destroyed or discarded is useful, usually as food, for something else. Nature seems not to produce undigestible or unusable waste. Everything is constantly recycled to be used by some other creature or organism. Nothing is wasted in complex systems. And natural systems are amazingly complex; that is what keeps them in balance. Dead matter is useful—as fertilizer or as food for the countless beings that form part of the great system that is life. That is what humans must strive for in designing systems for the next great phase shift that Schmactenberger sees coming. Or must come if we humans are not to self terminate. 

            Is such a phase shift possible? Elements of it have already started to emerge. And that word, emerge or emergence, again is a constant in Schmactenberger’s arguments. It is a deep biological/philosophical principle that states thatemergence occurs when an entity has or develops properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole, that is, when the parts act together for the good of the whole. It is like the cells in a human body: alone, they each act to preserve and advance their own survival. But when they come together as a body, they act their part as organs or T-cells to sustain the larger body of which they are a part, even at the risk of their own demise. And importantly, Schmactenberger notes, with no conflict between their individual function to survive and their overall bodily function to preserve the whole. In addition, there would be no way to predict that overall bodily function from observing the individual cells functioning on their own. Just as one could not predict the emergence of a butterfly from observation of the caterpillar from which it eventually emerges. And presumably, just as one could not predict the phase shift that Schmactenberger sees emerging right now from the perilous situation that we humans now find ourselves in. And yet, if the human endeavor is to survive, it or something like it has to emerge. Whether enough humans and cultures can be induced to join such a movement that goes against so many allegedly ingrained human instincts is arguable. But the incentive to do so is as great as anything has ever been: to emerge and survive, or to proceed to self-termination. Is there any real choice?

Lawrence DiStasi

Ukraine Extortion

To hear Drumpf and his Repugnant allies tell it, the holdup of military aid to Ukraine was just a normal part of the diplomatic effort to get rid of any chance of corruption in that country. The holdup, they insist, had nothing to do with trying to get leverage on possible 2020 rival Joe Biden and/or to invalidate the Mueller investigation by blaming the 2016 election interference on a Ukraine plot. But if we look at the timeline of the aid and its eventual release on September 11, 2019, the story becomes more damning. This is very important, but most news outlets simply stay with the events closely surrounding the July 25 phone call from Trump to Ukraine President Zelensky. That misses the deep issue. 

            What’s really key is to go back and focus on when exactly, the U.S Congress authorized desperately-needed military aid of about $400 million for Ukraine. This aid was for military equipment to stave off the Russian-backed forces trying to bite off another chunk of Ukraine in its eastern province. If we look at the record, as outlined by an important article in Lawfare (10/16/19), we see this:

On Feb. 15, Congress appropriated $445.7 million to the State Department to assist Ukraine (see here, § 7046(a)(2)), which included the $141 million at issue here. In a joint explanatory statement (page 65 of Division F, for interested readers), Congress broke down the $445.7 million in funding, which included (among other initiatives) $115 million in foreign military financing; $2.9 million in military training; and $45 million in international narcotics control, law enforcement and anti-terrorism funding.

Look at that date again. Congress authorized $445.7 million on Feb. 15, 2019. Yet that aid was not released to Ukraine until September 11. This in spite of the fact that the Trump administration twice notified Congress—on February 28, 2019 and again on May 23, 2019—that it was going to release the aid. It thereafter has struggled mightily to explain why the authorized aid was withheld for so long. That’s because top officials in both the Defense Dept. and the State Dept. sent letters to Congress authorizing the release of the aid—in the first case in May certifying that Ukraine was making good progress in the fight against corruption, and in the second in June with the Pentagon announcing that a large grant was being released to Ukraine for training, equipment and advisory efforts. These notices were undergirded by a May 23 letter from John Rood, defense undersecretary for policy who wrote:

“On behalf of the secretary of defense, and in coordination with the secretary of state, I have certified that the government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purpose of decreasing corruption.” (www.militarytimes.com.)  

            So Congress had authorized the $450 million, and both the State Dept and the Pentagon had approved dispersal of the funds; but still they were not released. Now the law says that the OMB in the White House has to approve these funds and can take up to 45 days to review them.  But it is only supposed to ensure that the funding lasts for the required time and is spent appropriately. It is not supposed to alter or amend the purposes for which the money is to be spent without formally notifying the Congress in accord with procedures, and must adhere to the 45-day limit. The Trump White House most decidedly did not. In this case, in fact, the White House OMB held up the funds, not just for a few weeks, or 45 days, but for several months (until Sept 11), and then only released them under the duress of the impeachment hearings.   

            The White House, of course has several explanations (aside from the extortion of President Zelensky) for the withholding of the funds. One of them came from Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff and director of the OMB. He told leaders at State and Defense in mid-July that the president wanted the aid withheld because he was concerned about the ‘necessity’ for the aid (even though Ukraine is fighting for its very life and depends on the U.S aid to do it). Note the timing here: the order to withhold the aid came before that notorious July 25 phone call, and the president himself ordered the delay. This means that the plan to extort the president of Ukraine was already in place well before the president made his recorded demands by phone. Other evidence makes this even more telling. Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony, for one, makes clear that the aid money to Ukraine (and the promise of a meeting) had long been conditioned on their complying with President Trump’s wishes to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter:

 “That was my clear understanding, security assistance money would not come until the President  [of Ukraine] committed to pursue the investigation.”

Taylor then affirmed that this demand, plus the demand to investigate the 2016 election interference by Ukraine (not Russia) met the definition of a “quid pro quo.” He also affirmed that it was Rudy Giuliani’s idea to get the Ukrainians to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on whose board Hunter Biden served. He said the idea was to get President Zelensky to publicly announce these investigations so as to put him into a “box” that would force him to comply. Taylor’s testimony contradicted EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s earlier testimony that there was no “quid pro quo,” after which the ambassador then revised his testimony to agree that, in fact, there was a “quid pro quo.” He agreed that the pressure on Ukraine was “improper” and “insidious” and that it probably violated the law. 

            There is much more to this nefarious case, including the politically-calculated firing of veteran ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Jovanovich, but it is all coming out in public hearings. The bottom line remains: the President of the United States held up for months desperately-needed aid to a U.S. ally in order to 1) damage the election prospects of his presumptive rival, Joe Biden; and 2) to impel a bogus investigation into a supposed Ukrainian plot to affect the 2016 election, thus invalidating the hated Mueller investigation. Both of these bogus Ukraine investigations were meant to serve not the nation he is sworn to serve, but his own political (and criminal) purposes. This is a textbook definition of extortion and of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitutional remedy of impeachment was written for. QED.

Lawrence DiStasi

Why We Don't Like Him

Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind.

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

 So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

‘My God… what… have… I… created?

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

from: “British writer pens the Best Description of Trump I’ve Read,” by Michael Stevenson, March 8, 2019 The Hobbledehoy.

Above the Law

The Trump administration’s latest ploy, in its letter to Congress on Tuesday, October 8, is a stunning document, in a month of stunning events. But this one takes the cake. That’s because what it says, in effect, is that the president, or this president* at least, is above the law. He cannot be legally indicted, because a sitting president cannot be, according to his Department of Justice’s OLC. And now his legal team is saying that he cannot be impeached either, because he is being denied due process. The Constitution, of course, doesn’t provide for due process in bringing impeachment charges by the House of Representatives, because the actual trial is held by the Senate. That’s where due process, if it’s relevant at all to impeachment (which is not a court of law but a political process), would come in. 

            But first, it’s important to remind ourselves what impeachment is, and isn’t. Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and that “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments…[but] no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present” (Article I, section 3.) That is all. In the Senate trial, a two-thirds vote of all members is needed to convict the person impeached by the House. In the actual impeachment proceedings, the House of Representatives charges an official by approving, by majority vote, Articles of impeachment (these articles must be gathered from an inquiry made beforehand). Representatives, called “managers,” act as prosecutors before the Senate in the trial. Senators listen to their evidence and witnesses, and then vote to convict or acquit.

            This whole process was adopted from English law. As the framers of our Constitution  saw it, 

this congressional power is a fundamental component of the constitutional system of “checks and balances.” Through the impeachment process, Congress charges and then tries an official of the federal government for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” (www.Senate.gov).

The penalty for an impeached official is not any legal punishment, as in a regular courtroom trial, but solely removal from office. This clearly proves that impeachment is a political process, its sole aim being precisely to step in where the normal political process is seen to have erred by putting into office someone who abuses that office in some way. As noted above, it is part of the system of “checks and balances” that the framers saw as necessary to keep the three branches in balance. That is to say, impeachment is the means to keep any one branch from consolidating too much power. The Founders feared specifically that a president might assume, without those checks on his authority, the powers of a king or dictator. 

            Now we add to this the policy of the Justice Department, as made highly visible by Robert Mueller’s explanation of why he did not indict this president* for obstruction of justice, i.e., that a president cannot be legally indicted while in office because according to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC):

The indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions. (Vox.com, 7/24/19).

This means, in effect, that there is no way that a president can be held legally accountable for his actions. No matter how heinous (this president has boasted that he could shoot someone on 5^thAvenue in New York and not be held accountable by his voters) these actions might be, a president cannot be legally held accountable while in office. As Richard Nixon famously said, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” 

This is precisely why the impeachment process is so critical. If, as has plainly happened with the actions of president* Trump with respect to Ukraine, the president abuses the powers of his office (here, for personal gain), the constitutional remedy—the only remedy—is impeachment. The House of Representatives conducts an inquiry into the alleged abuse(s), and if it finds that some violation has occurred (this does NOT have to be a legal violation but only a violation of the conduct expected of a president), then it refers its finding to the full House for a vote. This is the vote to impeach. If a majority so votes, the matter goes to the Senate for a trial, with representatives serving as managers or prosecutors.

What Trump’s legal team is trying to do is throw a monkey wrench into this process by claiming that the president must be allowed to face (and, he hopes, intimidate) witnesses before the trial even begins. This is legal nonsense. They are saying that the House has no right to make inquiries necessary to buttress its impeachment process, and that therefore the White House team is refusing to comply with subpoenas or requests for documents or witnesses. This is to essentially say that the president, or this president* at least, cannot be impeached. Because, for another very important thing, it will illegally reverse the results of the 2016 election.

But that is precisely what impeachment is for: to remove from office an elected (or appointed) official who has demonstrated his unfitness for office—by committing “high crimes or misdemeanors.” More than that, the administration’s position would mean that a person—in this case president Trump—would be able to set himself above the law. He could not be held legally accountable. Neither could he be impeached. He would be, in effect, a king or a dictator. 

 If this perversion of all they stood for doesn’t make the Founding Fathers roll over in their graves, I don’t know what would. 

Lawrence DiStasi

American Eugenics

Being conversant with Italian-American history, I had heard of the Immigration Bill that in 1924 had cut off Italian immigration to the U.S. almost overnight. I had also heard of the ‘Know Nothings’ and of Madison Grant’s infamous screed, The Passing of the Great Race. But before reading Daniel Okrent’s superb study of these matters in The Guarded Gate, (Scribners: 2019), I had never guessed at the depth of the racial loathing and hatred, the panicked white supremacy that operated in the years leading up to 1924. Now, however, with this book, I and everyone else can see the long history of the movement that even now has been given new life by the presidency of Donald Trump. And see that much as Trump would like us to think of his movement as unprecedented, it has a long and sordid history in these United States, including the manipulation of so-called ‘science’ to serve racial bias.

            Okrent begins his story with a series of Boston Brahmins—chiefly Senator Henry Cabot Lodge—who were all horrified at the ‘race-mixing’ that was threatening to dilute the alleged purity of America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. As early as 1891, Lodge introduced a law that would demand a literacy test of all immigrants to “sift the chaff from the wheat” (52). But his literacy provision failed, at least partly due to resistance from the steamship companies; they were doing a banner business shipping immigrants to America (it cost them $1.70 to ship an immigrant whom they charged $22.50 in fare, a handsome profit when they could squeeze 2000 of these wretched souls into steerage.) But Lodge’s failure wasn’t the end of it by a long shot. Such great icons as Teddy Roosevelt was also worried that whites were being out-reproduced by these immigrant hordes, and harangued Anglos to do their ‘reproductive duty’ (have lots of kids) rather than commit what he called ‘race suicide.’ And then came one Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote a tome called The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), in which he popularized the term that would shortly become lethal—“Aryan.” He wrote, “Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right…the lords of the world” (90). He added that not only Dante, but Marco Polo, St. Francis of Assisi and Galileo were also Germanic. In that same year, William Z. Ripley in his The Races of Europe added his scholarly heft to this nonsense by categorizing Europeans into three basic groups he called ‘races’: Teutonic (tall, blond, blue-eyed), Alpines (shorter and darker), and Mediterraneans (slim and darker still). As to those Mediterraneans (such as the more than 2 million Italians who would immigrate by 1910), a Washington Post editorial writer would say in 1906 that 90% of them were “the degenerate spawn of Asiatics” who had invaded the Mediterranean years before, and were now coming to America to “cut throats, throw dynamite, and conduct labor riots and assassination” (99). Prior to that, in 1894, three Harvard graduates, Prescott Hall, Joe Lee, and Robert Ward, all Boston Brahmins, had formed the Immigration Restriction League (IRL). Taking their credo from Francis Galton and the American biologist Raymond Pierce, they subscribed to the “new science of eugenics”—a ‘science’ devoted to selectively breeding better men to “elevate the race by producing higher types” (117). Hall’s publication, Eugenics, Ethics and Immigration made their main case: eugenics should be applied to immigration because “wars and pestilences no longer eliminate the unfit as formerly” (118). Such a pity we no longer have those helpful plagues to weed out the unfit!

            When Charles Davenport took over the Cold Spring Harbor research facility, and managed to convince Mary Averell Harriman (the richest woman in America) to fund his institute, eugenics was well on its way to becoming mainstream ‘science’ in America. Davenport quickly opened the Eugenics Records Office, with the uncredentialled Harry Laughlin in charge. Laughlin proceeded to compile mountains of data on the genetic histories of the unfit—imbeciles, epileptics, the insane and the criminal—all assembled in a Trait Book to allegedly study inherited characteristics that should be eliminated. It was useless material, based on the erroneous idea that complex traits like memory or shiftlessness were determined by a single unit character or gene (science at this point had no good idea what the gene was). Still, this and other eugenics work played right into the hands of lawmakers seeking a basis for limiting immigration. Nations like England, Australia, and Canada soon imposed immigration restrictions, and in America, restrictions based on certain categories like anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, and lunatics were soon in place along with restrictions on people with syphilis or even ‘poor physique.’ Davenport himself was moving closer to a position favoring marriage restrictions (indeed, the 1907 Expatriation Act had mandated that any American woman who married a foreign national automatically lost her American citizenship thereby):

“Unless conditions change of themselves or are radically changed, the population of the U.S. will, on account of the great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality and less given to burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy than were the original English settlers!” (147). 

In short, Davenport feared that battalions of short, musical rapists (e.g. Italians) were poised to invade the United States and intermarry, displacing those good drunken Anglos. Nor was he alone; by 1912, seven American states had enacted laws calling for the involuntary sterilization of some wards of the state, particularly those convicted of sex crimes. 

            In 1913, Lodge tried the literacy test again but the legislation failed when President Taft vetoed it. But the momentum to restrict immigration picked up new steam when sociologist Edward Ross wrote in his book, The Old World and the New, that the Mediterranean people were “morally below the races of northern Europe” and furthermore that immigrants from southern Italy, especially Neapolitans, were “a degenerate class…infected with spiritual hookworm,” and displaying “a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins…and backless heads” (188). He concluded by noting that these immigrants promised “an unthinkable future: a mingled, degraded America” (189). But despite these warnings, literacy test legislation failed once again in February 1915, when President Wilson vetoed the bill and the House sustained his veto. 

            However, the most serious challenge to immigration from southern and eastern Europe was about to emerge. Madison Grant, famous for his conservation work as a protector of California’s redwoods, was also the creator of the Bronx zoo. This made him a savior of trees and animals, but when it came to actual people, real immigrants, he went off the rails. He it was who conjoined the two toxic elements of his time, eugenics and xenophobia, to produce the most toxic amalgam of all—scientific racism. He described what he called Nordics: “a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats” who dominated other races by right. As to the Mediterraneans, they might be great artists, but since Italy’s Nordic invaders had “absorbed the science, art, and literature of Rome,” it was they, not the Italians, who could be given credit for “the splendid century that we call the Renaissance.” Indeed, all that was of value in Italy, according to Grant, was due to those Nordic invaders: “Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci were all of Nordic type” (211). He even said that “Columbus, from his portraits and busts, whether authentic or not, was clearly Nordic” (208). The arrogance and stupidity of this drivel is breathtaking. And yet The Passing of the Great Race was published by Scribner’s, with the great Max Perkins as its editor, and touted as a pathbreaking book by an author it called a “scientist, savant, traveler, and trained observer exceptionally qualified for this work.” The Nation magazine praised Passing as embodying the “truths of racial evolution which as a whole is unanswerable.” Not all were fooled, however. The great Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas wrote a review in the New Republic titled “Inventing a Great Race” that pilloried Grant’s book as one built on “fallacies,” which it was. Its concept of heredity was “faulty,” wrote Boas, its evidence “haphazard” and its opinions “dangerous”—as the world was soon to learn. Nonetheless, with Grant’s book as support, the literacy test for immigrants was reintroduced in1916, and vetoed again by President Wilson; but this time Congress overrode the veto, and passed the literacy test in February of 1917.

            World War I intervened, but even that horror was used to support the need for eugenics-based immigration restrictions. Edward Ross, in preparing his eugenics text, lamented the war as an “immeasurable calamity that has befallen the white race,” because it had killed off “more than 2 million British and German soldiers” (230), the flower of Nordic manhood. And Grant assured his readers that the barbarous conduct of modern Germany was due not to Nordics but to a population that had been polluted by Alpine or Asiatic blood. Later, Lothrop Stoddard in his book The Rising Tide of Color, described World War I as “the white civil war” that threatened “race suicide” and “mongrelization.” The intelligence testing that was introduced during the war was likewise used to support restrictions. Testing immigrants at Ellis Island, Henry Goddard concluded that “the intelligence of the average ‘third class’ (steerage) immigrant is low, perhaps of the moron grade” (239). And it is dismaying to note that Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, fully supported the eugenics movement. In a 1921 piece for Birth Control Review, she wrote: “the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of Eugenics” i.e. to breed a race of thoroughbreds (244-45). 

            By this time, eugenics was in full flower in America. Harry Laughlin, of the Eugenics Records Office, made a report to the Breeders Association about the ways to cut off the supply of human defectives and degenerates that included sterilization, a system of matings, polygamy, and euthanasia. His report’s central conclusion: “Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not solely to the individual (i.e. immigrant) who carries it” (274). Sounds a bit like some of the more rabid right-to-lifers of our own day.

             By 1921, the movement to control ‘bad’ immigration was too strong to be stopped. In May of that year, President Harding signed an Emergency Immigration Act into law. It set immigration quotas for individual nations—based on the number of immigrants from that country already in the U.S. in 1910. No more than 3 per cent of those already here were allowed. This immediately cut immigration from Poland by 70 per cent, from Yugoslavia by 74 per cent, and from Italy by 82 per cent. By contrast, Great Britain’s quota numbered 77,342, but due to a lack of those seeking to immigrate, 35,00 slots were left unfilled. And still the restriction bandwagon rolled on. At the Second International Conference of Eugenics hosted by Fairfield Osborne on Sept. 22, 1921 at New York’s Natural History Museum (with Madison Grant as co-chair), Count Vacher de Lapouge, author of The Aryan and His Social Role, intoned, “America, I solemnly declare that it depends on you to save civilization and to produce a race of demigods!” (303). Not long after, President Harding signed a two-year extension of the 1921 Emergency Immigration Act. And still the hits kept coming, almost too numerous to mention. The NY Times Book Review featured a review of Charles Gould’s book, America: a Family Matter, with the title, “Failure of the Melting Pot;” and the redoubtable Harry Laughlin provided “data” for a Congressional hearing which asserte that Romanians were 41 per cent more likely than average Americans to be criminal; that Italians were 57 per cent more likely to be insane; and that Russian and Polish immigrants were twice as likely to be tubercular. Whereupon Kenneth Roberts, editor of The Saturday Evening Post, warned: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southeastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in return” (319). Shortly thereafter, Secretary of Labor James Davis told an audience in Pittsburgh that 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior” (320).

            With the heat against immigrants at the boiling point, new and stricter plans began to emerge. One John Trevor (a wealthy zealot) presented his National Origins quota plan. Quotas would be based on all immigrants with roots in in a given country. But Roy Garis of Vanderbilt University went him one better. In his plan, quotas were to be based not on the 1910 but on the 1890 census because—as the Saturday Evening Post put it—that was the year “Nordic immigration was still strong and the low-grade stuff hadn’t begun to come to us in volume” (320). For Italians, this meant that quotas were drastically reduced—from an allotment of 222,496 before the 1921 quotas to 45,159 in 1921, to 3,912 per year with the new law. Senator David Reed was quite satisfied; “I think” he said “the American people want us to discriminate” (331). But not everyone was so pleased. Herbert Jennings, professor of zoology and genetics told his colleagues that the true aim of these measures was “Nordic propaganda.” And Emanuel Celler, then a 34-year-old congressman from Brooklyn, called Laughlin’s study “a vicious report redolent with downright and deliberate fallacies” while Madison Grant’s work was “dogmatic piffle.” He condemned the restrictionists’ intent as “the rankest kind of discrimination…set up against Catholic and Jewish Europe” (340). But Celler’s was a lone voice. When the final vote was taken, the House passed the new bill 308-62; the Senate vote was equally decisive, voting 69-9 in favor. With that, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 became the law of the land, and in 1925, a mere 2,662 immigrants from Italy were allowed to enter the United States.

            The eugenics movement had not only contributed its vicious creed to the immigration debate. It had more direct effects as well. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law, with Justice Holmes writing with the majority his infamous opinion that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” (350). Due to that opinion, at least 60,000 people were sterilized by 1970. But the worm was beginning to turn. Saner minds were beginning to attack eugenics. H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury attacked eugenics as “a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, full of emotional appeals to class prejudice, solemnly put forth as science” (351). And especially after Hitler came to power in Germany and praised America and its eugenicists as having inspired him, it became a little embarrassing to carry the eugenics banner. This was especially true after the 1946 Nuremburg Doctor’s trial, where several Nazi defendants actually used the Buck v. Bell decision in their defense, as well as Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Nor did they just use the excuse that they were following orders; they said they were following Americans (392). Even so, Charles Davenport never publicly disavowed his ‘scientific racism;’ neither did Fairfield Osborne or Madison Grant or Harry Laughlin. But eventually, all were, one way or the other, publicly disgraced, as well they might be.

            As for the infamous law they helped to pass, it too was revoked, this time by another Johnson. In October 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, at the Statue of Liberty, signed into law a new Immigration and Nationality Act. Written by the same Emanuel Celler who had vainly protested the 1924 bill, it abolished national quotas—too late for many, but a victory for fairness and equity in immigration nonetheless. At least for a time. 

Lawrence DiStasi