In my cultural background, when you go visit relatives, you go to visit the living ones and the dead ones. The living relatives are also supposed to make regular trips to visit the dead, clean the gravesite, weed around the headstones, have a chat, have a picnic, bring the kids. But in Australia, the council has paid gardeners and groundspeople who keep the cemetaries looking nice. They are often empty on weekends. People say cemetaries are ooky places, and some hold their breath driving past, almost as if death itself is contagious. The living typically only show up under duress, and stand around silently in black on the muddy verge of the pit when the next grandparent/aunt/uncle dies. They get out of there as soon as possible.
At work, I was talking about going to visit my great-aunt in the cemetary in Poland. "Oh, that's morbid," one of the Steves said when it came up in conversation. "I hate cemetaries. They're depressing places."
It might be morbid in the sense of being to do with death, but it's not depressing. Cemetaries are lovely places.
Everyone buried in a cemetary had family or relatives who cared about them, who for whatever reason wanted to make sure that the deceased's body was given a spot, a reference point, a marker to say that they had lived. Everyone with an inscription had somebody who cared to write it. Everyone with an alabaster pot for flowers on their headstone had people who expected to come to drop off flowers. Everyone who had "beloved of" written on their stone had somebody who loved them.
Relationships in life are complicated things - there are whole professions to help us deal with them. We can love people and can't stand to be with them; we can be supported by our parents but feel freedom when they die; and family duty or financial obligation can make a mess of an otherwise straightforward relationship. Love and death are tied together through grief, which has a depressing physiological effect on us - our endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous and cardivoascular systems are all affected through mechanisms which are only starting to be understood. Live humans are walking bundles of contradictions, and a dead body is not. So the living are left with all those contradictory emotions from the relationship, and they have to digest them alone. The focal point for this transition is often at the cemetary watching the coffin getting lowered into the ground. Whether the grief has surfaced by this point is irrelevant - that is the last image of that person burned into the retina of the survivor.
So if you only show up to a cemetary when somebody you know and love has just died, you're not going to develop an easy and comfortable association with the place, huh.
In broader terms, cemetaries are fascinating places. Archaeologists are always excited about grave digs. They are particularly interesting because for a cemetary to exist, the society must be stable, prosperous, healthy, and emotionally interconnected enough to find a spot to mark the resting place of their dead.
Cemetaries don't get populated in times of disaster or war - corpses usually get either a mass grave, or a spot on open earth or ocean to rot and get eaten by birds and eventually bleach and turn to dust.
Cemetaries don't get populated in times of contagious disease - corpses get burned. Only in the 20th century did we really seal coffins adequately to routinely bury those dead from contagion.
Cemetaries don't get populated by the extremely poor, or when food and money and energy are tight - when concentrating on survival, working 16 physical hours a day to subsist, or trying to keep alive your children who are too hungry to cry anymore, burying and marking the dead is a nicety that you can't afford.
Socially disconnected individuals don't normally get put in cemetaries. Digging a grave by hand requires substantial effort. Paying for a spot in a graveyard, and marking it with a stone, are the acts of someone who cares for the dead person. If there is nobody to care enough about you to put you in a grave, you would end up on the heap with the paupers, or cremated.
So when I notice that many suburban cemetaries are full, and the outer suburban ones are filling up, and gravestones a hundred years old are still cared for (and in some country towns the shop owners have the same surname as the oldest graves, I love it when I discover that!) I feel really happy about the modern world I live in.
What a privilege it is to bury your loved ones in a cemetary. To know where their bones are. To show your own kids and have a picnic there. To have a 3-high stack with 2 spaces left, and to ponder that this could well be a rare thing in human history, that people from all stratas of society (... poor in developing nations and modern slaves notwithstanding, but that post is still coming...) can plan where to put the corpses of their loved ones, ten, twenty, fifty years from now.
Please reconsider your local cemetary. Go check it out on a sunny weekend afternoon. Read the stones and think of all the care and love and joy and human connection that went into each one. It's actually a very happy place.
The key to a dairy free Western diet is finding substitutes. Every ingredient in traditional Bechamel is off our list. Here is a yummy alternative. Last time I cooked it in a bake, it was so convincing that DH asked if I was trying to poison him with dairy. I swear there's not a drop of milk protein in it.
Here is my best substitute for cheese. - it's quite awesome in a lasagna, a gratin, a creamy potato bake.It's based on a Bechamel recipe but carries not one iota of any of the actual ingredeints in Bechamel sauce.
1 cup soymilk - fridge or room temp to start with
3 tbsp canola oil
1/3 cup of the relevant flour (I use spelt flour cos we're not gluten-free, just wheat-free)
1 egg, whisked
Pinch of salt
Mix the milk and canola in a small pot. Whisk in the flour and start to heat it on the stove.
Mix the egg and salt in while the whole thing is still mostly cold.
Whisk vigorously and heat it until it has thickened. This takes a minute but when it happens it happens fast. Don't leave it on the stove
Use it in lasagna (smeared on top of super-thin slices of salted eggplant, you'd swear it was parmesan)
or use it on a sliced potato bake (sprinkling rye breadcrumbs on top gives it crunch and texture)
or use it on leeks/tomatoes/zucchini/your gratin of choice.
The places it does not work so well are where you look more closely at the sauce. For example, I need to come up with a better option for eggs benedict, fondue, pizza, and nachos.
But it is truly delicious in lasagna.
The people above are those credited with the description of the phenomenom that has stuck in the present canon of history. But for someone to get credit for a discovery, it actually needs to get discovered a number of times, over many years, and then for some reason one version 'sticks' in the historical record and that makes that person a Great Man (or more rarely Great Woman).
I conjecture that the Great Discoveries, and more specifically our
adoration of the 'genius' people who made such Great Discoveries, are
simply the most recent version.
On an individual basis, we all need to learn things several times before they stick. Ever tried to teach yourself to juggle? Try it, it's fun, and apparently good for your peripheral vision and thought speed. You will 'get the hang' of' juggling several times, and then weeks or months later you will have forgotten it and have to re-discover it. I remember needing to learn how to dive about 4 times in consecutive summers before it stuck. Our brains need to learn, and practice, and lose it, and learn again, and lose it again, and learn it again and again before the new thing is integrated into our being, before the synapses are established and co-opted properly into their new job.
I don't think discovery in the collective mind is any different. I think we have to learn things many times, each generation, in order to bring it into the collective body of knowledge. And the collective contribution is only what the collective mind can tolerate.
I have just finished a pretty torrid but nevertheless interesting book called 1434; The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance.
Poor Gavin Menzies is the punching bag of a series of well-read academic types in a number of fields. His book is not a properly peer-reviewed cross-referenced and footnoted dissertation. He likes maps, and astronomical navigation, and Leonardo da Vinci, and talks a lot about all of them. . Neither does the author clearly differentiate between speculation and well-evidenced historical factoid. I found some of his 'minor' evidence quite compelling: genome haplotypes on certain Dalmatian islands, sudden changes in the depiction of stars on chapel roofs etc. But I got bored and bogged down in all the map/globe stuff and endless comparisons between long-shelved drawings of river locks and extracts of ancient metallurgy texts. repetitive map footnotes talking about 47 carts of pepper per day consumed in Canton (now Guangzhou), and a series of Renaissance Men.
His main point, however, is that Chinese travellers to Italy caused the Renaissance. His theory is the conjunction of three historical factoids.
In 1434, the Chinese Ming dynasty had maps and navigation and astronomical and mathematical knowledge way ahead of the Europeans (this is more or less historically established);
The Europeans (specifically Florentines) made massive rapid leaps in science and technology at about the same time as a substantial number of sexy Asiatic slave girls messed with the Florentine social order;
Just about all of the major documented technological, agricultural and military advances of the early Renaissance can be cross-referenced to some Chinese texts which are about 100 years older. To illustrate, he traces every one of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions back to an old Chinese booklet, which he alledges was copied by the Sienese engineer Mariano Taccola.
Given this - and scraps of genetic evidence and folk stories - Menzies proposes that one particular Chinese admiral took his fleet to Europe, handed out a whole bunch of booklets, traded slave girls, and left in his wake the explosion of the Renaissance.
Whether or not Menzies is "right" about this Chinese fleet, he raises an interesting point. The history of discovery is quite different to the reality of discovery.
Chris Stringer, in The Origin of Our Species (which I found very much more engrossing than Gavin's book, sorry mate) talks about genetic evidence for wave after wave of migration, conquest, decline and elimination worldwide, of pockets of humanity. Technology and architecture develops and grows and then in spots it collapses and then it is sparked again and grows again. We rebuild on genetic ruins as well as the ruins of old cities. Mitochondrial (maternal) DNA mutations show dramatically different migration patterns to Y-chromosome (male) DNA mutations. For example, in New Zealand, evidence suggests that Polynesian conquerors came in from a different direction to the previous immigraiton wave from Australia, and killed many of the men and took many women as wives, and now a high proportion of Maoris carry mitochondrial Australian Aboriginal DNA, but Polynesian y-chromosomes. Their genes carry the 'sins' of the long-forgotten forefathers. As do we all.
But back to Gavin and the Renaissance. Menzies' long-winded book. Menzies seems to want to 'set History right' and give the Chinese fleet more credit. SO credit is the issue of discovery.
I propose that the history of discovery is more about claiming the credit. That is not to say that the discoverer didn't do anything; just that they overstated their case. When Google Scholar's startup page offers that you can "Stand on the Shoulders of Giants", they are recognising that this is what Great Discoverers have done for all of recorded Western history. And they are offering you the opportunity to do it too.
SO my original conjecture.
Newton did not discover gravity. Every child who has ever dropped food off their high chair has discovered gravity and is running experiments.
Newton did described gravity mathematically for the first time in Western historical memory, and this was an important contribution. He also claimed the glory wth great gusto, by publishing through the Royal Society the Principa Mathematica (isn't that a somewhat arrogant title?) and by standing over the next generation of physicists as a President and Grand Old Man of the Royal Society, knighted by the Queen, member of Parliament, standardising the amount of silver in the currency, and prolifically corresponding with anyone on anything.
However, the astrophysicist who conceptualised the gravity well, and spat space and time into more dimensions, is not remembered by name at all.
Columbus is credited with the discovery of the Americas because he was the key person in the last wave who claimed the discovery. He had a mindset, not of curiosity, but of claiming credit in order to get the Spanish royalty to make him Admiral of the new world and give him a knighthood. In contrast, if Gavin Menzies is indeed "right" about China discovering the Americas in 1421, perhaps they didn't attempt to claim it is that they didn't frame it as a discovery. They assumed that it was already ruled by someone else, and didn't plan to interfere, knowing the administrative nightmare of taking it on.There was no big social advantage in China of conquest, so why bother?
Einstein is put forwardas the ultimate genius of the modern age. As a child, I remember being fascinated by a documentary about a pathologist who had dissected Einstein's brain and found an extra fold in the right frontal lobe. This was supposed to make him the genius that he was. My modern reading on neuroscience shows how woefully inadequate this explanation is.
So what did Einstein actually do?
He had a very clever original idea about the photoelectric effect, which was indeed revolutionary. In and around other scientists' discoveries, Einstein also came up with some maths to reframe space and time as the same thing - except we can only travel in one direction in the time dimension. But it was a very generative time in physics in general, and Einstein's big interest was in claiming a great discovery. Even Wiki says he wrote 300 technical papers and 150 non-technical works in his effort to make a comfortable living from simply being a smart fellow. Titles included, "On the General Molecular Theory of Heat", "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions", "On Science and Religion". They don't sound like humble scientific papers. They sound like blog titles. In any case, I am sure you can see that he was a big fan of his own genius.
So how come, in the 21st century, we can 're-discover' the 'truth' of prior discovery, and bring DaVinci, Newton, Columbus, and Einstein down a peg or two in the collective firmament?
I propose that any society is very careful to forget or ignore known historical achievements that are beyond what we can conceptualise doing. We hate to feel inferior to the long-dead. We only look at the technology of the past when we can safely say "Oh look, they were still grunting and spit-roasting rats and picking each others' fleas". So Menzies' proposal only gets published because we now have widespread use of Newton's calculus, and GPS, and nobody needs to calculate longitudes using stars or clocks anymore.
So the tricks to being a Great Discoverer:
1) Find a new-ish idea and have a really good reason to take credit for it. Like a knighthood or a Nobel Prize. Market it to the scientific masses. Iterate the idea a few times, and draw a fabulous picture.
2) Quietly forget to mention your sources. Pretend it all came from your own brain.
3) Target your market. If in science, pick an idea just a little bit more complicated than the current cutting-edge. Don't try to propose anything too radical - the scientific community might feel inferior come after you with pitchforks. For example, don't try to propose planetary orbits to 12th-century Papists. Don't try to propose hygiene to 19th century Dutch obstetricians. Don't try to propose energy medicine and reiki to 21st century orthapedic surgeons.
4) Be a bit more fluent in academic structures, paradigms and language than Gavin Menzies. Newton had equations. Columbus had maps and charts - the academic structure of the time. And Einstein got very slick at producing papers.
5) Live a long time, get important, and dump on anyone younger than you who challenges your ideas too much. History is not written by the victor so much as the survivor.
Dear Gavin,
Your books 1421 and 1434 have certainly achieved 1) and 2). You are not comfortably established in your target market of academia, but you have great traction in the fiction-reading web-researching public (says me haha). But you do need to get your 4) sorted out, your peer-reviewed academic credentials. The real test of whether you get to keep your discovery is whether you live long enough to defend it. Good luck with that, buddy.
Sincerely
Lexskigator.
"So I've been working on a program, it's been getting data from the FOREX portal and I've been doing dummy trades with it, and I sent it live three weeks ago, and I earned enough to take my wife to a country club for the weekend." "You want to use it to quit your job?" "Yeah. I want to earn enough to not have to show up here anymore." He brings up the portal and his data. Over the day, he's "earned" about $500. He is stoked. "You want to know the best thing? It's self-reinforcing. This pattern works better week by week. The best thing is that when some human spots a pattern, then he publishes the pattern, and people start to believe it, they start to follow the pattern and they get all excited when the recognise it in the data. Then as more people follow it, it is self-reinforcing. It gets stronger when people buy and sell on the pattern." It's not fair, I say. Small nations get hit very hard by currency bubbles, people starve, you know. "It's not a good system. But it's a big system. And when the whole planet is trading like this, you should expect a lot of inertia. It's like a mountain, it's just there. And worrying about the morality isn't going to put dineros in my pocket."
I think the reason I posted it is because I find this quite a viscerally confronting moral position. This particular individual is totally refusing to recognise his part in the system - in fact he is pleased and satisfied to float on the bubble, and regards this as a worthwhile goal for his life. He is ready to trade in a generative, creative career for a shuffle-piles-of-money-at-the-expense-of-the-vulnerable career.
I am probably demonstrating my strangeness in the degree to which I disapprove. Youse all probably don't think this is a problem.
But how is this different to:
Pyramid selling schemes of any kind
Marketing superfoods or supplements for weight loss which are highly doubtful, or knowingly fraudulent
Running an energy futures market a la Enron
Packaging tranches of debt for on-selling as assets a la Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae
Selling FOREX pattern recognition software? or books?
At least with shark fins or illegal drugs, there is actually a product which makes someone somewhere feel happier about buying.
So those currencies whose national production has been left plundered by FOREX traders chasing 'candlesticks' or 'pennants' or 'head & shoulders' profiles in the data (not that FOREX is the only culprit of course, there are many other 21st century globalisation-related trade phenomena which contribute), the otherwise unemployed seek to find another currency. Like shark fins or poppy heads. This picture of rotting finless small nations' production capabilities lets me post my disapproval in a way everyone can see.
Quit your FOREX trading, lunch friend of mine. Build infrastructure or sell drugs or get a job as a personal trainer. That way I will be able to keep my own lunch down better.
Octopuses are very smart. This is one of my recent favourite octopus documentaries. They have more dexterity with their tentacles than we do with our hands, they can solve quite complex puzzles, they have inter-octopus communication through skin colours, and they can learn very detailed things from mimicking and copying each other. They are curious, deliberate, spatially aware, and super fast learners. The docco follows a Spanish research group dedicated to the evaluation of the intelligence of the common octopus (octopus vulgaris), and the results presented are quite impressive. The documentary proposes that despite the phenomenal cosmic learning capacity and long life expectancy of the (male) octopus, they haven't made a species leap for one simple reason. They can't systematically pass knowledge to the next generation, because after protecting her first clutch of eggs, the mother always dies. So for all their mad skillz, the
Mediterranean octopus must learn all about the world for himself, in each generation,
by trial and error and imitation of other octopuses. There is no direct help from other octopuses because a male octopus - even a directly
related one - doesn't appear to have the
capacity for empathy, ie a spontaneous negative neurochemical sensation
when another feels pain, and a positive one when another feels pleasure. They also don't bond, they are drifting individuals who are skilled at mimicry. Their brains simply don't seem to get to the point of "I see you are frustrated trying to open that jar. Let me teach you
how."
And female octopuses are expendable. Even human
experimenters don't bother teaching female octopuses anything. They
always die just before the hatching of the first clutch of eggs. If they
live long enough to have a clutch, they have been biologically
successful.
Here's an octopus opening a jar.
And a curious and dexterous wild octopus stealing a camera, and maybe trying to work it. See, they're smart. You wouldn't see a goat or a tiger or a cockroach doing this. A monkey, maybe. But not half as classily.
A fabulous book called Braintrust (R, you would really like this book), proposes a link between neurological structure, and community, morality and cooperation.
Patricia Churchland neatly argues that our ability to adapt to, and live in, a magnificent variety of societies adapted to the local geography and technology, is built upon the neurochemical pathways for:
Caring - for self, and for kin/mate/community as for yourself
Recognition of others' psychological states, and predicting how they will act. (Particularly
handy for wolves hunting in packs, for example.
Problem-solving in a social context, ie dynamic optimisation within constraints
Learning social practices, through explicit and implict teaching, plus imitation.
She then goes through the neurochemical pathways of each of these, from an evolutionary perspective, with reference to multiple other primate species, prairie voles, reptiles, and game theory. I am halfway through, and enthralled.
(I am also stoked to see some good quality tangible work along the lines that Sam Harris proposed in The Moral Landscape. Ie, that science ought to stick her nose into the moral space in order to explain and evaluate different moral structures in terms of individual/community wellbeing, measured by neurological function, social cohesion and aggregate welfare of the people in that structure, and thus evaluate different moral positions on some kind of yet-to-be-developed measurable axes. This would let us happily develop past an external singular morality (Holy Commandments) just like we have for law and order, models of illness and health, food and nutrition, and animal farming. He proposes that we need to accept that there are many different 'peaks' and 'valleys' in the moral landscape, and seek to map them.)
Anyway, with my human tendency to anthropomorphism, I was appalled at the sad fate of all those female octopuses.
And being a 21st century Western woman, I am acutely aware of all those generations of women before me (and all around me in the world today) whose lives resemble (relative to mine) female Octopus Vulgaris.
My great-grandmother and me
One of my great-grandmothers, Magdalena, was born to a reasonably well off landowning Polish family in 1881, and this section is about her. Okay, World Wars 1 and 2 messed up her world quite a lot, but her life story and selected medical history can tell you what she expected for herself in terms of reproductive health, general health, endurance of pain, and general and female-specific potential causes of death.
She survived several bouts of childhood illness for which I am vaccinated. Other children in the town died.
She always expected to spend her adult life mostly pregnant or nursing infants, and reasonably isolated from her husband's daytime activities.
She had a private tutor because they were quite rich and her father was considered indulgent educating her. A tutor was quite rare for young women.
She spoke six languages fluently but never learned to read any of them. (Her brothers had scholarly tutors too and they all were taught to read as children - she wasn't expected to need to.)
She expected to have peasant maids for her whole life. They were to clean, fetch and carry, wash clothes, and care for her children in various capacities. Her task was expected to be to manage the household.
She (and her contemporaries) understood that there was a real possibility of dying in pregnancy or childbirth, although she had a good live-in midwife and thought the likelihood was lower than for the peasant classes.
She had about 13 pregnancies - we think - between 1903 and 1916, and did not expect them all to go to term. She also had an unknown number of miscarriages. There was one preterm stillbirth. She had one set of twins.
She did not expect all her 12 live babies to survive childhood. She considered it extraordinary luck and good management that none died as infants during WW1, where their property was sporadically on the Eastern Front. Only one died in childhood, a girl, during WW2.
By about 1960, she had a prolapsed uterus that would FALL OUT of her body and she would ask her daughter to PUT IT BACK IN PLEASE. It was so bad the Australian surgeons wouldn't operate.
Forced labour in in Siberia had also left her with varicose veins like tree roots on both legs which she never had treated either.
She had never took painkilling medication until the refugee hospital in Turkey in 1946. Not because of unavailability (except during the Wars), but because she would fill the prescription and save it for her family and household.
She had tropical ulcers and parasites from 1948 onwards, which were never fully cured.
She had learned hygiene and food preparation habits, and herbal medicine, from her own mother. She advised and treated herself, her family, the local peasants, other refugees, and others who knew to ask, with honey soaked bandages and nettle tea and chicken soup and a hundred other remedies.
She died of pneumonia at age 95, half a world away in Australia.
My birthday was one hundred years and twelve days after Magdalena's.
I was literate by the age of four.
I have had formal schooling, university education, and when I get organised I expect to do postgraduate study too.
I don't have a household servant. I pay a fortnightly cleaner, some fabulous childcare workers, and sometimes the local takeaway shops, to cover much of what a servant would have done. Electronic appliances do the rest. I do get caught out with three feral kids at 6PM and no help. Magda would have had help.
I expect to spend most of my adult life working in what was until very recently clearly a man's job, with income and position based on my reputation and achievements and independent of my gender.
I am planning to have a long and illustrious career once my kids don't need so much from me.
I expect to end up in charge of a number of men, and hopefully some women too. I will expect them to do what I instruct, regardless of me being female.
I do not expect to have untreated gynecological issues. I expect mainstream medicine to be on top of female physiology by now.
I have had 3 full term pregnancies. I expected to survive all of them. I required medical intervention after one of the births. It worked - I survived.
I now expect to not have any more pregnancies. I have medical tools to control this.
I expected all 3 children to survive birth. Now that they have, I expect all 3 to live to adulthood.
I expect to put the same resources into educating our daughter and launching her into the world as for our sons.
I expect painkiller, anaesthetic, antibiotics anytime I need them. I expect medical consultation and surgical treatment where it is warranted.
I do not expect to have to learn my own herbal medicine in order to treat myself or women and children around me because of some social priority structure or because medicine didn't know about female physiology.
I can't speak of war, forced labour or refugee hospitals, but I would be more than indignant under such circumstances if resources are gender-prioritised, especially if it's away from me or women and children around me. That's my child-bonded brain flooded with oxytocin talking. (To be fair, Magda did mention that in DP and refugee camps after Siberia, women and children were medically and nutritionally well cared-for. In this point I suppose am contrasting with modern places like Somalia or Bangladesh.)
I expect to drive cars and boats and operate machinery as I am licensed to. I do not expect to be confronted or questioned on a gender basis about this anymore. I expect to be able to obtain such licenses, tickets, certifications and access cards as I need for my job or my interests on the basis of being able to pass the criteria, not on the basis of gender.
Expecting a particular life drives social change
The general expectation of a woman consistently surviving childbirth, and having medical resources and attention when you need, changes individual and community expectations of life length, power and influence during her life, and the type of life she can lead. Because my community expects me to survive and contribute, it is worth educating me, paying me money for my exertions, fixing me up when I am sick, and indeed researching how womens' health actually works (because the Western medical 'typical' patient is male) in order to treat me effectively. So I feel entitled in a way my grandmother couldn't. She was further away on the octopus continuum.
The 20th century was marked by periods of exponential economic growth (measured in GDP) in a great many countries. The following dotpoints are standard economic explanations.
A proportion of this was technological: mechanisation, economies of (massive) scale, new industries like communications and aviation and
A proportion of this was medical: for example Malaria reduces a country's GDP by up to 5%. Put in clean fresh water and watch the community's GDP go up.
A proportion is infrastructure-based, where trade (and GDP) grows following good roads and ships and telephone linkes.
A proportion of this was the increase in size and complexity of service/support industries to production such as marketing, management consulting, finance and investment, litigation, insurance etc. These industries move around a comparatively very large amount of money for their tiny contribution to the flow of tangible goods. (cycling bidons and stress balls notwithstanding).
A proportion of this is due to the new vast energy availability and consumption, in our use of power systems, transport, home and work electronics, and the digital revolution.
A proportion of this is due to the increasing payment - and thus measurement - of previously unpaid womens' household or volunteer work, including childcare, nursing, social work, food processing, hospitality etc.
A proportion of this is due to women starting to engage, and consume, in previously predominantly male activities, such as higher education, adventure sports, medical and dental treatment, travel, and all kinds of entertainment.
The elephant in the room has a long memory
Evolution is not fast. Women and men think and operate differently*. Gender equality and equivalency in antropology is a rich complex thing that I am not going to go into - except that typically men and women aren't equal or equivalent in a society. There is enormous diversity in humanity, but quite often men and women run in different, parallel 'working' worlds. Our species has had substantial and persisting evolutionary advantages from our gender-different brain wiring*. This simply does not change in a hundred years*. Epigenetics can change certain traits in 1 or 2 generations, but sex hormones as neurochemicals is part of the big structural stuff, because it is extremely similar across the globe and apparently selected over 40,000 + years.
Mounting evidence is indicating that mens' and womens' brains are very very different (two extremely readable books btw, with lots of evidence and quite vicious feminist critiques.)
and this is how.
* BUT keep in mind that:
Temperament, culture and environment have a vastly larger effect
on the brain and behaviour than anyone ever expected, we load our neural "firmware" in infancy and childhood and nobody quite knows how that works except that it causes magnificent variation in and between populations, and may be a factor in susceptibility/resilience to some mental illness.
There is an awful lot going on in your brain that is not gender-specific. Sex hormones are neural activity mediators rather than drivers, helping us with habits and reflexes and tendencies, not ruling our thoughts and actions (although parents of adolescents may wonder a bit).
Structural, neurochemical and hormonal variation is enormous between individual brains of each gender, and just about all neurochemical or behavioural gender-based normal curves have a large and poorly measured overlapping mid-region.
Neurochemical gender differences are age dependent. Differences are greatest at ages birth-3, 15-20, and when male and female brains both change for bearing and rearing of young. The difference effects decrease as you get older. Old men and old women are hormonally very similar.
**Anything here is a massive oversimplification.** It's an extremely complex area with a lot of conclusions drawn from fragments of data. For a slightly more detailed picture, go read the books above, plus some Google Scholar. For a very detailed picture, go do a PhD in gender and neuroscience.
Adolescent male primate brains are flooded with testosterone*, in humans it's from age 13 to 25. Teenage boys are* naturally confrontational and adversarial, they get hooked on the dopamine rush of doing exciting/fast/illegal/truly dumb things, they are suddenly hierarchy-focused and can develop a status-addiction, they have sex thoughts going in the background "like a TV in a sports bar", and they struggle to empathise, meaningfully communicate, or practically cooperate with any demographic except their age and status peers.
Primate females have more oxytocin receptors in key brain parts than the males* (it's a bit species dependent, human females have relatively many times more receptors*). Ovulating female humans have* apparently very complex, cyclical brains, but oxytocin is a dominant gender-different neurotransmitter. For most of a woman's life, blood oxytocin is more or less the same as a male's, but those receptors make the effect much more intense. Also, when a pregnancy occurs, oxytocin levels skyrocket. Oxytocin is a simple molecule used all over the brain - but in the female's corpus collosum it is super important in pair/family bonding, having empathy and reading others' emotional states, differentiating the in-group and out-group, and protecting and providing for the in-group with the same neurochemical reward as protecting and providing for oneself. It may also help the individual conceptualise social norms and expectations, and oxytocin levels rise when a monkey in a group is part of punishing an in-group offenders (eg ostracising a food thief). Doses of oxytocin can also make people of both genders more trusting, more communication-attuned, and more prone to spending spare time in social bonding activities like grooming, chatting, and non-goal-oriented cooperation (shopping and going to the toilet together).
Testosterone partially explains rugby union, and oxytocin afternoon chit-chats with the mums group where their hair is all nicely done.
But how is it that in the 20th century, women of all classes and backgrounds suddenly, abruptly, feel entitled to healthcare, paid employment, status in our own right? Our brain hardware doesn't carry this easily. Neither does my male colleagues' brain hardware cope well with a dominant low-testosterone woman in charge.
I propose that it is simple life expectancy and entitlement.
In the late 19th century, women started expecting to survive childbirth. They felt entitled to have plans and ideas for life after childbirth. And then from the 60's, to stop and start having children by choice. It seems reasonable to thus be entitled to have resources invested in girls: equal priority nutrition, education, public recognition etc.
20th century wars provided Western women with an opportunity to work in all kinds of paid (mens' world) employment.
Increased white collar work and certain new female-dominant professions helped in the overall raising of life expectancy, especially for working classes (eg. nursing, community health, unions, worksite safety enforcement etc)
By the mid 20th century, most of the developed world expected not to die from blood infection, measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, polio, tetanus, cholera, smallpox, plague, malnutrition etc. Even cancer and traffic collisions are getting less deadly year by year. With each sudden death risk eliminated, our sense of entitlement rises.
This century, we have invented "childhood", "adolescence" - both social constructs which didn't exist in the Industrial Revolution and still don't in sub-Saharan Africa.
We have also stretched out childhood like never before, and educating boys and girls equivalently also conveniently and safely occupies them at school until their brains start to come down from the hormone highs.
We have stretched out working life like never before. People who in past centuries would have been wizened and crippled from physical work by 40 can typically now work to 60 or 70 - often out of choice, and with much better health!
By starting from better healthcare for women we are living much longer, we feel entitled to more, and we are less socially, politically and militarily disrupted by testosterone-fuelled young punks, because they're safely encased in school or university.
I propose that the early-20th-century injection of oxytocin- rather than testosterone-driven workers and thinkers has been a big factor in the large number of revolutionary paradigm-shifts in just about every arena: technological, social, political, literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophical.
What if the 20th century marks a change in our own species - as big as if a significant proportion of female octopuses could survive their first clutch of eggs, and thus take the first evolutionary steps to changing their brain chemistry and structure for empathy, and developing social structures to pass on their knowledge to the next generation? Wouldn't the octopus vulgaris species just take off like a rocket? They are so very clever and adaptable, all they would need to do is get their intergenerational act sorted out - and watch out, ocean floor!
Wouldn't it take off like - well - all the exponential curves used to describe 20th and early 21st century development?
I would be so proud of humanity if this were a preliminary to a species-wide structural shift.
I wonder where it will lead.
I hope I live to be 95 like Magdalena. I might get to find out.
I recently rediscovered an old idea, apparently now renamed Power Cooking. Spend one afternoon a week cooking large quantities, and filling up your freezer with pre-packed meals. This stash will then prevent any 5:30-7PM oh-my-fridge-is-empty-and-the-kids-are-climbing-the-walls-and-eating-the-furniture catastrophes, reduce the frequency (and financial and nutritional costs) of ordering takeaway, and leave more time during the evenings for knitting/technical documentation/trips to the park/retrieving the chooks from up the street.
We used to do this when we were students - we would cook a pot of beef massaman and then still have some variety in the week afterwords. Many juggling mums I know do this to provide meals when the nanny has the kids in the evening.
But I had never tried it for a family. I was worried about 2 limitations in particular:
1) The meals that fare the best are curries, casseroles, soups, meatballs etc. Not prawn stirfries, or cajun roast chicken, or perfectly cooked kangaroo steak with honey yoghurt sauce. I'm sorry. You can't freeze kangaroo steak.
2) For lots of hungry young kids, the quantities must be large. The freezer space must be large. You also risk them not eating the food on a whim.
But I thought I'd try it. At least a bit. Pot pies seem to freeze OK.
Chicken was on special at Aldi.
Here is my recipe for dairy free wheat free pot pies (for those with dairy free wheat free eating)
Filling:
Chop 2 large onions and brown them in 1tsp olive oil (takes about 10min). Add 2 crushed garlic cloves for another minute. Put this into a food processor.
Chop 1.5kg chicken breasts into 3cm cubes. Sear them in a hot pan in olive oil, turning frequently so they get a little colour on all sides..
Meanwhile, put about 100g stale bread (if you like 100% rye, spelt, or gluten free) in a mixing bowl and pour hot boiled water on it. Leave it to soak until you have soft mushy bread in a bowl of water. Pour out the water and add the mushy bread to the onions in the food processor. Blend it to a pap.
By this stage, the chicken should be seared.
Season the chicken with pepper, paprika, and either salt or Vegeta. Other possible spices include a little turmeric, cloves, Add about 1 cup of water and leave it to simmer for 20mins.
Add the onion and bread pap to the brew. Add a handful of fresh chopped herbs: parsley, coriander, or thyme. This will thicken it up nicely. Cook 5 more mins if the herbs are woody. Set it aside till you need it.
Pastry:
Sift 250g rye or spelt flour and a pinch of salt onto your workbench. (Make sure it's a clean bench.)
Put 100ml olive oil and 80ml water in a bowl and swish it around briskly with a fork. It might not look like it mixes but it does help.
Gradually add liquid to the flour and knead it into pastry. Knead for several minutes until it goes really smooth, almost glassy. Roll it to an even layer of about 1mm thin.
Assembly:
Grease a Pie dish (for tonight) and/or some ramekins (to freeze).
Put chicken mix in the bottom.
Cut pieces of pastry to roughly the size of the top of each dish.
Put the pastry on top of the chicken.
Pre-cook for 20mins at 180 degrees (150 degrees in a fan-forced oven)
Re-heat:
When cooking from room temp or fridge temp, cook for another 20mins at 180 degrees (less time for smaller ramekins).
When cooking from frozen, cook for 20mins at 150 degrees followed by 10mins at 180 degrees (less time for smaller ramekins)
The drawback:
It was extremely tasty. The ravening horde ate most of it at lunchtime. I only had 2 ramekins left in the fridge, and then my husband ate one for dinner. I am going to take the last one to work with me. There is no point freezing them, so the whole "power cooking" thing kindof fell apart.
I would love to take a photo but I fear it would be gone by the time I find the camera.
Ghosts are typically assumed to be spirits of people who are stuck in the physical world, and remain connected to places or objects or even other living people (especially their most loved or hated ones, or those very sensitive to the 'vibe'). Psychics claim to be able to connect to a person who has 'passed over' (ie dead) by holding an object of theirs. Cell 16 of the Old Melbourne Gaol is a place supposed to be particularly haunted, more so than the gallows cell. When we visited the gaol, the whole place was certainly spooky, but there was a guide dog which whimpered and refused to go into that particular cell. ..."If these walls could talk, what stories would they tell?"...
We also don't find it hard to believe that places and objects can be imprinted with an emotion or an event, and maybe a shadow of the people (or animals!) involved, without actually being the place of anyone's death.
Very strong ghosts, or layers of ghosts, can give visitors ignorant of the particular circumstances a 'vibe'; most of us go quiet in a cathedral, a sacred cave, or an elephant graveyard; and I challenge anyone to go to a university Halls of Residence during summer break, and not pick up the uni student pheromones of attraction/repulsion/lust/betrayal/revenge which have soaked into the walls.
Ghosts can be very personal too. When I visit places where I first went with a long-moved-on ex, I get a vivid sense of the two of us as we were then, still imprinted on that place. Would having a big argument with someone there leave an imprint on a cafe? Or put another way, would you go back there lightly?
...Small objects, small ghosts...
Most of us keep small items with our ghosts, we call them mementos or keepsakes. Typical ghost-carriers include jewellery, things with your handwriting on them, things you made or fixed, when you pick them up your mind flashes back to another time when you imprinted something on them. Something tiny - oh yeah I wrote that phone number down on a supermarket docket because my phone screen was broken, I dropped it outside the fish & chip shop, I remember that day, it was raining.... or something significant - Mum gave me that to cheer me up after I failed my first uni exam... If you listen carefully, sometimes you can pick up the ghost from someone else's stuff. This is why I love secondhand shops and antique shops - it's a real treat picking up a nifty thingo with a nifty ghost on it. Knitting ghost map
My knitting has ghosts. The wool carries memories for me of where I
found it, what I did with it (dyed, knitted the other half skein into
something else) but there are tiny ghosts in the stitches too. Here is a recent project, made in a very busy week. Not my finest knitting effort, but perfect for illustrating a ghost map. I have labelled the ghosts in it for you guys, they are the memories that came back vividly as I felt the fabric and tracked my gaze along a row. Sometimes even medium-sized ghosts can hide in a pattern sequence or garment change -especially a stripy one like this.
I wonder if this is true of all stuff handmade with thought and care.
And I also wonder if our mass-sweatshop-produced clothing and footwear, contaminated-factory-labour electronics, slave-labour chocolate and coffee, and conflict gems carry ghosts of the despair of the producers. Which might be why handmade stuff seems inherently 'nicer' to many people.
It might not be pretty in the photo, but it fits me perfectly and actually looks pretty snazzy with black pants and Western boots, and it is a mosty-happy knit. The green band just above the waist contains excitement and good hopes for a newly pregnant mum and her fetus. And when I look at the lower left sleeve hem, I am reminded of the relief that I kept my job. Not a bad lot of ghosts for one jumper, huh.
