“I’m so over being a homosexual this month.”
–Man to man, overheard last month at Equinox Gym by Amy Weitz (July 3, 2018)
Your Self-Healing Body
Modern medicine has entered a new era in which many suffer from over-treatment
June 23, 2018
The placebo effect taps into what Howick calls our ‘inner pharmacy’—chemicals with a drug-like effect that are naturally produced inside our body.
By any measure, modern medicine is a miracle. Countless lives have been saved, epidemics averted, and suffering eased thanks to medical advances of the past century.
But this miracle comes with miserable side effects. Widespread addiction to prescription drugs, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and out-of-control health care spending are a few of the problems that plague the system.
According to medical researcher and philosopher Dr. Jeremy Howick, modern medicine has clearly benefited our lives, but we’ve also lost touch with how to determine a proper dose of it. We’ve developed effective treatments for diseases that killed mercilessly in the past, but now we suffer from a new problem: too much medicine.
“For the first time since World War II, life expectancy is going down in the U.S.,” Howick said. “We do need medicine, but we’re taking way too much of it, to the point where it’s bankrupting us and it’s not healthy anymore.”
Howick’s new book, “Doctor You: Introducing the Hard Science of Self-Healing,” offers a compelling solution to our unhealthy dependence: learning to tap into our body’s ability to heal itself.
The concept of the body as a self-healing organism is not new. In fact, it’s been around as long as people have been treating illnesses. Ancient doctors from around the world noted that, given enough time and support, the body will often correct itself.
Of course, it’s much easier to come to this conclusion if all you have is observations from nature, ancient traditions, and primitive tools. Arriving at this insight today is far less likely. One big reason is our sense of entitlement. Along with the miraculous cures that emerged in the 20th century has come an expectation that there must be a pill for every ill—or there may soon be one, given enough research and funding.
This expectation has produced incredible cures, but it has also warped our understanding of what it means to be healthy. Today, 20 percent of Americans take at least five prescription drugs per day, often with little understanding or oversight about how these drugs interact with each other. Medical error now ranks as the third most likely cause of death in the United States. Fatal prescription drug errors alone kill more than 100,000 Americans annually.
Meanwhile, drug researchers look at the body’s ability to self-heal more as a statistical annoyance than a blessing. In order to deem a drug effective, trials have to prove that it can outperform a placebo. The placebo effect shows that even when patients take a fake drug their symptoms often improve.
And it’s not just pills. A recent study at Oxford University looked at more than 50 placebo-controlled studies of various surgical techniques and found that placebo surgery was as effective as the real thing in more than half the trials.
We tend to think of the placebo effect as a delusion caused by deception in order to determine an unbiased truth. It’s why double-blind trials ensure that both researchers and patients are kept in the dark about who takes the placebo and who gets the genuine drug.
But the placebo effect may also demonstrate how our minds and bodies are naturally bent toward healing—no deception necessary. In a 2016 study from Harvard Medical School, researchers discovered that even when patients were told they were taking a fake pill, the ritual of having it prescribed by a real doctor still resulted in significant improvement in back pain.
Other studies on so-called “open label placebos” for IBS, depression, allergic rhinitis, and ADHD have all shown positive effects.
The placebo effect isn’t merely a trick of the mind. It taps into what Howick calls our “inner pharmacy”—chemicals with a drug-like effect that are naturally produced inside our body.
Becoming conscious of our inner pharmacy may make it more effective. One study looking at preoperative patients examined how much of an impact such insight had on painkiller use. Researchers educated half the patients about endorphins—the body’s own pain killing chemicals—while the other half received no such education.
After the operations, everyone in the non-educated group filled their painkiller prescriptions, but only 10 percent of the educated group opted for drugs.
So if our inner pharmacy can be stimulated simply by suggestion, why isn’t more done to promote this self-healing mechanism? Howick believes it’s primarily an issue of profit. The medical industry sees the healing potential, just not the market potential.
“If you work at Glaxo Smith Kline, you have an amazing cafeteria with healthy food, way healthier than you get in any hospital,” Howick said. “They teach mindfulness and yoga. They have programs to help their workers from taking drugs, but their business model for us is for us to take more drugs.”
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for the pharmaceutical industry’s blessing to access our body’s self-healing abilities. Diet and exercise are well-established strategies for improving our health, but there are many other things we can do to influence our well-being. We can keep close friends, have gratitude, and cultivate a positive outlook. Perhaps part of us has always known that such behaviors are good for us, but recent science is bringing clarity to their therapeutic value.
“I’ve quantified what many people know based on tradition in the same way we quantify the effects of drugs,” Howick said.
Even the demeanor of our doctor can have a quantifiable effect on our health. Howick says that a doctor who expresses empathy can have many of the same benefits as over-the-counter drugs for pain, depression, and anxiety.
Once referred to as “bedside manner,” empathy is an idea close to Howick’s heart. He’s the director of Oxford University’s Empathy Program, which looks at the impact empathy has on healing. His team recently published a systematic review of randomized trials that demonstrates just how powerful it can be.
One study found that doctors who receive empathy training see their patients’ pain reduce one point on a 10-point scale. It may not sound like much, but it’s enough to take the pain from severe to moderate, or moderate to mild. For some patients, this small shift can make a huge difference.
“In the context of the opioid crisis, people often start taking these drugs and it leads them on a path to more and more stronger drugs, and for many, it leads to dependence and death. Whereas communication can actually help,” Howick said.
One reason why empathy is so effective is that helps alleviate the feeling of loneliness that so many of us suffer. Research has found that, on average, feeling isolated is as bad for your health as smoking. Having another person with whom we can share our worries and concerns, and knowing that someone has our back, can give us a much-needed feeling of support and reduces our stress.
Finding the Right Dose
So how do we determine when to take medicine and when to let nature take its course?
First, consider the severity of the problem. Drugs used to treat a mild headache, for example, don’t perform better than a placebo. Big problems, however, require more intervention.
“If you get in a car accident, go to the hospital. But most things that we go to our family doctor for do not need drugs,” said Howick.
When you need medical care, opt for the most conservative, least expensive, and lowest risk treatment option first. Drugs and surgery can be lifesavers, but they can also have side effects worse than the disease they are designed to treat.
When facing a serious health problem, consider the evidence behind the suggested cure. Aggressive cancer treatments, for example, are often the first choice among patients desperate to save their lives. They rarely realize, however, that these harsh procedures were never approved based on trials where they look at mortality as an outcome.
“You want to know if you’re going to live better and longer,” Howick said. “The majority of these trials were based on surrogate outcomes—like tumor shrinking—which is important from a pathophysiological point of view, but it might come back more aggressively.”
Modern medicine can rescue us from extreme circumstances, but for general health maintenance, seek modalities that work with your body’s self-healing system.
Ed Paget, an osteopath and movement coach from Alberta, Canada, recently saw a patient who had suffered from a migraine for over six months. “It was so bad she couldn’t drive, had to quit school, and would go to the hospital just to get some pain relief,” Paget said.
But getting to the bottom of his patient’s pain required some sleuthing. “We looked at all the areas of her body that could be impacting or contributing to her migraine and the one thing that stood out was a fall that she had on her tailbone prior to getting the pain.”
With some gentle hands-on work to put her tailbone back in line, the migraine disappeared.
“The body is always trying to get better,” Paget said. “Even if you are dying of cancer, a cut on your skin will start to heal. Most of the time, we have to find the reason the body isn’t recovering. Remove it and let nature do the rest.”
Finally, realize how strong you truly are. Nature is full of self-healing mechanisms. And as a part of nature, our bodies naturally exhibit similar features. Every 15 minutes, our bodies make a billion and a half new cells. Pound for pound, our bones are stronger than steel. Our blood vessels are swimming with powerful cells that constantly seek and destroy harmful microbes.
Consider that, in a world where we are surrounded by numerous forces that can cause our demise, serious illness is relatively rare.
“People may say, ‘Well, if the body is so amazing, how come we get sick?’ But it’s the other way around, given that all the parasites and germs that come into our body all the time could potentially kill us,” Howick said. “The fact that most people remain healthy for their whole lives, that is the amazing thing. And that’s a testament to the incredible nature of the human body.”
Don Draper on mourning
Kafka on books
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
–Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. Wikipedia
DEMOCRACY DIES IN THE BLINDING LIGHT OF DAY
DESPITE BEING ONE of the United States’s founding statesmen and its second president after independence from Britain, John Adams was quite skeptical of democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” Adams reflected in an 1814 letter. “It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”
“There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”
The United States that existed when Adams wrote the letter was not very worthy of being described as a democracy in any case. Millions of African-Americans held in slavery were denied the most basic human rights, while women were denied any meaningful participation in civic life. Not until the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage in the 20th century could the United States start to be considered a full-fledged democracy, despite the country’s founding under the false flag of democracy in 1776. American democracy, in any meaningful sense of the term, is then less than a century old.
Recent events suggest that, even now, American democracy may be starting to enter a decrepit late-middle age. While many people assume that our current political turbulence is an aberration, long-term trends suggest that undemocratic illiberalism may one day become the norm in the United States and elsewhere. Democracy is eroding and may no longer be a plausible means of governance. Technological change, decaying institutions, and populist demagoguery may well make genuine democracy effectively impossible, validating Adams’s prediction that a democratic system could never really endure.
Book cover of “How Democracy Ends.”
A new book by Cambridge University professor David Runciman, provocatively titled “How Democracy Ends,” charts a number of trends in the United States and Europe that he believes foretell the approaching end of democracy as we know it. Among the threats we face are global problems like climate change and inequality, which our dysfunctional democratic systems have proven incapable of responding to.
Yet the end of democracy does not mean a return to any recognizable, pre-democratic past. Unlike many other gloomy predictions of democracy giving way to something like 1930s European fascism, Runciman argues that the unique nature of our modern societies means that, if the end comes, it will happen in a much more subtle way. Rather than a military coup d’état or the unilateral annulment of a vote by a strongman, in the West, democracy is more likely to simply fracture and fizzle out over time. As our political institutions become less and less able to deliver meaningful results and the speed of technological change continues to warp and remake society, democracy could effectively die while continuing to appear alive — “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style — for years to come.
“If you look 20, 30 or 40 years ahead, we are almost certainly going to continue having elections. The elections will still have lots of sound and fury and talk of change, but the technology and structures of modern life will mean that the change that can be accomplished by voting will be very limited,” Runciman writes. “The system that exists may not be either democratic or authoritarian, but rather a kind of ‘half-life’ democracy that could continue existing for a long time.”
Runciman cites a number of gradual “coups” that could kill or cripple a democracy without us clearly noticing what’s taken place. Among the more subtle types of power grabs available in mature democracies is executive aggrandizement by a sitting government, whereby elected leaders, once in power, begin to attack democratic institutions like the press and civil society groups, bullying them into submission and slowly hollowing out democracy from the inside. Another possible tactic is strategic election manipulation, whereby elections are never outright tampered with to the degree that they can be described as “stolen,” but are creatively manipulated just enough that they are never truly free and fair either.
Do these methods of the soft coup sound harrowingly familiar? In the United States, President Donald Trump has made no secret of his hostility to core democratic institutions, though his actions have not yet matched its heated rhetoric about institutions such as the media and courts. The alleged manipulation of the 2016 election by foreign powers possibly acting in concert with Trump has raised some doubt about how fair the election actually was, though the investigation into the level of manipulation is still ongoing.
Even when discounting allegations of hacking and collusion, the febrile information environment that surrounded Trump’s campaign clearly undermined the integrity of the process as a whole. Even if Trump did not collude with a foreign power to sway the vote, the level of disinformation that targeted prospective voters through new mediums of communication like Facebook suggests that the outcome of the election may not have been a product of sober public reason — a necessary element of a fully functioning democracy. With more sophisticated and genuinely terrifyingforms of “fake news” already in development, national elections decided on the basis of falsehood and conspiracy could become proliferate, a development that would make a mockery out of the democratic process.
THERE MAY BE yet another anti-democratic trend out there that has embedded itself so deeply in the body politic that we scarcely even notice anymore. The capture of democratic institutions by organized elites can slowly hollow out politics, transforming it over time into a soulless simulacrum of democracy. Even before Trump, many Americans may have already been reduced to passive consumers of a spectacle, rather than citizens of an active democracy. As Runciman writes:
A coup d’etat works on the basis of intimidation and coercion. But a coup that hides behind the workings of democracy can hope to get by on the public’s innate passivity. In most functioning democracies, the people are bystanders much of the time anyway. They watch on as political decisions are taken on their behalf by elected representatives who then ask for their assent at election time. If that’s what democracy has become, it provides excellent cover for the attempt to undermine democracy, because the two look remarkably similar.
A photograph of the author, David Runciman.
Photo: Charlotte Griffiths/Basic Books
Referring to this as “zombie democracy,” Runciman goes on to describe a state of affairs in which “the people are simply watching a performance in which their role is to give or withhold applause at the appropriate moments.” Rather than an expression of civic life, politics instead becomes “an elaborate show, needing ever more characterful performers to hold the public’s attention.”Barack Obama was sometimes criticized for being a “celebrity president” whose soaring, quasi-religious rhetoric masked what was essentially a standard liberal-technocratic platform. But the subsequent election of Trump — a literal reality TV entertainer — seems to epitomize the extent to which democratic politics has been reduced to a pageant of entertainment and provocation. Whether intentional or not, Trump has learned how to manipulate the attention economy of modern society by successfully focusing huge amounts of daily media attention on himself. This cycle has now gone on for years.
During the election, Trump was estimated to have received the equivalent of $5 billion in free advertising — based on news coverage compared against standard ad rates — from media organizations whose owners often expressed naked excitement over the boon that his anti-democratic antics were providing to their bottom lines. Little has changed since his election. According to a Harvard study published in January, Trump was the focus of an incredible 41 percent of all American news coverage during his first 100 days in office — three times the coverage given to previous presidents. His manipulation of social media, particularly Twitter, as well as the 24-hour cable news cycle has given him a yearslong psychological grip on the entire country that shows no sign of abating.
In the dystopian future depicted by George Orwell in “1984,” democracy is bludgeoned into submission by totalitarian brutality. In many ways, it was the competing post-democratic vision of Aldous Huxley, articulated in his famous novel “Brave New World,” that seems to be closer to fruition. Huxley argued that freedom would be slowly eaten alive by technological change and an insatiable public appetite for entertainment. Reflecting on that possibility in his 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” cultural critic Neil Postman wrote, “As he” — Huxley — “saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
“It’s clear that with regards to the major issues of our time – such as climate change and inequality – our institutions are unable to respond.”
Today, massive amounts of personal data harvested by companies like Google and Facebook are already raising the possibility that democracy could become superfluous, with powerful algorithms potentially able to make more “rational” political choices than any of us with our own limited consciousness. Seemingly innocuous social networking platforms and search engines have revealed themselves to be able to rewire our brains, transforming our politics and potentially ending our liberal societies as we know them.
If democracy is being killed by demagogues and tech companies, what comes next? Runciman argues that the looming end of democracy is not necessarily a cause for despair. The failure of old institutions opens the door for new arrangements, including local communities making positive use of technology to reorganize themselves and create more effective forms of civic participation. While John Adams may have been correct that existing forms of democracy would eventually start to whither, it may create the space for new possibilities to reveal themselves.
“There are many parts of American society and politics that still work and democracy is still quite vibrant at the state and local level, though it’s clear that with regards to the major issues of our time – such as climate change and inequality – our institutions are unable to respond,” Runciman writes. “But it seems ridiculous that in this time of incredible change that the future of politics has only one possible path or set of options. Coming out of the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, political choice seemed very limited. But now the future is wide open. And there is some hope in that.”
Music Happens Between the Notes (OnBeing.org)
YO-YO MA
The great cellist Yo-Yo Ma is a citizen artist and a forensic musicologist, decoding the work of musical creators across time and space. In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries, and would like to rename classical music just “music” — born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life, and of performance as hospitality.
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YO-YO MA
has won 18 Grammy Awards and is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the inaugural Fred Rogers Legacy Award. His newest album is Brahms: The Piano Trios, released with Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos. His most recent release with the Silk Road Ensemble is featured on the soundtrack to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary The Vietnam War.
TRANSCRIPT
YO-YO MA: While I’m on stage, you are all my guests, because that’s sort of the unsaid agreement. While you’re my guest, if something bad happens on stage, I often think of Julia Child, “Oh, the chicken’s fallen on the floor! Yes. Oh, well pick it up and put it right back.” And you know what? Everybody’s with you.
So whatever you practice for on the engineering side that fails is all right, because we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we’re communing together and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It’s not about proving anything. It’s about sharing something.
[music: “Suite for Solo Cello No. 6 in D Major, I. Prelude” composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Yo-Yo Ma]
KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is one of the most famous musicians in the world. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life and of performance as hospitality. In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries. He’d like to rename classical music just “music” — born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit.
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
[music: “Suite for Solo Cello No. 6 in D Major, I. Prelude” composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Yo-Yo Ma]
MS. TIPPETT: In addition to his numerous Grammys, Yo-Yo Ma has received the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2014 Fred Rogers Legacy Award, of which he said, “This is perhaps the greatest honor I’ve ever received.” I spoke with him that year from Boston, where he lives.
MS. TIPPETT: Let’s dig in. I’ve been listening to your music forever. And then, getting ready for this, I’ve been reading a lot of other interviews you’ve given and things you’ve written.
MR. MA: Uh-oh.
MS. TIPPETT: I’m just going to jump in.
MR. MA: So you’ve prepared.
MS. TIPPETT: I’m prepared.
MR. MA: Oh, no.
MS. TIPPETT: You were born to Chinese parents in Paris. And then you straddled another world when you moved to the U.S. as a child. I want to ask the question this way — was there a religious or spiritual background to that childhood of yours? However you want to define that.
MR. MA: Well, as you can tell from the brief bio, I grew up pretty confused because there would be all these languages floating around, different messages floating around. And in terms of a spiritual worldview my mother was Protestant, my father was more or less Buddhist, and, I grew up more or less Episcopalian.
MS. TIPPETT: Confused. OK, got it.
MR. MA: So, I think I’ve tried for all my life to make sense of things. I remember, as a five-year-old — at the age when people want to say, when I grow up I want to do whatever. I thought that what I really wanted to do was to understand. That was a five-year-old’s wish. But that gives you a little bit of an indication on where my mindset was. And I believe, that was before we first came to the United States. So already I was kind of thinking “hmm? I wonder how things work in this world?”
MS. TIPPETT: Well, that question then I think echos through the rest of your life. So we’ll keep coming back to that. Now you had already given up the violin by the age of four, when you took up the cello. And you have said that coming to the cello was a compromise and an accident. Can you tell that story?
MR. MA: There’s a very oversized double bass, that’s maybe about eight feet, nine feet high, in the Paris Conservatory. We went by, saw it, and of course, as a four-year-old: something huge, something big. Oh, I like it. [laughs] I want to play that. So I was haranguing my parents about saying, “Give me this instrument.” And of course, it was not possible for a four-year-old. And then the compromise was the next largest instrument, which was the cello.
MS. TIPPETT: And that gave us Yo-Yo Ma, the great cellist.
MR. MA: Yes. I’m a firm believer of accidental meetings between objects, people, circumstances. And, because so much of my life seems to have been orchestrated in that way.
MS. TIPPETT: Right. There is this parallel — really not just parallel, but interconnected, interwoven fascination for you or passion alongside music, within music, with this whole adventure of what it means to be human. So I think it’s interesting that, even though you were something of a prodigy, that you didn’t immediately pursue that. You went to Harvard and studied anthropology [laughs]. Do you think, even at that point did these things take up comparable places in you? This fascination with humanity and culture, and your life with music?
MR. MA: Well, I think you point to a very consistent parallel development. Skill at an instrument versus sort of just trying to figure things out, trying to decipher people. I think my lifelong preoccupation in the human realm has always been: who did it and why?
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Say some more. You mean just everything that comes along, those are the questions you want to ask?
MR. MA: Absolutely. Imagine a seven-year-old’s mind going from a Parisian landscape of not tall buildings, but very interesting rooftops — tiled rooftops sometimes with chimneys and whatever, to the landscape of rectangular buildings with an odd, at that time, water tower; a wooden sort of barrel at the top of it. It made me think, gee, who would have built that? What happened here? Somebody did it, right? And this would go to practically every asset of life. Why do people have different habits? Why is the bread square, white and sliced, versus, a baguette with that wonderful scent of baked goods and in the morning, when you go by a patisserie and [laughs] you want to grab the closest loaf of bread or croissant in your hand, and then, obviously, to language and to behavior, to all kinds of things that I was receiving unconsciously, but probably early on starting to at least pose the question: why? How come?
MS. TIPPETT: So what you just described about experiencing this spectrum of how humanity expresses itself in different cultures with all these things — architecture, food, and where you are a master, is this realm of music. And the way you just talked about that actually helps me think about my sense that you are steeped in music as an entry point to all that — I don’t even want to use the word diversity, because it’s an overused word and it’s almost too cold for what we’re talking about, right — all that richness, all that variety. Is that right?
MR. MA: Absolutely. I think Pablo Casals — the great, cellist from Spain, from Catalan — talked about infinite variety.
And I think that’s what I seek in the mind’s eye. If you look at the, to quote Carl Sagan, “the billions and billions of stars out there,” [laughs] and what stirs the imagination of a young child. You look at the sky and you start wondering: where are we? How do we fit into this vast universe? And to Casals saying that within the notes that he plays, he’s looking for infinite variety to Isaac Stern saying, the music happens between the notes. OK, well what then do you mean when you say music happens between the notes? Well, how do you get from A to B? Is it a smooth transfer; it’s automatic, it feels easy, you glide into the next note? Or do you have to physically or mentally or effortfully reach to go from one note to another? Could the next note be part of the first note? Or could the next note be a different universe? Have you just crossed into some amazing boundary and suddenly the second note is a revelation?
[music: “Song Without Words in D Major, Op. 109” composed by Felix Mendelssohn, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax]
So it’s about merging different aspects of one realm, which in the realm of playing an instrument, is pure engineering. But the mental process, the emotional process, the psychic investment in trying to make something easy infinitely hard.
MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today, with the singular cellist and citizen artist, Yo-Yo Ma.
MS. TIPPETT: Were there pieces of music or experiences of working with other musicians or particular concerts — have there been cathartic moments where you discovered this or started to be able to articulate it — or even something going on now? I’m just wondering if you can embed that in a piece of music or a story?
MR. MA: Sure. Well, I’ll give you two. So one of the composers that wrote for cello alone, Bach, wrote six of these wonderful suites. And they’re different movements. I’ve a moment of going between the moment at the end of a movement to the beginning of the next movement, so actually not necessarily coded or written in by the composer — they’re just separate movements — that I remember often playing, loving the connection between the end of the Sarabande of the G Major Suite, going into the Minuet, the next movement, because there was something — a Sarabande is like a slow dance, and it goes into a Minuet, which is a slightly more lively dance.
And there is something about the incredible restfulness of the way the first movement ends. And suddenly, the sunlight comes in.
[music: “Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major: Sarabande” composed by J.S. Bach, performed by by Yo-Yo Ma]
There’s a moment where you can go into nature — always, at any moment, and figure out some parallel to what is happening in a sound-centric world. And that moment was amazing for me. I wouldn’t want to end the day playing just the end of one movement without also including the other. So there was a connective thing. So that’s an early-age memory. I think you like to say that sound can be visual. Well, it’s telling stories, giving narrative, giving substance or meaning to something that’s coded, that I think gets us to want to be involved in a specific world that one is describing.
MS. TIPPETT: So you play and celebrate and encourage many, many kinds and forms and genres of music. But, this example is classical music. And I did want to speak to you about classical music in the modern world, in a modern sensibility. I wonder if you would say something about how classical music distinctively works for us and with us. It seems to me that you were just describing there is this fullness and drama and sweep that a classical piece is capable of, and that’s quite unusual, even compared to other kinds of complex music. But I don’t know if that generalization works.
MR. MA: I don’t know either because, I both like to make sweeping generalizations, and I also don’t like to make sweeping generalizations.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. I know. Me too.
MR. MA: So I’m always conflicted in that sense. I think, I would first of all say that the idea of classical music, the definition of it bears reexamination. That, in some ways, it’s a false category. It’s certainly a commercial category, because you can then, with that category, you can go into a certain world and assume that there’s a certain number of things that are going to be there.
Some people would say, well, classical music is really — its roots are church music, court music and popular music. So they’re all mixed in. So the sacred and secular definitely are part of it. And the sacred, secular and certainly the folk elements in Haydn and Mozart and Brahms — the Roma people. It’s all over the place.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah, but you’re right. That’s not something that’s consciously pointed at very often or named.
MR. MA: Exactly. And that’s what I mean by large generalizations. There’s that great famous New Yorker cartoon that says for New York-centric people, it’s Manhattan, there’s a Hudson River, there’s New Jersey, then there’s, the West Coast. [laughs] And then there’s Asia. You get to a larger and larger way of collecting an immense amount of information into one word. And obviously we know it’s not true, not quite true, but it serves a purpose.
MS. TIPPETT: Even thinking about music as geographies rather than a timescape, right? Which is “classical music,” you’re right, it sets it in time and makes it sound like something that once was.
MR. MA: Right. It’s, oh, yes, it’s dead white European music. Well, what about the classical great composers that came to, not just North America but to South America, that took in all of the influences of indigenous people, especially in places like Brazil, the African traditions, and then created a different sound, a different thing that we all treasure.
MS. TIPPETT: So who would you think of in that category? Just give me an example that people might know.
MR. MA: Well, OK. Let me use Argentina first. The music of Astor Piazzolla. Piazzolla, tango, nuevo tango. So here’s a man who was born in Buenos Aires. His father was a barber. He came to New York for a better life when he was a teenager. And he heard, went in those days went to jazz clubs in Harlem, loved the music. Then they had to move back because they couldn’t make a go of it. Later on, he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, one of the greatest teachers of music ever, who influenced Stravinsky, Copland, and tons of musicians from everywhere. And she looked at his work and said, “Oh, not bad. It’s a good — you’re trying to sound like Bartok, and it looks pretty good. Let me see some other stuff that you’ve written.” And he shows her his tango-influenced music. And she said, “Wow. The other stuff is OK, but this stuff you should really continue, because that is just outrageously fantastic.”
[music: “Andante and Allegro from Tango Suite: Andante” composed by Astor Piazzolla, performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Sergio Assad, and Odair Assad]
And so he went and then continued to write in that style. So he now has jazz in his background. He’s had sort of the contemporary classical skill sets in his background. He has tango music in his background. Piazzolla, to this day, is claimed by everybody. He’s claimed by world music, classical musicians, jazz musicians. He’s one of us, because he’s put in and people recognize, in his music, their own DNA in it.
MS. TIPPETT: So if you could replace the words classical music with another phrase, or some other words, what would they be?
MR. MA: I would say that, most people who’ve tried, they just say, “music.”
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. [laughs]
MR. MA: Music of our world. And obviously classical music, which had roots in improvisation; Bach, Mozart, Beethoven were some of the greatest improvisers of their time and, in fact, were renowned for what they were able to do, but then also wrote things down. We know their work because there were no recordings at the time of the music that they wrote down. So, I would have a template for just good musicians, as people who, who know something very, very …
MS. TIPPETT: Good music. [laughs]
MR. MA: Yeah. Good music. Look, or any type of music can be part of good music in the sense that — but I’m not even saying good music. I’m saying good musicians would be able to compose, to improvise, to be virtuosic in what they do, and can easily absorb other influences and make it organically their own. So that new influences are embedded. So there’s the process of constant growth. And then, finally, the last quality would be the musician that actually is able to transfer, to inject all of their knowledge and give it to somebody else so that they can actually look at the world and figure it out for themselves without the first musician being there. It’s a process of birth. It’s a process of constant cultural rebirth.
[music: “Playlist For An Extreme Occasion: Part Zero” composed by Vijay Iyer, performed by the Silk Road Ensemble]
MS. TIPPETT: After a short break, more conversation with Yo-Yo Ma. Subscribe to On Being on Apple Podcasts to listen again and discover produced and unedited versions of everything we make.
I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today, in a spacious conversation with one of our greatest musicians, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. We’re exploring his philosophy of life and of performance. He’s described himself as a “forensic musicologist” — dedicated to decoding the music of creators who are no longer with us.
But Yo-Yo Ma also makes music with a vast range of living artists, from Bobby McFerrin to the Kalahari Bushmen. His Silk Road Project, named after the ancient trading route that joined the Mediterranean and the Pacific, knits far-flung contemporary worlds together by way of musical encounter and understanding. His Silk Road Ensemble involves musicians from this array of cultures.
MS. TIPPETT: So it seems to me also that even as you described — you’ve sometimes thought of a “forensic musicology” that you were asking, “who did this and why?” It seems to me you’re also doing that all the time in your life of music with musical creators who are with us; playing music, making music with so many others. If somebody sees you on stage, and even if you’re together with someone else, this other person is very skilled and there’s a feeling of mastery, perfection. But I think that the state you’re in and the experience you’re having — and that you’re making — is much more vulnerable than an audience might realize.
Continue reading Music Happens Between the Notes (OnBeing.org)
Jordan Peterson: From the Barricades of the Culture Wars
From the Aspen Ideas Festival, recorded June 26, 2018. Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, may be one of the most famous intellectuals in North America today. He also may be among the most misunderstood. His fans say that he’s saved their lives, and detractors say that he’s the gateway drug to the alt-right. Who is this psychologist-philosopher whom so many of us had never heard of two years ago, and what does he really believe? Featuring Jordan Peterson in conversation with Bari Weiss. Hosted in the St. Regis Hotel Ballroom, Aspen, Colorado. ~ The Aspen Institute
Dananjaya Hettiarachichi – Leadership
Democracy: Still the worst kind of government except all the other kinds
By Steven Pinker, Psychologist and Linguist (BigThink.com)
“Now in practice,” says Steven Pinker, “no one has ever developed a democracy that works particularly well if judged in absolute terms. Democracies are always messy, they’re always unequal. They always involve lobbying and power grabs. But all the alternatives so far have been worse. Democracies seldom go to war with each other. They have higher standards of living. They have higher levels of happiness. They have higher levels of health. And they’re the obvious preferred destinations for people who vote with their feet. The whole world wants to live in a democracy. It’s an ongoing project. It’s currently under threat from a number of directions, but there’s never been a time in which we’ve had a well-functioning democracy in terms of meeting all the criteria in a high school civics class.”
July 6, 2018
TRANSCRIPT
STEVEN PINKER: Probably the most famous product of the Enlightenment was the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, a blueprint for a form of governance that tried to get the benefits of government—seeing as how anarchy is worse because you get spirals of vendetta and feuding and violence. You don’t get the coordination of large-scale economies without some kind of governance. Trying to get the benefits of governance without the perennial hazard that anyone given a bit of power will aggrandize their power and become despotic.
So the checks and balances of American democracy were a way of – I think of it as negotiating a middle route between the violence of anarchy (and anarchy does lead to violence—We were never noble savages that lived in harmony. Regions of the world without government are almost invariably violent) but also avoiding the violence of tyranny. Mainly you give someone power, they’re going to use it to maximize their benefits, their power, their longevity of their reign at the expense of people. Democracy is a way of steering between these extremes, of having a government that exerts just enough violence to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself.
Now in practice no one has ever developed a democracy that works particularly well if judged in absolute terms. Democracies are always messy, they’re always unequal. They always involve lobbying and power grabs. But all the alternatives so far have been worse. Democracies seldom go to war with each other. They have higher standards of living. They have higher levels of happiness. They have higher levels of health. And they’re the obvious preferred destinations for people who vote with their feet. The whole world wants to live in a democracy. It’s an ongoing project. It’s currently under threat from a number of directions, but there’s never been a time in which we’ve had a well-functioning democracy in terms of meeting all the criteria in a high school civics class.
Your Horoscopes — Week Of July 3, 2018 (theonion.com)
Cancer
All celestial signs point to you suddenly coming into possession of a great deal of twisted aircraft-grade aluminum, charred wiring, and burning jet fuel, but it’s not what you think.
Leo
You, your couch, and your TV will be whisked away to a remote island by a wealthy sportsman who has waited all his life to hunt the Least Dangerous Game.
Virgo
Once again, you’ll be saved from boredom by the fact that matches are often given away for free in establishments that sell alcohol.
Libra
It’s not wearing a white dress to your third wedding that people will find odd. It’s the blood of your two previous husbands on the veil and train.
Scorpio
Truth be told, you haven’t been a very good father, but it’s not your fault that the mothers of your children haven’t informed you of their existence.
Sagittarius
You’ll receive a recorded message from your future self in which you appear extremely insistent that an unspecified person be thanked for a waffle recipe.
Capricorn
A journey of self-improvement ends almost before it starts when you find out there’s a kind of waffle stuffed with cheese and booze.
Aquarius
Your coworkers seem to be hinting that they wouldn’t mind if you got rid of that beard, but you’ve been married to her for almost 10 years now.
Pisces
Pluto rising in your sign this week indicates vast trouble ahead, as you really shouldn’t be able to see it with the naked eye like that.
Aries
You try to be an accepting person, but you still don’t see why some people can’t be a nice, normal gender instead of women.
Taurus
Turns out that while dogs can’t actually smell fear, they’re really good at smelling who likes to carry bacon around in their pockets.
Gemini
When you think about it, there’s really only one way to quit your job at the refinery in a way they’ll remember for hundreds of years.