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Martin Luther King’s forgotten legacy? His fight for economic justice
The King we rarely talk about fought to remake America’s political and economic system from the ground up
Martin Luther King’s forgotten legacy? His fight for economic justice
The King we rarely talk about fought to remake America’s political and economic system from the ground up
Pictured above: The Stone of Hope statue at the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington DC.
Fifty years after he was assassinated in Memphis, how should we remember Martin Luther King Jr?
Popular treatments primarily portray him through his magnificent I Have a Dream speech, delivered before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. King called on America to live up to its historic ideals of equal rights in which all people would be defined by the “content of their character” and not the color of their skin.
Twenty-three years later, Congress declared King’s birthday a national holiday, the first one added to the calendar since Memorial Day in 1947. Since then, school assemblies and civic gatherings have often remembered King as an “icon” for color-blind democracy.
This way of remembering King appeals to a politically diverse audience, including advertisers, educators, the mass media and elected officials. The King holiday helps us to imagine the best kind of country we could be and makes us proud to be Americans. Yet most people misremember King and his historical context.
One major failing in how we remember King “is our typing of him as a civil rights leader,” the activist and pastor James Lawson says. “We do not type him as a pastor, prophet, theologian, scholar, preacher … and that allows conventional minds across the country to thereby stereotype him and eliminate him from an overall analysis of our society.” …
Where Have All the Rioters Gone?
Good jobs in black communities have disappeared, evictions are the norm, and extreme poverty is rising. Cities should be exploding—but they aren’t.
On August 5, 1966, someone struck Martin Luther King Jr. in the head with a rock. The assault happened not in Birmingham or in Memphis but in Chicago. Earlier that year, King had moved into a run-down apartment on the city’s West Side to bring national attention to the plight of blacks trapped in slum housing and confined to overcrowded schools. That day, he was marching in a white neighborhood for the right of families like his to live wherever they chose. The rock dropped King to one knee. He stayed like that for a moment, trying to get past the pain. “Aides and bodyguards closed in around King,” one account reads, “holding placards aloft to shield him from the missiles that followed.” The white onlookers broke into a riot, bloodying dozens of marchers.
While recovering from his injury, King said he needed to appear in public “to bring this hate into the open.” In a country that had never been shy about its hatred of black people, this was an odd remark. But King’s audience was amnesiac white northerners who had shielded themselves from the racial clash. During the Great Migration, black families fleeing Ku Klux Klan terrorism and dirt poverty in the rural South moved to urban ghettos in the North. As the folk saying went, “The South doesn’t care how close a Negro gets, just so he doesn’t get too high; the North doesn’t care how high he gets, just so he doesn’t get too close.” When he did get too close, hard and heavy objects rained from the sky. In 1919, a black teenager in Chicago named Eugene Williams drifted to the white side of the Lake Michigan swimming area. White bathers pelted him with rocks. The youngster drowned, and 38 others (23 black, 15 white) died in the week of rioting that ensued.
Historically, whites have been the ones to cast the first stones, inciting and then dominating most American race riots. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921: Whites destroyed a prosperous black community, using machine guns and even dropping bombs from planes. Detroit, 1943: Skirmishes between white and black youths escalated into a full-blown riot that left 34 people dead, most of them black. Milwaukee, 1967: Thousands of whites beat back a crowd protesting housing segregation, hurling rocks and bottles of urine.
But the riotous images that loop in our collective memory are those of Watts and Detroit and Baltimore in the 1960s. The unrest reached an epitome in April 1968, when black anguish over King’s murder saw city after city set on fire. King himself was only 39 years old when he died, but many black youths spoke a different language. Theirs wasn’t the cadenced, masculine oratory of the southern pulpit but the quick, clean shatter of brick through glass. This was speech that possessed, in the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick’s estimation, “the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come.” That power was unleashed in more than 100 cities, where blacks looted and burned white-owned establishments. …
Auteurism Keeps Abusive Men In Power–It’s Time To Call It Out
It’s time to finally let go of the myth of the infallible creative genius.
Slowly but surely, every industry is having its #MeToo moment. After emerging in Hollywood with the fall of Harvey Weinstein, the movement has reached tech, sports, politics, academia, cuisine, and, most recently, the stately institution of architecture.
All of these industries have two things in common: One, men are predominantly in power. And two, those who are in power are a lot more than your average boss. They’re considered visionaries. Unquestionable geniuses. Or my favorite term for the phenomenon, coined by American film critic Andrew Sarris in the mid-20th century: auteurs.
Every project an auteur touch becomes magically imbued with their sensibility, as if they’ve authored the entire thing singlehandedly. In turn, it’s no one’s right to question an auteur. Instead, you must stand back and allow their masterpieces to unfurl. You must celebrate an auteur’s lack of compromise, and their uncanny ability to get others to bend to their will.
So far, culture is chewing on the realities of point one–the true face of men. But it still seems to be overlooking the damage of point two–that the throne of the auteur so perfectly crowns his worst impulses. …
Will China Really Supplant US Economic Hegemony?
As artificial intelligence reshapes the global economy, economists who once argued that China’s massive population would propel it to superpower status should rethink that assumption. In fact, as the global economy reaches higher stages of development, China’s labor advantage today could become a handicap tomorrow.
As China and the United States engage in their latest trade tussle, most economists take it as given that China will achieve global economic supremacy in the long run, no matter what happens now. After all, with four times as many people as the US, and a determined program to catch up after centuries of technological stagnation, isn’t it inevitable that China will decisively take over the mantle of economic hegemon?
I am not so sure. Many economists, including many of the same experts who see China’s huge labor force as a decisive advantage, also worry that robots and artificial intelligence will eventually take away most jobs, leaving most humans to while away their time engaged in leisure activities.
Which is it? Over the next 100 years, who takes over, Chinese workers or the robots? If robots and AI are the dominant drivers of production in the coming century, perhaps having too large a population to care for – especially one that needs to be controlled through limits on Internet and information access – will turn out to be more of a hindrance for China. The rapid aging of China’s population exacerbates the challenge.
As the rising importance of robotics and AI blunts China’s manufacturing edge, the ability to lead in technology will become more important. Here, the current trend toward higher concentration of power and control in the central government, as opposed to the private sector, could hamstring China as the global economy reaches higher stages of development. …
Mark Zuckerberg floated a “Supreme Court” for Facebook. What does that mean?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Who is to judge?
Mark Zuckerberg seems to think Facebook needs its own Supreme Court.
As part of a damage-control press tour following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Zuckerberg spoke to Vox’s Ezra Klein on a podcast that aired April 2. In the interview, Klein and the Facebook founder discuss a claim Zuckerberg made in a separate interview several years earlier: that in many ways, Facebook is more like a government than a company.
On the podcast, Zuckerberg explains that Facebook—unlike many other companies—has to police speech on its platform, determining what is hateful and unacceptable content, and what is not. Also like a government, the company has to set policies for its constituents. The way that system functions now, he admits, is not great:
I think it’s actually one of the most interesting philosophical questions that we face. With a community of more than 2 billion people all around the world, in every different country, where there are wildly different social and cultural norms, it’s just not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policies should be for people all around the world. And I’ve been working on and thinking through: How can you set up a more democratic or community-oriented process that reflects the values of people around the world?
Klein points out that this is more than just an “interesting philosophical question.” Facebook can shut down the dissemination of terrorist propaganda and child pornography, and how it decides to control speech can also affect elections, suppress political opposition, or amplify authoritarian governments. To a certain extent, the company can determine how quickly misinformation and hate—which can translate to real-life violence—spread online. …
The Mexican indigenous community that ran politicians out of town
Cherán, in the violent state of Michoacán, will stand apart from Mexico’s electioneering season, having tackled corruption and exploitation by banishing political parties, police and gangsters.
Election publicity is ubiquitous in small Mexican towns and villages, but not in Cherán, where murals denounce political parties and exalt the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.
Al across Mexico, political billboards are springing up and candidates are hitting the streets, as campaigning starts for elections to pick a new president, renew the congress and replace hundreds of state and local officials.
Everywhere, that is, except for one small corner of the violent western state of Michoacán, which has found a simple solution to the vote-buying and patronage which plague Mexican democracy.
The indigenous Purépecha town of Cherán threw out all political parties after a popular uprising in 2011 – and it doesn’t want them back.
“The only thing the parties have done is divide us,” said Salvador Ceja, Cherán’s communal lands commissioner. “Not just here – in the entire country.”
Presidential campaigns officially kicked off at the weekend, and polls put the left-leaning populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador – ahead of his closest challenger by double digits.
The elections come amid widespread despair at the country’s worsening security crisis and disgust at political corruption. Antipathy toward political parties runs strong in Mexico: a recent survey found they were the least-trusted institution in the country. …
GM’s dress code is only two words
MODEL BEHAVIOR
GM’s Mary Barra is the only woman running one of the US’s 10 biggest companies.
When asked what men can do to improve women’s lives at work, Mary Barra gets straight to the point: “Stop making assumptions,” she tells Quartz.
As chief executive at General Motors, Barra practices what she preaches. Her management philosophy is epitomized by GM’s workplace dress code—which is equally brief, and also an antidote to the restrictive, wallet-draining policies at many large corporations. It reads, in full: “Dress appropriately.”
Having worked for GM since she was a teenager—first as a factory-floor inspector, then scaling through leadership roles in engineering and communications—Barra was well-acquainted with the automaker’s bureaucracy by the time she became vice president of global human resources in 2009, months after the company filed for bankruptcy.
Instead of immediately focusing on high-level restructuring strategy, Barra surprised her colleagues by tackling the small, seemingly inconsequential policies she knew were foundational to company culture. Her first battle: The dress code. …
Stop Thinking About Trump’s Dong, You Maniacs
If you believe the chatter coming from Stormy Daniels’ lawyer — and he provided a picture of a rewriteable CD-ROM, how could you not? — we’re only a short time away from seeing what President Donald Jayden Trump looks like when he’s doin’ the do. This news immediately gave the internet a bad case of the vapors, or at least that’s what we’re taking from the numerous tweets and posts hypothesizing about everything from how it looks to how it works to whether the carpet comes from the same fabric emporium as the drapes.
Here’s an attention-seeking asshole OR mainstream political commentator, we honestly can’t tell.
We ask you, we beg you, please stop this madness. It’s weird. When you’re using a public restroom, do you mentally script out a melodrama or half-hour prime-time comedy special about what you think the person next you is packing? We thought not. It’d be weird, and taking it on the road to your friends, family, co-workers, and random spam bot followers doesn’t make it less weird.
There are, of course, other, serious reasons you should stop caring.
It’s A Teachable Moment For How Screwed Up This Presidency Is
Whilst we the people have always had a thing for presidential wang, the key difference between this scandal and, say, what JFK and Bill Clinton did is that there’s no real reason this should have gone unnoticed before now. It should have been flagged before Trump entered office, in a review of his past dealings or financials or suitability to have high-level security clearance, or even someone flat out asking him whether he’s bribed his way out of any scandals. …
This should have been found, and the fact that Stormy Daniels now has his balls in a figurative vice (having allegedly already had them in a literal one) is a testament to how little we know about Donald Trump. He’s a serial liar who refuses to hand over his tax returns (despite his “crooked” opponent doing so), has an intricate spider’s web of dealings and debts across the world, and — if we’re to accept that he doesn’t know about foreign interference in the election — a potential hive of friends and hangers-on whispering who knows what in his ear between canapes and taco bowls.
Why have we never heard the taco bowl’s side of the story? Did someone pay it off too?
We don’t know what other bullshit is hiding in his closet alongside the ill-fitting Vincent-Adultman-style suits and power ties, and focusing on tawdry nonsense like what his dick looks like isn’t helping. How many other Stormy Daniels are there? How many other people has he paid for their silence? Where’s the money for these payoffs coming from, really? Is he being blackmailed, and if not, could he be? The answer is that we have no goddamn idea.
This celebrity gossip rag drama exemplifies everything bad about this administration, and you should be melting down your representatives’ phones and demanding that something happen, because double-you tee eff. We’re savvy enough to do it when he’s attempting to steal our healthcare, so let’s try it before his assholish obfuscation means he walks away scot-free until the next scandal from his past emerges. …
India’s ‘cheating mafia’ gets to work as school exam season hits
Vast network profits from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where university places and jobs are limited.
A student does some last minute revising before sitting her Secondary School Certificate (SSC) in Mumbai.
A few minutes into the final year maths exam at his Delhi high school, Raghav asked to use the bathroom. Inside, he texted pictures of the test paper he had secretly photographed to a phone number he was sent days before. Minutes later, answers materialised on the screen.
“It isn’t cheating,” insists his mother Sunita, who paid 16,000 rupees (£175) for her son to obtain the phone number. “It’s a way out.”
India’s annual exam season has gripped the country in the last month, with tens of millions of students undertaking gruelling tests to qualify for the limited slots available at Indian universities – the best of them with admission rates about one-tenth those of Oxford and Cambridge.
Also hard at work is the country’s so-called “cheating mafia”, the vast network aimed at profiting from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where, each year, an estimated 17 million people join a workforce adding only 5.5m jobs.
Last week, in the latest high-profile breach, the papers for two secondary exams were found to have been leaked on WhatsApp about 90 minutes before the tests. More than 2.8 million students in Delhi and the surrounding areas have been ordered to resit the exams later in April.
“It is mental torture,” said Kirath Kaul, 15, an east Delhi student who will be forced to sit a new maths exam this month. “I was spending all day study [for the last one] and even getting up at night to prepare.” …
How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete
If we could understand how the infant mind develops, it might help every child reach their full potential. But seeing them as learning machines is not the answer.
Deb Roy and Rupal Patel pulled into their driveway on a fine July day in 2005 with the beaming smiles and sleep-deprived glow common to all first-time parents. Pausing in the hallway of their Boston home for Grandpa to snap a photo, they chattered happily over the precious newborn son swaddled between them.
This normal-looking suburban couple weren’t exactly like other parents. Roy was an AI and robotics expert at MIT, Patel an eminent speech and language specialist at nearby Northeastern State University. For years, they had been planning to amass the most extensive home-video collection ever.
From the ceiling in the hallway blinked two discreet black dots, each the size of a coin. Further dots were located over the open-plan living area and the dining room. There were 25 in total throughout the house – 14 microphones and 11 fish-eye cameras, part of a system primed to launch on their return from hospital, intended to record the newborn’s every move.
It had begun a decade earlier in Canada – but in fact Roy had built his first robots when he was just was six years old, back in Winnipeg in the 1970s, and he’d never really stopped. As his interest turned into a career, he wondered about android brains. What would it take for the machines he made to think and talk? “I thought I could just read the literature on how kids do it, and that would give me a blueprint for building my language and learning robots,” Roy told me.
Over dinner one night, he boasted to Patel, who was then completing her PhD in human speech pathology, that he had already created a robot that was learning the same way kids learn. He was convinced that if it got the sort of input children get, the robot could learn from it. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while; it’s The Long Read.
THE NEXT BIG THING IN MARIJUANA WON’T GET YOU HIGH
NO COUCH-LOOK
Now serving.
Recently, at the end of a surf trip with several friends, my pal Tim passed me a pipe packed with sticky green buds. I’m not much of a social smoker (more of a one-hitter-before-chores type) so politely declined.
Then, he made an odd promise, for a guy brandishing a glass pipe and a lighter: “It won’t get you stoned,” he said. “It’s CBD.”
I took a little hit, and soon after, felt my body pleasantly melt into a lawn chair, my ability to socialize not at all impeded. Truth told, at the end of a physically exhausting vacation and a can of Tecate, I was already pretty relaxed. But the CBD seemed to deepen that state.
CBD is one of the many chemical compounds in a class called “cannabinoids” that naturally occur in cannabis plants. While THC is the most famous of cannabinoids for its ability to get us high, CBD is a rapidly rising star for its capacity to deliver mental and physical benefits without the giggles, paranoia, or couch-lock. Eaze, a marijuana delivery service that operates in California, reported an “exceptionally high” demand for CBD in 2017, which led the company to quadruple its product offerings in the category. Chris Kelly, a representative of Tikun Olam, an Israeli company at the forefront of medical marijuana, calls Avidekel—his employer’s highest-CBD strain—the “golden child” of its offerings. Rolling Stone deemed it one of the five best strains of 2017.
In addition to that good old “melting into a lawn chair” feeling, CBD’s reported benefits include relief from anxiety, joint pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, menstrual cramps, insomnia, nausea, seizures, bowel inflammation, and plain old moodiness. …
WHY THIS IS A BARELY UNINTERESTING AT ALL THING: I use a CBD product every evening. I also often use a THC product; it’s legal. Relaxation and sleep is incredible. My next morning mood is blissed (go ahead and click the link; I’m kidding).
If You’ve Met Aliens While on DMT, These Scientists Would Like to Hear From You
Some people on DMT say they meet aliens, demons, and even elves. It’s a common enough experience that Johns Hopkins wants to know more.
The prestigious medical university at Johns Hopkins wants to know if you’ve ever taken so much dimethyltryptamine (DMT) that you’ve broken through reality and met the benevolent machine elves that live in the center of the universe. Researcher Roland R. Griffiths is the neuroscientist in charge of the study and he’s been on the forefront of scientific research into psychedelic experiences for decades.
Participating in the study is anonymous and as easy as following this link and filling out a survey. Specifically, the researchers are interested in, “The experiences of people who have had encounters with seemingly autonomous beings or entities after taking DMT. This anonymous internet survey involves asking about your experiences, including the short-term and long-term effects.”
Some people who ingest DMT—the hallucinogenic ingredient of Ayahuasca—describing breaking through reality and meeting with creatures on the other side. Some describe them as angels, demons, and even elves. It’s a common enough experience that Griffiths and Johns Hopkins want to know more.
The survey takes around 20 to 40 minutes, depending on your answers and how thorough you are. It asks participants to describe their experience in detail, as well and the dosage of DMT and the method of ingestion. “Have you ever taken a ‘breakthrough’ dose of N,N-DMT; that is, a dose that produced very strong psychoactive effects” The survey asks. “By ‘breakthrough’ we mean the experience of passing through an entrance into another world or alternative reality.” …
POINT OF REFLECTION: It may have been irresponsible for me to suggest the use of DMT to those who might be interested in entrance into another world or alternative reality.
A four-eyed lizard walked the earth 49 million years ago
If you lived in what is now Wyoming 49 million years ago, you could have spotted a four-eyed lizard—the one and only known example of such a creature among jawed vertebrates. The species, an extinct monitor lizard called Saniwa ensidens (above), had two standard eyes and also sported so-called pineal and parapineal “eyes” on the top of its head (shown as white dots in the reconstructed image below).
Researchers figured that out by taking a closer look at two S. ensidens fossils that were unearthed from a Wyoming escarpment in 1871. Detailed x-ray scans, generated using computerized tomography, revealed two holes on the top of the lizard’s skull. The holes would have connected the lizard’s brain to eyelike structures, called pineal and parapineal organs, the team reports today in Current Biology. …
Doing Dishes Is the Worst
This is now an empirically proven fact. Dishwashing causes more relationship distress than any other household task.
Every day, they slowly accrete. Plates covered in sauces and crumbs. Bowls with a fine layer of sticky who-knows-what. Forks, knives, and spoons all gummed with bits of this and that. At the end of a long day of work, cooking, cleaning, and, for many, negotiating with small children, a couple has to face the big question: Who is going to do the dishes?
A forthcoming report from the Council of Contemporary Families (CCF), a nonprofit that studies family dynamics, suggests that the answer to that question can have a significant impact on the health and longevity of a relationship. The study examined a variety of different household tasks—including shopping, laundry, and house cleaning, and found that, for women in heterosexual relationships, it’s more important to share the responsibility of doing the dishes than any other chore. Women who wash the vast majority of the dishes themselves report more relationship conflict, less relationship satisfaction, and even worse sex, than women with partners who help. Women are happier about sharing dishwashing duties than they are about sharing any other household task.
What is it about dishes? Dan Carlson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Utah, and the lead author of the study, offers one possible reason: “Doing dishes is gross. There is old, moldy food sitting in the sink. If you have kids, there is curdled milk in sippy cups that smells disgusting.” Additionally, unlike some other chores such as cooking or gardening, doing dishes well does not beget compliments, he observes: “What is there to say? ‘Oh, the silverware is so… sparkly’?”
The most unpopular household tasks, Carlson told me, also tend to be the ones most often associated with women. Traditionally, women have shouldered full responsibility for chores that involve cleaning up after someone else: doing the laundry, cleaning the toilet, washing dishes. Men, on the other hand, are often associated with mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, washing the car—tasks that don’t require getting up close and personal with somebody else’s daily grime. Today, women who have to shoulder those traditionally-female chores alone “see themselves as relegated to the tasks that people don’t find desirable,” Carlson said. That breeds resentment. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Rox News host Con Mannity is an old-school conservative who believes in reducing the deficit, states’ rights, free trade, and standing up to the Russians. But lately everything seems upside down.
In honor of the MLK Special Issue, The Atlantic commissioned artist and photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier to photograph Chicago, Baltimore, and Memphis from the air—cities that bear MLK’s legacy. In her aerial photography, Frazier explains, the specter of oppression is writ large. “The history is written on that landscape and the body of its inhabitants,” says Frazier. “It became very clear to me how Freddie Gray lived in an environment that is toxic… it just looks like a target from the air.”
In this week’s Music Critic, Ira Kaplan and James McNew of veteran indie rock band Yo La Tengo review new music, including: Stone Temple Pilots, “The Art of Letting Go,” Judas Priest, “Never the Heroes,” Squirrels Nut Zippers, “Karnival Joe (from Kokomo), and Alice Bag, “77.”
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Michael Wolff discusses his book “Fire and Fury,” which details President Trump’s child-like temperament as well as the dysfunction within his administration.
Ricky Martin explains how the LGBTQ community is represented in “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” and discusses aiding hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump celebrating Easter by ranting about immigrants while more key members of his Cabinet are accused of corruption.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Jordan breaks down the battlefronts of the war on men, including a greedy conspiracy to put women on money and the diabolical feminist plot to steal the male essence.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper for making this program available on YouTube.
Pterosaurs were ancient flying reptiles that outlasted many of their dinosaur contemporaries, living through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. But while many were the size of modern-day birds, some were enormous.
Meet “Dracula,” the largest one ever found, who just went on display for the first time in the Altmuehltal Dinosaur Museum in Denkendorf, Germany.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
I’ve been investigating how to make force fields behind the scenes on me channel. I suppose it’s a hobby.
Max got a new ball to beat up.
FINALLY . . .
Want to enjoy life? Take some time to think about your death
MORTAL MUSINGS
A guide to thinking productively about death.
Memento mori—invitations to reflect on our own mortality—have been common throughout history. Two ancient traditions that made reflection on death central to their paths are Buddhism and Stoicism. For both, the starting point is the fact that our normal perceptions of value are deeply flawed, as we are constantly craving or loathing things that in reality are unimportant. The Buddhist texts offer a neat list of these: gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. The Stoics had a word for them, which translates as ‘indifferents’. The things that we are so keen to pursue—wealth, material possessions, sense pleasures, comfort, success, people’s approval, romantic love and so on—are bound to disappoint and distract us from what really matters, which is our ethical and spiritual progress.
But arguing that we shouldn’t spend our lives seeking those things is not enough. The urges are strong and engrained in us, and both traditions knew it takes more than reason to begin to shake them. It takes sustained reflection on vivid and even shocking imagery to make the point on a more visceral level. This is where death meditations come in.
One of the most striking examples of this is the meditation on corpses presented in the Buddhist Satipatthana Sutta. In ancient India, corpses were left out in ‘charnel grounds’, and people would have had the opportunity to observe the various stages of decomposition. The text is nothing if not thorough, describing in some detail ‘a corpse thrown aside in a charnel ground—one, two or three days dead, bloated, livid, and oozing matter…being devoured by crows, hawks, vultures, dogs, jackals or various kinds of worms’, eventually turning into ‘bones rotten and crumbling to dust’. On observing this, the monk reminds himself that ‘This body too is of the same nature, it will be like that, it is not exempt from that fate.’
Reminders of death are everywhere in the Stoic literature, albeit generally less graphic. The nearest the Stoics come to such detailed descriptions is with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: “Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. Or that everything was born to die.” He is also concise and to the point in his assessment of human life, which is “brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.” …
DEGREE OF POSSIBILITY: By highlighting the fact that time is short, death meditation can help us to put things in perspective and appreciate the present more.
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?