You don’t have to spend a long time reading up on the Silk Road before you see the term itself (“Silk Road”) called a misnomer. In fact, what we refer to by that name comprises a whole network of trade routes connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe, whose traffic constantly shifted over a millennium and a half according to climatic, geopolitical, and civilizational conditions. Nor was silk the only, or even the primary type of good carried along those routes. From East to West went tea, dyes, perfumes, porcelain, and paper; from West to East, glassware, horses, camels, honey, wine, and gold, to name just a few items in perennial demand. It was along the Silk Road, or Silk-and-Many-Other-Things-Roads, that gunpowder spread out of China — and the Black Death spread out of Europe.
According to the Knowledgia video above, the roughly 4,000-mile-long Silk Road was officially opened in 130 BC. But it wasn’t without its predecessors: in 500 BC, for example, the “Royal Road” established by Darius I’s Achaemenid Empire “stretched from Susa, which lies in modern-day Iran, all the way, nearly 2,000 miles to the west, to Sardis, which is today a part of Turkey,” with spurs reaching India and Northern Africa.
Whatever its economic impact, the Royal Road had nothing like the cultural effects of the Silk Road, any history of which emphasizes the “new thinking and new ways of life being passed along the network of trade routes,” to say nothing of “the spread of religions or ideologies that would occur thanks to the merchants and travelers themselves.”
This despite the fact that few of those merchants or travelers crossed the Silk Road’s entire length. But we can all name at least one man who made the full journey: the thirteenth-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who as a teenager first made the trek to Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome with his father. (At that point, the Mongol Empire had already unified its routes, but not before laying waste to a fair few settlements along the way.) It is to Polo’s writings that we owe our enduringly romantic image of the Silk Road, but he understood the dangers of that lawless gauntlet across empires as well as anyone. The Urban Atlas video above lists a few of them, including desert heat, diseases, hallucinations, banditry, and slavery. Today, we encounter no such perils on the way from Rome to Xi’an, a journey we can make on a flight with a stopover in Beijing. Perhaps Marco Polo would say we’ve all gone soft, but then, he’d probably be more interested in learning about our roads in the sky.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A century later, on another continent, Hegel’s thought influenced the course of a very different struggle. And while the historical conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and mid-twentieth-century America present entirely different sets of specific concerns, the same general observation applies: the time and place of such radical thinkers as Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Huey Newton and a host of other activists presented “peculiarly auspicious” circumstances for revolutionary social philosophy.
But while these figures appear today as the vanguard of radical black thought, Martin Luther King, Jr., the most widely celebrated of Civil Rights leaders, “is often conflated with neoliberal multiculturalism,” writes Critical Theory, his program associated with “the failure of the civil rights movement to dismantle the ongoing systemic white supremacy of the status quo.” And yet, King’s movement not only succeeded in ending legal segregation and hastening the passing of the Civil Rights Act; it also provided direction for nearly every nonviolent social movement from his day to ours. King’s legacy is not only that of an inspiring organizer and orator, but also of a radical thinker who engaged critically with philosophy and social theory and brought it to bear on his activism.
We are generally well aware of King’s debt to Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement that won Indian independence in 1947, yet we know little of his debt to the same thinker who inspired Marx and his contemporaries—G.W.F. Hegel. As philosopher Nolen Gertz has demonstrated on his blog, King was highly influenced by Hegelianism, as much as, or perhaps even more so, than he was by Gandhi’s movement. Marx may have turned Hegel’s system on its head, but King, writes Gertz, “fought White America… by turning the ideas of dead white men against the oppressive practices of living white men.”
King read and wrote on Hegel as a graduate student at Boston University and Harvard in the mid-’50s, where he studied theology and the history of philosophy and religion. He took a yearlong seminar on Hegel with his advisor at BU, Edgar Brightman (see King’s diagram notes of Hegel’s system above), and found a great deal to admire in the “dead white” philosopher’s logical system, as well as a good deal to critique. The two-semester class, King wrote in his autobiography, was “both rewarding and stimulating”:
Although the course was mainly a study of Hegel’s monumental work, Phenomenology of Mind, I spent my spare time reading his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. There were points in Hegel’s philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His contention that “truth is the whole” led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.
While King may have disagreed with Hegel’s idealism, he found support for his own philosophy of nonviolence in Hegel’s dialectical method, a mode of analysis that seems particularly well suited to socially revolutionary thought. In Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote,
The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.
King’s critical appraisal of Hegel extended to other radical philosophical thinkers as well, including Kant, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche. Gertz offers many samples of the budding Civil Rights leader’s notes on various thinkers and philosophies, including the first paragraph of an essay entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” (below), in which King confesses that his encounter with Existentialism often “shocked” him, especially since he had “been raised in a rather strict fundamentalist tradition.” And yet, he writes—in an allusion to Kant’s reaction to David Hume—he acquired “a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis” that “knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.”
In the essay, King writes, “I became convinced that existentialism, in spite of the fact that it had become all too fashionable, had grasped certain basic truths about man.” He seems particularly drawn to Kierkegaard (see his notes on the philosopher below). Yet it is Hegel who seems most responsible for awakening his philosophical curiosity. As King scholar John Ansbro discovered, King “stated in a January 19, 1956 interview with The Montgomery Advertiser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher.” Later that year, King gave an address to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in which he used Hegelian terms to characterize the Civil Rights struggle: “Long ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that justice emerges from the strife of opposites, and Hegel, in modern philosophy, preached a doctrine of growth through struggle.”
Independent scholar Ralph Dumain has further catalogued King’s many approving references to Hegel, including a paper he wrote entitled “An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian Logic—Being, Non-Being, Becoming,” the “last of six essays that King wrote” for his two-semester course on the philosopher. King also approached Hegel by way of an earlier Civil Rights leader—W.E.B. Du Bois, who read the German philosopher while studying with prominent social scientists in Berlin, and who applied Hegelian logic to his own analysis of racial consciousness and struggle in America.
Interestingly, what neither King nor Du Bois remarked on is the fact that Hegel was likely himself inspired by black revolutionaries. The Haitian Revolution, argues scholar Susan Buck-Morss, gave Hegel the impetus for his analysis of power and his “metaphor of the ‘struggle to death’ between the master and slave, which for Hegel provided the key to the unfolding of freedom in world history.” While Hegel’s thought is a philosophical thread that winds through the work of radical thinkers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his own philosophy may not have taken the direction it did without the revolutionary struggles against oppression waged by former slaves in the New World centuries before King led his nonviolent war on the oppressive system of segregation in the United States.
H/T Nolen Gertz
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
“Scientists Discover the Earliest Evidence of Drug Use in Really Old Teeth” may sound like odd headline language, at least by the traditional standards of the New YorkTimes. But then, the teeth in question are, indeed, really old. “Archaeologists have pushed the timeline of human drug use back further than ever before by studying teeth that belonged to a hunter-gatherer who lived in Indonesia sometime from 16,000 to 25,000 years ago,” writes reporter Becky Ferreira. This beats the 13,000-year-old beer from Israel that previously held the title of oldest known mind-altering comestible. “The individual’s molars, which were found in a cave on the island of Sulawesi, are marked with deep grooves that were most likely left by incessant sucking on betel nuts, which release psychoactive stimulants.”
All these millennia later, betel nut-chewing remains a major ritual and pastime. Though it seems never to have caught on in the English-speaking world, it has a great many adherents in not just modern-day Indonesia but also other parts of southeast and south Asia, including India, as well as in China.
Mixed into a compound with the leaves of its own plant, slaked lime, and a variety of other ingredients from coconut to menthol to cloves to tobacco — the regional variations are countless — betel nuts can be chewed all day long, and often are. Whether you call it paan, buai, doma, ngangà, or something else entirely, the stuff is “reputed to be the world’s fourth most popular psychoactive substance after alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine,” write the authors of a study on the Sulawesi teeth newly published in Science Advances.
Before you seek out the nearest areca palm to experience what all the fuss is about for yourself, know that the documented health effects of betel nut-chewing include cancer, cardiovascular disease, liver damage, diabetes, and infertility; even still-fertile chewers run the risk of causing birth defects. At the very least, those who pick up the habit also acquire a characteristic red tooth stain, which has been seen on nearly 5,000-year-old skeletons unearthed in southeast Asia. In the case of the skull from Sulawesi, it wasn’t the color of the teeth but their wear patterns that told the tale. Griffith University professor Adam Brumm, who led the study, hypothesizes a “negative feedback loop” in which betel nuts inflicted dental damage on these ancient peoples, but also offered the only means of relieving the pain of that damage. Whether now or 25,000 years ago, if one substance seems to be both causing your problems and providing their solutions, it’s probably time to quit.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Before the Japanese fell completely, one hundred percent in love with anything and everything Disney (I mean, seriously,they love it), Mickey Mouse represented something completely different: Pure American imperialist evil.
At least he did in this 1934 animated propaganda cartoon Omochabako series dai san wa: Ehon senkya-hyakusanja-rokunen (Toybox Series 3: Picture Book 1936) by Komatsuzawa Hajime. It’s a convoluted title, but pretty simple in plot. An island of cute critters (including one Felix the Cat clone) is attacked from the air by an army of Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) riding bats and assisted by crocodiles and snakes that act like machine guns. The frightened creatures call on the heroes of Japanese storybooks and folk legends to help them, from Momotaro (“Peach Boy”) and Kintaro (“Golden Boy”) to Issun-boshi (“One Inch Boy”) and Benkei, a warrior monk, to send Mickey packing. The not-so-subtle message: Mickey Mouse may be your hero, America, but our characters are older, more numerous, and way more beloved. Our pop culture is older than yours!
Though made in 1934, it is set in 1936, which might tie (according to this site) into the expiration of a naval treaty between the United States and Japan on that date. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a full seven years off, but clearly tensions were running high even then, as both the West and Japan had their eyes on Asia and the South Pacific.
Also of note is the trope of characters coming alive from a storybook, as this was a favorite subject in several Warner Bros. cartoons that would come out a few years later (and which we’ve covered).
And finally to clarify Mickey’s fate at the end of the film: the old man with the box is a Rip Van Winkle character, and in Japanese folklore he is made old by the contents of a box he’s been told not to open. Violence is not vanquished with violence at the end of this cartoon, but with magic and derisive laughter followed by a song. In the real world, things would not end so easily.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
This past summer, the United States of America celebrated 250 years of independence. But for a great many Americana-lovers around the world, this year also brings another, even more resonant date: the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Route 66. In the months leading up to November 11th, the official birthday of what John Steinbeck dubbed the “Mother Road,” tourists both foreign and domestic have seized the occasion to make the 2,448-mile drive of which they’ve long dreamed. Running from Grant Park in Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier, Route 66 reveals a great swath of America’s big cities, small towns, historic sites, vast open spaces, natural wonders, and — most important for any enthusiast — pieces of roadside kitsch.
You’ll see plenty of all that in the video at the top of the post from Chris Attrell, one of the YouTubers who’s marked Route 66’s centennial year by driving it all and making a video along the way. He seems to have had less than ideal luck in reaching the attractions on his more than 100 stops during business hours, but in the true American spirit, he expresses optimism about getting back to them next time.
There are a host of schools of thought on which direction is best to drive the whole of Route 66, but Attrell heads inland from the coast, as travel vlogger Josh McNair did with his father for his channel Through My Lens a few years before. They take only two weeks to do so, a fairly rapid clip at which to cross seven states, or eight if you count the tiny segment that passes through the southeast corner of Kansas.
httpv:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0bA72fjHMQ
There are, no doubt, Route 66 purists who would insist that no stretch, no matter how short, can be bypassed — or at least no stretch of the 85 percent of the original highway that remains drivable today. Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985, nearly three decades after the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System began making it obsolete. But it wasn’t long thereafter that efforts began to preserve as much of it as possible as Historic Route 66, an enterprise that may have initially been driven by nostalgia, but increasingly trades in the exoticism of the once-ordinary. It’s easy to over-romanticize the days of pre-Interstate automobile travel, but as the aesthetics and rhythms of life in that period pass out of living memory, their remains become all the more compelling, even in total desuetude.
Anyone in search of total desuetude can hardly find more vivid examples, at least in my experience, than the Route 66 ghost towns (and, as Attrell calls them, “semi-ghost towns”) that the freeways passed by. For example, the strip of mostly hollowed-out lodgings that is Tucumcari, New Mexico has been a photographer’s dream for so long that a non-clichéd shot of the place can now be hard to come by. But for all the books published about it — and indeed, all the videos made about it — Route 66 is less a subject than an experience, a pilgrimage through an America of neon signs, period-accurate gas stations, memorabilia shops, eccentric artworks, hot dogs on sticks, Muffler Man statues, diners both operating and abandoned, and, of course, wigwam motels. May it endure to the United States’ quincentennial.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s an ungainly word for English speakers, which is maybe why we do not hear it often: Gleichschaltung. Yet the concept remains central for a clear view of what happened to Germany in the 1930s. In 1933, the nation completely transformed, seemingly overnight, through “a concerted policy of ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung),” the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum writes. “Culture, the economy, education, and law all came under Nazi control.” Those artists and organizations that were not purged had their essential character changed to reflect an entirely different set of artistic and political values. One publication, especially, serves as an example of the Nazification of culture.
The arts journal Jugend (Youth), writes Messy Nessy Chic, “had been turned largely into propaganda” between 1933 and 1940, its final year. But prior to the regime’s takeover, Jugend showcased the most avant-garde, “degenerate” artists of the era, and might have been “the ‘brainiest’ periodical of the day,” as one critic wrote in a 1904 issue of The Yale Literary Magazine. “There is no magazine published in England or in this country which is at all like it.”
As in England, France, Austria, and the U.S., the Art Nouveau movement in Germany emerged from a whirlwind of post-Impressionist painting, Orientalist motifs, folk art, modernist art and advertising, book illustration, and graphic and industrial design. Appropriately, given its perch on the threshold of a new century, Art Nouveau looked both backward—to the medieval, gothic, and Romantic—and forward toward a more modernist, urbane, and urbanized sensibility.
So influential was Jugend that Art Nouveau in Germany became known as Jugendstil. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines writes, “Among Jugend’s most important qualities—indeed, an essential aspect of Art Nouveau and its German equivalent Jugendstil—was its brilliant escapism.” Founded in 1896 by writer Georg Hirth, the magazine was “from the start a venue to promote the new cultural Renaissance without recourse to the established ‘vintage’ art.” (See its very first cover right above.)
Jugendstil was primarily based in Munich, where most of its artists, designers, and writers lived and worked, until the turn of the century, when, notes the Art Encyclopedia, “the Munich group dispersed, heading for Berlin, Weimar and Darmstadt.” Art Nouveau in Germany developed in two phases, “a pre-1900 phase dominated by floral motifs, themselves rooted in English Art Nouveau and Japanese art,” and a “post-1900 phase, marked by a tendency towards abstract art.”
While we know the names of many Art Nouveau artists from elsewhere in Europe—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in France, Aubrey Beardsley in England, Gustav Klimt in Austria, for example—Jugendstil in Germany produced few international stars. Many of the artists published in its pages were relatively unknown at first. But its shockingly brilliant covers and radical editorial tone put it at the forefront of German arts for decades. “Jugend’s political and social platform,” wrote The Yale Literary Magazine critic, “is one of opposition—opposition to everything.”
In 1933, however, the magazine was forced to comply with the kind of dour conservatism it had arisen explicitly to protest. Its wild covers and proudly original contents turned somber and neoclassical, as in the bust of Nietzsche on the cover above from 1934. Many of its artists disappeared or went into exile. But as we observe this transformation happening abruptly in the University of Heidelberg archive, we still see a magazine whose editorial staff held fast to notions of artistic quality, as they were forced to turn away from everything that had made Jugend exciting, cutting-edge, and worthy of its title.
Today, we’re surrounded by technologies we could justifiably describe as time thieves. In ancient Greece, those who wanted to know where their time was going consulted a device they called a “water thief.” The roots of the clepsydra, or water clock, go back as far as the sixteenth century BC, with evidence of such devices found in modern-day Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, and more ambiguous evidence unearthed in places like India and China.The mechanism in the earliest examples takes not much more complex a form than a bowl out of which water slowly drips, albeit not at a regular pace. That natural impediment to hydraulic timekeeping wasn’t corrected until the third century BC, when a Greek inventor called Ctesibius set about making his own improvements.
Ctesibius’ automatic water clock used a vertical cylinder, rotating once yearly, marked with straight vertical lines representing the months of the year and curved horizontal lines representing the hours of the day. A pointer next to it indicated the current hour, its position changed by the water level of the cylinder in which it floated. That cylinder was filled through a feeding reservoir, itself constantly supplied with water.
The idea behind this arrangement was to keep the rate of flow steady, and thus the speed of the pointer constant. To empty the reservoir without the need for human intervention, Ctesibius incorporated a siphon that let water out every 24 hours, resetting the clock’s daily cycle. A water wheel attached to a simple system of gears kept the cylinder turning, so that its “display” could keep up with the ever-changing length of the daylight-based ancient Greek hour.
All this is explained with detailed visual aids in the animated Deconstructed video above. “In a world without electricity, digital logic, or even mechanical clocks,” says its narrator, “this ancient invention laid the foundation for automation and timekeeping as we know them today.” Indeed, Ctesibius’ clepsydra “kept better time than anything else on Earth for 1800 years,” until Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1656. There’s something in the swinging of such a mechanism that appeals to the innate human attraction to rhythm, and the metaphorical value of the grains of sand passing through an hourglass (an intermediary invention between Ctesibius and Huygens) remains strong even now. But it’s probably not a coincidence that the flow of time and the flow of water, at least from the human perspective, feel like two aspects of the same primal phenomenon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When the historian Timothy Snyder left Yale for the University of Toronto in 2024, he took with him the practice of occasionally putting his course lectures online, making them available to anyone who cares to learn from them. Above, you can watch ten lectures from his recent course Hitler and Stalin Today. In this course:
Snyder examines the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instruct us about how “it” can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. The course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century and what lessons we should carry forward.
This course is for “anyone interested in understanding the relationship between history and contemporary democracy.” You can stream the lectures above, or watch them on YouTube.
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Frank Lloyd Wright was often strapped for cash. In that respect, he had something in common with Vincent van Gogh, who passed most of his much shorter life in more dire circumstances. Unlike Wright, who enjoyed decades of fame at the pinnacle of the American architectural profession, van Gogh remained practically unknown until after his death. But if they’ve encountered one another in the afterlife, they’ve certainly discussed one subject above all others: their shared appreciation for Japanese woodblock prints. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the collection of 500 such works of art that van Gogh left behind. At the end of Wright’s life in 1959, he owned about 6,000, many of which his estate had to sell to pay both Japanese art dealers and American tax collectors.
We could say that Wright died as he lived, advanced age having not evidently diminished either his financial recklessness or his obsession with ukiyo‑e. The masters of that classical “art of the floating world” like Hokusai and Hiroshige were among his favorite artists of any kind. When still a teenager, Wright went to work for the architect Joseph Silsbee, who’d built a chapel for his uncle.
“Silsbee’s cousin, Ernest Fenollosa, happened to be the world’s leading Western expert on Japanese art at the time,” writes Kevin Nute at The Conversation. It isn’t certain how well the young Wright knew Fenollosa — or indeed when he began collecting ukiyo‑e, writes Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan author Julia Meech-Pekarik, though he may have seen both Hokusai and Hiroshige’s works at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, “about the time he opened his practice in Oak Park.”
Eight years later, “Wright made his first voyage to Japan in pursuit of prints, and he did indeed return with enough expertise to stage an exhibition of his own Hiroshige collection at the Art Institute of Chicago in March of 1906.” He returned for two months in 1913, making it clear that he was only interested in using that time to acquire more prints. Later, while working on the Imperial Hotel between 1917 and 1922, he spent a total of more than three years there, later writing that “the pursuit of the Japanese print became my constant recreation while in Tokio,” a quest whose “adventures and excursions would take place at night or sometimes call for a journey by day to distant places.” This positioned him well to take on a sideline as a dealer (or as he liked to call himself, a merchant) of Japanese art in a United States only just becoming aware of its beauty — an especially advantageous condition in architecturally lean years.
Wright valued ukiyo‑e, about which he published a book in 1912, for its sense of order, structure, nature, and simplicity. “Five lines where three are enough is stupidity,” he wrote. “Nine pounds where three are sufficient is stupidity. But to eliminate expressive words that intensify or vivify meaning in speaking or writing is not simplicity.” In his own form, he understood full well that “expressive changes of surface, emphasis of line, and especially textures of material, may go to make facts eloquent — forms more significant.” But it was Hokusai, Hiroshige, and countless other commercial artists of that earlier time and distant land that changed his approach to building in the first place. “When I saw the print and I saw the elimination of the insignificant and simplicity of vision, together with the sense of rhythm and the importance of design, I began to see nature in a totally different way.” And thus, thanks to Japanese art, did that most American of all architects begin taking shape.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When the U.S. media began reporting on the phenomenon of “forest bathing” as a therapy for mental and physical health, the online commentariat—as it will—mocked the concept relentlessly as yet another pretentious, bourgeois repackaging of something thoroughly mundane. Didn’t we just used to call it “going outside”?
Well, yes, if all “forest bathing” means is “going outside,” then it does sound like a grandiose and unnecessary phrase. The term, however, is not an American marketing invention but a translation of the Japanese shinrin-yoku. “Coined by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in 1982,” writes Meeri Kim at The Washington Post, “the word literally translates to ‘taking in the forest atmosphere’ or ‘forest bathing’ and refers to the process of soaking up the sights, smells and sounds of a natural setting to promote physiological and psychological health.”
So what? We already have the examples of thousands of years of Buddhist monks (and Thich Nhat Hanh), of Henry David Thoreau, and the saints of the Sierra Club. But the oldest and most useful ideas and practices can get carelessly discarded in the frantic pursuit of innovation at all costs. The pushing of hi-tech outdoor gear, wearable activity trackers, and health apps that ask us to log every movement can make going outside feel like a daunting, expensive chore or a competitive event.
Forest bathing involves none of those things. “Just be with the trees,” as Ephrat Livni describes the practice, “no hiking, no counting steps on a Fitbit. You can sit or meander, but the point is to relax rather than accomplish anything.” You don’t have to hug the trees if you don’t want to, but at least sit under one for a spell. Even if you don’t attain enlightenment, you very well may reduce stress and boost immune function, according to several Japanese studies conducted between 2004 and 2012.
The Japanese government spent around four million dollars on studies conducted with hundreds of people “bathing” on 48 designated therapy trails. In his work, Qing Li, associate professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, found “significant increases in NK [natural killer] cell activity in the week after a forest visit… positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods.” Natural killer cells fight viruses and cancers, and are apparently stimulated by the oils that trees themselves secrete to ward off germs and pests. See the professor explain in the video above (he translates shinrin-yoku as taking a “forest shower,” and also claims to have bottled some of the effects).
Additionally, experiments conducted by Japan’s Chiba University found that forest bathing lowered heart rate and blood pressure and brought down levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that can wreak havoc on every system when large amounts circulate through the body. Then there are the less tangible psychological benefits of taking in the trees. Subjects in one study “showed significantly reduced hostility and depression scores” after a walk in the woods. These findings underscore that spending time in the forest is a medical intervention as well as an aesthetic and spiritual one, something scientists have long observed but haven’t been able to quantify.
In theirreview of a book called Your Brain on Nature, Mother Earth News quotes Franklin Hough, first chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry, who remarked in a 19th century medical journal that forests have “a cheerful and tranquilizing influence which they exert upon the mind, more especially when worn down by mental labor.” Hough’s hypothesis has been confirmed, and despite what might sound to English speakers like a slightly ridiculous name, forest bathing is serious therapy, especially for the ever-increasing number of urbanites and those who spend their days in strip malls, office complexes, and other overbuilt environments.
What is a guided forest bathing experience like? You can listen to NPR’s Alison Aubrey describe one above. She quotes Amos Clifford, founder of the Association of Nature & Forest Therapy, the certifying organization, as saying that a guide “helps you be here, not there,” sort of like a meditation instructor. Clifford has been pushing health care providers to “incorporate forest therapy as a stress-reduction strategy” in the U.S., and there’s no question that more stress reduction tools are sorely needed.
But, you may wonder, do you have to call it “forest bathing,” or pay for a certified guide, join a group, and buy some fancy outerwear to get the benefits of hanging out with trees? I say, consider the words of John Muir, the indefatigable 19th century naturalist, “father of the National Park System,” and founding saint of the Sierra Club: In the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you. The quote may underestimate the amount of risk or overstate the benefits, but you get the idea. Muir was not one to get tangled up in semantics or overly detailed analysis. Nonetheless, his work inspired Americans to step in and preserve so much of the country’s forest in the 19th and 20th centuries. Maybe the preventative medicine of “forest bathing” can help do the same in the 21st.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
In 1927, Bertrand Russell delivered a lecture titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” At the time, such a declaration was still fairly bold, as was the reasoning he provided for it. Nearly three decades thereafter, he included in his collection Portraits from Memory another, shorter piece, “Why I Am Not a Communist.” That description was safe to apply to oneself in 1954, at least in the mainstream of the English-speaking world. It would have been riskier for those who moved in intellectual circles, as a celebrated philosopher like Russell most certainly did. What’s more, his criticism extended not just to communism as then instantiated by certain societies in the world, but to the thought of Karl Marx himself.
Russell makes two charges against Marx: “one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.” In his view, the author of Capital commits intellectual fraud by opportunistically accepting Thomas Malthus’ dire prediction of population growth (while rejecting it at other times), as well as applying David Ricardo’s theory of value, which describes it as a kind of embodied labor, to wages but not the prices of manufactured goods.
“He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners.” Marx sees their uprising against capitalists as inevitable due to his “extension to world history of certain features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago” and belief in “a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions.”
This dismissal of Marx’s worldview as “mere mythology” has something in common with Russell’s critique of Christianity, and not coincidentally so. “I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other,” he says in the clip above. “I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt.” And “if a philosophy is to bring happiness, it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now, Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat, but he really wanted is the unhappiness of the bourgeois. And it was because of that negative element, because of that hate element that his philosophy produced disaster.” There are, perhaps, arguments to be made that communism, as practiced in, for example, the Soviet Union, took the form it did precisely because it departed from Marxist lines. Whether that was better or worse than the alternative is a matter no philosopher can settle.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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