In the trailer below for the world’s first 3D replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Yves Ubelmann speaks of using “AI for Good,” which isn’t just an ideal, but also the name of a lab at Microsoft. Microsoft and Ubelman’s digital-preservation company Iconem were two of the participants in that ambitious project, along with the Vatican itself. Pope Francis, writes AP’s Nicole Winfield, “has called for the ethical use of AI and used his annual World Message of Peace this year to urge an international treaty to regulate it, arguing that technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness were too great.”
What better show of good faith in the technology than to allow AI to be used to bring the center of the faith Pope Francis represents to the world? In the nearly 400 years since its completion, of course, the world has always come to the current St. Peter’s Basilica, and will continue to do so.
The 3D-replica project “has been launched ahead of the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee, a holy year in which more than 30 million pilgrims are expected to pass through the basilica’s Holy Door, on top of the 50,000 who visit on a normal day,” Winfield writes. But no matter where in the world you happen to be, you can virtually enter St. Peter’s Basilica right now, and spend as long as you like, admiring the basilica itself, the cupola, Bernini’s St. Peter’s Baldachin, and Michelangelo’s Pietà, among other features.
However important (and attention-drawing) artificial intelligence was as a tool in the creation of this ultra-precise “digital twin” of St. Peter’s Basilica, the four-week process of capturing every detail of the real structure that could be captured also necessitated the use of drones, lasers, and cameras taking more than 400,000 digital photos. The “AI for Good Lab contributed advanced tools that refined the digital twin with millimeter-level accuracy, and used AI to help detect and map structural vulnerabilities like cracks and missing mosaic tiles,” says Microsoft’s site. “The Vatican oversaw the collaboration, ensuring the preservation of the Basilica as a cultural, spiritual, and historically significant site for years to come.”
It makes a certain sense to apply the highest technology of our time for the benefit of a building known as the greatest architectural marvel of its time. But in order to better appreciate the kind of knowledge that will be revealed by the 22 petabytes of information that went into the digital model (which offers its own guided tour) we’d do well to immerse ourselves first in what was already known about St. Peter’s Basilica. For a brief introduction to the conception and evolution of this grand church as it stands today, we could do much worse than architecture-and-history YouTuber Manuel Bravo’s video “St Peter’s Basilica Explained.” If you watch it, don’t be surprised if you find yourself tempted to engage in prolonged exploration of the model — or indeed, to book a visit to the real thing. Enter the digital St. Peter’s here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian classics Anna Karenina and War & Peace—died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, made a rather dramatic decision. He left his wife, his comfortable estate, and his wealth, then traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to spend the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut. (Elif Batuman has more on this.) But then he pushed on, boarding a train to the Caucasus. And it proved to be more than his already weakened constitution could handle. Rather amazingly, the footage above brings you back to Tolstoy’s final days, and right to his deathbed itself. This clip comes from a 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and these days you can still find copies of Clark’s accompanying book kicking around online.
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More than 120 years after the end of the Victorian era, we might assume that we retain a more or less accurate cultural memory of the Victorians themselves: of their social mores, their aesthetic sensibilities, their ambitions great and small, their many and varied hang-ups. Some of the most vivid representations of these qualities have come down to us through primary sources, which tend to be texts and works of visual art. Late in Queen Victoria’s reign came photographs, and at the very end, even the motion picture. But how can we be sure how her people really sounded?
Strictly speaking, the earliest process for mechanically recording the sound of the human voice dates back to 1860, not even halfway through the Victorian era. But the technology still had a long way to go at that time, and it wasn’t until the 1880s that Thomas Edison’s phonograph and the wax cylinders it played became commercially viable. So explains the King and Things video above, on the spread of audio recording and the earliest possibilities it opened for capturing the voices of what we now regard as the distant past. Those voices include that of a man introduced as “one of England’s most famous after-dinner speakers, Mr. Edmund Yates.”
That cylinder was recorded in 1888, at one of the London soirées held by an American Edison employee named George Gouraud. The son of French engineer François Gouraud, who had introduced daguerreotype photography to the United States in the 1830s, he took it upon himself to bring the phonograph to Britain. He did so in a top-down manner, inviting socially distinguished guests to his home for dinner so that they might thrill to the novelty of after-dinner speeches delivered by machine — and then record their own messages to Edison himself. “I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening’s experiments,” said one of Gouraud’s guests, the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.
That astonishment aside, Sullivan also admitted that he was “terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.” Many alive today would credit him with considerable prescience on that count. But he also understood that the phonograph would produce wonders, such as the recordings included in this video of such notables as four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, and Queen Victoria herself — at least according to the consensus of the scholars who’ve scrutinized the highly indistinct recording in question. Only long after Edison’s time would humanity develop a recording technology capable of being replayed again and again without degradation. But given our image of Victorians, perhaps it’s suitable that their voices should sound ghostly.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Photos on this page courtesy of the Falklands Maritime Heritage
Few who hear the story of the Endurance could avoid reflecting on the aptness of the ship’s name. A year after setting out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drifting ice off Antarctica. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men waited for a thaw. But the Endurance was being slowly crushed, and eventually had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the history books is the sub-expedition made by Shackleton and five others in search of help, which ensured the rescue of every single man who’d been on the ship.
This harrowing journey has, of course, inspired documentaries, including this year’s Endurance from National Geographic, which debuted at the London Film Festival last month and will come available to stream on Disney+ later this fall. “The documentary incorporates footage and photos captured during the expedition by Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who [in 1914] brought several cameras along for the journey,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Filmmakers have color-treated Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used artificial intelligence to recreate crew members’ voices to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”
The fruits of an even more technologically impressive project have been released along with Endurance: a 3D digital model “created from more than 25,000 high-resolution images captured after the iconic vessel was discovered in March 2022.”
As we noted at the time here on Open Culture, the ship was found to be in remarkably good condition after well over a century spent two miles beneath the Weddell Sea. “Endurance looks much like it did when it sank on November 21, 1915. Everyday items used by the crew — including dining plates, a boot and a flare gun — are still easily recognizable among the protected wreckage.”
Endurance has, in other words, endured. Its intactness — which “makes it look as though the ship,” writes CNN.com’s Jack Guy, “has been miraculously lifted out of the Weddell Sea onto dry land in one piece” — is, in its way, as improbable and impressive as Shackleton and company’s survival of its fateful first expedition. The degree of detail captured by this new scan (not technologically feasible back at the time of the last acclaimed documentary on this subject), should make possible further, even deeper research into the story of the Endurance. But one question will remain unanswerable: would that story have resonated quite as long had the ship kept its original name, Polaris?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongoing construction realizes ever more fully a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in designing the cathedral that would remain a work in progress nearly a century after his death, Antoni Gaudí built a model upside-down, making use of gravity in the opposite way to which we normally think of it as acting on a building. But as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Gaudí was hardly the first to use that technique.
Take St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Christopher Wren decided to make the tallest building in London in 1685. It included what would be the highest dome ever built, at 365 feet off the ground. “For a traditional dome design to reach this height, it would have to span an opening that’s 160 feet or 49 meters wide, but this made it much too heavy for the walls below,” says Hicks. “Existing techniques for building this just couldn’t work.” Enter scientist-engineer Robert Hooke, who’d already been figuring out ways to model forces like this by hanging chains from the ceiling.
“Hooke’s genius was that he realized that the chain in his experiments was calculating the perfect shape for it to remain in tension, since that’s all it can do.” He explained domes as, physically, “the exact opposite of the chains. His famous line was, ‘As hangs the flexile line, so but inverted will stand the rigid arch.’ ” In other words, “if you flip the shape of Hooke’s chain experiments upside down, the forces flip, and this shape is the perfect compression system.” Hence the distinctively elongated-looking shape of the dome on the completed St. Paul’s Cathedral, a departure from all architectural precedent.
The shape upon which Wren and Hooke settled turned out to be very similar to what architecture now knows as a catenary curve, a concept important indeed to Gaudí, who was “famously enamored with what some call organic forms.” He made detailed models to guide the construction of his projects, but after those he’d left behind for Sagrada Família were destroyed by anarchists in 1936, the builders had nothing to go on. Only in 1979 did the young architect Mark Burry “imagine the models upside-down,” which brought about a new understanding of the building’s complex, landscape-like forms. It was a similar physical insight that made possible such dramatic mid-century buildings as Annibale Vitellozzi and Pier Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center: pure Space Age, but rooted in the Enlightenment.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Some refer to the written Chinese language as ideographic: that is, structured according to a system in which each symbol represents a particular idea or concept, whether abstract or concrete. That’s true of certain Chinese characters, but only a small minority. Most of them are actually logographs, each of which represents a word or part of a word. But if you dig deep enough into their history — and the history of other Asian languages that use Chinese-derived vocabulary — you’ll find that some started out long ago as pictographs, designed visually to represent the thing to which they referred.
That doesn’t hold true for Chinese alone: it appears, in fact, that all written languages began as forms of pictographic “proto-writing,” at least judging by the earliest texts currently known to man. If we look at the oldest of them all, the limestone “Kish tablet” unearthed from the site of the eponymous ancient Sumerian city in modern-day Iraq, we can in some sense “read” several of the symbols in its text, even five and a half millennia after it was written. “The writing on its surface is purely pictographic,” says the narrator of the brief IFLScience video below, “and represents a midpoint between proto-writing and the more sophisticated writing of the cuneiform.”
Cuneiform, previously featured here on Open Culture, was used by the ancient Babylonians to label maps and record stew recipes, among other important tasks. “First developed around 3200 B.C. by Sumerian scribes in the ancient city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a means of recording transactions, cuneiform writing was created by using a reed stylus to make wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets,” says Archaeology magazine. Over 3,000 years, this earliest proper script “was used by scribes of multiple cultures over that time to write a number of languages other than Sumerian, most notably Akkadian, a Semitic language that was the lingua franca of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.”
Cuneiform was also used to write the Scheil dynastic tablet, which dates from the early second millennium BC. That means we can read it, and thus know that it comprises a literary-historical text that lists off the reigns of various rulers of Sumerian cities. We should note that the Scheil dynastic tablet is also, sometimes, referred to as the “Kish tablet,” which surely causes some confusion. But for the anonymous writer of the earlier Kish tablet, who would have lived about two millennia earlier, the emergence of cuneiform and all the civilizational developments it would make possible lay far in the future. His pictographic text may never be deciphered properly or mapped to a historically documented language, but at least we can tell that he must surely have had hands and feet more or less like our own.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nauseatingly difficult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this controversy? What is the evidence brought against the famed Swiss psychiatrist and onetime close friend, student, and colleague of Sigmund Freud?
Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Nietzsche, whose work was deliberately bastardized by Nazis, beginning with his own sister, Jung need not be taken out of context to be read as anti-Semitic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psychotherapy Today, in which he marvels at National Socialism as a “formidable phenomenon,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” This is only one of the least objectionable of such statements, as historian Andrew Samuels demonstrates.
One Jungian defender admits in an essay collection called Lingering Shadows that Jung had been “unconsciously infected by Nazi ideas.” In response, psychologist John Conger asks, “Why not then say that he was unconsciously infected by anti-Semitic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to power. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Jung was accused of trading on his professional associations during the 30s to maintain his status, and turning on his Jewish colleagues while they were purged.
Yet his biographer Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse persecution without his consent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Vernon writes at The Guardian, “because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.” And unlike Heidegger, Jung strongly denounced anti-Semitic views during the war. He “protected Jewish analysts,” writes Conger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, precursor to the CIA, during the war.
His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for.” Dulles also cryptically remarked, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” These contradictions in Jung’s words, character, and actions are puzzling, to say the least. I would not presume to draw any hard and fast conclusions from them. They do, however, serve as the necessary context for Jung’s observations of Adolf Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his supposed characterization of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a comparison that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Germans did, use ancient European belief systems as clothes hangers for modern racist nationalism.
In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “personification of psychic forces” that moved through the German people “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thousands of unemployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hundreds of thousands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In personifying the “German psyche” as a furious god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims.”
“One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evidently against hope, that Jung did not intend” his statements “as an argument of redemption for the Germans.” Whatever his intentions, his mystical racialization of the unconscious in “Wotan” accorded perfectly well with the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, “Hitler’s chief ideologist.” Like everything about Jung, the situation is complicated. In a 1938 interview, published by Omnibook Magazine in 1942, Jung repeated many of these disturbing ideas, comparing the German worship of Hitler to the Jewish desire for a Messiah, a “characteristic of people with an inferiority complex.” He describes Hitler’s power as a form of “magic.” But that power only exists, he says, because “Hitler listens and obeys….”
His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing.
Jung’s observations are bombastic, but they are not flattering. The people may be possessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. “The true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” He goes on to paint an even darker picture, having closely observed Hitler and Mussolini together in Berlin:
In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.
His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.
With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?
Read the full interview here. Jung goes on to further discuss the German resurgence of the cult of Wotan, the “parallel between the Biblical triad… and the Third Reich,” and other peculiarly Jungian formulations. Of Jung’s analysis, interviewer H.R. Knickerbocker concludes, “this psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.)
Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” The dark humor of the comment indicates a critical consensus about fascism. As a form of extreme nationalism, it ultimately takes on the contours of whatever national culture produces it.
It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many different cultural manifestations of authoritarianism, across Europe and even South America. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country,” and got to name the political system. But Eco is perplexed “why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements.” For one thing, he writes, fascism was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”
While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unremarked is his characterization of the Italian opposition movement’s unlikely coalitions. The Resistance included Communists who “exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property,” and leaders like Eco’s childhood hero Franchi, “so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a specific feature of an Italian resistance, one not observable across the number of nations that have resisted totalitarian governments. As for the seeming total lack of common interest between these parties, Eco simply says, “Who cares?… Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.”
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