Solzhenitsyn’s Conversion

Last updated on: July 5, 2024 at 5:28 pm By Gene Veith

The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation” exposed the evils of Soviet Communism by documenting the atrocities in the Soviet prison camps, where he himself was confined for nearly a decade. Another theme in that three-volume exposé was how he himself was converted to Christianity.

Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Slavic literature at Northwestern, tells about how that happened in his article for the Wall Street Journal [behind a paywall] entitled How Solzhenitsyn Found Himself—and God.

Solzhenitsyn was hardly a dissident when he was arrested and sentenced to an arctic prison camp for ten years of hard labor. He was a committed Marxist who was serving as a captain in the Soviet army that was invading Germany when he was arrested for letters he had written to a friend criticizing Stalin’s conduct of the war. For that he was sentenced to eight years in a prison camp, plus permanent exile in Siberia.

Morson says that Solzhenitsyn’s spiritual awakening began in a prison hospital when he heard of a prayer by U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and mocked it as obvious hypocrisy. Another prisoner replied, “Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?” Solzhenitsyn began to realize that atheism “had been planted in me from outside.”

He began to see the connection between conditions in the Soviet Union and its ideology of materialism and atheism. “If people are nothing but material objects,” summarizes Morson, “if there is nothing resembling what we call the soul, then concepts like ‘the sacredness of human life,’ ‘human dignity’ and ‘the inviolability of the person’ are merely bourgeois mystification.”

Instead, Communist ethics taught that the end always justifies the means, judging everything not in terms of some absolute principle but whether or not the result advances the cause of the Communist party. The notion that the ends justifies the means was absorbed even by the prisoners.

Prisoners who thought this way concluded that they would “survive at any price,” which meant “at the price of someone else.” Others might hesitate, but when party members were arrested, they were already prepared to betray others and, if they were intellectuals, to devise sufficient justification.

But the final stage for Solzhenitsyn in his conversion to Christianity was not his perception of other people’s evil, nor of the collective evil of the Soviet system, nor of the evil of Communist ideology. Rather, he had to face his own evil.

The final step to faith comes when you don’t simply blame “them” but realize your own sinfulness. Solzhenitsyn reflected on how, as an officer, he had looked down on ordinary soldiers and, even after he’d been arrested, made one of them carry his bags. Now, whenever he mentions the “heartlessness” and “cruelty” of his executioners, Solzhenitsyn writes, “I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards” and ask if he and those like him were any better.

Speaking with Solzhenitsyn after he’d undergone an operation, prison doctor Boris Kornfeld attributed his own Christian conversion to the recognition that no punishment is entirely undeserved. “It can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact,” the doctor told him, “but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply,” you will identify a transgression for which you hadn’t paid the price.

Kornfeld was murdered within a few hours of this conversation. “There was something in Kornfeld’s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “I had gone over and re-examined myself . . . why everything had happened to me. . . . And I would not have murmured even if all that punishment” were still greater.

The torturers may have escaped punishment, Solzhenitsyn concedes, but they “are departing downward from humanity,” while we, as compensation, experience an unexpected way to develop the soul. When Solzhenitsyn recognized the many ways he had contributed to the evil he saw, he found faith. “God of the universe! I believe again!” he wrote in a prison poem. “Though I renounced You, You were with me!”

Upon his release after eight years, Solzhenitsyn became a devout member of the Orthodox Church. But notice how his conviction by the Law led him to the Gospel.

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America vs. Political Panic

Last updated on: June 30, 2024 at 5:55 pm By Gene Veith

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America faces huge problems, politically and culturally. There is no doubt about that. And in this election year, both sides want to fill us with alarm. But on this Independence Day, let’s take a breath and consider what we have to be thankful for about this country.

If you listen to our politicians from both sides, you would think that America is a dystopian hell hole. In President Biden’s State of the Union address last March, when the media was praising his performance as disproving the charge that he was too old, he said, “Our cities are choking to death, our states are dying, and frankly our country is dying.” In Donald Trump’s response, he agreed with how bad things are: “We’re a third-world country at our borders,” he said, “we’re a third-world country at our elections.”

Is it really so bad to live in America?

Is America really racist to its very core, a land of oppression in which privileged groups exercise their power against marginalized groups, such as women, homosexuals, and racial minorities, as progressives claim? Is the American economy so bad that businesses are going bankrupt because of all the federal regulations, workers can’t find jobs because factories are moving to China, and families can’t pay their bills because of government-created inflation?

If all of this is true, why are so many people from the rest of the world trying to come here? Why are they pouring over our borders illegally in numbers too big for us to handle if the U.S.A. is dying, is a third world country such as the ones so many of them are trying to leave, is racist, oppressive, poor, and without jobs?

A liberal newspaper warns, Democracy won’t survive another Trump presidency. A conservative newspaper warns American democracy won’t survive the anti-Trump witch hunt. It sounds like American democracy is doomed either way.

Is America with its constitutional form of government really so fragile?

Does anyone think that either Trump or Biden has the broad national support that would allow him to suspend the Constitution, declare that the public will no longer be allowed to vote, and make himself ruler for life? If they don’t believe in democracy, why are they trying so hard to get elected, as opposed to just seizing power as dictators usually do?

Political rhetoric, of course, is filled with exaggerations designed to make the public afraid, to the point of fearing one candidate and turning to the other as a savior.

That rhetoric may include some truths or at least half-truths, and it may warn of tendencies or consequences that should be taken seriously. But we citizens need some perspective so that we can keep a clear head and avoid succumbing to political panic.

My Patheos colleague Jim Denison had a thoughtful reflection on said State of the Union address in which he points out how our constitutional democracy is designed to limit sweeping changes and how our Founders, aware of the dangers of human depravity, “set out to create a system of government that was best equipped to protect its people from their leaders.”

That statement deserves to be enshrined as a maxim and as a prime criterion of all political theories and practical policies: How to protect the people from their leaders!

Denison quotes Jonah Goldberg: “Presidents don’t matter as much as they would like you to think . . . Five years from now, America will be okay. You’ll probably be okay. And if you are not okay, it will in all likelihood have nothing to do with who was elected president in 2024.”

Of course, we Christians have a moral impulse, to be concerned not just for our own self-interests but for our neighbors. Not everyone will be okay. Not aborted children, not mutilated adolescents, not families that can’t make ends meet, not people losing their jobs, not soldiers killed in any wars that might get stirred up. . . .

This concern–the love of neighbor–is what properly motivates Christian political activism, not some ambition to seize power for the church or some utopian vision of building heaven on earth.

At the same time, as Denison reminds us “God is on His throne.” Those of us who believe in the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms know that we don’t need to build the kingdom of Heaven on earth because God is already reigning, working mysteriously for His purposes, which includes working through our human vocations, including that of citizenship. So remembering that God is on His throne can preserve us from political panic.

Furthermore, God blesses us through our country, government and all. Our country, even in its troubles, is God’s gift to us. Can you count the ways?

Illustration: American Flag via PickPik, royalty free

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Cold War II–and We Are the Soviets

Last updated on: July 2, 2024 at 7:33 am By Gene Veith

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The Cold War between the Western democracies, led by the United States and NATO, and the Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union and China, was a period of tension, espionage, and jockeying for influence over the non-aligned nations, with occasional flare-ups of hot wars, such as in Korea and Vietnam. It lasted from 1947 to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Niall Ferguson is a Scottish-American conservative thinker, fellow at the Hoover Institute (among other think tanks), a founder of the alternative higher education institution the University of Austin, and the husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

He has been arguing that a new cold war is emerging. The alliance between Russia, China, and Iran and their common ambitions, he says, constitutes a new “axis,” which Western democracies are having to confront. He cites Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s proxy wars against Israel and the conservative Arab regimes, and China’s military buildup and threat to Taiwan. (See his article New Cold War and a New Axis of Evil.)

Recently, though, he added a disturbing twist to his thesis. In Cold War II, the United States is paralleling the Soviet Union! He develops this notion in his essay for The Free Press entitled We’re All Soviets Now, with the deck, “A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?”

Here are some of his points of comparison:

(1) A key weakness of the Soviet Union was its “soft budget constraint,” so that the government never had enough money for its ambitions. Ferguson sees parallels in the U.S. deficits and a national debt whose service now exceeds what we spend on defense.

(2) In the Soviet Union, investment decisions were largely determined by the central government. Which reminds Ferguson of the current administration’s “industrial policy.”

(3) The Soviet Military was huge and formidable on paper. “But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of.” It couldn’t even win a war in Afghanistan. (Ouch!) The U.S. military is like the Soviet army in other ways. Ferguson quotes a report that concludes, “America’s military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk.”

(4) “Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.” I’ll let you finish the comparison.

(5) “Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions.” Ferguson documents that for both the Soviets and contemporary Americans.

(6) “Also, the decline in life expectancy due to ‘deaths of despair.’ In both, the working class and part of the middle class ‘drink and drug themselves to death.'”

(7) Soviet Communism supposedly championed the working class, but in reality, the party elite constituted a new class, the nomenklatura, which ran the nation and the economy for its own interests. Ferguson sees a parallel with the drift of American liberalism from its working class origins to becoming the ideology of the highly-educated elite, who dominate the bureaucracy, higher education, and the big corporations, all of which–despite their rhetoric–they operate for their own benefit.

(8) “A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check.”

(9) “A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check.

(10) “How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid.”

(11) “And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.”

This stings. Ferguson identifies American weaknesses that might prevent us from prevailing in any kind of war, whether hot or cold. But what distinguishes us from our adversaries?

Both World War II and the subsequent Cold War were conflicts between the ideology of freedom and the ideology of totalitarianism; that is, the notion that a central government, whether Fascist or Communist, should exercise “total” control over all facets of the nation.

I’m thinking that in a Cold War II, freedom vs. totalitarianism is still the issue, with some differences and special challenges for the American side.

The Soviet Union exercised total control over its people but did this incompetently. China, though, seems to be doing this effectively, adding to its Communism a measure of market economics while still keeping its citizens under strict control with the help of “surveillance state” technology.

Totalitarianism also explains how secular Marxism and radical Islam can ally with each other. Both are totalitarian, seeking to control every aspect of their subjects’ lives. Islam, a this-worldly religion, does this through sharia law.

Our problem is that this totalitarian impulse has permeated the American side as well, as we see in the alliance between the American left and Islamic terrorists in the Gaza war protests, America’s “illiberal” thinkers on both the left and the right, and the ambitions of America’s nomenklatura to regulate and control the behavior and the thinking of their fellow citizens.

Depending on the direction America takes, maybe we have, in effect, lost the ideological battle of the first cold war. In which case, there won’t be much point in a Cold War II.

Photo: Niall Ferguson by Fronteiras do Pensamento, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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What Does “Establishment of Religion” Actually Mean?

Last updated on: June 21, 2024 at 3:55 pm By Gene Veith

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Louisiana has passed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in all of the state’s classrooms. In 1980, the Supreme Court overturned a similar requirement in Kentucky, but that was before 2022 when the court threw out the principle that was the basis of that decision, the “Lemon Test,” which requires laws regarding religion to have a secular purpose, neither advance nor inhibit religion, and avoid the state becoming “entangled” in religion.

Reportedly, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry pushed the new law in order to find out where the post-Lemon court will draw the lines. He said that he “can’t wait to be sued,” and a number of groups are lining up to oblige him.

The opponents of the requirement are saying, of course, that the new law violates the separation of church and state and that it amounts to an “establishment of religion” in violation of the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

So does posting the Ten Commandments establish Christianity (perhaps Reformed Protestantism, if the non-Catholic and non-Lutheran numbering is followed) and, presumably, Judaism (which has a different numbering still) as Louisiana’s official religion?

In discussing the controversy, Natan Ehrenreich at National Review draws on a new book on the Establishment Clause by two legal scholars, Nathan S. Chapman and Michael W. McConnell, entitled Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience.

They say that at the time of the founding the establishment of a religion, which was pretty much the norm in Europe, involved six specific characteristics. In countries with a state church, the state. . .

(1) exercised control over doctrine, governance, and personnel of the church;

(2) had laws mandating compulsory church attendance;

(3) provided financial support to the church;

(4) prohibited or restricted worship in other churches;

(5) made use of church institutions for public functions;

(6) restricted political participation to members of the established church.

Thus, in the Church of England of the time, the state supervised doctrine, appointed bishops, and assigned clergy to parishes. It enforced laws requiring attendance, citing Luke 14:23, “compel them to come in.” It fully financed the church. It forbade Catholic services and those of Protestant separatists (which is why the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock). The Anglican church was fully involved in coronations, state funerals, the opening of Parliament, and other state ceremonies, as is the case even today. And only Anglicans–not Catholics or Protestant separatists–were allowed to hold public office, vote in parliamentary elections, or attend the universities.

To be sure, by the late 18th century, some of these practices were toned down. The Toleration Act of 1688 allowed for non-Anglican Protestants, as long as they were licensed and did not meet in private homes. Catholics were gradually granted toleration beginning in 1778, when they were allowed to worship publicly, and continuing through the 19th century, when they were allowed through various laws to hold office, enroll in universities, and the like. But even today many of those original characteristics apply to the Church of England.

Other nations had their own state churches that had the same or similar characteristics. Where Catholicism was the state religion, the church hierarchy had the responsibility of appointing bishops and assigning priests to parishes, but the state generally was allowed to make recommendations that were usually followed. Switzerland and the Netherlands had Calvinist state churches. The various principalities of Germany had their own state churches, with some being Catholic, some being Reformed, and some being Lutheran.

The Scandinavian nations of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland had Lutheran state churches. For much of their history, no other churches were allowed. As a result, the Lutheran cultural influence is said to be greater in Scandinavia than in Germany, which was home to a number of other religious traditions and smaller state churches. That would change, somewhat, with the rise of Pietism in the 19th century, though that movement for the most part stayed within the context of Lutheran churches. And, of course, the state churches, under the control of the secular authorities, would become more and more secular themselves with the advent of theological liberalism.

Here is my question, which perhaps some of you can help me with. How can Lutheran state churches be justified given the Lutheran doctrine of the Two Kingdoms? They must have been, since many orthodox Lutherans operated that way, before the mechanisms of the state church led them to become liberal and secularist. That began to happen as early as the 18th and 19th centuries, as we see with the “Old Lutherans” who would leave the state church and come to America, eventually founding the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

Back to our main topic, Ehrenreich believes that if the Supreme Court justices are truly “originalists” in their interpretation of the Constitution, they will rule that posting the Ten Commandments does not constitute an establishment of religion. After all, it has nothing to do with the six defining characteristics of a religious establishment. Nor would prayer in school, displays of religious symbols, certain kinds of funding, and other contentious issues involving the relationship between church and state.

Do you think the Justices will rule in that way?

Some conservatives–the Catholic integralists and Reformed and Pentecostal dominionists–think that America should have an established religion. Do you think they would like their churches being subject to those six characteristics of state churches?

It seems to me that, judging from history, state religions do not generally, in practice, mean that the religion rules the state. Rather, the state rules the religion.

Photo: Coronation of Charles III by Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Repairer of the Dung Gate

Last updated on: June 20, 2024 at 8:05 am By Gene Veith

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I would like to commend to you as a Biblical patron saint of vocation Malchijah the son of Rechab, repairer of the Dung Gate.

Let me explain. . .

I was in North Carolina attending the graduation service of Wilson Hill Academy, an online classical Christian school where my daughter is a Latin teacher and one of the administrators.

The Valedictorian was a young man named Caleb Vogel. (I was glad to hear that he will be attending Patrick Henry College, where I was a literature professor and provost, which is finally getting the academic recognition that it deserves.)

In the course of his valedictory address, which drew on J. R. R. Tolkien’s story that I blogged about Leaf by Niggle, Caleb quoted what he said was one of his favorite Bible verses:

Malchijah the son of Rechab, ruler of the district of Beth-haccherem, repaired the Dung Gate. He rebuilt it and set its doors, its bolts, and its bars. (Nehemiah 3:14)

The audience kind of laughed. But then Caleb explained.

For context, recall that the walls of Jerusalem, along with the Temple, had been torn down when the city was taken by the Babylonians and the people taken into captivity because of their unfaithfulness. But now the King of Persia is allowing the Jews to go back to their homeland. The book of Nehemiah is about the rebuilding of the city walls. That includes putting in the gates. And one of those gates was the Dung Gate, set aside for the removal of human waste, which was hauled to the rubbish dump in the nearby Hinnom Valley. (This was the site of “Tophet,” where the idolaters among the Jews would sacrifice their children to Molech [2 Kings 23:10]. “Ge-Hinnom” was rendered in Greek as “Gehenna,” one of the terms the New Testament uses for the place of eternal punishment, generally translated into English as “Hell” [e.g., Matthew 5:22, 29, 30].)

Caleb made the point that the Dung Gate was a very lowly portal. Indeed, whoever had the job of going through it to take out the city’s sewage was doing a very unpleasant, dirty, and humble task. But the Dung Gate is honored in the Bible. And Malchijah the son of Rechab is honored for repairing it. Just think! His name is recorded for all time in the Word of God itself! As Caleb said, “his name is mentioned in the Bible one more time than mine is.”

This means, Caleb went on to say, that no job is to be looked down upon, that no honest worker should be despised, that even the most menial-seeming, low-status tasks are of great value to God.

Caleb’s speech to the high school graduating class of 2024 was about vocation. And he, along with Malchijah the son of Rechab, is underscoring a very important fact about it.

The recent rediscovery of the doctrine of vocation, which I like to think I had a hand in, has led to what is being called “the faith and work movement,” in which Christians in various professions think through how to live out their faith in their work. But this has led to some criticism. Jeff Haanen, in reviewing a book on the subject, sums up his critique in the title of his essay: The Faith and Work Movement Is Leaving Blue-Collar Workers Behind, with the deck “Can it speak to evangelicals outside high-status professions?”

Christians today often focus on the talents they have been given and the fulfillment they feel in their vocation, which tends to be some high status, highly-paid profession. What about the greater number of workers in dead-end, thankless, and tedious jobs, who are often exploited by their employers? What does all of this talk about “vocation” mean to them?

Well, I would urge those critics to study Luther’s treatment of vocation. He is the great theologian of vocation. He writes much more of lowly, peasant-style labor–the farmer through whom God gives us all our daily bread; the servant girl sweeping the floor–than the upper reaches of the medieval social hierarchy. And Luther writes about the sacrifices and cross-bearing that happen in vocation, as God calls us–not just in our economic activity but even more importantly in our families, the church, and the society–to deny ourselves (not fulfill ourselves) as we use our multiple vocations to love and serve our neighbors.

They should read Gustaf Wingren’s Luther on Vocation. Also, for modern applications, my God at Work: Your Christian Vocations in All of Life; Family Vocation: God’s Calling in Marriage, Parenting, and Childhood (with my daughter Mary Moerbe); and Working for Our Neighbor: A Lutheran Primer on Vocation, Economics, and Ordinary Life.

And let us all remember Malchijiah the son of Rechab, repairer of the Dung Gate.

Photo: Jerusalem, Dung Gate*, by Berthold Werner – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6034191

*Not the original or the one repaired by Malchijiah (also known as Malchiah). This one was built in the 16th century by the Ottomans.

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The Loss of Language, Culture, & Relationships

Last updated on: June 13, 2024 at 6:16 pm By Gene Veith

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Language is what makes culture and all human relationships possible. We are seeing a broad based decline in language–not only the loss of the ability to read and write, but the also the ability to speak, listen, communicate, comprehend, and think. If we allow this trend to run its course–as we are beginning to do by letting Artificial Intelligence do our writing and our thinking for us–culture will be impossible and our very humanity will be at risk.

So argues Nadya Williams in her article for Providence entitled A People Without Culture: What the End of Reading Truly Means. She cites an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the much-complained-about topic of how college students have become such poor readers. But this one, “Is This The End of Reading?” by Beth McMurtrie, goes further, saying that students are increasingly unable to handle language and the tasks that require facility with language.

Williams, a classical historian, then gives a vivid evocation of ancient Greece before the dawn of literacy, when its oral culture enabled incredible feats of memory and extended attention spans, as when whole cities would come together to hear Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey recited from memory. Then writing came, retaining and preserving much of the oral culture, while making possible new heights of learning and thinking. Williams writes,

This brings us back full circle to the beleaguered college students whose inability to ingest information, whether written or oral, McMurtrie documents in her Chronicle piece. The students she describes decidedly don’t fit the characteristics of a written culture. The problem is, they don’t fit the characteristics of an oral culture either. Rather, powered by the latest modern technologies of smart phones and AI, they are steadily regressing to a pre-human state of cognition. Unable to receive sophisticated information in any form at all, what is left for them? Profound anxiety and loneliness.

This loss of culture, both oral and written, has significant implications for how any human society, let alone a democracy, functions. How do you communicate with other flesh and blood people with neither the ability to read nor listen deeply? This is a civilization-destroying kind of crisis. Without the possibility of deep, meaningful communication across society, there will be fewer deep friendships, fewer relationships, less healthy marriages, and more intergenerational strife as communication between parents and children becomes harder. There will be less collaboration beyond our immediate circles. All of these activities rely on effective speaking and listening, on remembering information, on understanding people and their ideas, on holding multiple ideas in one’s mind and discerning patterns or conflicts between them.

A “pre-human state of cognition”? I’m not sure what that is. Is she saying that we are starting to think like animals?

Despite that evocation of evolution–or, rather, devolution–Williams is a Christian, who emphasizes the centrality of the Word of God; that is, God’s language, through which He reveals Himself

There is significance, as the early Christians knew well, to the idea of God as Word that became flesh. Words can be transcendent. Words are how God communicates with us—especially, today, through the written word. And words, written or spoken, are how we express our love for God and for other people. Without them, we lose not only culture, but our very humanity.

Indeed, this loss of humanity that is unfolding in front of our very eyes is only further abetted by the hollow solutions readily available. Can’t find a real person to date? AI girlfriends are here for you. Can’t make friends on your own? AI friends to the rescue. Can’t do the reading to write your college papers or job application letters? You guessed it, yet again, AI can do it.

But the nature of human beings as flesh and blood made in God’s image insists on this truth: We have been created for relationship—first and foremost with God, but also with other people. And so, the solution for the literacy crisis in our society can only be relational.

That is to say, talk with each other. Listen to each other. Try to comprehend each other. Read. Read with each other. Write and let other people read what you have written. Read the Bible and listen to the Bible being read. In response to God’s Word, pray with your words. Take to heart what the Book of Proverbs says about words, good ones and bad ones. Recover language.

Illustration by Ghozt Tramp, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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