A moment of beauty

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The other night my wife’s piano teacher came to our house to conduct a lesson.  This is not usual, I have to say. He not only teaches but is a successful concert performer who has performed all over the world.   It was a one-off.

At the end of the evening I asked him if he would be prepared to give us a treat – to play something for us before he left.  He chose the Chopin Nocturne in D major, opus 27, one of Chopin’s most famous and beautiful piano pieces.  He played it exquisitely., with feeling and tenderness.  What our neighbours thought of this wonderful sound coming to them through the walls at nearly 11 p.m I don’t know, but I hope it was a treat.

The endless torrent of bad news from around the world has made it  an emotional and disturbing period for reasons we have no control over and are not supposed to discuss on this blog. But this was food for the soul, the most beautiful of sounds resonating through the building and bringing with it true ataraxia.  I admit it brought tears to my eyes, beautiful, reassuring and uplifting.

We badly need more beauty and less uninformed partisanship in our lives, and that applies in almost every country in our roiling and disrupted world.

The apostrophe

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To The Guardian

I love Kingsley Amis’s response to a challenge about the usefulness of apostrophes: “Those things over there are my husbands.” Three different possible meanings.
Bryan Morgan, Worksop, Nottinghamshire

…and a butcher’s trick

To The. Daily Telegraph:

I once saw a notice outside our local butcher. It read “Sausage’s”. When I went in to point out the error, the butcher said: “Yes, I did it deliberately. It brings people like you into the shop. How many sausages would you like?”
Steve Cowling, Knockin, Shropshire., UK

What has this to do with Epicureanism?  Nothing at all.  It’s just that I see, even in publications such as The Washington Post”,  sloppy editing of apostrophes.  Epicureans should be, at the very least, masters of the language.

People with more empathy might be sharpening divisions

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You might think that a little more empathy would help to heal the divisions in US politics, but it could actually worsen the situation by increasing polarisation.

A recent survey found that those with a disposition for “empathic concern”, one of several traits that make up general empathy, seem to be more politically polarised. They hold a more favourable opinion of their own preferred party, whether Republican or Democrat, along with a more unfavourable opinion of the opposing one.

The team then surveyed 1200 students, randomly splitting them into two groups. Each participant was shown a different version of an article about a protest on a university campus. The article told the story of a public event with either a Democrat or a Republican speaker, which is halted by protests from the other side. When the police try to move in, a bystander is struck by a protester.

In a series of questions afterwards, students with low empathic concern took the same view on whether the speech should have been stopped, irrespective of the speaker’s party. Students who were more empathic, however, were happier to censor speakers they disagreed with. They did care more overall about the bystander’s welfare, but that concern showed a partisan bias too, being less sympathetic if the bystander wanted to hear a speaker from the side the student disagreed with.

It seems that empathy is a complex thing, a bit like an emotional contagion to a certain degree.  “I’m sharing the pain with somebody I connect with, so I don’t like the cause and the effect of the pain”. 

Moral emotions evolved to help us navigate a world where tribal solidarity likely offered an advantage in survival. Thus, it makes good sense that empathy might be in-group oriented.     (Journal reference: American Political Science Review, DOI: 10.1017/S0003055419000534.   Leo Benedic,  New  Scientist , edited entry).

My comment: Both in the US and the UK politics is painfully tribal.  This tribalism has long-ago roots and is not going to abate or disappear anytime soon.  Watching it I wonder at the fact that in my twenties I wanted to become a politician (a notional gasp from Epicurus!).  I would have made a terrible politician. Concern about the best interests of the country is no longer in vogue.

How can we be more like Iceland?

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How can we become more like Iceland? That’s the question we should be asking. This sub-Arctic nation of only 330,000 people beat England at soccer, along with Argentina.

And the reason for its success? A national plan, introduced 20 years ago, to promote clean living. It was introduced in response to authoritative American research on how drinking, smoking and drugs were ruining young people’s lives. “Other nations probably saw that report too.” But Iceland acted on its recommendations. State funding was massively increased for sport, music and other activities that made youngsters feel part of a team; alcohol and tobacco ads were banned and age limits on their purchase raised; parents were encouraged to take a greater part in school life.

The consequent improvement in the health and motivation of Iceland’s teenagers has been “stunning”. Twenty years ago, they were among the heaviest-drinking in Europe; now they’re the cleanest-living: the number getting regularly drunk has dropped from 42% to 5%. And a byproduct of this social transformation has been Iceland’s astonishing rise of 100 places in Fifa’s world rankings.   (Lesley RiddochThe Scotsman and The Week, June 23, 2018).

Years ago I was stranded in a snowstorm on Reykjavik airport on my way to London. Three whole days of non-stop partying ensued, with more alcohol than I had drunk in my previous life, shortish though that had been at the time. Snowstorm over and I was poured back onto the grounded plane with a memorable headache.  Nothing about my brief stay had been moderate. The locals seemed at the time to party for a living. Nice people, pretty girls, but too much for me.  I’m glad a Daddy Government drew the line and sorted them out.  You can do that most easily in small, homogenous countries.

Standing up for history

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To The Sunday Times

In 1960s Oxford I would see Cecil Rhodes’s statue, think how wrong he was and walk on. That is life in an open, tolerant country: bits of our history are sticking up everywhere, and we are free to admire, condemn or laugh at them. I prefer that to a country in which public art has to conform to a prevailing ideology.

Mike Lynch, Cambridge,  (The Week. 7 September 2019)

Well said!  As an historian I am aghast at the petty and narrow-mindedness of people who claim to be educated, but want to expunge the memory of those they don’t fancy.

Historians have to study large numbers of people whose views and actions are anathema to them. I spent a year on Germany and Hitler, and the Second World War.  Disgusting mass murderer, Hitler, but he is nonetheless part of history, and he rose to power for a reason.  Were we to expunge him from the history books it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that over-delicate students then refused  to learn about Stalin, Pol Pot (who?), Mao and others like them.

Cecil Rhodes was not a nice human being, but he is a fact.  Get rid of everything that reminds you of conquerorsand mass killers,  and public memory of them fades. Look around the world at the current number of ruthless would-be dictators and their enablers, and remind yourself of the chronic ignorance of history among the enabling populace who display an indifference to long- existing institutions.  There! You have your answer.  We are doing it to ourselves.