The uses of philosophy

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“Vain is the word of a philosopher, by which no mortal suffering is healed.  Just as medicine confers no benefit if it does not drive away bodily disease, so is philosophy useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind”.  (from “The Essential Epicurus”, trans. by Eugene O’Connor, Great Books in Philosophy series, quoting Epicurus).

Philosophy, or so it seems, has become a dry pursuit of the meaning of words , and lengthy investigations into the thought of philosophic writers, using long words inaccessible to most people in the street.  This approach to philosophy fails to “ drive away the suffering of the mind”.  On the contrary, it exasperates all those who want to understand, but cannot navigate,  the thicket of words.

What we seek to do here is to take modern issues and try to look at them, as it were, through the eyes of Epicurus.  Although he lived at a time and in a culture difficult for us to appreciate, Epicurus was a pragmatist.  Pleasure and peace of mind were his objectives.  They should be ours as well.

Britain’s land and housing crisis

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In England less than 1% of the population – including aristocrats, the royal family and wealthy investors, owns about half the land.  Putting it another way, with a population of about 56 million, half the country belongs to just 25,000 landowners, some of them corporations.  This reflects the chronic inequality of Britain, in contrast to other countries like Germany, France, Scandinavia etc.  (although British inequality is less than that of the United States).  Land is much more expensive than in other countries – it is in short supply.  In 2016 it accounted for half of the country’s net worth, double that of other similar countries.  It was the value of land that caused Britain’s net worth to triple between 1995 and 2017,  giving the landowners huge unearned income gains that far exceeded that of wage or the economic growth.  On top of that the EU farming and forestry subsidies have made existing landowners even more rich, thanks to taxpayer-funded financial aid.   (In 2017 the Queen’s Sandringham estate received  $900,000 in taxpayer aid).

On top of this, big developers are sitting on holdings of land that are supposed to be used for new housing.  But the developers have an incentive to wait as the value of the land continues to rise.  Returns in this way outweigh the uncertainty and hassle of actually having to build anything.  The country is, as a result in a housing crisis.

And then there is another infuriating development over the past decade.  The Ordnance Survey, at the time of the First World War, surveyed every corner of the British Isles for military purposes.  Out of this came wonderful, large scale maps showing public rights of way across private land, everywhere.  Under common law you can walk on these pathways regardless of ownership, and this made England a walkers paradise.  But the Tories privatised the Ordnance Survey, which promptly scrapped a huge proportion of the big-scale walking maps.  Thus , you might have a right to roam, but you can’t find out where they are unless you come across them by accident.  Gradually the public knowledge of where and in what direction the pathways traverse the land is getting lost, and we have a de facto undoing of the common law that has applied since the days of the Anglo Saxons, nearly a thousand years ago.  Thus does the government look after the interests of the landowners (who hated mere citizens and taxpayers walking across their property).  Epicurus would spot my frustration and advise me to chill out and cultivate ataraxia.   But you can see why ataraxia is in as short a  supply as housing for poor people..

Is climate change becoming too normal?

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A recent study suggests that we quickly get used to unusual weather, which has troubling implications for our ability to motivate people to support measures that will protect us from global climate change.  The study measured the literal remarkability of different temperatures by seeing how much comment they generated on Twitter. Hot and cold conditions both generated lots of posts, particularly if they were unusual for a particular place and time of year.    But temperatures quickly became unremarkable: after just a couple of years of strange temperatures, people stopped tweeting about them. The best estimate is that  people base their idea of normal weather on what happened in the last two to eight years.

Climate change gradually changes the weather people experience from year to year. Very large warming is projected for the 21st century in the absence of a comprehensive plan to save the planet.  But if people forget what weather was like eight years ago and more these unprecedented conditions won’t feel particularly unusual to people experiencing them.  Moreover, natural variability in the climate system means we could continue to be surprised by weather that seems cold, even when that “cold” weather is far warmer than the natural baseline.

The tale of the boiling frog has long been used to describe the dangers posed by change that happens slowly relative to people’s perception and memory. The apocryphal story compares a frog dropped into a pot of boiling water, who jumps out right away, to a frog placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated up. This frog never recognises the danger he is in and eventually boils to death. The risk is that slowly worsening environmental conditions lull us into a false sense of normalcy.

The findings suggest we may be at risk of becoming boiling frogs – but they don’t determine that fate. No one alive today remembers “pre-industrial” conditions, yet there are plenty of records we can use to give us the longer-term context critical for understanding climate change. We need to be aware of how our own perceptions of normal versus unusual weather might slip over time, and of the growing disconnect between those perceptions and true natural conditions 50 or 100 years ago.

 We need to keep the right perspective on the weather we are experiencing and recognise just how unusual things are in the historical or even geological context.

( based on New Scientist article 24 March 2019.  Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1816541116.Frances Moore, the author, is an assistant professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis).

My comment: At the risk of being labelled a Jonah, climate change is going to result in mass migration and inevitable mass violence.  Climate change has already contributed to the Syrian war and the chronic instability in  North Africa and Central America.  Faced with an escalation of the current trends I forecast that eventually everyone, even the corrupt people with vested interests,  will “get it”.   It will be a matter of survival.  Not noticing minor changes in the weather will seem irrelevant to a world turned upside down, its people starving.

Emotion in the White House

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The U.S Attorney general, William Barr has excused the wild behavior of the President by explaining, without a hint of humour or irony, that the President gets “emotional”.

Wow!  One of the frequent Republican accusations against women in charge of anything is that they are too “emotional” to be able to run whole countries or large companies.  It takes thoughtful, calm and knowledgeable people of male inclination to do that.  Hilary was accused of being a woman and therefore being too “emotional” to be President.  Can you imagine the field day her opponents would have had with her at the helm?  Every little thing that went wrong would be put down to her “unstable”, feminine disposition.

Of course, all this sexism is nonsense.  However, it seems that Mr. Barr has inadvertently given a good reason for demanding Trump’s resignation, not necessarily for collusion, obstruction or shady dealings but for being emotional.   Mr. Barr is clearly stating, as Attorney general, that Trump is unfit for his job.