“In this fast-paced century, rife with technological innovation, we’ve grown accustomed to the impermanence of things. Whatever is here now will likely someday vanish, possibly sooner than we imagine. Movies and music that once played on our VCRs and stereos have given way to infinite choices in the cloud. Cash currency is fast becoming a thing of the past. Cars will soon be self-driving. Stores where you could touch and feel your purchases now lie empty as online shopping sucks up our retail attention.

“The ever-more-fleeting nature of our physical world has been propelled in the name of efficiency, access to ever more information, and improvement in the quality of life. Lately, however, a new form of impermanence has entered our American world, this time in the political realm, and it has arrived not gift-wrapped as progress but unpackaged as a profound setback for all to see. Longstanding democratic institutions, processes, and ideals are falling by the wayside at a daunting rate and what’s happening is often barely noticed or disparaged as nothing but a set of passing problems. Viewed as a whole, however, such changes suggest that we’re watching democracy disappear, bit by bit.” (Karen Greenberg in Tom Dispatch.com)

The conundrum:  Epicurus told us to ignore the political world.   One tries to, and this blog tries to  avoid party politics.  But how can one achieve, let alone maintain, ataraxia when the institutions and constitutional arrangements one took for granted and are there for our mutual benefit, are being casually overturned by people who have sworn to uphold them?  Soon it could be our ability to speak openly and publicly about our views.  Then we will ask one another, “What happened?”  The polis in the days of Epicurus was robust; ours are not .  We should be fearful indeed.

“The middle-aged man who shot dead nine people in two shisha bars in Germany last week appears to have been motivated by a hate-filled ideology. Tobias Rathjen subscribed to the idea of the “great replacement”, which argues that white Europeans are being “replaced” by an “invasion” of brown and black people.  At this point, the tendency is to say that such ideas have no place in our society and must be stamped out. And rightly so, when they lead to racist attacks. But an uncomfortable truth is that it is not only extremists who are worried about racial change. My hunch is that this is an anxiety harboured by millions of ordinary Europeans, who have seen a huge growth in immigrant populations over a very short period. In Spain, for instance, the proportion of people born abroad has gone from 3% in 2000 to 14% today. No replacement is going on; it’s more of a mingling. But if we don’t want anxieties to fester into strife, we should acknowledge this change, and be allowed to discuss it.” (Juliet Samuel,  The Daily Telegraph and The Week, 28 Feb 2020)

My take: In the 1670s my family arrived in London from Sedan in Eastern France, Huguenots fleeing religious intolerance.  There were tens of thousands of these Protestants, and grave disquiet about them among London’s cockneys, who called them “ Frogs”.   Was London being turned French?  Two generations later nobody was thinking twice about it.  The French quickly adopted British ways and made a huge contribution to the country in the arts, military, the silk industry and so on.

Fast forward and I am now writing this in Florida, which has a huge Latino population. Some people are from Cuba.  Others are from Central and South America and from Puerto Rico, which is a territory of the United States. Talk to any of them at random, and you really can’t tell them apart from ordinary Americans, aside maybe from an accent.  They love the country and simply want a good job and opportunities for their children.  In 27 years I have yet to meet anyone wanting a political “takeover” of the United States.  Indeed, they want to fit in and make a positive contribution.  Moreover, most countries need these people – to do jobs that no one else wants to do, to be frank.  In two generations………….

I think the people who write in the Daily Telegraph have unnecessary concerns, but, given its take on other issues, it doesn’t surprise me.  Epicurus accepted a very wide variety of people, including slaves and women. So should we.

Almost half the airline flights taken by British men aged 20 to 45 last year were for stag do’s, while 35% of those taken by women in that age group were for hen parties. The environmental charity Hubbub, which published the figures, urged the public to save money, and CO2, by partying closer to home. (TheWeek 28 Feb 2020).

We are talking here about the generation that is, or ought to be, most concerned about the environment and climate change.  I think it should now be a consensus that fouling the air we breathe by taking plane rides all over the place for two or three days of celebration is no longer acceptable.  If you want to get blind drunk and make out with a girlfriend of the bride, it can be just as much fun to do so nearer home, less expensive and less harmful to the planet.

Epicurus was big on moderation.  There is nothing moderate, I suspect , in this modern fashion of marking the wedding of a friend.  Call me a prude if you will.  I don’t care!  But I do care about the planet I am leaving to my grandchildren.

The EU’s negotiating tactics are shockingly “dishonest”, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph, a very right-wing publication.  For three years, Brussels’ negotiators have refused to consider British proposals for a bespoke Brexit deal, on the grounds that that meant “cherry-picking”.  Michel Barnier has maintained that, if the UK didn’t want to keep free movement or stay in the customs union, its only option was a free-trade agreement like that struck with Canada. Fine then, said Boris Johnson, when he took over: “Canada it is.” But now, with trade talks set to begin in earnest next week, Eurocrats have “shamelessly” backtracked: Canada suddenly isn’t available.

Actually, when they said Canada, what they meant was, “Canada plus an obligation to let Brussels set some of your rules in perpetuity” – over state subsidies, and employment, welfare and environmental standards. Which would undermine the whole point of Brexit.

Arguably, it’s Britain that’s being disingenuous, said Sebastian Payne in the Financial Times. The EU has always been clear that the UK cannot have exactly the same deal as Canada because of its proximity to the bloc, and the volume of trade between the two. Understandably enough, it doesn’t want a big competitor with an unfair advantage on its doorstep. The EU and the UK have already made firm commitments on such a “level playing field”, in the “joint political declaration” signed last October. The British position is a “fantasy”, said Will Hutton in The Observer. No state has total freedom to make its own laws. The closer the trade deal, the greater the need for “common rules”.

An abyss is yawning between the two sides, and disagreement about what a “level playing field” means is only the start of it. The EU also wants any trade deal to be dependent on allowing EU fleets continued access to British waters. Britain, for its part, wants its services industries to be given privileged access to Europe. Additionally, the EU wants the return of “unlawfully removed cultural objects” – thought to be a reference to the Elgin Marbles.

In short, it seems likely that “the talks will blow up shortly”, said James Forsyth in The Spectator, and sooner rather than later. “It is only once the two sides have realised just how far apart they really are, that the serious negotiations can begin.” (The Week  22 Feb 2020) 

My comment: Putin, whose fingerprints (and roubles) are all over Brexit and who wants nothing less than the break-up of the EU, must be watching all this with huge enjoyment, a massive grin on his face.  He may be unlikeable, but you have to credit him with being ten times smarter than anyone in the British government ( plus it’s supporters).

Why has this anything to do with Epicureanism?  Because a giant cloud hovers over the future of nothing less than the United Kingdom itself.  What a mess!  Any sentient being, observing this mess has a deficit of peace of mind, and no faith at all in those who are dictating the future.

Oh, and by the way,  the Elgin Marbles are glorious, but cleverly worked reproductions to fill the huge hall at the British Museum could be made indistinguishable from the originals.  I suggest Barnier is requested to pay for replicas, which, yes, should be in Athens.

Mount Vernon, Virginia

“A souvenir model of George Washington’s dentures has been withdrawn from sale at his Mount Vernon estate because of evidence that the real version included teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.

“According to popular myth, the false teeth worn by America’s founding father were made from wood. In fact, they were made from ivory and human teeth, at least some of which came from enslaved people. Washington’s own accounts reveal that in 1784, he paid six pounds and two shillings for nine teeth taken from “negroes”. This has been known for some time, but has received fresh attention due to the publication of a revisionist biography, which documents Washington’s mistreatment of the slaves at Mount Vernon”.  (The Week, 28 Feb 2020).

When you reflect on the lives of George Washington and Good King George III of England you have to wonder why the colonists chose to rebel.  All King George wanted was a contribution towards the cost, to the British alone, of the war with France that was necessary to defend the colonies.  The colonists wanted this protection totally free!  They seem to have thought this totally reasonable, although it wasn’t to many others. And now you have the future President Washington (very unpopular in that role, incidentally), yanking teeth out of the mouths of his slaves.  This is what the British taxpayer was apparently fighting for the freedom to do.

No one else is going to defend the understandable policies of the Good King , so I have chosen myself to do so, defying slander and contempt!

(Note to those of a serious frame of mind: this is a joke.  Sort of)

There is a new book called “How to argue with a racist”, by Adam Rutherford.  Writing  at a time when genetic services such as 23 and Me are being used by huge numbers of people, Rutherford points out that the last common ancestor of all people with long-standing European ancestries lived only 600 years ago.  Indeed the experts say that nearly everyone with British ancestry is almost certainly descended from King Edward III.  And every person alive in 10th Century Europe, and who left descendants, is an ancestor of all Europeans alive today.

Ancestry studies show that we are all mongrels and that there is no such thing as “racial purity”.  Every white supremacist and racist has African, Indian, Chinese.,  Native American and even indigenous Australian ancestors of some sort. The idea that small genetic variations in between racial groups have an influence on behavior is totally discredited.  Skin color is the most visible difference between people who are otherwise all remarkably similar, born with a wide variety of capabilities and potential.  Race is a social construct, powerful still and a curse, but something that allows one person to feel superior to someone else.

As for this writer, he claims to be descended from, yes, Edward III, also King Louis XV of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund 1368 – 1437. (a notorious fellow for the ladies, it is said).  This just shows how silly all this is, since is does me no good at all, and you probably don’t believe it anyway.

( A bit long, but very important)

In an essay for the Atlantic  – The Nuclear Family was a Mistake — New York Times columnist David Brooks argues that the family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many.  By “nuclear family,” he means a married mother and father and some kids. The alternative arrangement was “the extended family,” which included not only Mom, Dad and the children but also close relatives — cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents — as well as family friends.

The great defect of the nuclear family, Brooks asserts, is that if there’s a crisis — a death, divorce, job loss, poor school grades — there’s no backup team. Children are most vulnerable to these disruptions and often are left to fend for themselves. There’s a downward spiral. “In many sectors of society,” Brooks writes, “nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, [and] single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.”

The advent of the birth-control pill encouraged people to have sex outside of marriage. Women’s entrance into the labor market made it easier for them to support themselves. Modern appliances (washing machines, dryers) made housework simpler.

As Brooks sees it, almost everyone loses under this system. The affluent can best cope with it, but children have it worst. Brooks cites an avalanche of statistics. In 1960, about 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now that’s about 40 percent. In 1960, about 11 percent of children lived apart from their fathers; in 2010, the figure was 27 percent.

Adult men and women also have their share of troubles. There’s a vicious circle involved: “People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers  may have trouble building stable families. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.”

There is little doubt that reversing the breakdown of families, and its consequences, is one of the urgent tasks of social policy in the 21st century. We have been struggling unsuccessfully with it since Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later became a U.S. senator, warned in the Moynihan Report in  1965 that the breakdown of black marriage rates would have a devastating effect on African Americans’ well-being. The report proved highly controversial, and some branded Moynihan a racist.

But there is a problem.  The conditions needed to broach a debate over family policies strike at the heart of Americans’ political and cultural conflicts. Brooks writes:

“We value privacy and individual freedom too much. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose.”

Brooks finds both liberals and conservatives unequal to the task of dealing candidly with family breakdown. “Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; ‘go live in a nuclear family’ is really not relevant advice.  The majority [of households] are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families.” He’s just as tough on progressives. They “still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people.”

The larger issue is how we judge our times. We are constantly deluged with economic studies and statistics, implying that economic outcomes are the only ones that matter. The national scorecard of well-being should take a much broader view. How well families do in preparing children for adulthood and how well they transmit important values is a much higher standard for success.  (David Brooks, The Atlantic, lightly edited)