Climate change inertia

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“For the media, climate change is Kryptonite. It fails to tick almost every one of the boxes that defines a story. It’s not new: it’s part of the background noise of 21st century life. It lacks a hard deadline. There seem to be summits coming up, but there have been summits before. The crisis also lacks a specific location, and what places there are – those that will be hit first by, say, rising water levels – are far away. It’s long on technical details, and short on human narrative – it lacks a clearly defined, single villain. Above all, it’s a bit of a downer. Plenty of news is depressing, but a world rendered uninhabitable by human beings? Faced with that, who wouldn’t rather talk about something trivial? (Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. His words have been lighly edited).

He’s right, of course. If he wasn’t, something really useful would have been done internationally by now. Epicureans know that if, for two hundred years, you have poured carbon-heavy gunk into our pristine atmosphere there have to be costs. No one, unless they are paid to say so, now believes that climate change is caused completely naturally.

So all an Epicurean can do is to fly as little as possible, use a car that doesn’t belch fumes, and generally make as small a carbon footprint as possible on this planet. We all , I’m sure, preach this and believe it – actually being disciplined about it is another matter.

Assisted suicide: at least, a step forward

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In a unanimous ruling, Canada’s supreme court recently struck down the country’s law that bans doctor-assisted suicide. The court said the law denies people the right “to make decisions concerning their bodily integrity and medical care” and leaves them “to endure intolerable suffering”. The ruling includes several provisions:

* Patients must be competent adults who clearly consent to terminating their lives.
* They must be suffering from “a grievous and irremediable medical condition … that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable.”
* Physicians cannot be compelled to assist those who want to die.

In its analysis, the court called the prohibition on assisted suicide overly broad. The existing ban had not been meant “to preserve life whatever the circumstances, but to protect vulnerable people from being induced to commit suicide at a time of weakness”. In fact, it has the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable. The decision is silent, for example, on whether depression or mental illness counts as a medical condition, nor does it include psychological pain under the criteria of “enduring and intolerable suffering.” The court suspended its ruling from taking effect for 12 months, to give the government time to amend the law.

My own mother suffered a miserable and heart-rending death. A terrible accident in her youth came back to assault her in old age, depriving her of memory, judgment and peace of mind. She was violent and no old person’s home would take her. We did our best, but my sister and I have lived with a feeling of guilt that we were unable to do anything to end it all for her. The option of quietly and mercifully letting her go eventually became possible, but any pro-active measure towards this end was, of course, illegal. Now we can only really remember our mother, not as the beautiful photographic model she once was, but in her suffering old age.

If a pleasant way of life is a basic tenet of Epicureanism, then it follows that doctor-assisted suicide should be legalized everywhere, with safeguards, of course.

Immigration: a viewpoint

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An extract from a TV interview in Florida featuring Rep. Alan Grayson, a Congressman from Florida, who is talking about regularizing undocumented immigrants in his State:

“We have a lot of people here locally who are undocumented and not paying taxes; now they’ll have to pay taxes. We have a lot of people here locally who drive on the roads without any form of insurance for their cars, a danger to us all. Now they’ll have to get insurance for their cars. So as we make progress in normalizing the lives of these people, whose only real crime is that ……they want to live here.”

Interviewer:  What do you say to those who are on the opposite side of this? I’ve seen people protesting that if we provide a path to citizenship, “who’s going to work on our farms?” 

AMG: Well, in fact, what’s happened is that the undocumented have eroded labor standards throughout the entire local economy, and that is unfortunate. There’s no practical way to solve that problem except to bring them into the local economy in the same way that everyone else is.  The result of that is that they’re often not paid the minimum wage; that drags down labor markets for everyone else. They work without benefits; that drags down the labor market for everyone else. And in general, because of their undocumented legal status, they provide unfair competition to everyone else. Now we’ll see an end to that, as they become normalized and legalised”. (from Alan Grayson’s website)

Mexican immigration has declined as the Mexican economy has improved, owing mainly to the NAFTA treaty. This suggests that, if you want to moderate immigration you give migrants an incentive to stay in their own countries. All very well, but the very trade treaty that has helped Mexico, is also under bitter fire for having destroyed large numbers of jobs in the US. How you boost the economies of poorer countries while not damaging your own is a conundrum. “Aid” has more or less failed as an instrument. Unless the individual countries can change their own cultures (and in some cases their birth rates) it seems difficult to provide an answer. Epicurus would probably advocate staying in your own country, but not jobless, desperately poor, and discontented.

The internet is not the answer?

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In his book “The Internet is Not the Answer” Andrew Keen says that the internet started well in the 1970s and 80s when it was controlled by publicly funded technologists who worked for scientiific advancement and national security.  The rot, he says, set in during the 1990s, when control was ceded to commercial internet service providers, triggering what he says is a lack of common purpose, perhaps even soul.

The digital revolution, Keen argues, has served only to fuel the wallets and egos of a white, male, middle-class few. Not only are human values being discarded in favour of winner-take-all economy, but it is destroying more jobs than it is creating.  Amazon has eliminated high-street bookstores, digital cameras have killed Kodak, Uber threatens traditional taxis etc.  It has also to be said that there is a perception that the leaders of the digital revolution are (autistic?) geeks, unpleasant to work for and unaware that they are supposed to be serving human beings.  They are not known Epicureans!

On the other hand the internet has a huge role in education and supply of ready information, and it has been a blessing as weel as a disruption. It’s only twenty years old. The founders of the innovating companies will die, and maybe their successors will settle into workaday corporate mode, like every other corporation in history, swallowed up or bureaucratized. It’s too soon to make a final judgement.