“Numquam praestantibus in re pública gubernanda viris laudata est in una sentencia perpetua permansio”.
Sticking with what they think has never helped political leaders.
We are in this mess for a good reason
Twenty years ago, watching big American companies move production to China, I clearly remember thinking “We will bitterly regret this. Short-term it will look innocuous, yes, reducing prices for consumers. Long term it will mean that China will be a super-power, challenging the United Stares. Living standards will become static, jobs fewer and worse paid, and the great mass of Americans will become bitterly resentful. Meanwhile, the US will have to spend more to restrain China, which has no comprehension of democracy or human rights.
As it happens, I was right – and, much as I can do nothing about it personally, my peace of mind is roiled as I think about the implications for the young, who will have to struggle with what to do, short of another world war. China is ruled by a megalomaniac, and we know what that can mean. Thousands were slaughtered in the struggle against Hitler. But this time there is no powerful United States to shut him and his yes-men down.
Worryingly, the priority of many of our politicians seems to be to make the rich richer. The latter, however, by and large (there are some great exceptions) don’t care about the country. They have hideaways in places like New Zealand. They resist even paying a fair share of tax. Don’t rely on them to lift a finger to help resisting China, where many are making fortunes.
The forebear of native Americans
A man who lived in Siberia about 14,000 years ago is the earliest known person in the world to have the specific mix of genes seen in people with Native American ancestry, analysis of DNA from a fossilised tooth has revealed.
This suggests the link between ancient Siberian and Native American people is much deeper and stronger than previously thought, says He Yu at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
Yu and her colleagues dated the fossilised tooth, originally found near Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, to about 14,000 years ago in the Upper Palaeolithic era. They then extracted and sequenced DNA and compared it with sequences from ancient and modern Native American people.
Their analysis revealed the man as the earliest ever discovered with the specific mixture of ancient north Eurasian and north-east Asian ancestry commonly present in Native American people. The earliest previously known individual in the world with similar ancestry lived about 11,500 years ago.
It is thought that the ancestors of modern Native Americans first migrated to North America from Siberia at least 15,000 years ago across the Bering land bridge – a piece of dry land that at that time connected modern Russia and what is now Alaska. (Journal reference: Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.037. Layal Liverpool, New Scientist 30 May 2020)
My comment: Some years ago my wife and I visited a native American reservation in Utah. A more depressing experience is hard to imagine: few jobs, a lot of alcohol consumed, and poor health. We bought some artifacts, which mainly served to illustrate ancient skills, but not modern ones. The economic straits of the locals were very clear. Not a happy visit.
Self-image
I was ruminating about self-image – my own in this case – and reflecting on its importance.
The idea of oneself emerges as one grows up. Does it stay with you all your life? I suppose this varies from person to person. The purpose of this is to encourage the reader to examine honestly his or her self-image and ask how it emerged.
In my particular case I think it grew out of being sent to a boy’s boarding school at the age of eight through eighteen, and afterwards being corralled with males only and through two years in the army. I was only liberated at university (with a glad cry!).
Why do I say liberated? Because in most groups of young men there is the inevitable aspiring “leader” and/or bully, out of which gangs emerge and followers follow. The bullying at school was very distressing. One contemporary of mine threw himself in front of a train; another had what I believe was a mental breakdown. Too big to be bullied myself, I was nonetheless disgusted, especially since the adults shrugged. When I became a school prefect I made it my mission to crack down on bullying, delivering an impassioned speech on the matter to the headmaster. I may have been (temporarily successful), but who knows what happened after I departed?.
The effect of this whole experience was to encourage the belief in equality, empathy, unselfishness, understanding, kindness, politeness and putting oneself in the shoes of others. Of course, only an onlooker can say whether I, as an individual was successful or simply kidding myself. I made mistakes as a young adult, of course, but would like to think that I quickly realized my mistake, cringed, and usually apologized.
Whether running a business, working alone, dealing with acquaintances or neighbors, I feel that what I later understood to be Epicureanism was firmly implanted because of the dog-eat-dog behavior I lived through at school. I don’t feel my attitude to others has changed.
What about you?
A changed America
“The paradigm shift of the 1980s really was equivalent in scale and scope to those of the 1960s and the 1930s. Key intellectual foundations of our legal system were changed. Our long-standing consensus about acceptable and unacceptable conduct by big business was changed. Ideas about selfishness and fairness were changed. The financial industry simultaneously became reckless and more powerful than ever. The liberal establishment began habitually apologizing for and distancing itself from much of what had defined liberal progress. What made America great for centuries, a taste and knack for the culturally new, started to atrophy in the 1980s.
This conservative momentum – the Reagan revolution – kept charging ahead through the 90s and onwards. Eye-glazing changes in business and financial regulations gave oligarchs their spoils, while leaving the majority of Americans in a state of ever-increasing economic insecurity, stranded on the wrong side of a canyon of income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age.
The villainous masterminds of the story – people like the Koch’s, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, and Robert Bork, and think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, hid their plan to make a tiny number of people super- rich and replace FDR’s New Deal, projecting a veneer of philosophical and ethical worthiness that persuaded the media and the public that it would be best for everyone if business was less restrained.
This was achieved firstly by manipulating the boring rules and regulations that protect the public from predatory capitalism. Secondly, the rich conservatives ramped up the pre-existing spirit of extreme individualism and self expression that took off in the 1960s. The message was: “O.K, hippies and liberals, you win. From now on, it’s maximum freedom and individualism for all. You have your sexual and artistic self-expression by all means. You do your thing and we’ll do ours” (that is, make pots of money). Thirdly, conservative interests played on the longing for the “good old days”, manufacturing nostalgia for a public ready for calm after the tumultuous 1960s.
The book brings us up to date with the virus that has tested us and found us wanting. On top of the unaddressed climate crisis and the extreme form of short-term, profit-obsessed capitalism that serves only the plutocrats, it is clear that the current paradigm is played out. Support for Trump is a cry of anger and frustration, a cri de coeur from a huge section of the population who feel the promise of America has evaded them. They blame Washington while in fact it is the “conservative” plutocrats and money men who have skewed life to their own selfish benefit and then blamed Democrats and the Washington civil service. We have to restore the sharing of economic power and wealth we once had. Enough is enough.
(Adapted slightly from a review by Tom Krattenmaker of a book by Kurt Anderson: “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History”: (Random House, 2020)
Tomorrow: other reasons why we went wrong, not to be easily corrected.