Happy 20th! is live

January 2014 saw the inaugural issue of the Society of Friends of Epicurus' newsletter, titled Happy 20th.  SFE is the first contemporary attempt a Humanist missionary work of this kind and is dedicated to the teaching mission of the Epicurean Gardens.  If you're interested in Humanism, philosophy, prudence, criticizing consumerism, living a frugal and simple lifestyle, minimalism, Zen, and critical thinking, please subscribe and share!

Haitian-Dominicans in a post-Mandela World

Mandela died.  He had been imprisoned for decades to free its nation from apartheid and racial injustice.  He fought the legacy of colonialism and racism that still has its grip on most of Africa, having become more than a man: an international hero that inspired all of humanity, a kind of people's messiah, the type that every nation has dreamed of at some point.  But he was real.  He delivered a promise, an ideal that people will forever hold in their hearts.  He seized history and made history.

Mandela will forever make us ask questions about what in my French literature class has been referred to as la négritude, blackness and Africanness as a political, spiritual and cultural construct.  Why is blackness so threatening to some ... and so redeeming and liberating to others?  Why is it and why MUST it be so political?  What is the history of blackness?  Why does blackness matter?  Does it still matter?  And most importantly, why must we ALL deal with la négritude.

In the first hours in a post-Mandela world, I learned that the Dominican Republic has passed a law to disown its Haitian-descended citizens, some of whose families have been there since the 1920's.  The Spanish-speaking Caribbean nation gained its independence from Haiti, not Spain, and has since sought to assert its identity as standing separate from Haiti, with which it shares borders and an island.

It's undeniable and natural that, since they share borders, many Dominicans have Haitian ancestry.  But the law that was just passed is incompatible with international standards of human rights and forces us to ask: Why is Haiti such a source of shame?  Should these Haitian-Dominicans not be encouraged to take pride in originating from the first free black nation?  One that was born of rebellion against slavery?

Haitians have not had a pleasant history.  They never had a Mandela, or a historical, national messiah of any sort.  Most of their leaders have been tyrants.  Aristide was able to do some damage-control but he did not, by any means, bring utopia or even normalcy to what still remains the poorest country in the hemisphere.

Is it poverty?  Does the specter of poverty, with its accompanying ghosts of misery, crime and illiteracy haunt the very identity of a people, the majority of whom have never been able to lift themselves from it?  Can we respect those who live in poverty?  Is it really that difficult?

The disdain born of class divisions (and boundaries have always been blurry when it comes to class and race divisions), and the agenda of the ruling classes, is so embedded in our psyche and even in our language that we hardly take notice.  I learned only recently that the word naughty shares semantic roots with the word needy; that need (read: poverty) and evil are such inseparable companions, always hanging in the same corners, that they acquired one shared identity, one shared word.  The needy are to be pitied; the naughty are to be reviled, but the sense of one word lurks behind the semantics of the other.

What if we rebel against language, against meaning?  What if we stopped pitying and reviling the poor and sought to solve poverty from its inception and from its roots?  What if we choose to not produce any more poor people?  What if we abolished the corporatocracy and raised the minimum wage ... globally?  What if we took a second look at the poor person that lives next door and began to dig into the narratives of slavery, of exile, of apartheid, of chains, of négritude, of denied opportunities, denied access to education, of living under tyrants?

Can people choose to not be poor when poverty is all they know?  Do they not have to re-learn their very identity?  Is this not a long-term project that requires new models?

History can not be erased, but there is a narrative of redemption in Mandela, a narrative of reconciliation where mutual distrusts, old hostilities and hatreds were successfully put aside and new paths were forged forward, a new national identity constructed with new symbols, a complete reinvention of the paradigm. Nothing less.  Mandela, of all people, understood the dynamics of how need demoralizes us, of how the needy come dangerously close to becoming naughty, and knew how much moral stamina was required to withstand the erosion of our morale.

Mandela died.  May he live forever!  We in the New World should look to Africa, for once, in search of inspiration and hope.

THANK YOU NELSON MANDELA !!!

"Our deepest fear is not that we are weak. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." - Nelson Mandela

... Just the facts

Not sure by what criteria the jury decided that Zimmerman was innocent.  This has never been clarified by mainstream or alternative media, not even by the vocal parties that are racist and hostile to Treyvon.  It would have helped to ease a lot of the anger and disapointment that many people feel if a clear and concise opinion had been published along with the verdict explaining why it was what it was.  In the meantime, I have to join my voice to those of others that say the whole Treyvon case reeks of racism and double standards.

Beautiful Epicurean Sermon

Boycott the Russian Winter Olympics!

In recent years there has been increased hostility against sexual minorities in Russia.  Attempts to celebrate an annual Pride Parade have been treated with the same suspicion that other countries treat terrorism and now a "non-traditional relationships propaganda" bill has passed, which will criminalize any positive references to homosexuality and any expression of gay-friendliness.

A recent push by global human rights organizations for a boycott of the Russian Olympics not only stands on moral ground but also argues that any gay athletes that compete in Russia will have to face the possibility of arrest and, possibly, torture in the hostile climate that Russian authorities have created, which is reminiscent of recent efforts in that other homophobic shithole, Uganda, to approve the 'Kill the Gays Bill'.

I am sharing this blog in solidarity with the movement to BOYCOTT THE RUSSIAN WINTER OLYMPICS and the Russian fascist state in general.

In fact, how do you say FUCK YOU RUSSIA in Russian?  That should be our slogan!

Wisdom's Full Circle: the Good Book

Age plants more wrinkles in the mind than the face - Proverbs 5:11, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible by AC Grayling

I've been recently reading the works of Norman DeWitt, an Epicurean writer whose research inspired and served, in great part, as the foundation of much of the work that we're doing now with the Society of Epicurus.  Dewitt has as thorough an understanding as we're capable of having today of what it was like to be an Epicurean in antiquity and presents the ideas of Epicurus accurately and from an Epicurean perspective.  One of the main problems we have with the ancient sources is that they're mostly indirect and often hostile.

It becomes quite obvious when we read DeWitt's assessment of Epicureanism that ancient Christians borrowed liberally from Epicureans: they acquired the Catholic sacrament of confession, which was originally not guilt-based but a tool for accurately diagnosing the diseases of the soul in the therapeutic process of applied philosophy.

They also developed the tradition of writing epistles to individuals or groups of people for didactic purposes, where the epistle was meant to be read and shared with the entire community and to be used in the teaching mission.  A recent revival of this tradition was Lucretius' Epistle to the Objectivists.

Christians would not have appropriated the epistolary didactic style from the Epicureans if they had not admired its usefulness and value.

It's a curious fact of history that Christians borrowed from Pagans and philosophers and that now, those that identify as humanists are imitating styles that have been thought of as Christian for the last 1,700 years at least.  AC Grayling's writing of a humanist Bible is the perfect example.  The humanist Bible, which makes not even one reference to God or to the supernatural but utilizes Biblical and Quranic styles of editing and writing, is an excellent example of how these literary traditions are recycled for every era.

The Good Book has its moments: it really does evoke that sense of wonder and reverence for wisdom's consolations that the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada and other scriptures sometimes inspire.

Many of the proverbs in the Christian Bible were inspired by the Maxims of Ptah-hotep, an ancient Egyptian philosopher of whom most Christians know nothing.  Many of the ancient and sometimes barbaric laws in the Old Testament were drawn from the Code of Hammurabi, the Sumerian predecessor.  The Good Book is, then, just one more in a chain of wisdom traditions, perhaps the one that is most relevant appropriate for our scientific era.  As the book of Ecclesiastes itself makes known from the get-go: "Nothing is new under the Sun".