​        The Jefferson lecture is probably the most prestigious lecture in the Humanities, and the question of reparations for slavery is probably the most contentious issue being debated in our contention-filled republic.
     Andy Delbanco, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of America Studies at Columbia University and President of the Teagle Foundation, will address that issue in his Jefferson lecture on October 19th.  If you are in DC you can attend; elsewhere, go on line.  Here’s how:
      The lecture will take place on Wednesday, October 19 at 6:30 p.m. at President Lincoln’s Cottage, a historic site and museum in Washington, D.C. A reception for attendees immediately follows the lecture. mm   Free tickets are available here. The lecture will also stream online at neh.gov.

Now and then I send a Newsletter to friends.  Below is the latest.  If you'd like to be on the mailing list, let me know at wrconnor1@gmail.com.
​            Over the summer I found myself often thinking about two issues -- the mental health pandemic affecting adolescents (and hence their education, schools and families), and  the revival of interest in ancient Stoicism.  It took me a while to realize that the two were connected: that Stoicism provided a powerful approach to well-being among adolescents and many others of us as well.
            These issues are explored in a series of postings on my blog at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
You might especially emjoy:
Why the Stoic Revival? entry .of September 13th)
The Best Insights I Have Found into the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis (August 31st)   
In Case You Didn’t Notice: There’s a Stoic Revival Going on (August 20th)
Happy  (August 14th)
If you check out these blog posts, you’ll also find discussions of
The Student Loan Problem (August 28th)
Monarchy (September 10th)
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Isonomia, Anyone?
Does the 2,500 year old concept of isonomia, , “Equality before the law” apply to former US president?  You bet it does,.argue  ASHA RANGAPPA and JENNIFER MERCIE  (Thanks to Dan Tompkins for calling this article to my attention.)
Ancient Sailing: The Washington Post tells the story of a reconsyructed ancient ship and how it contributes to our understanding of trade and military movements in the ancient Mediterranean.  The key, though, is not the ship but the comparison of evidence about ancient and contemporary wind patters – they are very much the same, it turns out.   (Thanks again t Jean Houston for putting me on to this story.)
 
Neologism of the Month: ”Manosphere”
 Jennifer Roberts.exposes the fake view of the Bronze Age. behind this hyper-masculiniyy; see the blog entry for August 27th/
A New Phase in Thucydidean Studies?  A discussion with Dimitris Doulgeris of thGreek newspaper Ta Nea, points t a new, more internationalist approach to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.  See the discussion on the blog post of September10th.
 What IS a Classic, anyway?
At Tanglewood in the summer the Boston Symphon okays Randall Thompson’s Alleluia  as a theme song. In Maine our favorite  Da Ponte string quartet has been doing the same.  I find it more beautiful every time I hear it. That makes it, in my view, a true classic – not just “News that stays news,” as Era Pound said, but news that gets better each time you hear it.  Here's a link:to a performance by the Oberlin College choir: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fMtFmNqKFI
Where Have All the Najors Gone?:
            The numbers are presented and discussed in an article  from the Washington Post. It’s not a pretty picture.  I’ll be discussing the figures in blog posts in the next few weeks. Stay tuned. (Thanks again t Jean Houston for pointing me to this article.)
Riddle of the Month:
            Why is a eunuch like a bat?  Answer in next months Newsletter, or  you can read  Athenaeus 10. 451b ff.
Quotes  of the Month:
When a sympathetic soul said to Helen Keller that it must be very hard to get along without seeing, she replied, It would be, if I had no vision.”
 
“We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein--
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Coming in the October Then and Now Newsletter
Word of the month
Riddle of the Month
Quotes of the Month
Best One Sentence Book Review, ever.
If you enjoy this Then and Now Newsletter, please consider forwarding it to friends and inviting them to subscribe  by email at wrconnor1@gmail.com,
And, please, send me leads, suggestions  and comments. Thanks!
Bob Connor
 

​A CONVERSATION ABOUT THUCYDIDES
from the Athenian newspaper TA NEA,
(in Greek)
    Last week I had an interesting conversation about Thucydides with Dimitris Doulgeridis of the Athenian newspaper   TA NEA.  Here’s a ;imk for Greek speakers.  It’s based on the publication of my Princeton Press book Thucydides in a Greek translation recently published by the Gutenberg Press in Athens.
     The conversation made me rethink one aspect of my reading of Thucydides, both in the book and in more recent articles..
       All this work is   grounded in American experience and problems, from the Vietnam War, through the demagogy of Trump and others , and now to  the Covid pandemic.  My hope now is that a corresponding reading grounded in contemporary Greek concerns, experience and understanding will emerge and be shared across national borders.  There is no compelling theoretical obstacle to such an approach, I believe, at least if one is willing to recognize the way Thucydides engages with his readers – challenging and shaping their reactions, rather than pontificating about his own views.  Once one starts using such a reader response approach, multiple readings of this amazingly rich work become possible, and new transnational and cross-cultural discussions open up.  I hope that will help shape the future of Thucydidean studies.

     Readers of this blog will know that a revival of public interest in ancient Stoic philosophy  is well under way. But why?
     The answer, I believe is straight forwaerd but two fold. First it’s needed; second, it works.
      The need is clear in many ways, not least in in the adolescent mental health crisis we are suffering through. ( The best discussion, I believe, is in The New York Times’  podcast .
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/podcasts/the-daily/teens-mental-health-crisis.html
       But it’s not just adolescents who are affected. . Adults, too, though  not necessarily in crisis mode, often report feeling that life is not as rich and rewarding as they hope.  They are turning t Stoicism fr help.
     Second, Stoicosm works:  Evidence: People are voting with their feet for a reason.  The evidence is coming in that Stoicism contains insights  that really help.  That became understandable to me when I read D. Robertsons book How t Think Like a Roman Emperor. It‘s a brilliant fusion of. ancient Stoic practices and modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Wee are now getting solid  evidence of the effectiveness of CBT.  It’s a good guess, then, that Stoic practices, in so far as they intersect with CBT are genuinely helpful to many people. .
      Laypeople like us will benefit from a look at some of that evidence, even if the technical aspects of it are beyond our reach. …. Rigorous studies are now being published, notably a meta-study, “ Neural Effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychiatric Disorders:“ recently published in Frontiers.  I have no expertise in this field but from a layman’s point of view the conclusion is clear and compelling:
     “  Many studies have demonstrated the efficacy of CBT in psychiatric disorders …  And a subsample of … meta-analyses was compared response rates between CBT and other treatments. The result showed CBT was highly effective for depression, anxiety disorders, cannabis, and nicotine dependence. And CBT demonstrated superior efficacy as compared to other forms of psychotherapies in personality disorders, bulimia, positive symptoms in schizophrenia …  . Moreover, much cbt
 addressed that CBT produced long-term persistence of therapeutic effects following the termination of treatment). A meta-analysis suggested CBT was related to symptom improvement in social anxiety disorder …  posttraumatic stress disorder. Similar findings were observed in depression. A meta-analysis found that there was the same effect between antidepressant medication and CBT at follow up-… ““  “
      It’s not surprising, then, that Stoicism should produce some of the same effect. But, is there any reason to seek such therapeutic benefits  through the study of ancient philosophy rather than through reliance on contemporary psychiatric practice?  Obviously one needs to be wary of substituting a private engagement with a Stoic text for professional help with a mental illness.                 There are, however, two considerations that underline the value of Stoicism.      First, , while the Stoics have their own phraseology, their writings are relatively jargon free and hence easier to put into practice. .
      Second, their testimony comes with real world backing, that is from people who lived more productive lives thanks to Stoicism, That  is most evidently the case with Marcus Aurelius, and at the other end of the social spectrum by the ex-slave Epictetus.  And don’t forget Seneca! They knew how to use Stoicism t live a better life.
        Be cautious, though! One feature of Stoicism not found in CBT is its fierce hardening of the body.  The goal was to inure oneself to pain and suffering. – the plunge into the icy Tiber, clothing too thin to protect from the chill winds,  gruel equally thin. No thanks!
     I mention these only as a reminder that Stoicism is not the same as CBT, and to ask what other parts of Stoicism differentiate it, for better or worse, from CBT and to probe into what more needs to be brought into focus about ancient Stoicism.  My hunch is that we are just at the beginning of the road of understanding Stoicism and benefitting from it. 

​     Americans seem to be as absorbed in mourning Queen Elizabeth II as Britons are.  But                             Why?
      Part of the answer must be, I suppose, must the style and elegance of the British  mourners we encounter in the media.  Good show! Or, to  put it more bluntly, good fashion show.
      Surely there’s more to it than that.  Three things, in fact, all tied to the symbolic power of  monarchy. 
     First is the assurance of stability which monarchy brings.  Things will not change with every swing of the electoral pendulum,  Monarchs endure – perhap not s long as the late Queen did, but a seeming eternity by American standards.
     Second, the British monarch is not, or at least pretends not to be, the creature of one political party, thereby assuring the citizenry that government aims to serve all its citizens.  Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic and at both ends of the political spectrum profess this, but the American political system requires the head of state also to be head of government, and leader of a political party -  an almost impossible conflict of interests.. No wonder, then, if Americans sometimes look to the British monarchy for an assurance they cannot find at home.
      Third, and perhaps most important, a  constitutional monarchy sends a reassuring message about hierarchy.  We can imagine a truly egalitarian society, but we have not found a way to organize a society without hierarchies of many sorts.  Again, we seek reassurance that the distribution of power along a vertical axis need not be a “construct” designed to suppress those of lower status, as some theoreticians warn us.   
     These are all symbolic messages, not necessarily backed up by facts, economic or social, or by the harsh realities of politicking.  Like most symbols, they speak to our unconscious minds as well as to our practical instincts. Yet they are messages we crave to hear – all humans do, I suspect, semper et ubique.  Without their presence in some form or other, citizenship is an anvious state of being, and political life looks acrss the icean for reassurance,.
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   PS:  If this is right, we need to think more rigorously about politics, ancient and modern, as symbolic messaging..
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A podcast on the  New York Times series The Daily for August 30th 2022 is the best discussion of this often-neglected and surely under treated problem.  The podcast builds on some important reporting by Matt Richtel,.notably  “ ‘The Best Tool We Have’ for Self Harming and Suicidal Teenagers” in the Times for August 27th.
          Here are six takeaways that I believe are really important for anyone who deals with adolescent (and pre and post adolescents) and for colleges and universities whose effectiveness is put at risk by this crisis. :
First. the HUGE upsurge in adolescent mental health problems is linked to the early onset of puberty in our society.
Second, puberty is not just what happens to the body.  It also revs up the brain’s search for  information about social relations, BUT the brain’s capacity for making sense of that information does not increase in a similar way, leaving the kid awash in material  that seems senseless, out or control and impossible  to manage. For adolescents everything may seem out of control, except their ability to infoict harm on themselves.
Third, the health care system is unprepared for the resulting mental health problems.
Fourth, pharmaceutical treatments may help in the short run, but they don’t do all that is needed.
Fifth, cognitive behavioral therapy works. 
    …   Don’t take my crude summary as a substitute for the podcast itself. 

​Over the years I have found it fun, and sometimes rewarding, to try two exercises on my birthday: first dividing my age by some factor and imagining what it would be like to be that age again; second, living backward in time.      
    My current age is not one of those wretched prime numbers, allowing no factoring.   In fact, I can  divide my age by 2, 8, 11,22, and 44, with the same numbers (in inverse order) providing my  fantasy ages.   Which should I choose? Twi and 8 are too infantile, even for me, 44 is too boring.  So it’s 11 or 22.  Which would YOU choose?
    I decided on dividing by four, in part so I could relish once again A.E. Housman’s poem:
When I Was One-and-Twenty
When I was one-and-twenty
       I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
       But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
       But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
       No use to talk to me.
 
When I was one-and-twenty
       I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
       Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
       And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
       And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
 
Part Two: Living Backward in Time
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         My other birthday fantasy is living backward in time, that is, subtracting my age from the date of birth, rather than adding it to reach 2022.  This puts me back into 1846, a splendid  year, at least here in Maine. It’s before famines  and revolutions in  Europe brought  my ancestors to this continent, but that’s no problem for the imagination.   It's also before the gold rush introduced the California fantasy, into our land, and before the Maine fishing industry started to go south, literally and figuratively, and depopulated this island. It's also before the War called away the young men  who never returned. 
       It’s a big  year for Edgar Allen Poe, for Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and  Dostoevsky.
   In music: Berlioz, Bruckner, Chopin and two Mendelsohns.
    Match that, if you can, oh age of debased taste.

          From Cemetery Man, a vampire movie.
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​     We all want to see  a college education more affordable. A college degree is a benefit (personally as well as financially) not just to the individual but also to society as a whole.  But basing affordability  on the current  system of student loans does not do the  trick, because the measures currently under discussion do not deal with the core problem.  In fact, they  are likely to make it worse.  In a few years a new generation of college students will have run up even higher loan balances as college costs continue to soar. Little brother will demand the same debt forgiveness his older sister received – only more so.   
No proposal that I have seen deals with the core problem –  financing an education through loans incentivizes colleges to increase costs and students to make educational and career choices based on expected “returns on investment.” 
      These are vampire loans: they suck the blood out of the education the student is seeking.   “Forgiveness” of such loans is like a Band Aid over an infectious wound. Things may seem better for a while, but the problem is likely to get worse. That’s just one sign that the student loan system is broken and needs to be fixed.
      How? By replacing loans with direct need-based grants, expanding the Pell program and instituting federally funded achievement based scholarships.
       How to pay for it?   As a nation we have now decided to allow colleges and universities to make profit-centers out of their athletic programs.  If the Big Ten can nail down a 7 year,  $7 billion deal with the media, with other  institutions trying to do something similar, then the money is there to start  fixing the student debt crisis.
       Tax the bastards.

   Ukrainian troops after a swim; The New York Times

   ​     Jennifer Roberts has called my attention to the manosphere.  In her  intellectual history of Greece forthcoming from Princeton University Press she describes the manosphere as “ . . a loose collection of malcontents from all over the world who communicate mostly on the internet.  United by a conviction that the liberation of women has resulted in a degenerate society, members of this community believe that the world around them is salvageable only if men cultivate a hyper-masculinity that will restore traditional sex roles.  Ignoring the Stoics’ unisex approach to philosophy, citizens of the manosphere have been drawn rather to their advocacy of cultivating a self that is proof against adversity and rejects the prevailing value system of the world around them.
    “In countless websites the movement appeals to Stoicism in proclaiming the superiority of men, who operate on the basis of reason, over women, who are governed by emotion. Action plans are provided to counter purported efforts to cripple society by feminizing young men.
     “One of the most remarkable books in the manosphere is the anonymous Bronze Age Mindset, a mixture of impressive learning and misogynistic ravings that was highly regarded and much read in the Trump White House.  ‘With the liberation of women in the 19th [sic] century,’ the anonymous author complains, “the West has given itself an infection and can be saved from complete collapse only if a few exceptional men dare to emulate the Greeks and recover the unbridled ambition of the Bronze Age heroes;  The author’s use of the term Bronze Age is not completely consistent; at times he distinguishes it from the Classical Period, but at others it seems to refer more loosely to ancient Greek civilization as a whole. He identifies the Greek state as the product of “free men accepting the rigors of training together so they can preserve their freedom by force against hostile outsiders and against racial subordinates at home.” These men, he explains, could never have subscribed to any abstraction like “equality“ or “the people,” which they would have rightly seen as deferring “to the opinion of slaves, aliens, fat childless women, and others who have no share in the [sic] actual physical power” . In Greece, “The real man was a man filled by courage and daring that all came from an excess of being,” an idea “shared by other Aryan cultures.”
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      Enough of you, Manosphere and especially  of you “Bronze Age Pervert,” self-styled author of Bronze Age Mindset!   You garble the Stoics, as badly as you garble the Bronze Age.  Isn’t it time for ALL  of us to work to embody the Stoic virtues of Courage, Wisdom, Justice and Restraint?

​      Don’t believe me; checkout The Daily Stoic, which claims 300,000 followers. Or do a Google NGram for word frequency in publications from 1600 to the present, with the words “Stoicism” and “Epicureanism” as  the search entries, and watch Stoicism surge from 1980 to the present. .Or re-read the excellent  essay “Turn Out and Lean in”  by Greg Hays in the New York Review.for March 11 2021, including books by  Cora E.. Lutz (on Musonius Rufus), James Romm on Seneca, A. Long on Epictetus. And, of course, he could have added many other recent books, including  Nancy Sherman’s Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience.  and Donald Robertson’s “How to Think Like a Roman Emperor,” a terrible title for a very valuable book. (The emperor is Marcus Aurelius, of course; he’s all the rage these days., as one can see from book sales: Penguin reports that sales of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations went from 16,000 to over 100,000   in a recent year – yes a single year!  
     That “grave and holy man ”  Hierocles (as Aulus Gellius called him) has made his way into the New York Times.  His concentric circles are still a way of living a better life.
     There’s plenty to argue about as one can see from   the article just mentioned, Nancy Sherman  “If You’re Reading Stoicism for Life Hacks, You’re Missing the Point”  in the New York Times for May 16 2021. The dark side is brought out in an essay  by Shavla Love in Vice. (Thanks again to Greg Hays who called it to my attention.)
    Before we dismiss this movement as a “mega-industry,” or as Pop Stoicism, it’s worth asking ourselves What’s behind it?  
    What’s your answer to that question?  I would like to include your responses. Post them here on the blog  or email me at wrconnor1@gmil.com
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