Latest news with #Diogenes
Spectator
6 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
How ‘cosmopolitan' is Lord Hermer?
The Telegraph reports that Attorney General Lord Hermer has 'been accused of asserting the primacy of human rights law over British government and politics'. Is he then a latter-day Diogenes (4th century bc), who saw himself as a 'cosmopolitan', i.e. a citizen of no one place, but rather of the whole world (kosmos, 'the ordered world' + polites 'citizen')? At one level, obviously not. Diogenes, we are told, travelled from place to place, rejected all conventional values, often lived in a large stone wine jar and performed all natural functions in public, like a dog – kunikos in Greek, whence our 'cynic'. Self-sufficiency, freedom of speech, indifference to hardship and lack of shame were Cynic hallmarks. Their aim was to build up inner resources, unconnected with worldly goods, that could be nurtured only by severe physical and mental self-discipline. Animals, primitive man, barbarians and the gods held the key to their ideal virtuous existence, which civilisation had wrecked with its notions of marriage, family, politics, the city, all social, sexual and racial distinctions, reputation, wealth, power, authority, literature, music and so on. The move to humanise this stimulating lunacy was made by Stoic thinkers who associated cosmopolitan values with a common, shared rationality, drawn from divine reason, expressed by, for example, love of friends and family. 'All men are by nature brothers,' averred Epictetus (c. ad 50-135). As the Roman empire expanded so successfully across much of Europe, North Africa, Egypt and the Middle East, it is not surprising that Romans such as Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius identified Rome with the idea(l) of a universal cosmopolis bringing lengthy periods of peace to regions often at war (as much later did St Augustine, in different terms). But modern human rights bear no relation to the ancient, and come at a very considerable social, financial and political cost, especially in relation to refugees. Perhaps Lord Hermer would be more suited to the UN, where 'no question of error is to be found in those for whom the height of virtue consists in the execution of their will' (Ammianus, 4th century ad) than the messy business of politics.
LeMonde
01-07-2025
- LeMonde
During French heatwave, homeless are on front line: 'We liked to sit in the shade here, but they put up a barrier'
By 11 am on Monday, June 30, it was already 30°C in the Paris's 14 th arrondissement. Two homeless friends, Christophe and Laurent (who did not wish to give their last names), had found a spot of shade across from a storefront closed for renovations. "Last week, I fell asleep in the sun," Christophe recounted, wearing a gray cap. "When I woke up, I felt really awful: I had heatstroke." Local shopkeepers and passersby know the two men well, greet them and offer their support, like Alice, a neighborhood resident, and the local pharmacist. Christophe, however, regretted the attitude of the fast-food restaurant on the street. Pointing to a small, narrow path that was now closed off but shaded, he said, "We liked to sit in the shade here, but they put up a barrier." Further on, at a bus stop, a homeless woman dressed in pink was surrounded by about 10 suitcases. "She has Diogenes syndrome," explained Eva Hamza, a social worker at the group Les Enfants du Canal (an NGO that supports the homeless). "She's exactly the kind of person we need to watch carefully, because she might wear several layers of clothing even when it's 30°C." But the woman does not appreciate contact with organizations.
Irish Examiner
22-05-2025
- Science
- Irish Examiner
Three ground-breaking studies on family lives of great apes... our nearest and dearest
Homo homini lupus est — man is a wolf to man Diogenes, 'the Cynic', rejected convention and lived in a barrel. According to historian Frederic Copleston, he did in public "what it is generally considered should be done in private — and even what should not be done in private". 'Cynic' means 'canine'; Diogenes and his followers, 'the disciples of the dog', held up the lives of animals as a model to mankind. Theirs was a moral exhortation, but studying the ways of other creatures can tell us much about ourselves. Aristotle wrote about animals, as Pliny the Elder would do four centuries later. Porphyry, famously, advocated vegetarianism: "When animals are sacrificed, harm is done to them, in that they are deprived of soul," he declared. Caligula's alleged appointment of his horse to the Senate appears, however, to have been fake news. Over the next two millennia, animals would be regarded as 'lesser folk', mere 'brute beasts', entirely unrelated to humans. 'I am no kin to the monkey and the monkey is no kin to me' a fundamentalist hymn proclaims. But the insights of Lamarck and Darwin would change that. They made us realise that the ways of animals are often remarkably similar to ours. Indeed, animal studies have helped us understand many of the peculiarities of human behaviour. Three ground-breaking papers, just published, concern the family lives of great apes... creatures which we now accept as our nearest and dearest. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, working at the Tai National Park in the Ivory Coast, spent almost 4,000 hours observing 50 chimpanzee mothers with infants under the age of 10. They found that 'attachment theory', developed by psychologists studying human behaviour, can be applied to chimps. Body contact between mothers and infants was one of the maternal behaviors examined in the study. Picture: Caroline Schuppli 'Attachment', the affectionate bond between a human mother and her offspring, is crucial to a youngster's subsequent mental and physical well-being. "Secure attachment arises from confidence in the caregiver's ability, nurtured by their high responsiveness." Faced with a strange situation, an infant will immediately seek the protection of its mother. But, if she is unresponsive, the child may exhibit 'disorganised attachment', characterised by aggressive or antisocial behaviour. Young chimps, the researchers found, exhibit 'organised' attachment, but they never show the 'disorganised' form. The black boxes show human attachment types. The white boxes depict the respective predicted behaviour of offspring towards mothers, given the applied assessments Another team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute have been investigating the behaviour of orang-utan females with babies in the wild. Analysing 15 year of data, they found that, just like their human counterparts, orang-utan mothers have varied and flexible approaches to caring for their infants. They "showed variation in behavioural plasticity … otherwise called maternal personality". "Mothers differed in how they modified their behaviour in response to their offspring's increasing age." They adapt their approaches as a baby develops and as circumstances change. Each mother has her own set of procedures which she uses consistently, "strengthening the notion that there is personality, specifically maternal personality, in non-human primates". 'Layered complexity', the repetition of phrases denoting particular entities, was thought to be a feature unique to human language. Now, researchers from the University of Warwick have identified similar structures in the vocalisations of orang-utans in Sumatra. This suggests that this complex linguistic trait first evolved in a common ancestor of both orang-utans and humans.
