GOOD NEIGHBOURS

One of the marks of civilisation and peace is the policy of being a good neighbour. The nearer the neighbour is the more difficult this co-existence can be. At a domestic level we all know the irritation a noisy neighbour can be. A friend was plagued by a neighbour practising his bagpipes most evenings, another had a professional pianist endlessly rehearsing while we commonly experience the neighbour careless of dustbins or whose garden shrubs encroach upon your sacred soil. With a little mutual goodwill (an often elusive attribute) these difficulties can be brushed aside.

On an international level, matters are often less easily resolved with long and turbulent history sustaining distrust. For example, Britain has a currently open land border with the Irish Republic. Only since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 has this been possible as prior to that the Republic claimed Northern Ireland as part of a mythical United Ireland. British sovereignty in Ulster was denied. This enmity was sustained throughout the Troubles (1968-98) with Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey involved in gun-running to the IRA, long before Libya’s Gaddafi. You do not need to be very old to remember the mayhem caused by Sinn Fein and the IRA (Jeremy Corbyn’s friends); the murder of the British Ambassador in Dublin, the Harrods bomb, the Birmingham pub bombs, the Hyde Park bomb, the Brighton attack on the Tory conference, the murder of Lord Mountbatten, Crossmaglen, attacks on the City and hundreds of tit-for-tat atrocities in Belfast as the Loyalists understandably retaliated, Enniskillen and Omagh. We hope Ireland has turned a new page but it is not easy for Britons to forgive and forget.

IRA murder 21 civilians and injure180 in Birmingham in 1974

                              

A current example of the necessity of tip-toeing on eggshells is the furore over proposed increased political power for the Polish government over judicial appointments. The EU in Brussels, no doubt prompted by her President, ex-Polish Premier Donald Tusk, claim that these proposals are contrary to EU values and should be vetoed. Yet the Polish judiciary, unreformed since the fall of communism in 1990 is said to be slow and corrupt. It probably urgently needs a shake-up, and political involvement in judicial appointments is common enough in some other EU countries and of course in the USA. EU interference, championed by grand-standing President Macron of France, will be sharply resisted by the present Polish strongman, wily Jaroslaw Kaczynski. A clash will damage the EU and can Brussels rally neighbour Angela Merkel to this cause, given the delicate relations between Poland and her ancestral enemy Germany? Probably better for the EU to make its point and then politely to withdraw.

Need the EU make an enemy of Jaroslaw Kaczynski?

 

My second homeland, Greece, has a neighbour problem to an acute degree. She has four land borders; with Albania which claims Epirus: with FYROM which claims Macedonia: with Bulgaria which claims Western Thrace: and with Turkey which also claims Western Thrace and many Aegean islands. Of these claimants, much the most menacing is Turkey, falling daily ever more under the thumb of wannabee Sultan and despot Recep Erdogan.

Autocratic menace Recep Erdogan of Turkey

The problem is not so much with Erdogan personally, fanatic though he is. The trouble is that the Turks have “form” in matters relating to nationality and minority rights. It was the Turks who invaded Cyprus in 1974 to protect the Turkish minority in maybe justified response to a Greek-inspired coup. They were not justified in greatly extending their occupation of Cyprus a month later, after the military Greek government had fallen. They have zero justification for remaining in Cyprus in full force 43 years later. Although there was much to admire in the modernisation of Turkey forced through by dictator Kemal Ataturk in the inter-war years, the process was far from bloodless. The former Sultan, Mehmed VI, died comfortably in his bed in San Remo in 1926 but less lucky was our Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather, accomplished Ali Kemal, lynched by an anti-Sultan mob in 1922.

Minorities were treated with extreme brutality. Over 1m Orthodox Greeks living in Asia Minor for millennia were, if not killed, uprooted and shipped to the struggling Kingdom of Greece, the proud Pontic Greek community was displaced and mainly eradicated. Worst of all the entire Christian Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire (at least 1.5m souls) were burnt out from their villages, murdered by irregulars or driven by forced marches to death in the desert. This was the world’s first genocide.

Armenian girls crucified by the Turks c.1915

People get impatient by the hostility of Greek for Turk but history must be faced (the Turks simply deny genocide). Turkey has a long way to go before it can be considered a civilised nation and its neighbours meanwhile rightly sup with her with the longest possible spoon.

SMD

27.07.17

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2017

THE GREAT GAME

The Great Game has nothing to do with deadly power rivalry in Central Asia and about who controls the Silk Road, the Hindu Kush or the Khyber Pass.  It is all about the serious activities daily occurring at Muirfield, at Royal Birkdale, at Augusta, and at thousands of venues throughout the world, furrowing the brow of nations and giving participants 18 chances of triumph or disaster. In short the Great Game is the game of Golf.

Golf is called a game but it is in fact a kind of religion to be approached in hushed tones. PG Wodehouse writes comically in Those in Peril on the Tee, about how Frederick Pilcher and John Gooch play a round of golf, which they both desperately try to lose, for the hand in marriage of the formidable Agnes Flack, under the baleful gaze of lovesick but violent Sidney McMurdo. It is funny but a touch blasphemous. On a golf course you seldom hear peals of laughter only the odd groan, impossible to suppress, as the ball disappears in a dense stand of brambles. I recall guffawing loudly when my convivial partner Spike, at an otherwise jolly company golf day, drove off wildly hitting the ladies tee box causing the ball to rebound over the starter’s cabin and land 30 yards behind him. The spectators and other golfers were po-faced and silent and I realised I had committed yet another gaffe.  

The Scots claim to have invented golf and they certainly codified its rules. As Scots are known to be serious-minded to a fault, it is not hard to see where the reverence for the game comes from. One can imagine an early McTavish, horny-handed son of toil, trudging over the windswept shore at St Andrews, calculating how a fiendish bunker might be fashioned and gaining some dexterity with a primitive club and pebble. A later McTavish learns the arcane secret of the gutta-percha ball and profitably carries the clubs of the snootily well-born and famous. Our modern pro McTavish rubs his hands in anticipation of the arrival of bus-loads of Americans in vivid checks, eager to kiss the sacred soil and spend mega-dollars on the paraphernalia of the great game. Much too serious a matter to be laughed at.

The vocabulary of Golf is an early obstacle. When I first was conscious of the game in the 1940s people still talked of mashies, niblicks and brassies (no, not peroxide blonde ladies in Soho), all clubs of varying lofts. The names were sensibly standardised by the Americans but we still have eagles, birdies and bogeys (triple-bogeys in my case), not to mention fairways, GASP and Mulligans. It all adds to the mystery - not unlike albs, orphreys and chasubles in matters ecclesiastical.

Learning to play the game only to a moderate competence is a labour of many years to all but the precociously talented. Depending on your mood, psychological state or hangover, you are likely to duff this drive, foozle that chip and miss a sitter of a putt. These frequent setbacks must be shouldered with a philosophic steadfastness although even Tiger Woods has been known to throw away a club and many lesser golfers attempt to snap one over their knee – but this is very bad form. This is where GASP comes in, (Grip, Address, Stance and Posture), steadying ordinances murmured to yourself, but hard to get all four right.

Having achieved some small ability, you should then try to join a club. This used to be a great and snobbish trial but now, apart from a few famous names, most clubs will at least consider your candidacy as the economic crisis has seen membership rolls nose-dive. To be admitted, you will have to be “played in”, an ordeal usually involving a round with the Captain and an Old Member to see what you are made of. In my case I was made of soggy meringue and I committed the horrid solecism of putting my ball hard against the Captain’s so that he was knocked away rather like a cannon in snooker. If looks could kill, I was toast. Somehow however I was admitted through pure cronyism – a revered former Captain, a business friend, had kindly proposed me!

A green at Hampstead Golf Club

After 30 years hacking round a variety of private and municipal courses, my own club golfing career was short and undistinguished. I enjoyed my club in leafy North London with its convivial bar and gentle undulations. I later joined one in the Cotswolds. There the members were very friendly too but the course was built on the side of a steep hill making a round a challenge for alpine troopers, let alone middle-aged gents with cardiac premonitions. After moving mainly to under-golfed and baking hot Greece, my enthusiasm gradually fizzled out, to the silent disappointment of my eldest brother who has been a good golfer all his life and who would still cross continents to attend the midweek Medal.

I can understand his dedication and that of proper golfers. I once watched Tony Lema, sadly soon to die in a plane crash, and Peter Alliss, later to succeed Henry Longhurst as the BBC voice of golf, play in Scotland and the power of their play, their long drives and accurate irons bowled me over. For much of the last 60 years, the Americans have dominated with charming Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in their pomp walking off with all the trophies. Even Nicklaus became fallible however, taking 4 shots to get out of Hell Bunker at the 14th during the 1993 Open at St Andrews.

Magnetic Seve Ballasteros

 

Rory McIlroy, Northern Ireland's idol

  

Gradually the Europeans reasserted themselves. Who can forget the excitement of Tony Jacklin winning the Open in 1969 and then the US Open in 1970 or of the epic demolition of Greg Norman by Nick Faldo at the 1996 Masters? Drama was evident too as Jan van de Velde, paddling without his socks, threw away the 1999 Open at Carnoustie with a catastrophic triple-bogey at the 18^th and we could not watch Rory McIlroy go to pieces, shooting an 80 after 3 rounds of glory at Augusta in 2011, since redeemed by his famous Open triumph. After a wait of 65 years, Sandy Lyle became the first Scotsman to win the Open in 1985 and the first Briton to don the green jacket at the 1988 Masters.

The Ryder Cup, long an American victory procession, burst back to life when the continental Europeans joined it in 1979 and Europe has won the competition many times recently. Golfing talent is abundant. Great players like the mercurial and much-missed Seve Ballasteros have graced this event and curiously super-golfer Tiger Woods has never shone, even before his private demons undermined his game.

Apart from these public highlights, regular golfers the world over enjoy smart club-houses, beautiful courses and convivial company (although golf bores do pop up) - and they get away from their spouses. I now depend on my TV for viewing golf and I regularly play Nintendo WII golf with my lovely wife. We are well matched, both unable to better a 4-under-par round and blissfully I do not have to don windcheater, waterproof trousers and lug caddie carts and bellow “Fore!” as my drive slices to the wrong fairway. Currently (2011) my namesake Luke holds the World No1 spot and I bask in reflected glory. Although I cannot prove it, I am quietly convinced he is a 6^th cousin twice removed.

This year in 2017 the Open is at Royal Birkdale and my money is (unreliably) on Danny Willett, Masters winner in 2016, or Justin Rose. Keep your heads down!

SMD

1.6.11 and 20.07.17

Copyright © Sidney Donald 2011 and 2017

HUMANITY AND BLEEDING HEARTS

In a recent Daily Telegraph, Bryony Gordon condemned the poverty of spirit of those who are already tiring of the Grenfell Tower victims and the painful dilemma over baby Charlie Gard. She is right of course - the milk of human kindness should not curdle quickly, if at all, and the Grenfell victims were housed in a combustible environment inexcusably. Yet I do not accept that we are obliged to take upon us all the sins of the world (that, I believe, was Another Chap’s chosen role); we help our fellow-humans as much as possible but there are limits to the material aid we can provide and we jib at giving them an open invitation to share our own crowded shores.

Grenfell Tower blaze kills 80

The pressing problems of the indigenous poor, the displaced and the armies of migrants are challenging but are capable of rational solution. No group can claim a monopoly of conscience or feelings of pity.  The great engine of progress in our society is economic growth. If growth can be achieved, our poor will be relaunched on a sea of prosperity, their benefits increased and new employment opportunities will open up. The genuinely displaced, those actually homeless from the wars in Syria for example, are refugees and must be given humanitarian shelter under UN guidelines. The UK will of course readily take her due share.

Migrants trudge through Central Europe

 The migrant army is fleeing the chronic poverty, corruption, instability and violence of their own societies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. These unfortunates are economic refugees, merely seeking a better life. We owe them absolutely nothing other than our natural compassion but we will treat them fairly if they reach our country. Our border security is as porous as the rest of the EU. Economic migrants should in time be repatriated to their countries of origin, if practicable, and our government’s efforts concentrated on improving the economic and social systems of those states, admittedly a grindingly long-term policy target.

The narrative from Corbyn’s Labour and the Left would take a quite different angle. Our native poor were created by the “exploitation”, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, of labourers by rapacious bosses, who are still at it. The poor deserve special privileges to lift them out of poverty and confiscatory taxes should be levied on the rich to narrow the wealth gap so that all end up equally miserable and dependent on the Socialist government. The Grenfell Tower disaster is branded as “social murder”.  The notorious politics of envy and class hate runs riot, Marxist claptrap is presented as self-evident fact and Corbyn’s star is currently in the ascendant.

Soon to be our nightmare masters? John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Living a relatively sheltered life, I could hardly believe that Labour’s Leftie views carry any credibility and I am appalled to discover that whole generations have been fed this stuff and swallow it without a single choke. My eldest son, an idealist in some ways but no fool, lent me a book which gained currency from its publication in 1980 and is taught reverently in many public schools and colleges in the US. I refer to A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

I am only partly through it and I find it hard going, so opposed to every fibre in my body is the Zinn theology. He preaches the merits of the underdog, the underclass exploited by their superiors. Thus he paints a bucolic idyll of native Indian life destroyed by the Europeans, an account of the suffering of the black Africans and the horrors of slavery, descriptions of poor whites bullied by colonial masters, of the revolutionary impetus against the British with the propertied classes keeping control, on through Jacksonian era rent and labour agitation, Civil War, Reconstruction, robber barons and early trade unions, the later struggles of factory workers and women.

All this is no doubt well-researched but it is all slanted towards the Socialist cause. This picture of American history is distorted. In Britain, as in the US, history is made by leadership and decisive action by men of substance like Nelson, Wellington, Peel, Gladstone and Churchill, not to mention a later heroine, Thatcher.  Zinn (and Corbyn) reduce ordinary citizens to being victims living under oppression. It is nonsense – the great achievements of recent US democracy needed the oratory of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King; the legislative cunning and persuasiveness of LBJ and the populist clarity of Reagan.

Truly, the mettle of Britain has been sadly weakened. Nobody admires the dignified “stiff upper lip” any more. The tragic death of Princess Diana in 1997 triggered off an orgy of self-indulgent grief and since then every celebrity’s passing and every life cut short brings out flowers and teddy bears from hysterical strangers. Even Theresa May thought it “human” to admit to blubbing when she fouled up the recent election. For goodness sake, take a grip!  

The Conservative (and indeed the Liberal Democratic) national vision needs to be proclaimed with passion by its leaders. Cameron fell short and Theresa May has betrayed her inadequacy. In our topsy-turvy world maybe an odd-ball like Boris Johnson (or even solid David Davis) with oodles of personality could rise to the challenge. The electorate needs to be wooed and inspired, amused and impressed by its politicians, not patronised.

Is Boris the man?

Save us from patronising Labour, – I remember wincing years ago whenever Scargill referred to the miners as “the lads” – may we present a compelling contrast to their categorisation of us as “victims”. Let us bury for ever their neo-Stalinism and fight for an open society, trading freely, competing fairly, prospering together and living comfortably within our own institutional skin.

SMD

17.07.2017

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2017

A TASTE OF FRANCE

I live most of the year in Folkestone, Kent and as I stroll down The Leas, the grassy promenade of this historic town, I can gaze over the narrow English Channel to the coastal settlements and fields of France some 25 miles away. I find this glimpse tantalising, so near and yet…; I know France and England to be quite different societies, fashioned by their unique histories and imbued with wholly dissimilar views on many key issues. Both have huge merits and contribute enormously to global felicity but their proximity can mislead if the observer assumes nearness in space equates to nearness in fundamental attitudes.

National Heroine of France - Joan of Arc

  

The French are idealistic yet passionate, making a heroine of brave, driven, perhaps unhinged Joan of Arc, betrayed by her own countrymen and doomed to a martyr’s death. The English have no such recognised hero but a representative figure might be Oliver Cromwell, pragmatic, decisive and single-minded, who flattened his enemies and died in his bed - a striking contrast.

For many centuries France possessed the richest culture in Europe. In poetry from the early 12^th century epic The Song of Roland, through to the three 17^th century dramatic giants Corneille, Racine (yawn, yawn) and Molière, with a later great flowering with Hugo, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Apollinaire. Unmatched prose has flowed from Gallic pens too, the musings of Montaigne and Pascal, the seminal novels of Stendhal, Flaubert and Balzac, crusading Zola, arrestingly decadent Huysmans, the endless descriptive mastery of Proust with his Madeleines and Vinteuil’s Sonata. How much there is to admire in the powerful Voyage au bout de la Nuit by maverick Céline, in the exquisite sensitivity of Gide, the sardonic conservatism of Montherlant and the coolly radical Albert Camus!

Victor Hugo

Marcel Proust

  

While England slept, France produced the baroque music of Lully, Rameau and Charpentier giving way to romantic Schumann, Gounod and Berlioz to be followed by the later Debussy, Ravel and Fauré. Her philosophers were highly influential throughout Europe from Descartes onwards, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Comte and Bergson and the modern figures of Barthes, Lévi-Strauss and Foucault. Painters like Poussin, rococo Fragonard and Boucher, Ingres, David, Courbet, Monet, Degas, Manet, Cézanne and Gauguin delighted the entire world.  I can only name the great, so dense is the achievement in so many fields. I omit vast tracts of distinction too in the sciences, in medicine and in industrial pioneering.

To English eyes, what is missing is consistent political stability with elites hanging on too long and triggering violent reaction. To some of us, the French commitment to liberal democratic values is only skin-deep. France did not reject Absolutism until 1789, and it did not need Lady Bracknell to advise us that it was too late to avoid the horrific excesses of the French revolution.

Charlotte Corday gives Marat his due

Characters like Danton, Marat and Robespierre, though eagerly romanticised, were a nightmare and there was much relief at the emergence of Napoleon. His triumphs threatened all Europe while France still indulges in Emperor-worship of their law-giving saviour. The restored Bourbons and the Orleans dynasty failed to pacify the fissiparous natives although there was some stability with the Second Empire of Napoleon III allowing the growing prosperity of the bourgeoisie. Another convulsion, with defeat by Prussia and the blood-letting of the Paris Commune, ushered in the Third Republic with tumultuous politics but also the cultural glories of Belle Epoche Paris. 

WWI brought searing misery to France, though almost for the first time Britain and France were allies. After the hectic and fruitful inter-war years, demoralised France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, polarising opinion between traditional nationalists who mainly gravitated towards Papa Pétain (but not so de Gaulle) and the Left. With Liberation, delivered by the British and Americans, France soon recovered but was hampered by divisive colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria requiring in effect a Gaullist coup to revive the government via the Fifth Republic.

France has since been well governed, notably by competent administrators from les grandes écoles. This elite organised French economic progress in the early Gaullist period but despite its efforts Germany forged ahead and French parity with Germany is a polite fiction. French diplomatic expertise is acknowledged by the senior partner in the alliance, but the EU diktats emanate from Berlin rather than Paris and are funnelled out via supine Brussels.

The political culture of the EU, protectionist, dirigiste, integrationist, and mainly Catholic well suits most of the nations in the Union, though there are plenty of noisy critics and dissenters. Only the UK has decided the direction of travel is not acceptable to her and is negotiating a hopefully friendly divorce. The UK has made the right historic decision as her political culture has quite the opposite aspirations.

I very much hope relations between France and the UK can find a renewed level of mutual respect and esteem. French lucidity, intellectual reach and French defence capabilities are admirable and in even lesser matters French food is delicious and their grandes horizontales are tasty beyond measure. Britain and France are entwined in a misty incomprehension, but each rather likes her antagonist. 

Long may the amicable rivalry between the Frogs and Les Rosbifs flourish!

SMD

5.07.17

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017

IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

As you progress upwards through the 7 Ages of Man, you soon realise that there are a number of ambitions you are not going to realise. In part this is because your talents, such as they were, lay elsewhere and partly because you were too damned idle to do anything about it when you had the chance and the physical capacity. In any event it is in an elegiac frame of mind rather than a self-reproachful one that I parade some of my now impossible dreams.

1.      Athletics. Nature was a little unkind to me as I was always chunky rather than lithe, plodding rather than graciously rapid. So I had to admire others from afar. As a lad, I fantasized about scoring that winning try for Scotland against the Australians just as Wee Jaikie Galt scored his in Buchan’s 1930 novel Castle Gay. Wee Jaikie had been a member of The Gorbals Diehards street-gang but had contrived to get to Cambridge and earn his rugby Blue. On the wing, Jaikie baffled the Aussie defence with his side-step and his ferret-like ability to evade and squirm out of tackles sealing his triumph at the final whistle. Well, Scotland can still beat the Australians (24-19 in Sydney as recently as 17 June) but the All Blacks are still an unscaled peak. But be patient!

The most exciting rugby player I ever saw was Richard Sharp, fly-half for England when still up at Oxford, who cut through defences like butter. His Championship winning try at Twickenham in 1963 against, alas, Scotland was the epitome of elegance and skill.

Richard Sharp touches down in 1963

2.       Hill Walking. I was brought up in glorious Scotland and walking in The Pentlands, The Grampians and dozens of other places was open to me. I did walk up Byron’s “Dark Lochnagar” at least twice but that was about the zenith of my achievement apart from the undemanding heights of Bennachie (“whar the Gadie rins”), a nostalgic spot for all natives of Aberdeenshire. But I can say nothing of scaling Munros and other such commonplace feats. I missed many a trick there but I was living in London- or that’s my excuse anyhow. Now in Folkestone, I would doubtless enjoy a brisk walk over the Weald but my dream hill-walking is further afield in the magical Dolomites which I only know slightly – those craggy mountains overlooking enchanted alpine meadows are my idea of heaven.

The Dolomites - a dream of heaven

                                           

3.      Singing. I love singing and as a prep-school boy I sang solos, being particularly appreciated when my voice darkened to become an alto. When my voice broke I inexplicably turned my back on singing and never took up a bass part in my school choir. This was another of life’s errors, but then 14-year-olds are not easily managed. So I have to content myself with arias in my bath and hymn singing in my car, well away from sensitive ears.

But how much I envy those choir members contributing so much to the great classic oratorios, masses and cantatas. A day or two ago I listened on YouTube to a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F7TVM8m95Y). What a magnificent piece, how devotionally intense, yet how joyful and how replete with flowing harmony! It must be an enormous privilege to be a member of a choir capable of performing such works. I am more familiar with Handel’s stupendous Messiah (were I a trained bass how much I would love to sing The Trumpet shall Sound) but the choir has rousing choruses galore culminating in glorious Worthy is the Lamb and the incomparable Amen. Singing in these works means partaking in some of the finest achievements of Western Civilisation.

4.      Writing. I try my hand at writing and I enjoy this modest labour. Sometimes I am pleased with my results but I am untrained and I occasionally muse that had I kept with my first ambition to be a journalist I may have been more satisfied (though poorer!) than with my eventual incarnation as a rather pedestrian private equity investor. Yet I am far too diffident to be an effective journalist and an isolated writer in his ivory tower is a lonely existence, so maybe my quiet return to writing in my later years was the sensible route for me.

For I know good writing and good writers when I see them. John Steinbeck surpassed himself with The Grapes of Wrath just as Thomas Wolfe had done with Look Homeward, Angel. Evelyn Waugh was never better than in Brideshead Revisited. Critics like Christopher Hitchins and Tom Wolfe could write like angels and versatile Alan Bennett enchants his British public with his dry humanity. I present the palm for the greatest writer of fiction to our hardy perennial Charles Dickens, whose work is admittedly uneven but whose bustling style and eye for character has brought us Mr Pickwick and hilarious Sam Weller, Betsy Trotwood, Little Nell, Mr Squeers, Fagin and Bill Sikes, Mrs Gamp, but most of all Mr Wilkins Micawber, nobly “waiting for something to turn up”. Here was real genius and truly perceptive writing – far beyond my feeble grasp.

The great Charles Dickens

5.      The Brotherhood of Man. Yes, this is a utopian vision and our present world does not encourage us much. Divisions, conflicts, hatreds and animosity run rampant. However I am reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and he informs me that Man is merely an organic algorithm and nowadays algorithms can be re-engineered. Before too long Artificial Intelligences will take control of our world, leaving the great mass of mankind in a secondary position, but made peaceful by genetic manipulation. All this is alarming and lowering as I had cherished the illusion of human free will. Utopia is thus a dream I will miss out on but modern science will not prevent me proclaiming the proud words of Robert Burns:

Then let us pray that, come it may, 
(As come it will for all that) 
That Sense and Worth o'er all the earth 
Shall bear the gree and all that. 
For all that and all that, 
It's coming yet for all that, 
That Man to Man the world o'er
Shall brothers be for all that.

SMD

1.07.17

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017