Bull by Franz Marc, 1911. Public Domain. Growing up in a village I was born in a Greek village where land and food self-sufficiency were everything. My father had a few strips of land where he raised enough food for his family and the family of his brother who lost his life during the war years of the 1940s. My father cultivated wheat, barley, lentils, vine grapes for wine, and olive trees for oil. Animals made our lives possible – and easier. We had a mule, a donkey, goats, sheep, chickens, dogs and cats. I learned to respect and love these animals. I could not conceive life without them.  My most interesting agrarian memory comes from our harvesting of grapes during the heat of Summer in late August. My sisters and cousins would fill wicker baskets with ripe bunches of white, blue and red grapes, load them on the donkey, and my younger cousin, George, and I would take them home. We would unload the baskets and pour the grapes into the linos, a rectangular ...

The reign of the plague The 2020 corona virus pandemic is not merely killing countless people. It is also having invisible but deleterious effects: psychological, political, and intellectual. Some people cannot cope with the severe economic effects of the plague, the constant barrage of bad news, and of being alone and isolated. They probably commit  suicide . Others enter realms of fantasy and conspiracy. And still others, who know how to oil the wheels of power and influence, are taking advantage of America’s corrupt Trump administration. It’s like we are back to the dark ages when religious superstition, oppression, ignorance and oligarchy dominated life and politics.  In 2020, our first sense that things are wrong is our “distancing” from each other. We and all other animals are by definition social, depended on close contact and relationships.  Our next shock comes from observing those who know. Medicine men and women and public health experts, dr...

The Athenian leader Perikles honoring the dead during the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Painting by Philipp Foltz, 19th century. Public Domain. Prologue   Humans have had almost ceaseless difficulties in working and living together. Superstition, religious ideas, race, geography, ownership of land, and language engulf them so much, they often fail to extend a friendly hand to people who don’t fit their schizophrenia of who among humans is like them. This culture has been generating a deadly record of competition and conflict.  The terror of survival coded war and peace in human genes and societies.  The sixth century BCE Greek natural philosopher Herakleitos praised war as the father and king of everything. He should know. He lived in Ephesos in Ionia (Asia Minor), where Greeks had several flourishing independent states. These Greeks lived next to the Persians. War was nothing unusual. The Greeks had a war god named Ares. The Greeks struggle...