Stoicism and Enthusiasm
It’s a depressing thought, really. No getting around it. It’s depressing and discouraging – in fact it’s tragic – to think that our best qualities are so inseparable from our worst. That (if this idea has anything right about it) we can’t even aim to make things better, do great things, right wrongs, improve the world, without risking turning into a butcher or an apologist for butchers. But it seems difficult to deny. Of course some people manage it, of course there have been improvers who don’t become homicidal maniacs or their lackeys. But the inherent risk of it seems difficult to deny – I suppose because the two seem to be actually the same thing only in different forms. What the Romantics valued as intensity, what Hume and James Mill suspected or scorned as enthusiasm. Passion. The Stoics were very wary of it, too. Horatio is a Stoic. ‘Give me that man that is not passion’s slave,’ says Hamlet admiringly, ‘and I will wear him at my heart’s core.’ But we don’t love Horatio, we love Hamlet, and with good reason. He cares – and not just about himself, though some productions give that impression; no, he cares about the world, about the something rotten in Denmark; he cares about love and memory and loyalty and truth. As he should. And yet what havoc he wreaks – as people who care often do.
No, the safest course is to take things as they are, to roll with the punches, to be laid-back, to eat what’s put on your plate. Montaigne knew that, living as he did in the midst of a bloody civil war about (in reality) nothing – disagreements over theology. But…
But this is where the hesitant good word for utopia comes in. There is some obstinate core in me somewhere that thinks we shouldn’t just take things as they are, shouldn’t just settle for the world as it is. That we should want to and try to make things better. And yet I know how quickly and easily that kind of thing can run amok – into orthodoxy-imposing and heresy-hunting, persecution and excommunication, and thinking of people as large abstract units to be shoved around or eliminated and then forgotten. It seems safer to cultiver the old jardin and let it go at that. But then – that thought ‘could do better’ returns. We could be less selfish, less greedy, less trivial…Yes and be more like Ted Kasczynski, I suppose. Ted, meet Osama; Osama, Ted. Have a nice day.
Give me Utopia or give me gardening!
Any other (in between) choices?
:- )
Lots!
I’m polarizing terribly there. Of course there are masses of in between choices.
So what is your point? I’m too obtuse to get it.
Is it that gardening is trivial, Utopias are dangerous, we could do better, and …?
What about all the more interesting, non-trivial things in between that might help people to make this a better world?
It’s not so much that gardening is trivial. But…it’s a metaphor for the self-absorbed and/or apathetic, I guess. Just a metaphor (via Voltaire, and I’m misappropriating it). My basic point is that it takes enthusiasm, passion, commitment, etc, to go beyond selfishness – but that those things can be dangerous.
You’re right about the things in between – that’s what I said, I was polarizing, and ignoring all that. On the other hand – there are situations where the things in between aren’t really enough. Building dams or irrigation projects or schools or hospitals in dirt-poor war-torn bits of the globe – that sort of thing. Selling all you have and giving it to the poor, sort of thing – Peter Singer type stuff. Going to the Mississippi Delta in 1964 to register black voters. Extra stuff – utopian stuff.
Universality is not something that is at all easily or readily attained- or even laid claim to, although the temptations to readily lay claim to it are the source of all sorts of conceptual gerrymandering to self-justifying effect. Unless, of course, one simply reclassifies gardening as a universal, which is a very popular move nowadays.
Just wanted to say that you’ve got one helluva great website, and keep up the good work. A must read for all those new leftists who never grew up with the times and are now “sucking up to tyranny” – “the enemy of my enemy must be correct” style – and whose oh so bleeding-heart democratic values, stop right at the borders.
Thanks! And thanks for saying so back here, where I can say thanks. Mostly people say so in the Guestbook or Letters, where it’s not etiquette for me to answer – which makes me feel slightly impolite, as if I’m ignoring them.
I think of ratchet wheel: when you can get enough leverage, you move the wheel ahead one notch; until you can do that, you concentrate on keeping the pawl in place so the wheel doesn’t go backwards.
We can only make real progress one little step at a time, choosing as best we can from the options we see at the time. Much of the time we are struggling just to hold on to the gains we’ve already made. Holding your ground against the barbarians can seem futile, but it is an accomplishment all the same. Not much opportunity for passion there, but it’s a necessary place that’s familiar to the stoic.
Yeah and sometimes holding your ground against the damn barbarians can seem just plain impossible, let alone futile. The impossible dream: not being dragged backwards. Oh goody.
She said in a sudden access of bitterness.
Yeah, I know.
Stoics must get that reaction a lot.