Just thinking through how our society copes with climate change. One way might be to bring back national service.
Why?
1) We need to train a generation of young people how to deal with crises, whether that’s food riots, race riots, or extreme weather. They will have to be physically and mentally tough, resilient and disciplined. 2) In general, we need to instill a war-time discipline into the country if it is going to cope with a drastic reduction in our quality of life. 3) We need a bigger domestic emergency force. 4) We may need a bigger external defence force as well.
What are the arguments against it?
1) It’s the first step to a fascist military state. 2) We need experts, not amateurs. 3) We need a bigger global peacecorps, not brownshirts at home. 4) We need de-centralised innovation and spontaneous systems evolution, not goose-stepping drones.
I think the arguments for are better than the arguments against. If you want the UK to be at a forefront of a global solution to food shortages, helping other states that are failing, then you will need an even bigger armed forces.
Our country will need to become much more disciplined very quickly, and I think national service is one step towards that.
I wonder if this could become part of the Resilience programme which Martin Seligman developed, and which the government is now piloting in some schools in the UK.
That programme is based on the assumption of an affluent society. But it could easily be adapted to a much more Stoical sense of resilience - how to survive and stay positive, engaged and ethical in a crisis-prone society.
By the way, just as a supplement to my last post, Lovelock picked the wrong name for his earth goddess. He should really have called her Demeter.
The narrative he says will occur - the goddess of the earth gets angry with the pesky human population, and turns her face from us, leaving the earth a wilderness - was told by the ancient Greeks.
Demeter loses her daughter, and she goes into mourning. The earth becomes a wasteland:
"Then she caused a most dreadful and cruel year for mankind over the all-nourishing earth: the ground would not make the seed sprout, for rich-crowned Demeter kept it hid. In the fields the oxen drew many a curved plough in vain, and much white barley was cast upon the land without avail."
The humans try to propitiate the goddess through the Eleusinian Mysteries, and finally she comes out of mourning, and we are re-born, as children of the goddess.
This ancient myth was one of the most sacred myths for the Greeks. It was the mythical foundation of many of the greatest tragedies, such as Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus and Aeschylus' Eumenides. It was also the basis of their most sacred religious festival, the Eleusinian Mysteries.
These tragedies, and the mysteries, taught the Greeks the same basic fact that we are now about to learn, most bitterly: civilisation depends on the benevolence of nature. If we forget that, we are heading for a fall.
You can read the ancient hymn to Demeter, which tells the story of the Mysteries, here.
Spent the afternoon at a water-park in Dubai, mainly reading Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road .
If there’s ever a book I don’t recommend reading in a water-park in Dubai, its Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road.
The book is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which some unspecified ecological disaster led to the sun being covered behind dust or ashes, leaving the earth in perpetual winter. American society has broken down, most people are dead, most plants and animals are dead, and most of the survivors are marauding bands of cannibals.
In this horrendous environment, a man and his son travel a road, trying to stay alive and get south, where they hope some form of human society may have survived.
Reading it makes me wonder if the so-called ‘politics of well-being’ may be hugely presumptuous.
Geoff Mulgan said this century would be defined by the politics of well-being. Lots of others are involved in this emerging politics - Lord Layard, Richard Reeves of Demos, Martin Seligman, Oliver James, NEF, and in a small way I am too, that’s why I named my blog www.politicsofwellbeing.com
But the main idea of the politics of well-being is western societies are safe and affluent, therefore can afford to turn their attention to higher transcendent goods like inner peace and so on.
Then you read a book like The Road , or like James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia , and you wonder…
What if this century isn’t about well-being at all? What if it’s mainly about ecological disaster, food shortages, water shortages, extreme weather, burnt out fields, societies breaking down?
James Lovelock predicted that the global population go from 10 billion to 1 billion in the next 90 years, because of food shortages. The hotter earth will not have enough arable land to support a population of 10 billion.
If people don’t have enough food, they will eat each other. That is the grim message of McCarthy’s book. Civilisation will break down.
In this sort of situation, the question becomes ‘how can states prevent themselves from breaking down’?
They need two things - food and security. They need to be able to protect their borders from the huge amounts of people who will migrate in search of food, and from other states hunting in search of food. And they need enough arable land to make their own food.
The UK as a society, in such an apocalyptic future, would have a chance of surviving, because its institutions are strong, and its people are (one hopes) good at coping in crises and not eating each other.
But if we are facing huge food shortages in the future, then is there an argument for controlling or even stopping immigration? Partly because we can only take a population that we can support with our own land, and partly because I am not sure how a multi-cultural society copes under extreme stress…
Do you think liberalism survives climate change? Or that the open society survives climate change? I don’t think they do.
Like I said, not a great beach book…but a great book nonetheless.
There are probably around 200 people in the world who describe themselves as Stoics, including me. Why choose to follow such an obscure and minority philosophy? Is it an act of willful perversity, like supporting Norwich FC?
If you are a Westerner, and are spiritually inclined, you have a number of options before you.
Christianity
First of all, you can decide that the Western spiritual tradition is Christianity, and your place is therefore in that herd, under the protection of the Good Shepherd.
You don't have to be an idiot to make this choice. Some very intelligent and culturally aware people have, after much deliberation and wandering, decided to join the Church. I'm thinking particularly of TS Eliot and Coleridge, in some ways the two greatest minds of their respective generations.
Both of them came to the Church from positions of heterodoxy, and were highly aware of non-Christian traditions. Eliot, for example, taught himself Sanskrit, and chose to end his Wasteland with words from the Upanishads. But he resolved the spiritual crisis that that poem expressed so powerfully by turning to the Anglican church.
He decided that Christianity was the glue that held Western society together. It was the mythical and ideological structure that our individual and collective psyche needed to give it roots. Without it, he believed, we were destined to become ever more materialist, anxious, and spiritually bankrupt.
The role of the artist, he believed, was to re-connect Western society to its Christian roots, even amid all the progress, destruction and confusion of the 20th century. His great hero was Dante, who he believed performed a similar service for Western society amid the upheaval of the Renaissance - re-connecting Western society, re-telling the myth, re-opening the portal to the Divine.
Coleridge likewise, after long wandering and questioning, ended up declaring his faith in the Christian church, and asserting that the role of the artist or intellectual was to be like a modern 'clerisy', re-connecting us to the myths of Judea and Galilee.
I cannot do the same. I can never say that Christ was the only son of God, and that the only path to God is through him. I have tried to do that, but the words stick in my throat. I have occasionally turned to the New Testament for advice, but found scant consolation mixed in with all the talk of devils and miracles.
And then one turns to the Old Testament, with all its tribal bigotry and intolerance, and Christianity becomes even more unpalatable.
The Church experience I also find inhospitable. I don't like the hymns, I have heard about two sermons in my entire life that inspired me, and the communion is bizarre. I don't want to drink Jesus' blood, nor to eat his body. I'm not a cannibal.
And it is dangerous to assert that Christianity is or should be the bed-rock of Western society, as TS Eliot did, in a modern multi-cultural society. You end up seeing other cultures, such as Judaism, as parasites or alien bodies within the Body of Christ.
I am still a product of the Christian faith. There are ideas, phrases, that are part of me and that have helped me greatly - 'as you sow, so shall you reap', 'the Kingdom of Heaven is within' - and I admire the gospel of St Thomas, and other Gnostic writings. But that is mainly, I think, because Gnosticism is the part of Christianity most influenced by Greek philosophy.
So I don't think I can ever sign up and be a Christian.
Buddhism and Hinduism
The most popular alternative for many Westerners today is Buddhism and Hinduism. I think the visit of the Beatles to Rishikesh, to study Hindu mysticism under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was a defining and revealing moment.
Because just as the Beatles stormed the US in the 1960s, just as the American press spoke of a 'British invasion' by the Beatles, Stones and others, so we can speak of an 'Indian invasion' during the 1960s, up to the present day.
Like the Beatles in America, various Indian and Tibetan gurus have arrived in the West, and been greeted with the same kind of hysterical adulation.
Westerners have seized on Buddhism, Hinduism and Yoga as the answer to all their prayers, as the window for which they were searching out of their narrow and anxious selves.
I was also deeply impressed by Buddhism when I was a teenager. Of all the faiths and philosophies I read, it made the most sense to me. It seemed the richest in ideas and techniques, and certainly was far richer in practical spiritual exercises than modern Christianity, which seemed to be all about hymns and tea and biscuits.
But I can never sign up to Buddhism either. For the simple reason that I am not Indian. It is not my culture, it can never be my culture. I don't speak Hindi, I don't write Sanskrit. The ideas and concepts of Buddhism and Hinduism have their own deep cultural and historical roots, and they are not mine.
We might sprinkle our conversation with the occasional Buddhist phrase, talk knowingly about the 'sangha' or 'sunyatta' or 'monkey mind' or whatever. But we're fooling ourselves about the deep foreignness of Asian culture, and we will always be outsiders in this culture, always be the new kid in the class, sitting at the feet of the Master, nodding.
This brings me to the second main reason I cannot sign up to Hinduism or Buddhism. These faiths grew out of far more authoritarian societies than exist in the West. And they depend, to a great extent, on the relationship with the guru - you find your guru, and then you give total allegiance to him or her (almost always him), you give up your will and self-responsibility, and do their bidding entirely. This fits well with an Asian model of political society, in which the Dalai Lama was supreme ruler of Tibetan society, or Mao Tse-Tung was the supreme ruler of communist China.
Some Westerners have been happy to give up their self-responsibility this way. Western middle class women, in particular, have been willing to give up all for the Master. And, unfortunately, many Asian gurus, greeted like rock stars in the West, have been only too happy to take everything that their female Western followers have proferred up to them.
The history of the 'Indian invasion' since the 1960s has been a long history of sexual exploitation of naive western women by visiting gurus. This goes all the way back to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, about whom John Lennon wrote Sexy Sadie about, accusing him of being a 'dirty old man'. It goes all the way through Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Sogyal Rinpoche, Swami Prakashanand Saraswait, Bikram Choudhury, and others.
A survey by Jack Kornfield, the eminent Zen teacher, found that over a third of Zen teachers in the West had had sex with their female students.
You can say that this is 'crazy wisdom', that these gurus have reached such a level of wisdom that they can shag their students and it's OK, it's tantra, it's transcendental. OK. Whatever gets you through the day.
I remember listening to a tape of Sogyal Rinpoche talking at the Rigpa centre in Ireland. He was criticising Western society for being so materialistic and shallow, while Indian society was so wise and fulfilled. And the audience, of mainly Western women, were nodding and chuckling and assenting vigorously. This is the man who was later sued for sexual harassment of his students while being drunk.
Just because our society is screwed, it doesn't mean Indian society is any less so: the caste system, the fatalism, the lack of any developed concept of human rights. And, I repeat, it's not our society, not our language, not our myths, not our political society, not our concept of the individual and of responsibility, rights and self-determination.
'Tibetan rights' is a noble concept, as noble as the freedom of Tibet from Chinese oppression. But the concept of rights was as little observed in Tibet before the invasion of China as after. Petty crimes (such as, for example, not taking part in the worship of the Dalai Lama) were punished with whipping, and more serious crimes were punished by cutting off of ears or the gouging out of eyes. I am not for one moment justifying the brutal invasion and cultural assault of Communist China. I am saying this was not necessarily a society that we should hold up as a template for ourselves.
The same goes for Bhutan. Why does our society keep on sending people like Lord Layard to Bhutan, to see how we can be happier? This is an authoritarian monarchy, which only allowed access to TV and the internet a decade ago. I wonder if Layard would like to see a similar regime in place here, with himself as high priest of Happiness.
I'm not going to discuss the modern attempt to revive paganism. It's not serious. It's a bunch of people in Stevenage dressed as druids, hitting bongoes and mumbling words from Lord of the Rings. The cornerstone of ancient pagan culture, in Ireland, Gaul, Saxon Britain and elsewhere, was human sacrifice. Getafix and his ilk were mass-murderers. If you really want a pagan revival, you have to bring back human sacrifice. Everything else is just bongoes and Lord of the Rings.
Why I am a Stoic
The greatest achievements of Western society, intellectually and spiritually, were in ancient Greece: Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and their Roman followers - Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius.
Socrates gave us the idea of the autonomous self, learning to know itself, to be aware of itself, to challenge the beliefs that had been handed down to it by its society. This is an incredibly radical idea, that you should think for yourself and not merely accept the beliefs of your tribe or elders. And it was born here, in the West.
But his work was not purely critical. At its heart was the idea of transforming the self to bring it into harmony with nature, the cosmos, the divine. But you have to do it yourself, not by giving up your responsibility at the altar of some despotic Master.
Sophocles gave us the founding myths that enshrined these ideas, particularly in the late tragedies - Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, which are far more powerful and meaningful for me that anything in the Bible.
Stoicism developed this idea, and gave us practical 'spiritual exercises' that individuals could use to work on their selves, to transform their psyches, to bring themselves into harmony with nature and the cosmos.
Without the guiding influence of Hellenic philosophy, Christianity would have been little more than an animist cult.
The Western tradition is founded on the Greek concepts of rights, self-determination, critical rationalism and the other achievements of liberalism, which are unknown in ancient Indian culture.
But ancient Greece combined the achievements of liberalism with a spirituality founded on reason and on practical spiritual exercises, which the West has now taken up (albeit without much awareness of their deep roots in Hellenic philosophy) in modern cognitive psychotherapy.
This is our culture, and it is exceptionally rich. There is no need to sit at the feet of some visiting Master who has flown in for a weekend workshop, for a chant and a grope. Our culture has resources enough of its own, within itself, within us.
The Hellenic tradition was taken up and absorbed by Judaism (Philo, the Kabbalah), by Islam (Al-Kindi, Averroes), by Christianity (Tertullian, Origen, Clement, St Paul, St Augustine).
And it never demanded the absolute allegiance that Christianity does, or that Indian gurus do. That is why it was so easily taken up by other cultures. And that is why it is so appropriate for a modern, liberal and multi-cultural society like ours.
That is why I am a Stoic. I still learn a great deal from other cultures and philosophies - I still respect the Dhammapada, the I-Ching, the Upanishads, as some of the greatest of human creations. But I approach these traditions from my own tradition - the Hellenic tradition which is my heritage.
I saw Richard Layard talk at the LSE last week on the Good Childhood report he and others have just brought out.
He suggested that the UK needs a 'revolution in values', involving a shift away from pushing children towards success, and instead trying to help them achieve happiness. Success, as he put it, is a 'zero sum' game. 'We can't all be winners'. Instead, young people could be encouraged to pursue 'positive sum games', in which everyone wins, such as learning that helping other people is very gratifying.
He suggested that Thatcherism was part of the problem - it had created great inequality in the UK, and led to a culture of selfishness, including selfish parents who put their own satisfaction above their children's.
On the other hand, I read an interesting article by Chris Woodhead, former chief schools inspector, in the Sunday Times today, in which he basically laid into Layard, and said we should spend more time teaching children about the world, and less on trying to protect them from failure.
He writes:
Competition was the lifeblood of my south London grammar school in the 1950s and 1960s...Things began to change in the late 1960s. Politically, Tony Crosland, Harold Wilson’s education secretary, began his campaign to destroy grammar schools. Every child was equal; no child should suffer the humiliation of failing the 11-plus; comprehensive schools would offer equal opportunities to all...
In 1986 Sir Keith Joseph, as Tory education secretary, was persuaded that we should no longer divide 16-year-olds into the academic sheep and the less able goats. The GCSE examination replaced the old O-level and CSE examinations. Despite reassurances that standards would be maintained, grades rocketed and the politicians, I guess, realised they were on to a good thing.
He suggests that:
We have all signed up to a national programme of self-deception in which real competition in demanding tests with the inevitable prospect of a significant number of students failing has been banished from our education system.
He then takes direct aim at Layard:
If you have children at the top end of primary school, ask them what they did last week. The odds are that they will have spent some time on the government’s Seal (social and emotional aspects of learning) programme. In a typical Seal lesson 9 to 10-year-olds will be asked to fill in rings of a circle with, from the centre, the names of the people closest to them they love; of people they like a lot; of people they know quite well; and, the outer ring, people they know as acquaintances. [Editors' note - this is actually a practice from ancient Stoicism, which Martha Nussbaum suggested we should introduce into education in her book Cultivating Humanity - see my interview with her below for a brief discussion of it].
The authors of a report on childhood commissioned by the Children’s Society think that we must employ a thousand more therapists and counsellors to help our damaged children. What we really need is a little clarity about the nature of education and the miseries of man. Life is about failure and learning from failure. We do our children no favours when we cocoon them in a false sense of success.
We need more competition, not less as the report for the Children’s Society advocates. Why can’t we be more honest? Why can't we admit that some children will fail? When is education policy going to be rescued from the corrosive sentimentality into which it has sunk?
Who are we to back in this debate?
I think that, actually, they are both making a false dichotomy, between a culture of success, on the one hand, and a culture of personal growth on the other.
Actually, there's no reason why learning to be 'resilient', learning not to base your self-esteem entirely on externals, shouldn't actually make you more open, more prepared to take risks and to fail and, yes, perhaps more successful, while at the same time helping you not get carried away if you are granted external success.
It is when you have a strong inner anchor that you can seek your goals in the outside world in a balanced way, without getting too knocked back by failure, and without getting too carried away by success.
Nor do I think that, just because we might decide that education teaches things like values and cognitive management skills, that it necessarily has to avoid teaching a healthy pleasure in competition.
In fact, one of Layard's points is that schools should make sports more available. Well, the life-blood of sports is competition. But truly great sportsmen learn how to handle defeats, how to deal with set-backs, and how to respect your opponents and respect the rules of the game.
That, surely, is what our schools should be teaching - not that there is no such thing as failure. There is, of course. But that to have tried and failed is better than not to have tried at all. And also that we can often learn more from failure, in terms of useful feedback, than we can from success.
As for Woodhead's mocking of the touchy-feeliness of PSHE (personal, social and health education) and SEAL programmes, well, it's easy to mock any value system as soft. I imagine Woodhead would think the Lord's Prayer or the Gospel on the Mount were pretty soft if the government suddenly invented it. 'Blessed are the meek - what is this claptrap?'
I personally think, if we want to teach young people about values, then we should not mess around with psychobabble hatched by psychologists a few years or months ago. We should teach them the classics - the best that was thought by man and woman.
That would mean teaching them both values and techniques from the Stoics, the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, the New Testament, the Torah, and also from atheist philosophies such as humanism or Epicureanism. Most modern psychology is derived from these sources anyway, so why not take young people direct to the source, let them discover it for themselves.
You could call the subject 'Approaches to the Good Life'.
I don't think teachers should get too involved in the psyches of young people. Better give them the books, and the tools, for understanding their own minds, and then let them draw on it if they want to.
I also think 11 is too young to be learning about this stuff. Young people should be learning about it when they are say 16, when they really start to think about who they are and what they want from life.
If you get the chance, listen to the edition of In Our Time that went out on New Years' Day - it was a discussion on Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy, with Roger Scruton and AC Grayling among the guests, but it broadened out into a general discussion of what consolation philosophy can bring us, with plenty of thought about the Stoics and their importance to western culture. BBC broadcasting at its finest.
I just had a David Lynch dream. No, not a dream that was Lynch-esque. A dream with David Lynch in it. He was playing the Devil. He was sitting behind a desk, in this seedy Fifties motel room, talking to me in this threatening way, and as he spoke, his words would suddenly speed up, or the light bulbs around him would flare, or fire would suddenly burst from his hands.
In the dream, I was Dale Cooper, and I started to confront the Devil, and even mock him. I remember thinking 'fuck it, I was never one for this world'. Then he shot me in the stomach, like Dale was shot at the end of Series One of Twin Peaks. My last words before I woke up were 'why did you go and do a thing like that?'
I woke up, and for some reason immediately thought about how Lynch's work is often, really, about the Devil, in one form or another. The closest thing to him in American literature is maybe Nathanial Hawthorne, who is also obsessed with the Devil, in a very Puritan way.
If you read his short stories, you come across the same idea as you meet in Twin Peaks - if you leave the narrow comfort of the town and head out into the woods, devils and demons are waiting for you out there, to test your soul.
This is an interview with Martha Nussbaum I did for the forthcoming edition of the Stoic Registry report. I'll also publish it as a podcast for the Stoic Registry.
She's an important thinker in that she is uniquely bridging the worlds of ancient philosophy, modern psychology, and modern political theory, so is right at the centre of the modern discourse on the politics of well-being, and the role of emotions in political theory.
And she integrates literary criticism into modern political theory in a way that is also unique. Reading Upheavals of Thought actually persuaded me, after a long period of scepticism, of the point of reading novels.
Anyway, enough gushing, here's the interview:
So you began your academic career in Harvard in 1975...
Well, I started my graduate career at Harvard, but I don't regard my academic career as having started there, I regard it as starting in high school. I was already working on the same problems when I was 16 that I am now.
For example?
I was already thinking about the nature of emotions, their role in ethical life. I did quite a lot of writing on the tension between the aspiration to justice and the aspiration to love in individuals. I wrote a long play on that, it was actually about Robespierre and the French Revolution, but the main theme was love versus justice.
When did your relationship start with ancient philosophy?
It was probably when I was around 14. We were studying ancient Greece, and I was given a special assignment - the teacher thought several of the more ambitious students could write essays on tragic and comic poets, so I got going on Greek drama. I was also doing a lot of acting in those days.
How much would you say has changed in terms of the level of interest in Hellenistic philosophy, in academia and among the general public, since the beginning of your career?
You need to look at the longer trajectory. Hellenistic philosophy was absolutely central to the education of any cultivated person in Europe and North America from around the 17th to the late 19th century, so you did probably read some Plato and Aristotle, but you were much more focused on Roman authors. Lucretius, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero above all, were authors that really shaped the thinking of a lot of public life in not only continental Europe but Britain and the US. Stoicism had an enormous influence on the Founding Fathers, for example.
So the question is really: why did it go out of fashion? And it's really because of the influence of Hegel and Nietzsche. They were taken as guides, and they made Plato a much more central figure. People were also focusing more on Greece than Rome, and of course the Hellenistic Greek texts are just lost, they're fragments, so people forgot about Hellenistic thinkers.
There was a huge gap in the world I grew up in graduate school. Everyone was reading Plato and Aristotle, they thought that was absolutely central, and there was no study at all of Hellenistic philosophy. People didn't even think you had to learn Latin to do ancient philosophy, because it was clear to them that Roman philosophy was not worth studying. I was actually very lucky that I got my PhD in classical philology and not classical philosophy, because it meant I had the equipment to study a lot of the classic works of Roman philosophy -- including the poetic works of Lucretius and Seneca.
The revival of Hellenistic philosophy was very self-conscious. It was started above all by a group of philosophers in the generation before mine, led by Richard Sorabji, Miles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes, who decided 'well Plato and Aristotle have now been exhausted, they've been mined for their philosophical significance, we should move on and do something where we can make a creative contribution'.
So they got people together to have these meetings called Symposium Hellenisticum, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the first one, in Oxford. It was around 1980 or just before. They published a collection of essays shortly after, called Doubt and Dogmatism, which is quite a famous book. Then every three years they held a similar meeting. I didn't give paper at the first one because it was on epistemology, which is not my thing. But the third symposium was on ethics, and I did give a paper, and was on my way, because I decided to write book about it. Would you say there has been a revival in the general public's interest in Stoicism?
The humanities curriculum has still not internalized it. Look at the typical Great Books curriculum, which is two years of liberal arts study. That's where a member of the general public would make contact with Stoicism, but the curriculum still doesn't reflect the revival of interest in Hellenistic philosophy, it's still focused very strongly on Plato and Aristotle, and then it might go quickly over Augustine and Aquinas, but sometimes it still leaps straight over to Descartes. So there's not very much Hellenistic philosophy in the average Great Books curriculum. They don't focus on Rome in general, and that's what you have to do if Hellenistic thinkers are to be read. Of course, Lucretius is always loved, so he's an exception, but that's because people think of him as a poet rather than a philosophical thinker.
As for Seneca, part of the reason there's a lack of interest in Seneca is the translations are of a very uneven quality. Right now at the University of Chicago Press, there's a project to make a complete set of new translations of all the works of Seneca. There's a terrific team of experts lining up to translate all the philosophical works, the literary works, the tragedies and so forth. My own translation is of the Apocolocyntosis [Seneca's satire on the death of Claudius], which is the only funny Stoic work... maybe it's not Stoic, but it's by a Stoic.
In your book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [2001], you describe your position as neo-Stoic...
I've got to correct this - there are two parts to the Stoic view on emotions, the descriptive part and the normative part. What I call neo-Stoic is the descriptive view of what emotions are like, but I certainly reject the normative view.
So what do you think Stoics got right and wrong?
Are we talking about the descriptive view?
Let's start off there.
With that, I think they have a very powerful position about the role of judgments of value in emotions, which has now been amply supported by psychological research into the emotions, and i show that convergence between Stoic philosophical analysis and modern psychological analysis, which focuses on what psychologists call appraisals, that is, evaluations and their role in emotions. That part the Stoics got brilliantly right, and a lot more detail about particular emotions they also got right.
What you need to do, to make it a defensible philosophical view, is to correct their view that animals and small children don't have emotions. That's not correct, so you have to revise that view so that emotions still have a cognitive / evaluative character but it's the sort of cognitive character that animals and children could have.
Secondly, the Stoics are also not very sensitive to cultural variation in emotion, so you have to learn from anthropology and put that into the neo-Stoic view.
And finally, because they didn't think you had any emotion until you were sixteen, which is a very implausible position, they didn't care about development and how that influences emotions, and we do have to care about how emotions develop from infancy through childhood into adulthood. So we have to draw on developmental psychology and psychoanalysis.
So can you combine the Stoic cognitive model with a more psychoanalytic model, or are they contradictory?
It depends which psychoanalytic view you use. If you use the view that the goal is always pleasure, then it's much harder to make a connection. But if you use the view from objects relations theory, according to which children have complex cognitive attitudes to objects, such as anger, grief and envy, that sort of view that you get in Klein or Winnicott meshes very nicely with the basic way that Stoics view the world, and it also make sense of the fact that children do have emotions.
Upheavals draws some great parallels between Stoicism and modern psychology and neuroscience. How rare is that? How much of a dialogue is there between classical academia and modern psychology?
If you're talking about classicists, it's an individual matter. If you're talking about philosophers working on emotions, it happens all the time. You wouldn't think of publishing something on the emotions without becoming at least aware of what's going on in neuroscience. Sometimes philosophers do it too often. They think neuroscience solves all our philosophical problems, whereas I think it gives us helpful hints, but doesn't replace the need to do hard philosophical work, and also doesn't replace the need to go back to developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, which some neuroscientists don't like at all. So you need a judicious sense of what it can solve and what it can't.
So what did the Stoics get particularly wrong?
I already told you three big things that are wrong in the descriptive view. Turning to the normative view, Stoics think the correct attitude is that nothing is worthy of serious concern except our rational nature, nothing outside of us, not our political culture, not our friends or our children, none of that is really worth serious concern, so we shouldn't get upset when bad things happen to them. It's hard to argue with that because it's a very complete view and internally consistent in most ways.
So if we produce an argument that will shake a modern Stoic, it needs to show something of importance to the Stoics themselves that the Stoic view can't explain. I try to show certain things Stoics want to say - for example that we should care about our country and should be committed to defending it - which contradict their view on externals, so in the end they can't defend their theory. It's not simple, you need to take a long time to show that, but I think you can show that, even on its own terms, it's not entirely successful.
So the Stoic position that all externals are indifferent is untenable?
The Stoics think you should never mourn, for example. Cicero reports that a good Stoic father says, if their child dies, 'I was always aware that I had begotten a mortal'. Now, Cicero is one of my favourite thinkers of all time, and I find it very interesting to look at his letters when his daughter died. Just before she died, he had been writing typical letter of Stoic consolation to a friend who had lost a child. But when his own daughter died, he was absolutely devastated. He says to his friend Atticus again and again, 'I can't do normal things'. Atticus says 'this is not seemly, not fitting, you should not mind this so much', and at one point Cicero says 'it's not only that I can't go about my normal business, it's also that I don't think I ought to'.
So he made un-Stoic judgments about both his daughter and the Roman republic. He lost his life trying to save the Republic. If he hadn't stayed in Rome so long trying to criticize Mark Antony, he wouldn't have been assassinated. He lived his life for both these things - his daughter and the Republic - and both were lost. What I find admirable is that he really wrestled seriously with the norms of Stoicism, and saw that they could help us correct an inappropriate kind of worldliness - he saw a lot of people go wrong because they were too ambitious, too competitive, too attached to worldly goods. But about the things we really love, and rightly love, we shouldn't be Stoic. So even if we don't accept the Stoic view of externals, we can still use Stoic methods of therapy?
The therapy they have in mind is that you can't really improve your life without understanding what's worth valuing and what isn't. It would have been better if everyone learned all this in the first place, but since, according to them, people live in a highly corrupt culture, they don't learn right values, so they have to be given therapy, which consists in weaning them away from money, status, competitive goods of all sorts, and this will undo the damage of anger, jealousy and so on. All of that seems reasonable; it's only when they take it so far that they say we should lose love of children, family and so on. There I part company with them. Bu it doesn't mean their methods of weaning people away from unwise values is useless.
In Upheavals, you argue that Stoics are part of what you call an anti-compassion tradition, as opposed to a pro-compassion tradition. Could you unpack those ideas a bit?
Sure. When people read figures like Nietzsche, who say you shouldn't have pity, they read that it means you should be cold and hard-hearted. That's not it at all. Nietzsche tells us he's following a whole slew of people like Seneca, Epictetus, Kant. These people think that what you rightly value is your own good will and rational purpose, and that external things shouldn't upset you so much. And then they say 'OK, if you yourself are not deeply upset when you lose money or status, then you shouldn't pity or have compassion for someone else who loses those things. If you think you shouldn't be upset when you lose a child, then when someone else loses a child, you shouldn't feel compassion'.
Marcus Aurelius says, if someone is upset, and you know they have wrong values, you can treat them the way an adult treats a child - you can console the child, while understanding that the child is upset over nothing. That's the Stoic view. In other words, you have to be consistent. You can't say 'I'm going to get rid of anger, jealousy, hatred, but I'm going to keep compassion, because it's so nice'. No, what they say is, the best thing to do is get rid of your unwise attachments to externals, so you won't feel compassion, but you also won't want to hurt people, or to retaliate against them. You will be detached. So Seneca writes to the young emperor Nero on mercy, saying you should be gentle and merciful, but in the middle of the letter is an attack on compassion. Compassion is this soft thing where you care too much about what's out there. And they think in that is the seeds of anger, jealously and ultimately cruelty.
It seem to me that Stoics' problem with emotion is it is either attachment or aversion, either a running towards or a running away from something. But could we argue that compassion could be something more Buddhist, that could not involve attachment or aversion, and rather bean attitude of disinterested concern, which we could integrate into a modern Stoic approach?
Sure, you could. It depends how you define it. Some people do define it like that. But then it's not really an emotion at all, because it doesn't involve the idea of a deep attachment to an external object and a mental upheaval about the fortune of that object.
And it doesn't necessarily involve the judgment 'this shouldn't have happened'...
Exactly, or the idea that this person has suffered some important damage. No, you're supposed to think these things really aren't that important. But you can still have an attitude of concern, that's right.
I loved your analysis of Sophocles' Philoctetes in Upheavals. You made a dichotomy between Sophoclean tragedy and Stoicism, saying that Sophocles teaches us compassion for the wretched, like Philoctetes, while Stoicism teaches a more detached respect for our inner integrity. But could you argue there's a link between Sophocles and Stoicism, in that Stoicism could be seen as the end-point of tragedy? It's the point the tragic hero reaches at the end of their journey. For example, Oedipus reaches an end point at Colonus, a point of heroic passivity and endurance, so that whatever the gods of nature send him, he can endure. And by that point he has achieved a sort of divine oneness with nature. And that's what Stoics are trying to achieve, a oneness with nature and a heroic endurance.
You're on to something important. I'd say that's only true of Sophocles among the tragedians, that you find this attitude that the hero may actually transcend the vicissitudes of human fate, and it's particularly true of Oedipus at Colonus, so you picked the right play. I don't think it's really in Philoctetes at all - in that play, there's a tremendous joy and celebration that he will be cured and the war won. So we're not deflected from the real world, we're returned to it, with the right outcome. And likewise in Antigone, there's a sense of terrible loss and tragedy all around, and no sense that this is mitigated by anything else. So I think Oedipus at Colonus is the closest thing you get to Stoicism in ancient tragedy. And what that shows is that traditional Greek religion had in it elements that Stoics mined for their own view of Zeus and the nature of universe. Which is interesting, because it shows that their view didn't come out of nowhere.
But could you say that there is a Stoic element even in Philoctetes: towards the end of the play, he can't go to Troy because he can't get over his feeling of alienation and resentment, then Heracles appears and says 'there's a cosmic plan, and you going to Troy is part of it'. That realisation of a divine providence is what enables Philoctetes to accept his lot. It's like Hamlet realising there is a divine providence, and accepting his role in it. Isn't that moving towards the Stoic idea of the Logos, and of accepting your lot in the Logos?
Well, I think it's quite right that Philoctetes is supposed to go back and play his part, but notice he does it on the condition that he will be relieved from pain, and given great glory, so all the worldly goods are not undermined. It's not a sacrifice. And you represent Heracles one way, but in fact, Philoctetes is won over because it's his friend making the appeal, and he trusts his friend, not because there's a grand cosmic scheme. The main thing is it validates rather than undermines the importance of worldly goods.
Turning to your 1997 book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Do you think Stoic techniques of learning to control our emotions should be taught in schools?
The part of Stoic therapy I would like to focus on is the Socratic part , the commitment to self-examination, the relentless scrutiny of traditional values. That's what I appropriate from the Stoics. The part that says 'now we can use this to go into people's emotional lives'...I'm not sure that's appropriate in a university, it's more appropriate for small children. The other thing I'd want to appropriate is the Stoic sense of the whole world as a series of concentric circles, and that we should become increasingly aware of the broader world to which we belong. That you really can teach in university curricula, you can talk about the world economy, about different world cultures, different world religions and so on. So that's a very important thing we can borrow from Stoics.
The Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism?
Yes. We're citizens of a whole world order. We're not just members of one family, town or nation, but of the whole world. We're increasingly interdependent on important issues such as the environment, so there are now even stronger reasons for seeing oneself as cosmopolitan than there were in the days of the Stoic. We can't escape from the fact that what we do affects lives on the other side of the world.
You've written that the goal of political society is to enable citizens to search for the Good Life in their own way. Do you think the state has any role in terms of giving guidance as to what constitutes the Good Life?
I'm in strong agreement with John Rawls that the state has to show equal respect for all different reasonable comprehensive views of the good human life. The only way can do that is via the principle of non-establishment, which means no particular religious or comprehensive ethical view should be the basis of political principles or statements. But we can have a partial ethical view that's the basis of our political judgments, so we can all overlap on that and speak together in terms of that, because after all our political principles themselves have a moral content.
So what would that involve? Ideas of equal respect, support for human needs, human rights and so on. So there's a political part of the good human life that we can talk about and that the state certainly should persuade people about. So, for example, last Monday the university closed for the birthday of Martin Luther King. It does not close for the birthdays of racists. Having a national holiday for King, and not for racists, is a form of public persuasion, but it's right, because racial equality is at very core of the political conception that we all share, whether Protestant, Catholic, atheist, Hindu or what have you.
What about the idea that you find in Stoics and in Martin Seligman [founder of Positive Psychology], that the state and state schools can provide some guidance as to how to find eudaimonia?
Well, eudaimonia is a contested concept. What the state can do is provide some comparative studies of different traditions, and maybe show some things such as 'if you want to achieve the following, this is how go about it'. But to advocate one particular comprehensive concept of eudaimonia, whether religious or secular, a public institution shouldn't do that.
But certainly, in a philosophy course, you can try to show what considerations might make one conception more attractive than another. And when I teach criticism of utilitarianism, that's what I try to do. But if I was president or a supreme court judge, I would never stand up and say 'I think utilitarianism is an impoverished world view'. I would focus on the political conception we all share. Is Positive Psychology going too far down one particular road, of advocating one definition of eudaimonia and then propagating it?
It's not intended to be political, it's for people's personal lives. I've been talking about limits on political speech.
But it is taught in schools.
Is it?
Yes. In the UK, for example, the government is considering putting it into the national curriculum.
Huh...Well, it isn't here, but I guess I would be troubled by that. Seligman is a lot more subtle than most of people who talk about happiness. He has philosophical training, and asks questions about what it really is, he's pluralist about different religions, so it's much more open to contestation than many simpler views. But i still think it's too determinist. The state should not be telling you how to live your life beyond a certain core of political principles. The only thing about Seligman is he thinks we should be happier, that we're too sad. But I actually think, certainly in the US, that people should be a lot sadder than they are. The reason they're rather jolly is they don't think about the suffering of others, they don't think about the injustice suffered by others. I want to raise the level of sadness and anger in my students rather than diminish it.
You're an expert in therapeutic techniques in Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism, Platonism and other traditions. Are there ones you've found particularly effective or ones you've used in situations in your own life?
Well, when I observe my life, I think, 'How is what I'm going through here related to these views?' You can see that in Upheavals, where I talk about my mother's death. Sometimes when I get upset about some temporary thing, I do think 'you know how you characteristically over-estimate the seriousness of this'...But I'm not sure whether I needed to read the Stoics for that, or whether I always knew it. The parts of Stoicism that appeal to me are when they tell you to get rid of excessive attachment to money and reputation, but that doesn't happen to be my problem. My upheavals come from attachment to particular people or politics, and that's the part where I reject Stoicism. So that's why I don't find myself using Stoic therapy. Some of the leading writers on Stoic thought at the moment are women - yourself, Julia Annas, Nancy Sherman. Does that dispel the view that Stoic values are somehow 'masculine' values? Is that a wrong view, or even a sexist one?
Probably. I don't think any one view of values is masculine or feminine. The Stoics didn't either: they wrote treatise on how the virtues of men and women are the same, and they defended complete equality of the sexes in their ideal city. It's what Mary Wollstonencraft observed in her critique of Rousseau: people put up a stereotype of women as highly emotional or sentimental, but in fact just it's just a stereotype. They can be just as rational. And of course, Mary herself was deeply influenced by Stoic thought.
Martha, thanks very much for your time, it's been a very interesting talk.
Well, it's on the way out. Say hello to Chateau Du Edinburgh.
According to a new report from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, written up in the New Scientist:
A century from now, Spain and Italy will be enduring baking, parched summers while residents of central and north-west Europe will be experiencing what we now think of as Mediterranean warmth.
Reindert Haarsma and his team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt used existing computer models to study changes in weather patterns resulting from the expected global warming. These indicated that summer temperatures in southern Europe would rise by 2 to 3 °C compared with today's, and that lack of rain would dry up the soils. The hot, dry air above these arid soils would then rise and expand, creating a low-pressure zone over the region. Winds circulating anticlockwise around this zone would feed continental air to more northerly areas, raising temperatures there too.
The same issue of the magazine also discussed the expansion of the tropics, also caused by global warming, which is set to lead to "the most serious water crisis in the history" of California, according to governor Arnie. Snow levels in the mountains of California are currently only 61% what they have been in previous years, according to the article.
The Landmark Trust has released its new Childhood report. Put together by 10 experts, it was written by - who else - Lord Layard, the British government's happiness czar.
Speaking on the Today programme this morning, Layard suggested our culture has become far too individualistic and competitive, partly through Thatcherism, and this had led to neglected children, selfish parents, and schools that focus too much on tests and exam results.
I agree whole-heartedly that our schools have become far too focused on getting children to pass endless government tests, rather than making education holistic, and making sure it includes things like sports, acting, music, and other group endeavours. I also think Lord Layard is right to talk about teaching children how to understand and control their own emotions.
I'm not so sure about banning all advertising aimed at children. I'm just not convinced that advertising has that much effect on us, for all that advertisers and anti-advertisers say that it does. TV, magazines, the internet, cinema, music - I would argue these are more powerful influences. Seeing Lily Allen regularly drunk has far more influence on young people than a Bacardi advert.
The report was brave to take aim at single parents and broken homes. It made the alarming claim that children from single parent homes are 50% more likely to suffer from behavioural issues than children brought up by two parents.
This on the day that we discovered the proud mother of octuplets already has six children, no husband, and had the children via IVF treatment. The kids are likely to cost the US state around US$2mn, but the mother is now trying to mitigate the cost through advertising and sponsorship.
