There are two proclivities in the human animal so intrinsically destructive and dangerous that I cannot help concluding that the religious dogma of reprobation and original sin has a solid empirical basis.
The first is the desire to have power over other persons. C.G. Jung called this tendency the most profoundly evil aspect of our human psyche, and he warned that we had to be on guard against it every moment, both in ourselves and in others. Whether in a marriage or a family or a friendship or a job or a love affair, the impulse to control another human being’s thoughts or behavior leads to horrific grief.
The second is the human propensity to think up a problem where no real problem exists. If you imagine this to be a minor foible, you are naïve in the extreme. It is a catastrophic propensity. Almost every nightmarish thing that has made human history a record of atrocity has its root in some meddlesome fool deciding that “a problem exists,” and that “something has to be done about it.” Wars, revolutions, social upheaval, chaos, aggression—they all come out of this attitude. Some self-important philosophist says to himself “This is unjust,” and as a result he lights a fuse that leads to disorder. Some moralizing prig decides that current arrangements don’t conform to an abstract paradigm, and he instigates pointless discord. Luther, Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Sorel, Trotsky, Lenin—the list of troublemakers can be expanded indefinitely.
To compound the problem, these two evil tendencies frequently go hand in hand. The enthusiast who wants to “address an issue” also has no qualms about dragooning other people into the effort. He’s out there cheerleading and exhorting and drumming up support for his crusade. He’s insisting that you have a moral obligation to follow him. He’s demanding that you form up in ranks and take his orders. In short, he wants to exercise power over you.
If you are sane, you will pay no attention to him. You’ll simply walk away and go about your business. There are ruinous consequences, however, if a person of this sort manages to gain political power. Then the world is in for a horror show. Look at the havoc the neoconservatives wreaked in a few short years.
The only sane approach to life is to accept it as it is, and to enjoy it as fully as possible. In that sense the Epicureans were right—one should avoid pain, and take advantage of all reasonable opportunities for pleasure. Conjoin that with the cultivation of a totally cool ataraxia, and you’ll be as happy as is humanly possible in your particular situation. As Alexander Pope puts it in his Essay on Man, “Whatever is, is right.” There are of course exceptions to that, but it still serves as an excellent and commonsensical rule of thumb.
I alluded obliquely to this approach to life some months back in my essay “Kalos Kai Agathos,” and more fully in my recent piece on Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. All sorts of silly persons wrote to me complaining that I was promoting an immorally complacent view of life, that I was an unscrupulous hedonist, that I had no business teaching impressionable young people, etc. etc.
The substrate of all those various complaints could be summed up in this puerile sentence: You just don’t CARE! It’s the typical complaint of the moralist, the meddler, and the kibitzer. It’s the bleat of the little lemming who has gone through the treadmill of Deweyite education, where he’s been conditioned to value “sensitivity” and “social concern” and “solidarity,” and all the other euphemisms for self-denigration. It’s the whine of “the other-directed,” as David Riesman put it—the overanxious networking schmuck who can’t conceive of mental autonomy, much less independence from the wishes of others. All such types have been trained “to care.”
Am I saying that we have no external obligations at all? No, I’m not. We certainly do in regard to our immediate family, our relatives, our close friends, and to a lesser extent to our employers and colleagues. We can extrapolate from these few and perhaps add, in some attenuated degree, our neighbors, acquaintances, and those with whom we have business and contractual dealings. But beyond these farther reaches, our obligations end. To follow the Greek ideal of kalos kai agathos is to recognize these limits and accept them. To care beyond this point is to make yourself a catspaw for social agitators.
The only intelligent argument among all those irate letters and e-mails came from a classicist who wrote “What about the Greeks who willingly gave their lives at Thermopylae? Were they living for themselves solely? Were they kaloi kai agathoi? You don’t seem to recognize the concept of self-sacrifice for a higher end.”
Giving one’s life in a battle, to defend one’s home, gods, and way of life from the onslaught of barbarian hordes, is in fact the final act of testimony to the ideal I am championing. Those men at Thermopylae said to themselves “We are Greek and we will stay Greek. We are free and we will stay free. We will not let alien Asiatics overrun our land and reduce us to the status of debased slaves. We’ll die before we let that happen.”
Being willing to die to remain who and what you are is just as important an element of the kalos kai agathos ideal as the notion of cultivated leisure. It’s saying that you will live the way you choose to live, and if anyone attempts to dispute that, you will fight back even to the extremity of killing. Kalos kai agathos isn’t a philosophy of hedonism, of sunbathing and surfing and fine dining. It also has a steely backbone and firm willpower. For being truly cultivated in the humanities has the advantage of teaching one that all the good things in life are worth defending—that they come at the price of vigilance and violence. And if you want the gift of civilization, you have to be willing to kill barbarians—en masse, if necessary.
But as I said, the propensity to seek control over others and to think up bogus problems is a real flaw in the human character. Since it is embedded in our fallen nature, it cannot be totally eradicated. Let’s resolve at least to be aware of it, and to fight it.
I’ll end with a personal anecdote. Many years ago, in a small private college where I taught briefly, one of those penitential exercises known as a departmental meeting was being held. All sane faculty members loathe these meetings and want them to end quickly and painlessly. But there is a certain breed of academic who is enthralled by such gatherings and who delights in prolonging them. It’s an opportunity to orate, to posture, to strut like a drama queen, and above all to think up nonexistent problems and then insist that the department “care” about these chimerical problems and “do something” about them.
At the gathering in question, such was Professor X. He simply would not allow the meeting to end. He kept coming up with another “problem” that had to be addressed, another “issue” that had to be resolved, another “question” that had to be explored. Everyone else was glancing at the wall clock, desperate to leave. But Professor X wouldn’t let up—and as our frustration became more and more obvious, his pretentious moral rectitude became more and more strident. He was offended that none of us “cared.”
The department chair, a hard-boiled old Irishman, finally put an end to the farce. He was about to retire anyway, so he didn’t give a swiving hump what he did or said at that late date. He barked “Would you just shut the bloody hell up and cash your goddamned paycheck, Professor X? We don’t need you rocking the boat.”
Alas, there aren’t any chairmen left who have the cojones to say that to a faculty member. Professor X was so shocked he just sat there, speechless, with his jaw dropped down. The rest of us took advantage of his momentary silence to pack up and leave. It’s the only departmental meeting that I recall with genuine pleasure.
