Montaigne – Achilles & Aristotle

No Worries

I took the redoubtable Chris Croft up on his offer of a ‘Year of Happiness’ emails over Christmas. I told a friend, and she did the same.

She emailed me last week as below:

This made me smile – in truth 2020 has been a car-crash from start to finish. And where we are now: locked down and cooped-up – as the economy stops dead and we improvise field hospitals – is simply incredible.

Chris’s advice in this week’s happiness email is to ‘worry less’. For once I very nearly didn’t bother to read on.

But as always he has a point; and a practical suggestion… make a list.

To start with, make a list all of your worries. There’s something very therapeutic about writing things down, because it gives you permission to get them out of your brain, and that takes them further away from you, where they seem less important, and more easy to work on and to kill them off.

Usually, my list of worries would be the same somewhat improbable ‘sum of all fears’ one it’s always been:

Losing my job;
Not having enough money;
Having to sell the house;
The whole family confronting me and saying: ‘Dad, you’ve completely failed us.’

Thanks to Coronavirus though these are bang on the £££money – compounded by the very real fear of the lack of it.

But now I can add:

Facing a riot/riots at work;
Facing a riot in our street;
Having to stop paying people;
Having to furlough people (whole new worry!);
Having to make people redundant;
Having to hold onto people’s money who want it back;
Having to pay other people for things we are no longer sure we can afford;
Loved ones getting ill;
Running out of food;
Not being allowed out to walk the dog;
There never being any jobs of the sort I do ever again
My pension disappearing so I can never escape work I hate.

That about captures it! A proper list of worries.

So what to do? Paraphrasing Chris:

But what if the worry really is about something serious? What can you do about that? And the answer is nothing, there IS nothing you can do. Just tell yourself, it’s going to be fine. Keep saying it till you believe it, and finally, put it into context, it’s not the end of the world if it happens.

Unless of course it is… But I was helped today by some useful historical context; reminded of my old friend Michel de Montaigne by an article in Philosophy Now on his great friend Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563).

Montaigne’s Essays talk of French life in the sixteenth century, in a way which is accessible, modern and make it seem much like life today. More letters and fewer screens back then; but the same dramas of human affairs.

Except… they were in the middle of a bloody civil war of all-against-all.

As La Boétie describes it:

The result: “almost universal hate and malevolence between the king’s subjects, which in some places feeds secretly, in others declares itself more openly, but everywhere produces sad results… It divides citizens, neighbours, friends, parents, brothers, fathers and children, husband and wife.”

What followed was a series of massacres starting in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day, spreading to twelve other cities: Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, Orléans, Meaux, Angers, La Charité, Saumur, Gaillac and Troyes; and killing c10,000 people.

The UK’s WWII ‘Blitz spirit’ and Dunkirk rhetoric is getting more than a bit tired, but I’d rather take Covid-19 than face religious slaughter.

My worries – like everyone’s – are very real; but pretty much every age which precedes us has known worse.

Onwards.

Achilles, Life, Writing

spEak You’re bRanes

I retweeted someone’s prescription for modern times a few months ago:

‘Dance like the photo isn’t being tagged, love like you’ve never been unfriended and tweet like nobody is following.’

My basic social media motto is write what’s right for me and worry not (too much) about the reception. It’s my own form of spEak You’re bRanes, the website dedicated to bizarre ranting.

And on the topic of ranting, I got my first ever proper negative comment last week. Someone wrote “What a load of old B……….s!!!” under one of my posts.

When I read it, I laughed – it was funny. Looked at through a more sceptical eye, my blog was indeed a bit earnest. But it made me think…

There is something about Twitter and blogs which – absent a real person – can make us feel like ranting. It’s a bit like shouting at the telly. But as recent lawsuits in the UK have shown, tweeting what you wouldn’t dare shout at the person in real life, can now cost you big.

A healthy disregard for insults is perhaps the carrying cost of a ‘social’ life. I’m still working on being less thin-skinned. A life’s work I suspect. Good old Montaigne to the rescue, with a motto from 400 odd years ago. And not a bad one for for the modern day:

‘I write my book for few men and for few years.’

Before taking myself and any rude comments too seriously, it’s worth remembering – as Montaigne suggests – that almost all of what’s written will soon mulch into the digital biosphere. Maybe digital rantings – like writings – find the audience they deserve.

Ethics, Life, Philosophy, Work

Take me to your Leader

As the Curiosity rover pulled off an improbably complex landing on Mars, I was having a laugh with a friend in the US. I pointed out that it’s the US President’s duty to welcome any extraterrestrial when and if he/she arrives. As I put it to her:

It’s America’s job to have any alien invasion land there. And your job to extend the hand of friendship, attempt to nuke em and then use geek ingenuity to whoop ET’s sorry ass. These are important tests of the CinC plus would you have a beer with him/her.

But as Montaigne wrote 50 years after the discovery of the New World, Europeans did a pretty lousy job of ‘constructive engagement’ when they landed in the Americas:

We have taken advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, with greater ease to incline them to treachery, luxury, avarice, and towards all sorts of inhumanity and cruelty, by the pattern and example of our manners.

So many cities levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl and pepper?

Montaigne reckons the Ancients would have done it better:

Why did not so noble a conquest fall under Alexander, or the ancient Greeks and Romans; and so great a revolution and mutation of so many empires and nations, fall into hands that would have gently levelled, rooted up, and made plain and smooth whatever was rough and savage amongst them.

And that would have cherished and propagated the good seeds that nature had there produced; mixing not only with the culture of land and the ornament of cities, the arts of this part of the world, in what was necessary, but also the Greek and Roman virtues, with those that were original of the country?

I’m not so sure that ‘up close and personal’ the Greeks and Romans would’ve been quite that benign. But who knows.

A question arises. Having spent the week with my two kids arguing incessantly about fairness and equality, at what point do we give that up and go for dominance, acquisition and accumulation?

Lord Acton the Victorian historian, politician and moralist had a few ideas:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

“Great men are almost always bad men.”

“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

And with remarkable prescience:

“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”

Plus ça change…

Life

Of Sheds

Montaigne offers a top tip for he (or she) who would keep themselves sane:

That man, in my opinion, is very miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself, where to entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others.

When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at once all the concerns of my family.

Surely this is why men have sheds. A man needs his ‘domain’ however small. Given our postage stamp-sized garden, the kitchen by night largely serves for me. But a shed one day would be nice. As for a library, a man can dream. Lucky old Montaigne.

Life, Philosophy

Narrative or Episodic

I like (as do many others) the notion of lives as narratives. Interesting then to read a contrary view from my old philosophy tutor Galen Strawson – Against Narrativity.

He poses the question: is there really that much evidence that we are narrative beings? And if not, is it really so desirable – in terms of living a good life – that we seek to be?

What’s wrong with enjoying life as a smorgasbord of varied experiences and events. Does it all have to submit to the tyranny of a unifying narrative?

I was talking about this today. And as so often when you pick-up on something new – it then pops up everywhere. In my inbox this evening I find good old Montaigne on the same subject:

Our chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers employments. ‘Tis to be, but not to live, to keep a man’s self tied and bound by necessity to one only course; those are the bravest souls that have in them the most variety and pliancy. Of this here is an honourable testimony of the elder Cato:

“His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had been born only to that which he was doing.” Livy, xxxix. 49.

I do like the sense of a personal narrative. It helps make sense of it all. And along with the ‘can I look myself in the mirror test’ it keeps me on the right and proper path. But a sense of narrative shouldn’t be to the exclusion of Montaigne’s ‘divers employments’ and mixing it up a bit.

As my old tutor points out, a narrative can be both self-limiting and then dangerously self-fulfilling. Variety is the spice of life – and you only get one shot at it.