How to Temper Misfortune

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Nothing can harm a good man, either in life or after death. – Socrates, the Apology

Steps

1. Realize: Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
2. The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed.
3. Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
4. Practice on a constant basis dividing up things between which are inside and outside of your control, and learn that no harm can befall you from things which are outside of your control.
5. At the beginning of each day, recite the Premeditation of Seneca:

The wise will start each day with the thought…
Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destines of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.
Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything.

Tips

• Read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Letters of Seneca, Discourses and Enchiridion of Epictetus
• If you expect certain behaviors of things outside of your control you will always be miserable. Only expect certain behaviors from yourself.
• If you expect people to behave in a certain way you will always be miserable, focus on your own behavior and consider the rare instances of good behavior from those around you as divine gifts rather than “rights” to be expected from all people. You have no rights in the face of the universe.
• Meditate on death – realize that nothing bad can happen to you, including death. Define bad or evil as ignorance of what is in or outside of our control. If you behave in a dishonest or ignorant way, that is the only measurable evil, and the only one which you can remedy. Be strict with yourself and tolerant of others.
• Do not expect people to be honest, trustworthy, merciful, generous or just – most of them will not be. IF you expect people to be kind, or to follow the rules of the road, you will never be happy. Pity unkind people rather than hate them.

Warnings

• Contrary to popular opinion, everything will not always “work out” or “be ok” – prepare for misfortune so that when it afflicts you, you will not be devastated.
• When you become skillful in tempering misfortune, do remember to show magnanimity to those who are unskillful and fall upon hard times. Simply because you have a knowledge of what is within and outside of your control does not mean others will.

Things You’ll Need

• Courage
• Wisdom
• Temperance
• Justice

Sources and Citations

• Plato – the Apology (41d) ** Intro
• Enchiridion of Epictetus, trans. Elizabeth Carter (Aphorism 1) ** Steps
• The Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain De Botton (translation of Seneca’s Premeditation) ** Steps

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Piety as we have discovered in the Euthyphro has less to do with faithful religiosity and more to do with asserting power over others; Euthyphro is revealed to have an ignorant conception of piety through the investigations of Socrates and rather than admit his ignorance and refrain from judging his father on its attributes he yields to the seduction of authority. What then is piety but a vessel for concealing a tyrant? We, as it must have been with the Athenians, are far too eager to justify the irrational and murderous because we perceive an individual to be devout. This I think is the implication of Socrates’ investigation: the importance of challenging the supposedly pious and to pierce through with our reason the thin gilding of the priest robe, to judge arguments on their merits rather than on the merits of social prestige, to judge a word in itself rather than by the tongue which spoke it. We should not, as is customary, blindly accept what comes from the mouth of supposedly religious people, as we find in observing more closely, they commonly speak out of ignorance of the virtues they espouse, a realization created hastily upon interrogation.

Socrates is also implying that all human beings have equal footing in their ability to judge arguments, a revolutionary concept for his era. While the faux-pious Euthyphro flees at the end of his discussion with the gadfly rather than come to the stark realization that he is a phony, we all can have the confidence in our own reasoning to stand our ground and judge on the merits of evidence and cogent argumentation. Socrates implies that we should judge what is being said by itself, without considering the title of the person speaking, disregarding the Tyrian purple and holding wisdom and truth above wealth and esteem. Socrates argues that we must hold the same standards of evidence which we apply to everyday conversation to that of religious claims; that no argument is outside the reach of inquiry. Why are no thoughts sacred, none protected, none privileged? When irrational thinking infests a people, they, as Euthyphro did, murder men without having a true knowledge of why, and compound human misery unnecessarily by virtue of their power-drunk self-righteous judgment. Euthypro’s father was charged for offending the gods by his son, a pretender who lacks a true knowledge of piety – thus it was an unjust charge, and a man was executed for no offense made, other than as wrongly perceived in the tightly insulated and delusional mind of the priest. So we see that those who claim to be pious must be scrutinized, lest the power they are granted through society be wielded to unjust ends.

The question was posed: “what is a religious person?” This question is meaningless to answer without first defining religiosity. A religious person can be said to be someone who remains intellectually honest in faithfulness to a codified system of conduct and metaphysical frame of reference. In this sense, I believe there are few authentically religious people living in modern Western civilization, as the people’s conduct and beliefs vary so drastically from the code they pretend to have knowledge of, especially in the case of the religious descendants of Abraham. The liberal dispositions of Western peoples, the majority of which claim to respect the opinions of others and call themselves Chirstians, contrasts sharply with the petty, vindictive, callous and murderous God of the desert. In the contemporary era people do not study the code and instead live by the presumptions of pop culture in understanding the religion they claim to be faithful to, thus failing to meet the definition of a “religious person.”

It is perhaps of benefit to humanity that the people of Western democratic cultures do not adhere more honestly to their own religious codes, lest the imperial grandstanding of tyrants such as HRH Bush II, a fundamentalist Christian carving up the world into realms of darkness and light at the expense of millions of innocent lives, would be more tolerated than it is in the present. Yet it is for this latter reason that we must be hostile to claims of religiosity: when governments are dominated by the magical thinking of the Bible, only dysfunction and the suffering of the innocent is the product. Healthy governments must operate in the domain of insight, logic, magnanimity and impartiality, and these virtues become vices in the face of religion, as evidence and chains of reasoning, components so crucial in sound policy making, are antagonistic to metaphysical claims.

The keen blade of reason is dulled to a butter knife by delusions of afterlives, divine intervention and burning bushes, allowing nonsense, fallacy and presumption to go unchecked in the face of inquiry, or perhaps even more disturbingly, being championed as goods of public devotion. In the past decade the advances of reason and science have been slowly eroded by the machinations of powerful Christian interest groups and a fundamentalist electorate, bringing about a paradigm in which belief and opinion are increasingly valued over knowledge and well-argued claims, reducing our political discourse to contests of deception and seduction. Beliefs and opinions may be tolerated in picking favorable flavors of ice cream or other inconsequential judgments, but they must be scrutinized in all affairs public and political. If we abandon this latter calling, by product of our own inability to cope with reality and to perceive the case of things as they are, we resign to being only a step away from condoning the ascension of an autocrat.

We stand now on the cusp of disaster as the American people are seriously considering electing such an individual into the highest seat of power, inevitably the product of their failure to perceive the world in a rational fashion. John McCain, no stranger to the absurdities of the Christian dogma, would bring with him an even more dangerous threat to the wellbeing of the republic in Sarah Palin, a woman that believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans once co-existed together[i]. When one considers the actuarial tables it can be estimated that Palin has a 27% chance of becoming the president by 2015:[ii] if one chooses to elect McCain, they are also condoning the presidency of an individual who would welcome the destruction of New York City with trembling open arms, as it might usher in the apocalypse and the coming of the Messiah. Should we entrust our national security to an individual who believes in such dangerous misconceptions about the case of things, who believes most fanatically in the not-so-noble lie of global terrorism and a world divided into darkness and light, unwilling to compromise in the face of reason and evidence, who holds that opinions are equally as valid as knowledge?

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[i] Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-palinreligion28-2008sep28,0,3643718.story?track=rss

[ii] Palin: average isn’t good enough. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris3-2008sep03,0,5745350.story

The questions are posed: what is the meaning of the Hebrew God as compared to the meaning of god(s) in the Greek world, and what is the significance of the difference? In this interpretation I will assume that the word “meaning” means “significance” or “nature” – as meaning generally associates with personal judgment and is fundamentally impossible to summarize.

The Hebrew God initially was respected in a henotheistic fashion, being recognized as the most powerful or important god amongst many[1] but with Hezekiah’s centralization of the cult at Jerusalem in the 8^th century BCE[2] the other idols were banished and the Tanakh was from that point on written to describe a solitary God, the only god, the creator of the universe and all that ever was[3]. The Hebrew God essentially manifests as a ruthless, unreasoning and murderous tyrant[4] who instills in his people a legacy of conquest by declaring that a large swathe of the Levant[5] was to be divinely granted to them, lands which at the time were populated by many other peoples, nations which the Tanakh contends were destroyed by the Jews in ascension of their manifest destiny.

The Hebrew God is customarily referred to as being omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing) and omnibenevolent (all loving) although this may very well be a contemporary perception as there are numerous internal contradictions to these claims within the Bible itself[6][7][8]. Of particular absurdity is the latter claim that God is all loving, considering that it has been estimated by some scholars that he was personally responsible for at least 33,041,220 deaths in the Tanakh[9].

God is obsessed with sumptuary laws and the use and nature of our genitals, destroying those who do not obey seemingly random or nonsensical commandants. In Exodus 4:24-26 for example, God decides to kill Moses because he had not yet cut off the skin from his son’s penis and in Numbers 11:1 God sets the people on fire who had decided to eat meat, as he commanded them to only eat “mana.”

Later on in the history of the Jewish people, as the Assyrians expelled them from Jerusalem and the Bible was modified to explain this apparent injustice, God became a source of salvation and redemption[10] involved in a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, fated to return to redeem the righteous on “judgment day,” the end of times. This latter incarnation of God, a mysterious force that promises redemption to those who act righteously and unknowable barbarism to those who act poorly in the cosmic afterlife, is the more-or-less contemporary Hebrew God.

The conception of god(s) in the Greek world was one of greater polytheism with local polis-level examples of henotheism, centering around the 13 major gods Zeus (king of the gods), Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, Demeter, and Hestia. Unlike the God of the Hebrews the Greek gods tended to exhibit human qualities, especially as expressed in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: making mistakes, feuding, dying, battling each other, falling into love, showing empathy, taking part in family structures, forming relationships, having sex, laughing, crying, valuing comedy and picking sides in wars and politics.  The gods mostly behaved, especially as depicted by Homer, as being spoiled socialites, all too willing to meddle in the affairs of the common man just for their own amusement or satisfaction, and having little regard for the sanctity of life through their careless indulgences. These Gods love mortals, as Aphrodite did with Adonis or Zeus with Leda, or might outright destroy a mortal who angered them, such as Dionysus did to King Pentheus of Thebes for mocking his religious craft[11]. But the gods were not all too human, for they could exhibit magical powers, such as teleportation, elemental mastery, incredible strength, transmutation and illusion, to name a few.

The Greek gods could also be a source of great ideological inspiration and majesty, inspiring the virtue philosophies of Stoicism, Cynicism and Platonism by venerating the wisdom, courage, temperance and prudence of gods such as Zeus or Athena[12]. In this sense the gods served as exemplary role models but not law givers, inspiring the people to act in a righteous way. While not inspiring the people as lead characters in didactic moral stories and dramas, the gods served as a source of entertainment in the epics, contrasting with the strength, incorruptibility and virtue of the hero.

While the gods were powerful, they did not possess unlimited power, as it was implied that even Zeus, king of the gods, could be inhibited or even killed by the combined efforts of other gods, only having true mastery over their individual portfolio of powers, ex. Hades had absolute domain of the underworld, Zeus over lightning and storm.

Ultimately the significant difference between the Hebrew God and the Greek gods was that that the absolute moral direction and unceasing tyranny of the former is surely missing in all of the latter. While the Hebrew God sought to bring about a cosmic order (at least late in the history of the Tanakh) between the forces of good and evil, moral absolutes, steering a divine people into a particular code of conduct by top-down commands and punishment, the Greek gods were players in the world who stood as role models to inspire the people on how to act by example in poetry and in the theatre. Fundamentally Greek mythology did not demand an especially divisive worldview, as the Hebrew God did, as it did not have a conception of sin, or of judging people on the merits of their perceived transgressions. While the Greek gods could be related to, or be perceived as extraordinary humans, the Hebrew God is an unknowable sociopath of capricious insanity which at one moment preaches love and in the next eradicates entire cities of people without pause or reason. Ultimately the nature of the Hebrew God can be lent to the environment to which it was created: from the culture of a primitive hill tribe torn between the more literate and cosmopolitan imperial forces of Assyria and Egypt. The Greeks, another cosmopolitan and cultured people (by relative standards) would come to create gods which fancied wisdom, creativity, love, poetry, courage, beauty, song, dance and merriment, aspects which they thought were the touchstones of humanity. The Jews, too prone to violence and indecency, were unable to raise themselves from their barbaric infancy and instead resigned to be ruled by a madman.

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[1] Exodus 20:3, 5

[2] Hezekiah’s Reforms and
the Revolt against Assyria. The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology. http://www.tfba.org/articlespreview.php?articleid=10

[3] Isaiah 43:10

[4] Cruelty and Violence in the Bible. Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html

[5] Ezekiel 47:13-20

[6] Can God do anything? Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/cando.html

[7] Does God know and see everything? Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/knows.html

[8] Does God love everyone? Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/god_hates.html

[9] How many has God killed? Dwindling in Unbelief. http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-many-has-god-killed-complete-list.html

[10] Who Wrote the Bible?. First broadcast 25 December 2004 by Channel 4. Directed by Polly Morland and written by Robert Beckford.

[11] Dionysus – Wine God. About.com: Ancient/Classical History. http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/dionysusmyth/a/Dionysus.htm

[12] The Ethics of Athena. The Encyclopedia of the Goddess Athena. http://www.goddess-athena.org/Encyclopedia/Ethics/index.htm

Healthy communities need a common place to meet for means of socializing the children, cultural events, discussing values and discovering meaning – one flaw of modernity is that in the wake of godlessness the people have made the mall their new church, and sorely lacking any moral direction or sense of community in their lives, have given to abandon and decadence, to shallow and meaningless lives. I believe that man needs a proper community place to replace churches – not one fueled by profit. Civic goods must replace cosmic goods.

In class the question was posed: “what does it mean to know.” To know something is to deconstruct it with reason, to scrutinize it against the rigors of logic and to be fully aware of its nature, to hold it before the mind’s eye and to see it bare in its true form; to know is to pierce through what is apparent and to discover the essential nature of a concept, object or emotion. Realizing what is true, to know rather than to have an opinion of something, goes to the heart of one of my favorite passages from book six of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays translation):

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice., and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love – something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid.

Perceptions like that – latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time – all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust- to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.

A man with true knowledge of things would find the notion of becoming upset over the destruction of his property to be silly – after all, if we look at things critically and cast away all pretenses of glit and glitter, we are really crying over chunks of metal, or stitched together cotton or perhaps wood nailed to stone. Marcus Aurelius speaks evident truth to this topic to such a degree that I feel as if I waste my efforts in attempting to match his keen insight. And this insight is a crucial one: most people do not live in the domain of knowledge but in opinion, a self-defeating shroud of insecurity and indecision trammeled by faulty judgments, wherein only the superficial surfaces of reality are appraised. A man who is overcome with turbulence upon seeing his car destroyed is one who is squandering his moments and causing himself undue grief. If such a man were to have a knowledge of what a car truly is, and how the cosmos will eventually reclaim all of his possessions in due time anyway, he would not be offended, and would be a more helpful member of the community.

The logic behind Marcus’ words fundamentally addresses what is within and without of our control as human beings: we can only claim control over our own desires, actions, beliefs, aversions and decisions, while we can claim no control over things external to us, such as the caprice of fate, chance, other people, disease and disaster. To know of what is in our control and what is not in our control allows us to reach our true potential as human beings, to know what the case is truly. All grief is caused by the opinion that we may control these things outside of our control, and by control it is also meant to expect certain behaviors of things outside of our control. We have no control over the injustices inflicted upon us by others, or the devastations of disease and natural disaster, nor the ability or inclination of another’s heart to love us, nor the behavior of bosses, parents and friends. Knowledge of this state of the world is necessary to live happily and through the ages up until the present we observe countless people futilely sticking to opinion and cursing the gods and others for their misfortune.

Returning to the topic at hand, it can be said that to know something is to be aware of what is truly the case as opposed to what is not the case. We can judge the truth of an idea by scrutinizing it with logic and reason (checking to see if it is free of fallacies and holds evidently true to all minds through a chain of argumentation) and the truth of reality and the nature of objects through scientific inquiry.

We discussed both mythology and scientific approaches to understanding the origins of the cosmos. While the mythology serves as inspiring poetry and as a powerful force in unifying a nation it fails to address the state of the way things are and only pretends to understand essential truths about reality. Creation mythology is a form of social memory which serves to justify the existence of a people’s habits, customs and culture: the “chosen race” cannot be special when it is clearly a product of historical forces rather than magic, and so magic takes the lead in seducing our perceptions. This magic is woven by the priest-caste which seeks to control the population and does so by pretending to be given divine revelation and auspices. Religion is complete bunk.

That being said, I do have a sort of religious experience when meditating on the vast expanse of the cosmos or when observing the beautiful complexity of nature. I do indeed recoil at the notion of littering, or of treating other people with barbarism, infidelity, disloyalty and unfaithfulness – yet these dispositions arise from the heart of natural reason rather than the command of the god, or more relevant to the subject at hand, a knowledge of my own divine creation.

Ultimately while we may know of the scientific explanation this knowledge only serves a technical merit (in exploring space for example) rather than a teleological one: knowledge of the Big Bang, for instance, does not say anything about the ultimate meaning of life or why the universe was created. Understanding cosmology is similar to understanding how a ball set into motion continues to roll, and what effects it may have on reality: it is a cautionary knowledge rather than a mystical one. While I am awed by the sheer scale and number of nearly unlimited possibilities in the universe, fixating on its creation is ultimately pointless as no human can further understand why we are here than any other human. In this sense one could label me a “militant agnostic” like Michael Shermer, “I don’t know, and you don’t either.” We should, as Rousseau and the ancients contend, pursue virtue rather than the sciences, so as to live our lives properly, leaving the natural geniuses to obsess over such abstract knowledge. It is this sublime science, the acquisition of virtue, which should rather obsess our thoughts than pretensions of understanding cosmology, for the former is the labor of regular men, and the latter is a wasteful entertainment for all but the most clever of minds.

To clarify, many people do not have a understanding of what constitutes scientific “theory.” In science: theory is not the same as a theory used in common language, it does not refer to an approximate explanation of a phenomenon, but instead is a system of mutually supporting evidence and fact which offers itself as a model to explain an aspect of reality. “Theory” is a higher form of truth than fact, using facts in conjunction with one another to form a grander statement about the nature of reality.

When creationists say “evolution is a theory, not fact” – they are not only confused but superbly misguided, basing their worldview on a merely incorrect definition of a word.