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Smith’s contemporary, Bernard Mandeville, pointed out that if we were all ascetics like Diogenes, the capitalist economy would collapse.5 Capitalism needs us to be vain, deluded, insecure and miserable.
When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes in his barrel, and asked him what he could grant the philosopher, Diogenes replied, ‘Only that you stop blocking the sun.’
Conversions to the Cynic life could be sudden – it was known as the ‘short path to virtue’. People would suddenly look at their complicated and stressful lives and think, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ We hear of Monimus, the slave of a money-lender, who one day decided he’d had enough of his job. Rather like the hero of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, Monimus faked insanity to get out of his employment, throwing money around until his owner granted him his freedom, and he happily went to live in the streets with his fellow Cynics.
Satire is, after all, a way of tearing off the mask of civilisation to expose the grinning goat beneath.
of St Paul, who says: ‘We have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world and the offscourings of all things …’10 (or ‘the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world’, as a later Cynic, Tyler Durden, put it in Fight Club).
I had a fleeting vision of the future, once the Occupiers had taken control of England, and we have learned to fear a bang on the door in the middle of the night, and the shout: ‘Open up! It’s the Tranquillity Centre!’
the life of a tramp is not carefree. ‘Most homeless people are deeply unhappy with life. They struggle with the brutal reality of it, and escape it through substance abuse. One year, over twenty people I knew died of heroin. It’s not a safe life – I knew one guy who was killed for a five-pound debt.’
Choosing solitude is the opposite of loneliness. I was never bored, because there was always so much to do. It took a couple of years to get everything up and running, but I became pretty much self-sufficient, growing my own vegetables, foraging for berries and mushrooms, making my own elderflower wine. When I wasn’t active, I wasn’t really thinking. It was almost like a meditative state. The internal chatter fades away, and I became absorbed in the environment around me. I kept a journal while there, and as the years go on, I disappeared from it and it became basically a nature diary.
And so, the witch doctor was gradually replaced by the spin doctor.
He suggested, first of all, that we don’t have one self, but several. Our psyches are made up of different competing systems, each with their own agenda. He suggested a tripartite structure – there is a rational, reflective system; a spirited or emotive system; and a basic system of physical appetites. One can compare this to the triune brain structure put forward in the 1960s by the neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean, who suggests humans have a reptilian instinctive system, a mammalian emotive system, and a neo-mammalian system of higher reasoning.
we are who we imitate. We all of us use other people as patterns to copy, or as standards to measure ourselves against.
We can learn to be more conscious in the role models we choose and the patterns we emulate. The ancients, aware of how much of our behaviour comes from modelling and emulation, used the exemplum to try to steer people in good directions.
eradicating our passions ‘is neither possible nor expedient’. Instead, we should strive ‘to keep them within due bounds, reduce them into good order, and so direct them to a good end; and thus to generate moral virtue, which consists … in the well-ordering of our passions’.
‘Character,’ he wrote, ‘is habit long-continued.’
‘Ever to be the best and far above all others’
He thinks the last time that such a character was not seen as ridiculous – or even as pathologically sick – was the generation of T.E. Lawrence, Churchill, Shackleton and Scott; in other words, the ‘heroic’ last generation of the British Empire.
In a world without Empire, we no longer revere military values or military heroes, and we’re suspicious of ‘people who self-consciously set out to be heroes’ as Caesar or Alexander did. We prefer, Stewart notes, our heroes to be accidental.
The old Plutarchian ideal of the hero still lives on, but ‘in a very simplified form, largely pushed out of everyday life and onto the big screen’. Thus, contemporary American men may still find it thrilling
Still has its existence in business with larger than life leaders and challenges overcome?
‘I had this incredible power, an eye-watering budget, military units under my command … and I achieved nothing. That sort of power is very empty. You issue commands, but you’re so detached that nothing happens, or if it happens it’s not because of you.’
Perhaps we can say that some historical figures are genuinely heroic, that Nelson Mandela is heroic, or Ernest Shackleton, or Aung San Suu Kyi. There’s a value to reading the lives of such figures because, even if we can never become as brave as Shackleton, as defiant as Churchill, as stoic as Mandela, we can still raise our aspirations to become a little closer to such heroes.
Aristotle introduced the idea that there are certain cardinal virtues – courage, temperance, good humour, friendliness, patience amongst others – which exist in a ‘golden mean’ between excesses.
Courage, for example, is the golden mean between the excesses of rashness and cowardice. Good humour is the golden mean between the excesses of over-solemnity and buffoonery. Knowing how to hit the right mark between these excesses takes practice.
The only way we can acquire the virtues is by practising them in real-life situations, until they become automatic. He compares ethics to playing the lyre: just as a lyre-player gets better with practice, so we as human beings can improve our characters through practice, until eventually, after long traini...
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We become a virtuoso in living well. And we achieve happiness as a sort of free bonus to our ethical fulfilment.
Perhaps it was a ‘metaphysical chimera’, as Sir Isaiah Berlin put it, to imagine there was one single answer to the Socratic question ‘How should I live?’
modern liberal societies embraced a much more limited conception of the state: it should be a night-watchman, as the philosopher Robert Nozick put it, which protects its citizens’ physical and economic security, while leaving them to decide for themselves how to be happy.
In Berlin’s famous definition, the state should defend citizens’ ‘negative liberty’ – i.e. their freedom from interference by others – while leaving them to pursue their own ‘positive liberty’, their own personal conception of the good life.
Liberalism, it was argued, had left us lonely and atomised, rattling like loose change in the pockets of the corporate state, adrift in mega-cities with no common values,
He suggests there are five different versions of happiness, which he calls PERMA: Positive emotion, or feeling good in an Epicurean sense; Engagement, or feeling absorbed in an activity; Relationships; Meaning, or feeling like you’re serving a worthwhile higher cause; and Achievement.
He gives the example of Osama bin Laden, who he says would probably have scored high in tests of PERMA. But surely if Osama bin Laden fits your model of the good life, then there’s something terribly wrong with the model.
In the words of Aristotle: ‘It is the sign of an educated person to look for precision in a subject only so far as the subject allows.’
How long is it appropriate to grieve after your partner has died? That’s not a question science can objectively answer. It’s a moral, cultural and philosophical question – and a personal one.
But I think genuine relationships, genuine friendships, and genuine philosophical communities are only possible on a small and intimate scale.
We might agree that, lacking proof of an afterlife, death is certainly what Albert Ellis would call a ‘pain in the ass’, particularly if it cuts us down in our youth, before we have enjoyed what’s normally considered a long life. Then again, what’s a long life? I’m now thirty-four, which means if I existed during any other time or place, I would be lucky to have made it this far.
Fifty per cent of complaints in the NHS are to do with the way people die. There’s not enough good deaths, where the script can be written by the person dying … What we need is a way for people to write their own scripts.’
Dionysus and his followers would laugh at Socrates and his huddle of philosophers, and their ridiculous assertion that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. On the contrary, they would suggest, the more you examine life, the more it withers and dies under your microscope.
‘Only virtue is happiness,’ the philosophers insist, and cough. But we Dionysiacs know they’re lying, we who know the genuine joy that comes from the body, from hunting and dancing and love.
