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In an age such as ours focused on justice, it can be hard to keep our eyes on this particular prize. It is easy for even the most genuine passion for justice to assume a punitive aspect: we don’t like to see people getting away with bad behavior.
You are free to extend generosity to them because it benefits you. Go ahead and be selfish: think only of your own personal density. That is reason enough to be generous.
In a once famous poem, Rudyard Kipling writes about “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” Long ago, young people learned cursive handwriting through the use of “copybooks,” notebooks that came emblazoned, across the top of each page, with a sentence written in precisely the kind of hand that the student was supposed to master.
If human nature never changes, human circumstances do, so even if the copybook headings are both inerrant and complete, we must learn to apply them to our current challenges. And that requires something other and more than obedient copying.
“In the same book, I met with one of Sheridan’s mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation”—that is, a speech made in the British Parliament by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a native of Dublin,
What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.
When a slave boy in Virginia reads and thrills to a speech an Irishman made in London, or when a child from the slums of Johannesburg finds his heart touched and warmed
Though it seems that not many people realize it, the first seeds of the Stoic renaissance—if we can call it that—were planted by Tom Wolfe in his sprawling 1998 novel A Man in Full. What’s especially interesting about this novel is the way it emphasizes the connection between Stoicism and manliness.
This is amazing to Conrad. “Epictetus spoke to him!—from half a world and two thousand years away!” (The Big Here and the Long Now.)
Which brings us to what some have called the manosphere—the corner of the internet made by men for men and in support of a very particular understanding of what it means to be a man.
Zuckerberg is especially interested in a diffuse group she refers to as the Red Pill Stoics. Many in the manosphere believe that they, like Neo in The Matrix, have disdained the Blue Pill that keeps them intellectually sedated and have opted instead for the Red Pill that shows them what the world is really like.
straight white men, in an environment designed to malign and marginalize them.
a community that believes in physical fitness and demonstrations of overt muscular prowess, none of this looks good at all. Is there a way to salvage Epictetus’s reputation?
Ah yes, targeted questions—those powerful instruments of deliverance from servitude.
Zuckerberg actually agrees with the Red Pill Stoics about what reading old books is for. She merely has different political ends than they do.
They cannot teach us in part because we are refusing to listen to what they have to say that doesn’t fit into our preexisting categories.
Pigliucci is not just interested: he says flatly, “I’ve become a Stoic,” which he understands in this way: “in practice Stoicism involves a dynamic combination of reflecting on theoretical precepts, reading inspirational texts, and engaging in meditation, mindfulness, and other spiritual exercises.”
Fraenkel thinks that the Stoic model of living well depends wholly on what it believes about God. “For the Stoics, Zeus made everything, including human beings, to maximize the universe’s perfection. What sets human beings apart is that they alone share in Zeus’s rational nature and can help carry out his plan by embracing the fate he has allotted to them.”
one would practice the hard disciplines of Stoicism—the kinds of disciplines that made it possible for young Epictetus to accept his enslavement, and even horrific physical abuse, as long as it lasted—unless they believed that a good God had perfectly ordered the world.
Pigliucci says that the Stoics tried to make the world better; No they didn’t, replies Fraenkel, because they thought it was already perfect. “The key to happiness, therefore, is human reason, which enables us to understand Z...
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mapping that renders us unable to hear a strange word, a different word, a word that takes us beyond what we already know.
C. V. Wedgwood—who, as my favorite historian, has turned up several times in these pages—has
is an attempt to understand how these men felt and why, in their own estimation, they acted as they did”
in language that the people of the time studied not only wouldn’t have accepted but wouldn’t have understood, that they had lost any sense of the value of depicting what she calls the “immediacy of experience.”
As Lilla suggests, embracing that immediacy, striving to understand the people of the past “as they understood themselves,” is a mark of fairness to them; but it is also good for us. He points out that “the concept of ‘racism’ is today applied to everything from theories of racial inferiority and calls for genocide to unintended ‘microaggressions’ against particular individuals,” which means that “a small forest of useful concepts that used to grow between ‘racism’ and ‘woke-ness’—blindness, stereotyping, prejudice, bigotry—has been cleared.
Consequently, we are losing the ability to understand how people in the past thought about their attitudes and actions, and therefore are losing the ability to make proportionate moral judgments.”
We thereby become uncharitable to our ancestors—and to ourselves, whom we are depriving of one of the most vital traits imaginable: “the ability to make proportionate moral judgments.”
Nevertheless, “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”
“You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.”
But this almost ostentatious fair-mindedness was integral to Douglass’s massive success as an orator, as a persuader of the half-convinced and the faint of heart. It is a model of reckoning with the past, to sift, to assess, to return and reflect again. The idealization and demonization of the past are equally easy, and immensely tempting in an age of social acceleration. What Douglass offers instead is a model of negotiating with the past in a way that gives charity and honesty equal weight.
And it is in agreeing to a continuation with the past, not in pronouncing a universal verdict either for or against, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, that we increase our personal density.
language; and I will say equally flatly that Osborne is a match for Jane Austen—yes, Jane Austen—in wit. I cannot sustain those extreme claims without quoting rather extensively from her letters, which I shall now proceed to do.
raise her children? This review is the origin of the “theater of concurrence” phrase I used in the previous chapter:
quintessential example of what I call the “theater of concurrence,” a genre whose practitioners take for granted that their liberal audiences already agree with them about everything.
Nora very much, especially the way she recasts her abandonment of her family in terms of heroic sacrifice. For instance, she tells the family’s servant Anne Marie about the great personal “discipline” she had to exercise in order to prevent herself from sending Christmas presents to the three children she left without a mother. How brave of you, Nora!
Nora: How much do you even know about marriage? Emmy: Nothing. Nora: Exactly. Emmy: Because you left, I know nothing about what a marriage is and what it looks like. But I do know what the absence of it looks like, and what I want is the opposite of that.
Near the beginning of this book I talked about the ways that information overload generates the need for informational triage.
That environment also creates the need for moral triage: for straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person.
we are sure to find among those people a strong inclination to support Nora’s choice and to minimize the costs of it.
theater of concurrence
That particular lesson we have learned so well that it can be hard to remember that it had to be learned. Which can take the steam out of a performance today of A Doll’s House: yes, yes, we think, of course Nora is right to declare her independence. What was in its time a drama of profound tension can become in our own a mere melodrama, in which we already know who to root for.
These complications of perception are essential to the value of reading the past—they are the chief means, I think, by which increasing our temporal bandwidth increases our personal density.
This is wonderfully true and powerful; but there’s something also to be said for that moment when a figure from the past who has perfectly anticipated something you already believe then turns around and says something that puzzles or alienates you.
Alfred North Whitehead
“There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.” And those unarticulated ideas are the truly key ones in any culture or age—including our own.
They were not deterred by the fact that when they saw Henry he was at Mass, surrounded by cardinals of the Church and the kings of France and Sicily. They dragged him from the altar and murdered him before the assembled dignitaries.
writer Francis Spufford has said, “You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.”*
I could spend some time here asking an important question: How is it possible that a story that at one time conquered the whole French-speaking world is so inaccessible to us today?
To practice positive selection (chapter 3) in relation to the past, to seek the authentic kernel (chapter 5) of human connection, human value—such admirable ideas!
suggest in chapter 9, to use the solidity we have gained to help us make meaningful promises to the future.
