philosophy – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Rainbows

“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton, who died last week, had a remarkable talent for making complicated things sound beautifully simple. The above quotation is possibly my favourite of hers, although it competes hotly with her all-time classic, “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Ever the realist, with her feet firmly placed on the ground despite her stratospheric success and popularity, Dolly instinctively understood an inherent truth about life: that pleasure and pain are somehow connected. Whether it’s the first sip of a cup of tea when you are cold, getting into bed when you are particularly tired and sore or eating when you are ravenously hungry, there is a certain kind of pleasure that arises after pain. The pleasure is real, and it is enhanced by the contrast with what came before it. We don’t simply experience the pleasant thing; we enjoy and appreciate the change from one state to another We all recognise such experiences, even if we don’t normally think about them in philosophical terms.

Socrates noticed the same thing more than two thousand years ago. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates is sitting in prison on the day of his execution. His chains have just been removed and he rubs his leg, remarking upon the extraordinary inter-relationship between the pain he had been experiencing and the pleasure that has now replaced it. The conversation then meanders, in the usual Socratic style, into a much larger philosophical discussion about the relationship between pleasure and pain. His initial observation expresses exactly what Dolly Parton is saying: the pain is necessary in order to experience certain kinds of pleasures.

Plato returns to the subject in the Republic, in which Socrates considers people who have been ill and then become healthy again. Somebody who has experienced sickness may discover that being well is an extraordinary pleasure, perhaps one they had previously taken entirely for granted. The same applies to hunger, thirst and other physical discomforts. We often become much more conscious of pleasure when we have recently experienced its opposite. Nothing beats the relief and joy of feeling better after a nasty bout of illness, and the feeling is a useful reminder not to take our health for granted.

There is an interesting contrast here with the Epicureans, who really did place the absence of pain at the heart of their philosophy. Epicurus is often portrayed as the patron saint of hedonism, but his version of hedonism would probably disappoint anybody hoping for an excuse for endless feasting and debauchery. The Epicureans believed that the highest pleasure was essentially freedom from physical pain and mental disturbance. Once those had been removed, there was no need to keep chasing ever greater pleasures. Simple food, friendship, conversation and a life free from unnecessary anxiety were quite sufficient. In fact, Epicurus argued that many of the pleasures we pursue most enthusiastically are precisely the ones that eventually cause us pain. The sensible person therefore learns to distinguish between pleasures that genuinely contribute to a good life and those that merely create new desires, anxieties and discomforts. But for me, the Epicureans got it wrong.

There is a tendency, particularly when discussing resilience or personal development, to romanticise adversity. We tell ourselves that difficult experiences make us stronger, as though suffering were automatically a form of character-building exercise. It isn’t. Some things are simply awful. Some suffering achieves nothing except suffering, and there is nothing admirable about inflicting unnecessary misery upon ourselves or anybody else. But there is no escaping the fact that a certain amount of pain is unavoidable and I would go so far as to say essential for a fulfilled life.

Aristotle is (in my opinion always) rather more nuanced than Plato. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that pleasure and pain are fundamental to the development of character. We should, he says, be educated from childhood to take pleasure in the right things and to feel pain at the right things. This is not quite the same as saying that we should seek out suffering; rather, Aristotle recognises that becoming a functioning adult involves learning how to respond appropriately to the inevitable difficulties of life. This, I would argue, is much closer to what Dolly Parton means when she says that the rain is essential for the rainbow to appear: it is not that one should court discomfort, rather that discomfort is an inevitable part of life, in which unexpected joy is often just around the corner.

This is where I think the ancient philosophers (and indeed Dolly Parton) have something rather useful to say to those of us involved in education. We spend an enormous amount of time trying to make things easier for children. Sometimes this is absolutely the right thing to do. A child struggling with a genuine barrier to learning needs support, not a lecture about resilience. A child experiencing serious distress does not need somebody to tell them that adversity builds character. But there is another kind of difficulty that we perhaps need to be rather less frightened of, and that is the inescapable fact that learning is difficult. There really isn’t any getting around this. You cannot learn a language without forgetting vocabulary, you cannot become good at mathematics without getting things wrong, you cannot write well without producing some truly dreadful first drafts. Perhaps most recognisably of all, you cannot learn to play an instrument without sounding absolutely appalling for quite a while: just ask anyone who has sat through a performance by a junior orchestra. You cannot, indeed, become accomplished or even merely competent at anything without going through the slightly humiliating process of being a beginner. We have just moved to an incredibly quiet cul-de-sac and therefore experience no through-traffic past our door; what we inevitably see a lot of is learner drivers being taken out on their very first day, hunched forward over the steering wheel and gripping it for dear life while they crawl along the road. They will no doubt be competent and confident before you know it, but those first, anxious forays are unavoidable for all.

When it comes to education, we have developed an extraordinary expectation that difficulty is evidence that something has gone wrong. A student finds a piece of work difficult and concludes that they are not clever enough. A parent sees their child struggling and assumes that the teacher has failed to explain it properly. A teacher notices that pupils are frustrated and feels pressure to make the task easier. Sometimes, of course, the task really is too difficult or the explanation really isn’t working. But sometimes the difficulty is precisely what is supposed to happen. As I have written before, some of the most effective learning strategies feel distinctly unpleasant while you are doing them. Retrieval practice is harder than rereading: trying to answer a question without looking at your notes is considerably more uncomfortable than looking at the answer first. Learning something properly involves a certain amount of cognitive friction, when the brain has to do some work.

There is a curious irony here. We want children to become resilient, independent and capable of coping with adversity, but we seem determined to ensure that they experience as little manageable adversity as possible. We remove every opportunity to fail, provide the answer before they have had time to think, intervene at the first sign of frustration and then wonder why young people become anxious when something eventually goes wrong.

The answer is not to make children miserable. Nor should we turn every minor setback into some sort of Victorian character-building exercise: God forbid. I have no desire to see children being deliberately deprived of support so that they can learn the valuable lesson that life is hard. What children do need, however, is the opportunity to discover that they can cope with difficulty. There is an enormous difference between being protected from every unpleasant experience and being supported through experiences that are difficult but manageable. The first teaches a child that difficulty is dangerous; the second teaches them that difficulty is something they can survive.

Aristotle understood another important part of this. Unlike the Epicureans, he did not believe that a good life consisted of maximising pleasure and eliminating pain. Human flourishing, he believed, was something more complicated. We become good at things by doing them: we develop courage by confronting things that frighten us; we develop self-control by learning to resist things we want. Virtue, for Aristotle, was not a collection of qualities that magically appear in somebody who has been told to possess them; it is something that is developed through practice.

We cannot remove every difficulty from the lives of the children we care about, although many of us try. At some point, they will fail an examination, lose a friendship, be rejected for something they wanted, make a terrible decision, get something spectacularly wrong or discover that somebody else is better at something that they desperately want to be the best at. We cannot protect them from this. What we can do is to help them to understand that these experiences are not evidence that they are broken.

No ancient philosopher ever argued that suffering is inherently good: for them, philosophy was by definition the pursuit of the good life. But many of them have explored the idea that pleasure and pain, success and failure, confidence and uncertainty are not separable parts of human existence. Rather, we learn to appreciate one partly through experiencing the other, and we learn what we are capable of by occasionally discovering the limits of what we can currently do.

Perhaps that is why the metaphor of the rainbow is so enduring. We certainly shouldn’t wish for misery merely so that we can enjoy the happiness that follows it. But the metaphor captures something important about contrast. If everything in life were effortless, comfortable and immediately gratifying, we would have very little opportunity to discover what we are capable of overcoming. While we don’t need to go looking for the rain, perhaps we should be rather less wary of it when it comes. Many of the ancient philosophers said this in one way or another. Dolly Parton just happens to have expressed it rather more beautifully.

Friendships old and new

This weekend, my husband and I travelled to Suffolk for a close friend’s wedding. I was honoured to be a witness to the marriage, and it was a genuine tonic for the soul to watch a good friend declare her marriage vows, radiant and happy.

The weekend has caused me to think about friendship in general: how some friends come and go while others last the course. The groom had two Best Men, two close friends that he has been tightly bonded to since primary school. Seeing the lasting friendship between them was genuinely moving and there is something undeniably special about friends who have known us since childhood, for they have a perspective on us that nobody else can have. Those two friends not only remember the groom’s mother, who died long before he met and married my friend: they knew her well and spent endless time with her, as you do during childhood friendships. The same is true for me and my oldest friend’s mother, who died 20 years ago, long before my friend met many of the people who are a part of her life now. She reminded me of this fact when we were out together for dinner recently, and we both shed tears at the memory of her. There is immense value in hanging on to at least one or two people that have known you and your family for decades.

The friend who married her husband at the weekend is not someone I have known very long in the grand scheme of life, indeed we first met online during the pandemic when — like so many people — I flirted briefly with some online clubs. As so often in my case, the club proved to be too much of a commitment for me, but the friendship did not. I clocked her from day one as a genuinely interesting and intelligent individual, whom I made every effort to befriend long after I had dispensed with the hassle of the book club. I’ve never been much of a joiner, but friends are desperately important to me.

While our society places huge importance on romantic relationships — whether or not you have found “the one” — I would argue that it consistently undervalues the importance of lasting friendship. Elizabeth Day explored this in her book, Friendaholic, which I read in the hope of finding a kindred spirit, although it actually turned out to be an exploration of one woman’s neurosis rather than a legitimate exploration of friendship itself. For reflections on the value of friendship, one can find much better material in the writings of various ancient thinkers.

Aristotle argued that friendship was a crucial component of a fulfilling life. Ever the fan of definitions and categorisation, he divided friendships into three types: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure and friendships of virtue. I think we can all relate to what he means in the first two categories: some friends you need in your life for practical reasons — perhaps your children play together, or you work closely with that person. Some friends are of value because you share a common interest and/or enjoy a particular activity: perhaps you’ve joined a golf club or a running group. According to Aristotle, the highest form of friendship, and the most enduring, is the friendship of virtue. This type of friendship is based on mutual respect, admiration and a shared commitment to “the good life” (the philosophical ideal of living well, which meant living according to your ethical code). Aristotle argued that such friends grow together and seek each other’s well-being because of their shared pursuit of excellence. I am quite certain that Aristotle — genius as he was — would also acknowledge that a friendship might start in one category and develop into another. You might form a friendship out of utlity that evolves into something much more fundamental. For example, many women meet friends through the NCT that become genuine soulmates over the years.

Aristotle’s talk of the pursuit of excellence and virtue through friendship might sound rather highbrow and off-putting, but it is actually not a million miles away from the things that are said in the modern world about romantic relationships. How often have we heard the mantra “you make me a better person” or “you bring out the best in me”? This is what Aristotle argued was at the heart of a good friendship. He emphasised the role of friendship in personal development and moral growth and suggested that through friendship, an individual can learn to cultivate virtues such as generosity, honesty, and courage. Good friends, he argued, challenge each other: both morally and intellectually.

All of the above is unquestionably true of the friendship I have with the person who got married this weekend. She is someone who has challenged my views on a range of topics and (unlike many) is not hesitant to disagree with me, a characteristic I value enormously. This is the friend who got me into weight training, as I first wrote about all the way back in November 2023, and which I am still doing twice a week, every week. I think it is fair to say that no other friend has had such a concrete and indeed revolutionary effect on my life and my fitness. She has quite literally changed my life for the better. This is by no means the only influence she has had on my life and is just one of many things which we share and talk about on a regular basis, but it remains perhaps the most revelatory for me as an individual. As someone who has eschewed all forms of sport and exercise throughout most of my life, it has been life-changing to find someone who has managed to shift my perspective on something so fundamental.

The Epicureans argued that genuine friendships are essential for achieving ataraxia or peace of mind, which is the ultimate goal of Epicurean philosophy. By surrounding oneself with trustworthy friends, ones who share similar values and interests, Epicurus believed that individuals could create a supportive environment that enhanced their well-being and guarded against the uncertainties of life. For the Epicureans, true friendship is characterised by the absence of strife and the presence of mutual trust and companionship. It is often assumed that the Epicurean approach was seismically different from Aristotle’s emphasis on virtue, but in reality it was not. The only thing that was radical about the Epicureans was their argument that a tranquil and pleasurable life was the ultimate moral goal: friendship was thus a part of their moral attainment, just as it was for Aristotle. Friendship, for the ancients, was not merely a social convention or a means to an end but a fundamental aspect of the good life.

Fulfilling your destiny

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

Currently, I am obsessively plugged in to an audiobook, the latest release from my favourite author, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty writes what is often scathingly referred to as “chick lit”: a genre which at its worst can be undeniably vacuous, but no more so than the two-dimensional thrillers churned out by authors marketed to men. The withering contempt with which “chick lit” is viewed says a lot more about how society treats the everyday lives and concerns of women than it does about this particular genre of popular fiction.

It is undeniable although perhaps a little depressing that Moriarty is an author unlikely to be read by vast quantities of male readers. Her stories revolve around people – mainly suburban women – and the thoughts inside their heads. Often there is an unfolding plot, but the focus is on the development of character and relationships rather than on action or suspense. Moriarty is an absolute master of the genre and writes with an effortless charm that belies her talent; the best authors make it look easy when it isn’t. It’s a great shame that more men aren’t interested in some of the things which interest women, and a truth that I have pondered the reasons for on and off. I speak as someone who has read quite broadly and have flirted with books categorised in modern times as “lad lit”: I am a huge fan of Martin Amis and if you haven’t read David Baddiel’s forays into novel writing in this genre then you should – they are annoyingly good. So if I, as a woman, can enjoy books written from a male perspective and read by men, I find it somewhat irksome that so few men have the desire to show any kind of interest in the fiction favoured by women. Anyway, I digress.

Much as many of Moriarty’s books (perhaps most famously Big Little Lies) focus on the lives of suburban women, some of them are intricately plotted and follow the lives of a complex set of characters, all of which cross paths in various ways and with a myriad of consequences. Because of this, I was greatly surprised when I heard the author interviewed and she revealed that she writes without a plan. Prior to her most recent release, the last novel she wrote called Apples Never Fall followed the tensions and anguish within a family from whom the matriarch has disappeared: most of the novel we spend wondering what has happened to this character (including whether she has merely walked out of her life or has been horribly murdered by someone within it), and Moriarty reports that she too spent much of her writing time wondering the same thing. She had not, by her own account, decided what had actually happened to this key character when she began to write the book. She started with the idea of the disappearance and discovered the truth behind it along with her characters. It is perhaps this very unconventional approach to plotting that enables her to write with such authenticity – she’s not dropping hints or trying to plant red herrings in relation to the real outcome, for she has no idea what that outcome will eventually be.

I am around one third of the way through Moriarty’s latest and am gripped as ever by her writing. Here One Moment is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet as it circles around the idea of free will and destiny. In summary, the scenario is that a group of people on a flight from Hobart to Sydney are each pointed at by a woman on board the flight and told the supposed time and manner of their death. Some passengers are given what amounts to welcome news by most people’s standards (heart failure, age 95), others – inevitably – are told that they will die very young. Some are even told that their death will be as a result of violence or self-harm. The rest of the novel is about the fall-out from this thoroughly alarming and unscheduled in-flight entertainment.

One of the ideas explored in the novel is the impact that such an experience might potentially have, not only on the feelings of those receiving the predictions but on their actions too. One of the passengers pays a visit to another “psychic” after the flight, and this “psychic” points out to him that he will not be the same person after the reading as he was before it. He points out that whatever he says to his client will make him act differently and that this will then potentially have an impact on the outcome of his life. Moriarty refers constantly to the idea of chaos theory throughout her writing – the idea that one small event in nature has a ripple effect that causes huge impact in other areas. At the point in the novel where I am right now, a mother who has been told that her baby son will die by drowning while still a child has elected to take him to swimming lessons. He takes to the lessons like the proverbial duck to water and it becomes clear that he is going to become a huge lover of swimming. As readers, we now sit with our hearts in our mouths and await the inevitable: will the mother’s decision to take her child to swimming lessons, sparked solely by the psychic’s so-called prediction, end up leading to the death of her child in the future?

The same thought experiment was run by a Greek playwright called Sophocles almost 3000 years ago. He wrote what I would argue is perhaps the most influential work of literature ever published, in the form of the tragedy called Oedipus Rex. Most people know the name “Oedipus” only as a result of Freud’s early 20th century ramblings about motherhood and sexual repression; very few people have any idea what a frankly brilliant and chilling story that of Oedipus was when it was written. It is emphatically not a story about motherhood, nor is it a story about sexual repression; to be honest I don’t think I can ever forgive Freud for making it so. Oedipus Rex is a story about destiny, about free will and about the extent to which we have control over either of those things. If you don’t know the story, it can be summarised as follows …

In ancient Greece, a king and queen are horrified to be told by an oracle that their baby son will grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Terrified by this ghastly prediction, they send the baby away to be exposed on the hillside and die. The kindly old shepherd gifted with the unhappy task cannot quite bring himself to do the dreadful deed, so he ends up passing the baby to another ruler and his wife in a far-distant land who are childless, and they bring the baby up as their own. The baby is named Oedipus. He has no idea that he is adopted.

When Oedipus grows up, like all curious young men, he too consults the oracle and asks his destiny. The oracle tells him that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he does the only sensible thing: he removes himself from his family home and goes off on his travels, thus removing any possible risk of somehow murdering his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus believes that he has taken control: he is the master of his own destiny and he has cheated the oracle. Trouble is, remember … he doesn’t know he is adopted.

Several months into his lonely travels, Oedipus gets into an altercation on the road with an arrogant older man who tries to tell him what’s what. Long story short, Oedipus does the only thing any decent red-blooded young male would do, he kills the old fool. Afterwards, he continues on his travels and eventually comes to a kingdom which is in a bit of trouble because it’s being harassed by a nasty monster. Clever Oedipus defeats the monster by solving its riddle and – would you know it – it turns out that the king of this particular dominion has recently died and they’re in need of a chap to take over. What a stroke of luck! Oedipus marries the widowed queen – who is granted a little older than him but still young enough to bear children – and becomes King of Thebes. The rest, as they say, is a truly horrible history.

The whole point of Oedipus’ story is exactly the thought experiment that Moriarty is playing out in her novel. To what extent does a sense of destiny itself predetermine our actions? To what extent do people inevitably fulfil the path that they are told lies in front of them? It is easy to point out that if the oracle had not said what it said – on either occasion – the story of Oedipus would not have unfolded as it did. In the ancient world, the story was taken as a morality tale about man’s arrogance: humans are convinced that they can outwit the gods and cheat their destiny, and that arrogance begins and ends with asking the question. If nobody had asked, would nothing have happened? Does the asking trigger the event?

It is easy to assume that these big philosophical questions don’t affect our lives on a day-to-day basis, but in fact this loop of thought is inescapable and resonates in daily life. During my career, a trend came and (thankfully) went of sharing what were laughably called “predicted grades” with students. These grades were not teacher predictions (although teachers are indeed asked to make such psychic predictions and that nightmare continues) but based on a crushing weight of data that looks at “people like Student A” and attempts to make a mathematical prediction about how “a person like Student A” is most likely to perform in an exam. All sorts of data get included in the mix, from prior academic performance to socio-economic background. The happy news that a bunch of data analysis that hardly anybody fully understands “predicts” that Student A is likely to get a Grade 3 or below was – until alarmingly recently – shared with Student A. What an absolute travesty. I will never forgive the system for sitting a child down and telling them that the computer says they’re likely to fail. Likewise, I have seen children who are “predicted” a line of top grades spiral out of control under the pressure. For heaven’s sake stop telling kids what “the data” (our new name for the divine oracle) says about their destiny. It’s a seriously grotesque thing to do.

For similar reasons, I know parents who are understandably jumpy about their children being labelled as anything. Who doesn’t remember well into middle age having “he’s shy” or “she’s anxious” being said over their head, while they were going through an entirely normal phase of being wary of strangers? Before you know it, the label of “shy” or “anxious” or whatever the grown-ups have decided befits you becomes you. I am absolutely in support of my friends who will not have their children referred to in this way: if history teaches us anything, it’s that people tend to fulfil their destiny. So be careful what path you pave.

Following the Herd

At primary school, I rarely played with other children. For me, playtime usually meant a walk around the edges of the playground, observing others and thinking to myself. There were lots of reasons why I found it difficult to connect with my childhood peers, none of them particularly interesting or unusual, but I have always wondered whether my early childhood experiences have shaped my temperament: to this day, I’m not much of a joiner.

More recently, I have begun to ponder whether in fact my own biology has had more influence on my personality than I would like to admit: as someone who suffers with extremely poor eyesight and less-than-perfect hearing, I am naturally quite cut off from much of the world. In recent years, I have begun to realise how this has in many ways defined how I relate to others and in turn how others respond to me. Motivated by a desire for acceptance, I have always tried to disguise my disablities, to the extent that many people are genuinely surprised when I admit to them. The price I have paid for this – ironically – is that I have gained a reputation of being “stand offish”, with many people firmly convinced that I have ignored or blanked them over the years. So, for anyone reading this who is convinced that I have overlooked them in the street or in the corridor (especially to whomever it was that made me aware of it by writing a rather nasty comment on this blog): the truth is, I probably didn’t see you or hear you. I’m sorry. It wasn’t deliberate.

Large scale groups have always made me feel uncomfortable and I hate the idea of “losing myself” in a crowd. The thought of going to a football match terrifies me. I did a few big concerts in my youth but struggled with the sheer number of people around me and I would not do it again now I’m older. A crowd takes on a mind-set and a force of its own, one that’s both independent from and beyond the control of the individuals it contains. Recent events have served as a horrific and tangible reminder that herd mentality – in all its forms, both ancient and modern – is something that should frighten us all.

Experience has certainly taught me that being part of a group is not in my nature and broadly speaking I am proud of the fact that I won’t play ball for the sake of staying on the team. It may not be my most attractive quality, but it’s one that will drive me to raise the alarm whilst everyone else stays silent. It makes me the kid who will shout that the emperor’s got no clothes on. Some employers have thanked me for this, others have not: it takes a robustly confident leader to tolerate being told that they’re naked in front of the world. There are times when I have reflected that I could have led a somewhat easier life – certainly professionally – had I been more willing to march in time, but generally speaking I quite like being an outsider. This is not to say that my failure to merge cohesively with a group has not caused me some anguish over the years – it can be a lonely existence. In the past, it has meant being kicked out of a group of writers with whom I shared many values, due to my innate inability to agree with them on everything – or at least, to pretend that I did. It meant the Editor of the magazine blocking all contact with me as “no longer an ally” because I asked questions and defended other people’s right to to do so. As a lifelong supporter of social justice, the increasing phenomenon of these kinds of activists, who denounce all forms of debate or discussion, has come as a genuine shock to me.

Until a few years ago, I believed that the fight for equality would usher in a new era of empathy, diversity and understanding – a new age, in which our ability to relate to each other would be improved by our ever-evolving understanding of how human rights intesect and – at times – conflict. It is what being a liberal is all about. Yet it seems to me that most of my so-called liberal allies have been taken over by a collective fear of rejection. Like the teenagers I have worked with over the years, they constantly check in with each other to affirm whether or not what they think is acceptable – and who can blame them? The consequence of dissent these days is excommunication from the tribe. Man, as Aristotle said, is a social animal: rejection is frightening and dangerous.

In the past, I found myself briefly drawn to people who described themselves as “libertarians” – only to find once again that there was a hymn sheet of horrors that I was expected to sing from if I wished to be initiated into the tribe. According to most of the Americans that I met online, to be accepted as a “libertarian” then one must be in favour of guns. Lots of guns. One must agree that the act of carrying a gun is a liberating experience (I mean – what?) and certainly that the act of carrying one is none of the government’s business. Every time I tried to propose a different line of thinking (held by most sane individuals on this side of the Atlantic), I was simply told that I was “not a libertarian”. So there we are. Another crowd to watch from the sidelines as they descend into madness.

Another “libertarian” approach that I struggled to respect was the puerile desire to offend, bolstered by the dubious claim that this is somehow a noble and worthwhile antidote to the equally tedious culture of taking offence. Certainly, I relish challenge and debate, and I also believe that free speech is more important than the inevitable risk of causing offence to some. As Salman Rushdie said following the horrifying attacks on the staff at Charlie Hebdo in 2015, “I … defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.” But in an article on what he has termed “cultural libertarianism,” Breitbart author Allum Bokhari argued that “deliberate offensiveness plays an important role in the fight against cultural authoritarianism, … showing that with a little cleverness, it’s possible to express controversial opinions and not just survive but become a cult hero.” This surely sums up the unambitious and self-seeking aims of the internet-famous shock-jocks, who make it their business to offend – preening contrarians, whose sole function is to cause shock and awe, their online communications a heady mix of clickbait, worthless insults and self-aggrandisement. There is no evidence whatsoever that anyone’s personal liberty is furthered by such infantile sneering, yet swarms of self-proclaimed free-speech advocates rejoice in this toxic effluence with excited applause.

Maybe I’m still that little girl on the edges of the playground, the one with the problem joining in – but as I stand at the periphery, I see the herd mentality all around me. At its best, it gives us a sense of solidarity as we strive for the greater good or find our feet in the world. At its worst, it gives us mindless savagery, the kind of collective violence exemplified and explored in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. On a day-to-day level, however, it results in something much more mundane and insidious: it endorses mediocrity and prevents us from thinking.

This is an updated and adapted version of an article I wrote originally for Quillette magazine in 2016.

False judgements

Emotions got a bad rap from ancient philosophers. Most agreed that the ideal state was a kind of calmness that the Hellenistic philosophers (most famously the Epicureans and the Stoics) called ataraxia. There was even talk of apatheia – a detachment from the chaos of feelings and overwhelm. This is perhaps unsurprising if you understand the birth of western philosophy; if you’re trying to formulate, define and distil the key to the perfect life and the perfect society (which is what the early founders of western philosophy were trying to do) then it probably doesn’t include your citizens experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions. Once you’ve admitted that emotions are a bit of a distraction and often cause issues both on a personal level and for society, it’s not much of an overreach to find yourself arguing for a state of detachment.

The term “stoic” these days is synonymous with having a “stiff upper lip” but this is based on a crucial misunderstanding of the Stoic position. The Stoics did not advocate for iron-clad self-control or suppressing your feelings. Rather, they believed that all emotions were what they called “false judgements”, which meant that they were based on a misunderstanding: if you’re feeling them, you’re still getting it wrong. In the ideal philosophical life that they strove for, a person would have such a great understanding of himself, the world and his place within it that he would not suffer at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: he would simply nod and know the right thing to do. One example given is that a Stoic would run into a burning building in order to attempt to save a child because that is the right thing to do; they also argued, however, that a true Stoic would feel no distress when his mission failed. Weird, isn’t it? Interesting, though.

One of the frustrating things about this period of philosophy is that much of the writings that we have are general “sayings”, snippets or purported quotations which appear in the works of later authors, usually writing in Latin rather than in Greek, and reporting on what a particular thinker or school of thinkers believed. The reality of this of course is that they may be wrong. For example, there is a famous quotation attributed to Epicurus that states “the wise man is happy on the rack”. Quite how this works within a school of philosophy that was dedicated to the avoidance of pain is puzzling. If the quotation is correct, our best guess is that the Epicureans certainly spent a lot of their time considering the correct attitude towards unavoidable pain, for this was one of the biggest challenges to their philosophical position; presumably the “wise man” – someone at the pinnacle of philosophical endeavour – would know how to cope with pain in extremis.

Most people see Epicureanism and Stoicism as polar opposites and they were indeed rival schools of philosophy at the time. As so often, however, there was more that united them than divided them. Both schools were arguing and aiming for the perfect life and the state of detachment that philosophers before them had explored; both schools were concerned with how to manage our responses to pain and distress. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the Stoics believed in proactive, conscious and deliberate involvement in society and its structures, whereas the Epicureans were a bit more lethargic about the whole idea – getting involved with politics is painful and distressing, so is it really rational to bother?

One philosopher, writing before the Stoics and the Epicureans, was unusual in his take on emotions. Aristotle argued that emotions were appropriate and necessary: the trick was understanding when and how you should be feeling them and what to do with them. He spoke of “righteous anger” and argued that a good philosopher would indeed feel such a thing. It is difficult to explain how truly radical this position was, when the way the philosophical movement was drifting was towards ataraxia and apatheia. Aristotle also smashed through the Socratic idea that philosophical ideals such as “courage” and “justice” could be defined in one way and that if one could not do so then one lacked an understanding of them. Aristotle argued that there were multiple forms of “courage” and “justice” and that nobody could define them in one simple way nor apply their principles in individual cases without discussion, debate and compromise. What a genius he was.

Why the hell am I writing about this? Well, I spoke to a friend yesterday who has taken a decision about which she feels guilty. I cannot divulge the details of this decision as I do not want to betray her confidence. Suffice to say that it was a professional decision, the right decision and one which the people affected will hopefully benefit from in the long-run. There is no doubt – in my mind and even in hers – that the decision was right and good. Yet she still feels what she describes as “guilty” about it.

This reminded me yet again of The Greeks and the Irrational by ER Dodds, a book written in the 1950s, which I mentioned in another blog a few weeks ago. One of the chapters in the book argues that the Athenian world was a “shame culture” and that later ancient societies – the Hellenistic world and the Roman worlds – began the shift towards a “guilt culture”. I have thought about this on and off all of my life. The very thought that the nature of one’s emotions can be dictated by the society in which one grows up is fascinating to me. Dodds argues (rightly, I think) that modern society is more person-centric and hence feelings such as guilt can be internalised; in Athens, one’s personal standing and engagement with society was more relevant (a symptom perhaps of living in a small and emergent city-state) and therefore a sense of shame before others was more powerful than any kind of internalised guilt.

As I listened to my friend who left me some WhatsApp voice messages (I love them – it’s like receiving a personalised podcast!) I found myself wondering whether the Stoics had it right. Sometimes emotions truly are false judgements. My friend has no reason to feel guilty about her actions and she should strive to release herself from the false state of mind in which this feeling distresses her. According to the Stoic ideal she has prevailed in her actions but has not yet achieved the ideal state of detachment. So how should she achieve this goal? Well, I guess it depends on your approach to these things. A Stoic would advocate for rigorous rational analysis and say that this will eventually lead to release from one’s feelings. This is not, in fact, a million miles away from cognitive behavioural therapy, the therapy model supported by psychiatrists and many psychologists, who would say that she needs to question why she feels guilty and challenge her reasons for doing so. A psychologist with leanings towards the psychodynamic model would argue that she needs to explore where her feelings might stem from – does the situation remind her of experiences in her past, during which she has been made to feel or to carry guilt that perhaps should not have been hers? (Pretty sure the Stoics wouldn’t have been up for that one).

Whatever the answer in this particular circumstance, personally I find myself returning to the Stoics time and again. They were a fascinating turning point in philosophical history and paved the way – I believe – towards modern psychiatry. After all, what is the difference between sanity and insanity if not the difference between the rational and the irrational, the true and the untrue, the controlled and the uncontrolled? I will leave you with the Stoic image of how the individual should relate to society – not because I advocate for it, necessarily, but because it’s a classic and a model I have never stopped thinking about since I first learned about it in the 1990s. The Stoics believed that individuals could not control fate but they also argued that individuals had free will. So an individual person is like a dog tied to the back of a wagon. Whatever the dog’s actions, the wagon will go on its way. So how does the dog have free will? Well, he can resist the wagon and be dragged along, impeding the wagon’s progress and damaging himself along the way. Alternatively, he can trot along like a good dog and help the wagon to proceed smoothly.