Remember
that you must behave in life as you would at a banquet. A dish is handed round
and comes to you; put out your hand and take it politely. It passes you; do not
stop it. It has not reached you; do not be impatient to get it, but wait till
your turn comes.
Bear
yourself thus towards children, wife, office, wealth, and one day you will be
worthy to banquet with the gods.
But
if when they are set before you, you do not take them but despise them, then
you shall not only share the gods’ banquet, but shall share their rule. For by
so doing Diogenes and Heraclitus and men like them were called divine and
deserved the name.
—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 15 (tr Matheson)
It took
me many years to fully grasp how deeply obsessed our world is with acquisition
and consumption. I had always seen greedy people, of course, and I had promised
myself that I would never become like that, but I needed to be able to step
outside of the whole set of social assumptions, to look at them from the
another perspective, to recognize how thoroughly we define ourselves inside by
what we conquer or achieve outside.
The
grabbing and fighting over trinkets we see every year during the Thanksgiving
shopping season may rightly seem barbaric to many of us, but I suggest it is
just a rougher looking form of what we also see in business, politics, law, or
advertising. Produce, compete, acquire, consume, and repeat.
Now I’ve
observed some followers of Stoicism wonder if there can be some form of Stoic
social teaching to alleviate such problems of greed, and I’ve been told by
various Socialists, Marxists, Greens, Libertarians, or Anarchists that my
insight means I’m well on my way to embracing their politics.
I can
hardly deny others their solutions for a better world, but for myself, I have
experienced Stoicism as a philosophy that is never built from the top down, but
always from the bottom up. I have always thought it best to fix myself before I
tell other people how to fix themselves, and I remain perhaps naïvely hopeful
that if individuals chose to act with virtue, about the things within our
power, the rest would rightly fall into place.
No, I
can complain and protest about the greed and gluttony of a fast-food culture,
which will produce nothing but resentment from everyone, or I can try to
practice justice and temperance myself, day by day.
The
image of our behavior at a banquet has long been helpful in keeping my own
avarice under control. I was still raised to have good table manners, something
I suspect has been skipped over almost entirely by the generation that followed
mine, but my interest has nothing to do with the social niceties of how to sip
my tea or use the silverware. My interest has to do with the relationship
between what I want, what is offered to me, and what I then choose to take.
First, it
is within my power to rightly know what I should or should not want, and I need
never surrender that power to the pressures of others.
Second,
I should never want anything that is beyond what I need, and Nature has made me
such that I do not need to ask her to give me more than she offers.
Third,
if it is always within my power to choose or not to choose, it is also in my
power to take or not to take. The virtuous guest may thankfully accept what is
offered, or he may even graciously decline. He may even rise above desire
itself.
It is
noble to say yes with self-control, nobler still to say no through absolute
self-control. This, Epictetus says, is the true state of self-sufficiency of
the Divine.
I was
recently in awe of my teenage son, whom I expect to always be clamoring to buy
and consume more things. We were standing in front of an elaborate sales
display, and he calmly asked, “When was the last time anyone turned down a
sale?”
“Whenever
anyone refuses to be led by the nose,” was my reply, and I was pleased to see
that he completely understood. He was perfectly content to buy nothing that
day.
Written in 9/2016
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