. . . Am I to expect that evil speaking
will respect anything, seeing that it respected neither Rutilius nor Cato?
Will anyone care about being thought
too rich by men for whom Diogenes the Cynic was not poor enough? That most
energetic philosopher fought against all the desires of the body, and was
poorer even than the other Cynics, in that besides having given up possessing
anything he had also given up asking for anything.
Yet they reproached him for not being
sufficiently in want, as though it were poverty, not virtue, of which he
professed knowledge.
—Seneca
the Younger, On the happy life,
Chapter 18 (tr Stewart)
Rome had
many base men, but it also had many great men. Rutilius Rufus found himself
exiled for defending the citizens against the corruption of tax collectors, and
Cato the Younger felt it better to die than to live in a state dominated by the
arrogance of Julius Caesar. Like so many who stood for what they thought was
right over what was convenient, they were vilified and condemned.
Diogenes
of Sinope was well known for his extreme criticism of a society that he thought
was dominated by a lust for wealth, power, and privilege. While many found his
behavior shocking and scandalous, this apparently didn’t stop people from also insisting
that he was never quite poor enough to live up to his own standards. One
wonders how a man who lived in a barrel, and who discarded his only bowl after
seeing another man drink from his hands, could possibly have given up anything
more.
I recall
reading two articles at roughly the same time, one of which argued that Teresa
of Calcutta had failed to do enough for the dying, while the other claimed that
she had done far too much to keep them from dying. I have heard my different
leaders tell me that the problem with the poor in America is that they have too
little to survive on, and also that they have far too much. An important person
once told me that teachers were the most valuable assets to any society, but he
also insisted that they were grossly overpaid.
The
problem, I think, is that we are quick to criticize without any sound moral
measure, without a sense of right and wrong to guide our judgments. Diogenes
wasn’t trying to teach people how to be impoverished, but he was rather trying
to teach them how to be virtuous; being poor was hardly itself the point, but
being good was.
Mother
Teresa would have been baffled by the criticisms of the social planners, because
she thought that the dignity of every individual human being could hardly be
judged by graphs and statistics. I myself am deeply confused when we demand
that people make something of themselves, but then never give them the
opportunities to do so; a man cannot pull himself up by his bootstraps if he
has no chance to buy himself any boots. A teacher, or a student, or any person
at all, should never be thought of as a commodity subject to the greed of the
market, to be used only as far as they make us a profit.
Like an
armchair quarterback, the critic will find something flawed about you, whatever
you might do, because he simply likes to point out what is wrong. He has no
room for what is right, because that would require that he be constructive, not
destructive. It is always easier to dismiss a perceived evil than to embrace a
true good.
The
Stoic, like any decent man, begins and ends his estimation of anything by
asking how it can encourage us in being virtuous, and how it can discourage us
from being vicious.
His moral
compass always points to the pole of virtue. It is never about being rich or
poor, or being of one or another social, racial, or political persuasion, but
about aiming at that excellence that fulfills our shared human condition. A man
is not good because of what he does or doesn’t have, but by what he does with
what he does or doesn’t have.
Written in 3/2002
Image: John William Waterhouse, Diogenes (1882)
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