—Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 (tr
Long)
The Stoic understands something
about the relationship of the whole and the parts, both from the top down and
from the bottom up, that I suggest we all very desperately need.
Many of us, for example, are willing
to assume that what is good for the group as a whole is not necessarily good
for all of its individual members. Whatever benefits the many may well require conflict with what benefits the few, and while we may say that this is
unfortunate, we will accept it as the way of the world.
Conversely, others will take it for
granted that what is good for certain individuals will have to oppose any sense
of a common good. In order for a few great people to succeed, many lesser
people will have to fail. Those are the ropes, they tell us. Life will be
tough. To make an omelet, you’ll have to break a few eggs.
I have seen it in politics,
business, law, and education. I once saw it in the world of religion, when a
diocese began shutting down parishes to cover the vast legal costs
of paying for their abusive priests. In order for the Church to survive, they
said, some of us were going to have to make some sacrifices. So the parish that
gave me such comfort in my Wilderness Years, the church where I then met and
married my wife, is now closed.
We seem to be in a constant pattern
of opposition between the whole and the parts, swinging between the rights of
many at the expense of the few, and the rights of the few at the expense of
many. I’m sorry this isn’t good for you, but it is good for someone else, so
you’re just going to have to suck it up.
Now why do we automatically think
that this must be the case? Why are opposition and conflict, the failure of
some traded for the success of others, considered to be the norm? Cooperation
and complementarity should rightly be the full expression of man’s rational and
social nature. It is hardly a pipe dream, because I do see it happening, in
however small or unobtrusive a manner, on each and every day. People are at
their best when they work together, not when they are broken apart.
Nature herself may seem full of
violence and brutal competition, but we overlook there as well how everything
that changes, all that comes and goes, does so as a part of a greater harmony.
Death and birth are not evils. But greed, exploitation, and injustice are
certainly evils. These are human vices, of course, something only the abuse of
our reason and choice will bring into the mix, and something we can just as
easily decide to walk away from.
What is right and good for the many
is always right and good for the one, and what is right and good for the one is
always right and good for the many. These two aspects are inseparable from one
another. Virtue, the only complete human good, is never a resource or commodity
we need to go to war over. There is more than enough to go around, if only we
choose to live it.
Written in 7/2007
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