Musonius Rufus, Lectures 4.6

For all human tasks, I am inclined to believe, are a common obligation and are common for men and women, and none is necessarily appointed for either one exclusively, but some pursuits are more suited to the nature of one, some to the other, and for this reason some are called men's work and some women's.

But whatever things have reference to virtue, these one would properly say are equally appropriate to the nature of both, inasmuch as we agree that virtues are in no respect more fitting for the one than the other. 

The social trend in my own lifetime seems to have been one of an increased fracturing, a breaking of the bonds that we all share in common. Perhaps I spend too much time with too many people who wallow in too much division, but that has been my unfortunate experience.

A few years back, there was a story going around that one of our esteemed politicians had, during a passionate speech, mistranslated “e pluribus unum” as “out of one, many”. I laughed along with the rest, and I thought no more of it. I don’t even know if the story was true, and it hardly matters.

If that was the worst linguistic blunder the poor fellow had committed, he is a far better man than I am. There are moments when I am trying to write a rather simple word on the blackboard, and I suddenly have no idea how to spell it. I won’t even begin with my regular butchering of the Latin language, or my many failed attempts to manage Greek.

Yet then something odd started happening, something rather surreal, almost Kafkaesque: my students began using that old Latin phrase in that same confused way.

“Why can’t we understand that this country was made for the very idea of diversity? There was one at first, but now we are many! America’s about becoming different!”

“They used to have one way of doing things, over in Europe, but then Americans realized that anyone could do it his own way. Everyone does his own thing.”

“E Pluribus Unum, right? Doesn’t it say that on our money? We opened the floodgates, man, because there’s not one of us, just many of us!”

Where am I too even start with this? It isn’t about the Latin; it’s about principles behind the darn Latin. I’m worried I may wake up tomorrow morning as a beetle.

Don’t tell me it’s just foolish young folks who say such things. I once had to sit through a faculty enrichment seminar, provided by an esteemed law professor, entitled “Enforcing Diversity: What You Need to Learn”.

What is going on here? I was always taught that people from many races, cultures, and creeds could come together, recognizing, for all the differences in their backgrounds, that they all shared a common humanity. I was told that this was something approaching the sacred, to be revered. Human diversity only makes sense within the context of human unity, or otherwise we abandon the actual human part of it.

Yes, we do indeed lose the human part of it. We are so caught up in the particulars that we neglect the universal. We dwell only upon the narrow differences.

This is why I regularly hear those on the left calling those on the right “fascists”, and those on the right calling those on the left “mentally retarded”.

This is why I hear rich people saying that we need to get rid of the useless poor, and poor people saying we need to get rid of the greedy rich.

This is why I see the people of one tribe constantly fighting with the people of the other tribe. Each demands justice for itself, and refuses it to another.

This is why I see the proud worshiping themselves as gods, and not worshiping God.

And, for the purpose of this text, this is why I see men who hate women, just because they are women, and I see women who hate men, just because they are men.

If we’re going to play it that way, then there is no virtue on either side. Then we all stop being human entirely, and we just fight it out like beasts. Then we deserve all the grief we get.

There is a certain moral relativism that can cloud our minds, and an unwillingness to accept the balance and complementarity of the sexes is just another instance of it all. As soon as we remove a common moral purpose, we will remove all purpose. As soon as we define a person by the accidents, we will lose all of the essence.

We will never know who a man is, or who a woman is, without first knowing what a person is. A sense of right and wrong, a sense of truth as measured by the unity of Nature, is our only cure for this insanity.

“Virtues are in no respect more fitting for the one than the other.”

Written in 6/1999