Epictetus's Enchiridion: Conflict and Character
James B. Stockdale
I was thirty-eight years old in 1962 when I first encountered the classic text that influenced my life. The book was Epictetus’ Enchiridion, and we got off to a very unpromising start together. I just couldn’t bring myself to see that what that old coot Epictetus had to say bore any relationship to my life as a twentieth century technocrat.
The book had special meaning because it was a gift from a man sixteen years my senior, whom I idolized. It was given to me by Philip Rhinelander, my professor of philosophy at Stanford University Graduate School. He had been my mentor for almost a year when, during my last tutorial session, he removed the little worn and marked-up personal volume from a high shelf in his study and said: "Here is a book that a man in your profession should own. Keep it and read it from time to time."
I was a career naval officer, an experienced fighter pilot about to return to sea duty to command a carrier-based squadron flying the navy’s latest supersonic jets. What did I have in common with a first century Stoic who went along page after page reciting epigrams like:
Men are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them.
Do not be concerned with things that are beyond your power.
Demand not that events should happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen and you will go on well.
Mid-career graduate education is not uncommon in military life, though it is somewhat rare to have it in a field entirely separate from one’s immediate concerns. For nearly twenty years I had been on the operational and technical side of things--an engineering degree from Annapolis, with shore duty as an engineering test pilot bracketed by flying tours in carrier-based squadrons. I was now to return to such an aeronautical life after this sabbatical devoted to the study of political science, economics, and international relations with as much of the humanities as I could pack in. I did this in hopes of eventually achieving a high command that needed this education for policymaking and diplomatic and strategic planning duties.
I and others have found that a midlife second education, particularly one heavily salted with introspective subjects like classical philosophy, can precipitate an unexpected postgraduate wrinkle. An aftershock can develop as one returns to life in the world of cutting-edge technology, expediency, and not infrequent bureaucratic infighting. Throughout the first six or eight months after returning to the operational scene, I underwent a kind of transitional decompression. I groped for a stable platform of philosophical reference from which I could confidently call my shots. It wasn’t because I was in a new environment that I had to screw my head on a new way; it was just that I now saw contradictions where before I had seen only order. I had to hook my life to a big idea if I was to stay the course.
It was now 1963. Throughout 1961 and 1962 at Stanford, my mind had been awhirl with a whole new shopping list of big ideas. Rhinelander’s two-term philosophy course in "The Problems of Good and Evil" had alone taken me from the Book of Job to Camus, with more than a smattering of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Kant, Pascal, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes, and Hume along the way. But now, as I led my squadron on and off the carrier decks in Southeast Asian waters, halfway between war and peace, I gravitated toward a more self-supporting, independent ethical balance wheel as I suffocated in the moral dilemmas that I could feel closing in on us all. There, my last-found model, Epictetus and his Stoicism, who by then I had made myself better understand, struck the very chord of self-respect and personal autonomy that I so needed to keep my mind clear and to break through the clutter of false hope and wishful thinking and to cut myself free.
Had I been an ancient Stoic, I would have expressed what roughly went through my mind like this: "Just as in the universe, where the mind of God is immanent and indwelling and moves in a manner self-sufficient and self-ruling, so I as the leader of pilots in times of unexpected change, frequent confusion, and occasional duplicity in high place, can do no better than to interpose myself between those pilots and our bumbling bureaucracy as their ultimate guide and protector. I must cast off concern for all things not within my power. Remembering that as I aim for such goals, I must not undertake them by acting moderately, but must let go from within myself that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism called honor, and not hesitate to make exceptions to operational rules and procedures as necessary to follow my eternal guides of duty and personal responsibility."
With such an outlook, 1963 and 1964, eerie years of national decision, were not times of great soul searching for me. I experienced one big soul search, embraced Stoicism, and was off and running; once I had made up my mind not to be concerned with things beyond my power, I was no longer hung up on where I began and where I left off in these enigmatic conditions. The conditions were tailor-made for Stoicism, and in my new-found freedom, tailor-made for me. I loved the life I lived during those years; it was unique in modern military history. Washington was determined to call every shot and their operations were compounding and stumbling over one another; normal business was crowded out and chaos frequently reigned. When caught in the crossfire of conflicting imperatives of our secret missions into places like Laos, my conscience counseled: "Follow your duty as you interpret it, don’t foolishly endanger your pilots, do what you think is best, improvise with confidence, and be prepared to stand accountable for your actions."
So it was on that most chaotic night of those years, August 4th, 1964, when Washington decided to officially go to war. Just before midnight, I had been the eyewitness with the best seat in the house to see an action that had been reported as an attack by North Vietnamese PT boats against the American destroyers, Maddox and Joy. It was, in fact, a false alarm caused by the destroyers’ phantom radar contacts and faulty sonar operation on a very dark, humid, and stormy night. This was realized during the event by the boss of the destroyers at the scene, and by me, the boss of the airplanes overhead. Corrective messages were sent instantly to Washington: "No PT boats."
A few hours later, I was awakened to organize, brief, and lead the first air strike against North Vietnam, a reprisal for what I knew to be a false alarm. It was true that I had helped repulse an actual attack three days before, and that I thought it likely that another real one would occur in the future. But what to do, knowing that hours before, Washington had received the false-alarm messages, and that it would be none other than I who would be launching a war under false pretenses.
I remember sitting on the side of my shipboard bed, alone in those predawn minutes, conscious of the fact that history was taking a major turn, and that it was I, little Jimmy Stockdale, who happened to be in the Ferris wheel seat that was just coming over the top and starting its descent. I remember two thoughts. The first was a pledge: that this was a moment to tell my grandchildren about some day, a history lesson important to future generations. The second was a reflection: I thought about Rhinelander, his "The Problems of Good and Evil" course, Epictetus and how prophetic it had been that we had all come together those few years before. Probably nobody had ever tested Rhinelander’s course as I was likely to test it in not only the hours, but the years ahead. I knew we were stepping into a quagmire. There was no question of getting the truth of that night out; that truth had been out for hours. I was sure that there was nothing I could do to stop the "reprisal" juggernaut pouring out of Washington. My course was clear: to play well the given part. The Author had cast me in a lead role of a Greek Tragedy. Who else to lead my pilots into the heavy flak of the city of Vihn and blow the North Vietnamese oil storage tanks off the map?
Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses--if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen, see that you act it well. For this is your business--to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to another.
So much for Stoicism as a guide to where one begins and where one leaves off in the world of free will. I now take leave of that relatively happy place, stale and jaded though it may have become in those years, and shift to the much worse circumstances of a political prison, a house of compulsion. There I found Stoicism an even more perfect fit.
I’m about to tell you more about the psychological side of life in a political prison than many of you will want to know. I assure you it isn’t done for political instruction or shock effect but to take you inside the human mind in a state of its ultimate duress and show how Stoicism can elevate the dignity of man even in worst-case scenarios.
I got to that political prison just a little over a year after I blew those tanks off the map. (The Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been passed by the Congress two days later, and the air war in North Vietnam was on.) It was on September 9, 1965, after a couple of hundred bombing missions in that war (and just three years after I left graduate school), that my airplane was finally shot out of the sky. I arrived at the old French dungeon called Hoa Lo ("Fiery Furnace") Prison in Hanoi, as a stretcher case, three days later.
I identify Hoa Lo as a political prison rather than a "P.O.W. camp," not just because of its honeycomb of tiny cells, each with a cement-slab bed, leg irons at its foot, a food chute above the irons, a toilet bucket beside, and a "rat hole" to the outside drainage ditch for flushing, but because it was a place where people are sent to be used, to have their minds changed, or both. Political prisons are not to be confused with penitentiaries or prison camps where people are locked up to preserve the public peace or pay their debts to society. Little attention is given to terms of confinement or time schedules. They are institutions devoted only to the discrediting of the inmates’ causes; when all the prisoner’s juices have been squeezed out, when his forced confession of crimes never committed are judged as convincing as they can be made to be, he is usually free to go. (It’s not generally known, but Americans held in Hanoi were free to go any time, provided the prisoner (1) cut juicy enough anti-American tapes, and (2) he was then willing to violate our prisoners’ underground organization’s self-imposed creed of comradeship: "Accept no parole or amnesty; we all go home together." Thus we came to imprison ourselves, for honor, in accordance with our Code of Conduct. I might add that this mystified several high officials of our government here in Washington. They didn’t know their own code.)
Given their charge, the breaking of human will, all political prisons are similar. That is to say, neither what goes on there, nor how their prey grapple with it, appreciably change, century in and century out: Cervantes’, Dostoevsky’s, and my accounts are all the same. At the heart of the organization is a master extortionist or commissar like Gletkin of Darkness At Noon and the Cat of In Love and War. The same methods are used now as were used in the Middle Ages. They don’t use drugs; they want to impose guilt; they want authenticity with no easy outs or plausible denials. They don’t use brain-washing; there is no such thing. They do use pain, administered by a few selected torture guards. They also use isolation. Such prisons use a trip-wire system of multitudinous regulations, some of which many inmates inadvertently break because of their number and ambiguity, and other regulations which almost all inmates eventually intentionally break because their requirements defy human nature. (In particular, there was a regulation for us never to communicate in any way with another American prisoner.) The idea in political prisons is to get prisoners to break regulations. Since any violation is considered, prima facie, moral turpitude or "evidence of ingratitude," it is used as justification to recycle the inmate through the torture meat grinder. From that, the commissars obtain, on a production line basis: confessions, apologies, and atonements.
Seasoned veterans of these regimes realize that pain and isolation, to say nothing of other deprivations and miseries, are mere accelerators to the major pincers of this will-breaking machine: imposed fear and guilt. "Destabilize with fear, polarize with guilt," say the graffiti on the cave walls of the alchemists of the Middle Ages who worked on psychic transformation under pressure. In fact, the total regime comes to seem to its sufferers like an alchemist’s hermetically sealed, pressurized, and heated retort, in which they are perpetually stalked, hounded down, and harpooned with barbs of fear and guilt.
Like all good squeeze-play systems, political prisons are meant to destroy the man who chooses the "middle way," who decides to be "reasonable," to "meet them half-way." For hours on end, my commissar would plead with me to follow that track: "You are an American, you are pragmatic; come, let us reason together." It is only when he can get you to level with him in some small way, to drop your guard and betray an emotional dependence on his good will, that he can get his crowbars of fear and guilt behind your armor and begin to twist.
Political prison extortion is one grand leverage game. The inmate is well served to chant the rules he must live by under his breath: "Show no fear." "Never trigger shame." "The credibility of your defiance must be maintained." "The prison onslaught must be contained." "Never level with a jailer." One soon learns that to survive with self-respect, he has to divest himself of the remnants of his student-body-president personality: the willingness to be open, to interact, to respond in interesting ways. With time and care, many prisoners create a new independent personality that even under torture is difficult to manipulate. In Stoic terms, having external needs makes one vulnerable and vulgar.
The condition and characteristic of a vulgar person is that he never looks for either help or harm from himself, but only from externals. The condition and characteristic of a [Stoic] philosopher is that he looks to himself for all help or harm.
I do not suggest that I understood all this while in prison or that the Enchiridion was familiar enough to use as a text on how to face the challenge. But, remembering my experiences in prison, I have since come to think that the Enchiridion has all the right answers.
On the tactical side, the main idea I bring away from Epictetus is to "stay off the hook." If a prisoner demands conveniences, accepts favors, pleads for relief, aspires to status, attempts to prove something about himself to others, this means giving a manipulator an opening through showing need for "externals." The smart inmate makes it his business to find his tormentor’s exact limits, to know his own, and to demonstrate a commitment his adversary finds it unprofitable to challenge.
A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.
Shun externals, yes. But a man must concern himself in the world of Epictetus and in the world of extortion and manipulation with "internals," or those matters that are "up to him," and only to him.
Our opinions are up to us, our impulses, desires, aversions--in short whatever is of our own doing.
Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning speaks of the "freedom" he found, even in the depths of terror in his Nazi prison, in realizing that there was one thing they could never take from him: his attitude and his opinion of what was going on. As Jean-Paul Sartre said to a priest in another Nazi prison, "Remember, the important thing in here is not what they do to you, but what you do with what they do to you."
Internals are man’s only true ticket to freedom, but confronting them can be agonizing. In prison, there is one internal decision that is difficult beyond all others: when to first say "no" and knowingly force the commissar’s hand to carry out his threats and impose physical torture. This turning point almost always takes place in a frenzied moment when the new prisoner is awash in a sea of guilt and fear. The guilt arises from his having "gone along" with the commissar’s demand for a little of this and a little of that, while in the fashion of most of us well-brought-up American boys he had chosen "the middle way," to his now devastating regret, as he took preliminary measure of his predicament. And the fear! Arthur Koestler, while in a Fascist prison in Spain, described his initial fear of torture as "not a healthy fear, but the obsessional and morbid variety . . . the neurotic type of anxiety . . . the irrational anticipation of an unknown punishment."
No men avoid this initial terrible fear that only their imaginations can generate and few, if any, avoid the initial hesitant step of grudgingly giving ground while taking measure of their predicament. Finding himself sinking into the quagmire of complicity, hardly a man exists who does not wish he had stood up and blown the "enough’s enough" whistle sooner than he did. For self-respect--and in the long term sense, for mental health--the sooner he blows the whistle, the better.
If a person had delivered up your body to some passer by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivery up your mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded?
It is better to die of hunger, exempt from guilt and fear, than to live in affluence with perturbation.
If a man’s sense of honor, his good faith, and his prudence are not destroyed, then he too is preserved; but if any of these perish or be taken by storm, then he too perishes with them.
Once the neophyte political prisoner realizes that experiencing pain is not as bad as its anticipation, a kind of equanimity and pride comes over him. He knows that it is the unpunished complicity, not the tortured compliance, that tears a man apart. He casts aside the error of involving himself with externals, of depending on "what is not up to him," on another’s sympathy, gullibility, or price for making a "deal." He uses both the rational and irrational elements of his soul--both part of the same to the Stoic--to see his proper role in the unfolding drama. He accommodates himself to fate. He makes a declaration to himself and to the prison regime that, regarding his choices, he is "free." He has arrived at the point where the "strategic" side of Stoicism, the accommodation to fate and mind over matter, can bring him peace.
To the Stoics, God and the visible universe are two aspects of the same thing. God’s Soul is the Mind, and the visible universe (Nature) is his body. The Mind is the divine reason, immanent in the universe, whose nature reveals itself in the imperturbable laws of Nature. As humans, we are all a part not only of the visible universe, but our minds are a part of the Mind. The Mind, the universal, divine, all-embracing consciousness, is like a flame, and our individual consciousnesses are sparks in it. Hence each of us has a divine element in him. Just as God’s Soul, or the Mind, is the active principle of the universe, and his body, or Nature, is passive, so are our minds the active principle in us, and our bodies passive. Mind over matter; it all happens up here, don’t worry about your body. Also, there is no chance in the Stoic ordering of things. All that happens is inevitable, proceeding from God’s nature. By using the divine elements in us, we can know how nature proceeds from God’s Mind by divine necessity. A free man is one who understands this and accommodates himself to fate. The good man plays well the part fate has dealt him.
Stoicism is certainly not for everybody, and it is not for me in every circumstance, but it is an expression in philosophical terms of how people find purpose in what they have every right to see as a purposeless world. This is certainly the world of those who find themselves in that ever-proliferating human institution, the political prison. But Stoicism has apt application well beyond that population. It speaks to people everywhere who persist in competing in what they see as a buzz-saw existence, their backs to the wall, their lives having meaning only so long as they fight for pride with comradeship and joy rather than capitulate to either tyranny or phoniness.
In recent years I have been working on books that are heavily focused on my ten years in Vietnam. Publishers always ask writers to think through such questions as: "What in your background can you connect with this or that impulsive action?" or ". . . this or that decision?" I date most of the dramatic, intuitive material to the frustrations, fears, or guilts I incurred as a young boy. The intellectual decisions are harder to place, but the liberal arts ("as much of the humanities as I could pack in") at Stanford undoubtedly allowed me to be more comfortable writing my own rule book as I dealt with unusual circumstances, than had I stuck with high tech all the way. But it was Epictetus who played the unique part in preparing me for all this. I walked in his shoes throughout that time. Particularly in the prison scene, he was my guide for ethics, but more importantly, a guide to outlook, psychology, and will. One of the most valuable memories I had was that of recalling, even if faintly, that serious scholarship existed about a breed of men devoted to a Principle of Life of staying off the hook and prevailing with pride and joy against all odds in a hopeless world.
So it was that in Hanoi, after each of us in his solitude brought about his crucial rite of passage from the neurotic anxiety of the vestibule to the comforting pain of the star chamber, he joined a brotherhood of Stoics, dedicated to keeping high the spirits of each other, while locked in combat against hopeless odds, under the banner, "stick it in their ear." We flaunted the trip wire, made them torture us, and prevailed in establishing a civilization of men held together by a network of clandestine wall-tap communication. This civilization matured rapidly, as do all things in the pressurized hermetic, hot box, and took on all the usual binding elements of a culture: its own tap code dialect, traditions, heroes, inside jokes, and, of course, laws, leaders, and specific rules regarding succession to command.
My name appears to this day in official navy records as a man whose government-paid postgraduate education was never utilized. The bureaucracy scores my twenty-four months at Stanford a waste of money because I was shot down before I ever had a chance to take that Washington job they had in mind for me. How tunnel visioned can you get? What better preparation for head-of-government of an autonomous colony for nearly eight years than prior concentrated study on "The Problems of Good and Evil"? And the lessons of Epictetus paid off in pure gold.
The hardships were many, bones were broken, death visited some, but most of us were sure, deep inside, that we were on the right track by staying with internals, refusing to make deals, building a clandestine civilization, and seeking and finding purpose in serving each other in an otherwise purposeless world.
Difficulties are what show men’s character. Therefore, when a difficult crises meets you, remember that you are as the raw youth whom God the trainer is wrestling.
To the person skeptical of the validity of this Stoic approach to life in this aspect of war, I add one assertion: no psychotics came out with us. Every man felt good about himself. That’s the difference.
* * *
Did I undergo another transitional decompression, a reordering of values, as I re-entered this modern world of freedom? The answer is no. I couldn’t generate the same kind of turmoil in my mind that occurred when I first re-entered the world of bureaucratic infighting and expediency from the halls of Stanford’s philosophy corner. I was happy with the philosophic tilt I brought out of prison. I was by then wise enough to know that Epictetus has his applications out here in what, after years of solitary confinement in total silence, I immediately dubbed the big wide noisy world of yackety yack.
Once you’ve spent a few years as a target for the harpoons of fear and guilt in the hermetic hotbox of a political prison, you develop a very keen sensitivity for the first hints of the onset of an extortionistic squeeze play. We who are in hierarchies--be they academic, business, military, or otherwise--are always in positions in which people are trying to manipulate us, to get moral leverage on us. The only defense is to keep yourself clean-- never to do or say anything of which you can be made to feel ashamed. A smart and ethical person never gives a manipulator an even break. He is always prepared to quench the extortionist’s artful insinuation of guilt with the ice water of a truthful, clear-conscienced put-down. The more benign the environment, the more insidious is the extortionist’s style. How true the Arthurian legend: "Then Arthur learned, as all leaders are astonished to learn, that peace, not war, is the destroyer of men; that tranquility, rather than danger, is the mother of cowardice; and that not need, but plenty, brings apprehension and unease."
Epictetus’ tactics, particularly that of staying off the hook, are very good advice for those who seek dignity in our modern bureaucratized society. A few years ago, I originated and taught a course at Stanford entitled "Combating Coercion and Manipulation." Though we concentrated on applications of the course in everyday life, I chose our case studies not from office politics but from prison literature, such as the trial and death of Socrates, the confrontation of Christ by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the interrogations of Koestler’s Commissar Rubashov by Ivanov and Gletkin, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Epictetus’ and my own saga. Stoicism was a matter of deep curiosity to the students. There was much discussion about the sense of freedom and dignity it can spawn, about how its adherents so differed from moderns in never thinking of themselves as victims, and about its being a seedbed for the idea of the brotherhood of men, who share common status as humans, who are born with innate and highly principled ideas and with a touch of the divine.
For we come into this world with no innate conception of a right-angled triangle, or of a quarter-tone or of a semi-tone, but we are taught what each of these means by systematic instruction; and therefore those who are ignorant of these things do not think that they know them. On the other hand everyone has come into the world with an innate conception as to good and bad, noble and shameful, becoming and unbecoming, happiness and unhappiness, fitting and inappropriate, what is right to do and what is wrong.
Am I personally still hooked on Epictetus’ Principle of Life? Yes, but not in the sense of following a memorized doctrine. I sometimes become amused at how I have applied it and continue to apply it unconsciously. An example is the following story about myself.
As the months and years wear on in solitary confinement, it turns out that a man goes crazy if he doesn’t get some ritual into his life. I mean by that a self-imposed obligation to do certain things in a certain order each day. Like most prisoners, I prayed some each day, month after month, continually altering and refining a long memorized monologue that probably ran to ten or fifteen minutes. At some point, my frame of mind became so pure that I started deleting any begging of God and any requests of God that would work specifically for my benefit. This didn’t come out of any new Principle of Life that I had developed; it just suddenly started to seem unbecoming to beg. I knew the lesson of the Book of Job: life is not fair. What claim had I for special consideration? And anyway, by then I had seen enough misery to realize that He had enough to worry about without trying to appease a crybaby like me. And so it has been ever since.
I never thought about the implications of this until recently when I reread A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and it struck home that the simple soldier Ivan thought it immoral to ask God for more than daily bread. It suddenly dawned on me: How Stoic can you get? Ivan and I, so different in culture, he never alone, I always alone, yet each drawing on a wisdom born of extortion and hardship, a wisdom best articulated two thousand years ago by our common ancestor in hardship, a crippled Greek slave. Through Epictetus, Ivan and I became brothers.
Messages like these come only through the classics.
Of the teachers in this audience, I ask: Isn’t this the ultimate appeal of the classics? Their lessons are applicable to all ages, and this is true because they dwell on unchanging human nature. As you know, some in intellectual circles like to think there is no such thing as human nature, others fancy it can be changed, and some even believe they themselves can bring about the change! I met some highly placed educators at a recent curriculum-planning conference on how to educate leaders for the twenty-first century who said: "Wow, in the twenty-first century, all previous bets are off!" "It’s a completely new ball game." "The world of individuality and ego has got to go; we’ve got to erase these outmoded bad habits of several thousand years and get everybody pacified and cooperative." "Put away that curriculum you brought, Stockdale, that reading list with all those old books." "No more old books!"
Of course, these educators are social scientists, who write prolifically about something called "values." They don’t read Aristotles’s Politics because they believe that what comes out of Harvard’s Kennedy Center is more relevant. They don’t read Aristotle’s Ethics because they believe that books about cognitive development are better. Some teachers believe that in concentrating on contemporary trendy material they are announcing new ideas, scientifically demonstrated by something called "research," and that they are thereby helping to save the world. Actually, they are spreading indifference and lassitude in their classrooms because they are talking about a contrived race of people that do not live. Remember the poet W. H. Auden’s parting commandment to us in the United States as he left these shores for his native England, "Thou shalt not commit a social science!"
As I have already indicated, my reading list for a person about to enter circumstances entailing high risk of political imprisonment would be Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Kestler, rather than the latest "how to" government handout. But to prepare best for the life I have lived, I should have been reading Homer, not Mahan, at the Naval Academy. Hector is about to leave the gates of Troy to fight Achilles. He will lose, and he will die. When he says goodbye to his wife and baby son by the gate, the baby starts to cry as he becomes frightened by the "nodding" of the plumes on his father’s shining helmet bobbing in the breeze. You have it all in that instantaneous snapshot: Hector’s duty, his wife’s tragedy, Troy’s necessity, the baby’s cry. In the Illiad we can discern our family’s life in the twentieth century--the life we really live. The material of the classics has human meaning because it centers on a human nature that mutates, if at all, only with glacier-like leisureliness.
You ask what can a teacher do, using a text like the Enchiridion, to open a student’s mind and heart to respond to the claim the text wants to make on his or her life? Suppose brotherhood is the subject. Take a passage like this:
Enchiridion:
Everything has two handles: one by which it can be borne, another by which it cannot. If your brother does you wrong, don’t lay hold on the situation by the handle of his doing you wrong, for by that you cannot bear it, but rather by the opposite--that he is your brother.
Does that not give a clearer, more human answer to the age-old question of Cain to the Almighty: "Am I my brother’s keeper?" than the following from a current book on "teaching values"?
The stage six reasoner views an individual’s rights in much the same manner as would a stage five reasoner but with a much greater emphasis on the respect for life and personality of the individual.
Of course, that’s not a fair comparison, some would say. We need to know what stage five is, what stage six is, and also stages one, two and three, and more if we are to have (as this textbook from which I’m unfairly quoting would have us have) a proper appreciation for the cognitive developmental approach to moral teaching.
When I was lying for months with a broken back and a broken leg, sick, without medical treatment, in solitary confinement, I vividly remember getting a real boost from remembering a few simple lines from the Enchiridion:
Sickness is an impediment to the body, but not to the will. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will.
You teachers can fill in the blanks with the names of all those men and women you know who have transcended the crippling effects of disease or injury and gone on to do things that the world would be so much the poorer without.
This last word is to teachers and non-teachers alike. Tell your kids this and see that they don’t forget it. It is from chapter 35 of the Enchiridion:
When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shrink from being seen to do it, even though the world should misunderstand it; for if you are not acting rightly, shun the action itself; but if you are, why fear those who wrongly censure you?
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