On Christmas day 2009, al-Qaeda attempted unsuccessfully to bomb the North-western flight bound to Detroit from Amsterdam. This set off a mindless political finger-pointing in the US with no thought to any possible solution. 

Crises will never end 

When he heard about the attack, Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer prize winning writer, was reading The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He was immediately struck by the relevance of Marcus’ Stoic reflections: 

If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it. 

Meacham sounded jaded by the “mindlessly divided” nature of the political response to the incident. The same old finger-pointing and political point-scoring. Politicians using a threat as an opportunity to squabble among themselves rather than addressing the real issues at stake. 

Meacham reasoned that crises are inevitable. We are deluding ourselves to think otherwise. He could only wish that instead of the embarrassing display of Democrats and Republicans scrambling to opportunistically exploit the event, Americans would learn, like the Roman emperor, to embrace a philosophy of optimistic Stoicism. 

We should be hopeful, nevertheless 

Meacham says that a proper grasp of the Stoic philosophy of The Meditations would require not only adopting a world view which calmly accepts the darker side of human affairs, but also retains a hopeful sense of their possibilities. That paradox is the cornerstone of the entire philosophy. Stoics quietly accept life’s misfortunes without complaint but they nevertheless remain committed to doing good, for the common welfare of mankind. 

We are made to help one another 

Human beings were made to help one another – a theme that Marcus Aurelius returns to many times throughout The Meditations. The wise man, he says, can be recognized by the affection he exhibits toward his neighbours, and through his humility and truthfulness. The only true good is virtue, which leads to universally admired character traits such as justice, self-control, courage, and freedom. The only true evil is vice, the opposite frame of mind. 

The perfect can’t be the enemy of the good 

It’s unrealistic to demand that we live in a Utopia. Nevertheless, says Marcus, we should accept the imperfections around us while maintaining our goal of making progress toward something far better, even if it’s only one small step at a time. Indeed, it is the secret of fulfilment in human life. 

The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. […] As Marcus Aurelius would understand, a never-ending war is not a war we should not fight: it is just a war that never ends. The sooner we accept this, the better. 

That’s what I would simply describe as a philosophical attitude toward the stark reality of terrorism. One type of folly denies the reality of these threats and buries its head in the sand. Another type of folly accepts them but exaggerates our inability to cope and throws its arms up in the air in despair. What people find so difficult about Stoicism is that it does neither of these foolish things. Stoics like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius could walk and chew gum. They could calmly accept adversity while nevertheless patiently fighting back against it, even though the odds seemed stacked against them or the battle seemed interminable. Life, as Marcus said, is warfare. It never ends. The good man accepts this, without complaint, and he remains at his post anyway, standing guard against the enemy. 

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It’s unrealistic to demand that we live in an Utopia. Nevertheless, says Marcus, we should accept the imperfections around us while maintaining our goal of making progress toward something far better, even if it’s only one small step at a time..

 

 

 

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