Patriotism, Epictetus, and Juneteenth

 Tomorrow is a new holiday.  Etymology-- day which is holy.  The word denotes religious significance, although we now attach the word to days of purely secular significance, along with days which mark secular events that we treat with religious devotion.  Some are stupid, and some make sense.  I have stated on several occasions that we go overboard with the Day of X Awareness thing, and some holidays are just plain silly.  Then there is Juneteenth.  Juneteenth makes sense, and indeed, I would argue that if not the specific day, then some equivalent is a logical necessity for the philosophical argument that many of us make in response to the absurdities of people like Nikole Hannah-Jones, peddlers of critical race theory, and a variety of schools of thought to be addressed here.

I like the Fourth of July, and not only because it is an excuse to light the grill, throw some meat on it and read the Declaration of Independence once again, while chuckling like the juvenile I still am at heart when I get to "manly firmness."  It is a day that means something.  That document means something.  I am happy to acknowledge everything sketchy in it, but it was the clearest statement to that point of principles that one can defend to this day, principles that are better than any other political principles.  I am no relativist.  Western, classical liberalism, as we now call it, is just better.

Yet the framers were as all people.  They were people.  They were flawed, and they made some horrendous moral compromises, the most egregious of which was the maintenance of slavery.  Some of them were enthusiastic about it, some would have abolished it then and there if they could, but it was 1776, and even the best of them were merely flawed and compromised in every sense.

The view that I have always taken of the founding, of the drafting of first the Articles of Confederation, and then the Constitution, was that the founding fathers, to varying degrees, had some understanding of the core principles Jefferson espoused in the Declaration of Independence.  Some understood how incompatible slavery was with those principles.  The American project, as some will call it in a particularly trite turn of phrase, has been a process of striving to reach the lofty goals spelled out by the Declaration of Independence.  The most egregious failure at the outset was permitting slavery, and alas, it took the Civil War to abolish it, but right is right, wrong is wrong, the South was wrong, slavery was abolished, no relativism, no revisionism, end of story.

Or not quite.  The story of slavery ended, to the degree that it ended when human trafficking still occurs, on Juneteenth, so that seems like as good a date as any to mark the fulfillment of a promise, of a principle stated in the Declaration of Independence.  If we are going to celebrate the Fourth, then, and make the argument that I have made regarding it, Juneteenth is logically necessary.  It is a celebration of the principles, and a demonstration of the gradual realization of those principles.

More, it is a repudiation of Nikole Hannah-Jones-ism.  Consider the absurd claims made in the 1619 Project.  It would take another book to detail all of the false and absurd claims made in that Project, and more books to explain how and why that Project went so far off the rails.

The view from 30,000 feet is this.  When you hire fact-checkers, and then tell the fact-checkers to eat shit and die when they tell you that you got facts wrong (yeah, that happened), you are not engaged in an honest enterprise.  Yes, I am saying they were not merely wrong, but dishonest.

The premise of the 1619 Project was that the founding was not 1776, but 1619 because that is when the first slaves arrived, and America is defined by slavery.  Well, if the founding was 1619 when the first slaves landed, then that proto-nation (New York was New Netherland, not even New Amsterdam yet, remembering that the project was published by the New York Times) was un-founded, and dis-established on Juneteenth.

I have no intention of spending this post explaining, once again, the absurdities proposed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who knows nothing of history and cannot formulate a logical argument.

Rather, the day is a useful moment to think more coherently about the trajectory of the country, the trajectory of civil rights, and philosophical aspects of the moment.

Tomorrow marks a good day, the day a promise was fulfilled.  The day a promise that was made by flawed men who could formulate a principle but lacked the courage, or perhaps just the context to live up to their own philosophy, the day that philosophy could come closer to realization.  It would be too deterministically glossy to say that the arc of history necessarily bends towards justice, and if you actually do read history, you can find plenty of twists and turns and backwards movements.  But anyone who cannot see that 2023 is better than 1860 is a goddamned fool for whom I have no patience.

And so we turn to philosophy.  I've been re-reading Epictetus.  Smart guy, who had a lot to teach you.  He was on my mind again, though, because among the stoic philosophers, he was the one who was neither an Emperor nor a Senator nor anything like that.  He was a slave.

Abolitionism was a non-existent ideology in ancient Rome (or Greece, and Epictetus was Greek).  It should not be surprising, then, that Epictetus did not tell a bunch of gladiators to rise up and say, "I am Sparticus," in order to overthrow the institution of slavery.  He was weirder than that.

If you want Epictetus in a nutshell, it is this.  You do not control others, you do not control the world.  You control your reaction to it, primarily your thoughts about it.  If you want to live in peace, decide to live in peace, through your own thoughts because what you truly control is your own mind.  Assent and live harmoniously with the world as it is.  Someone can do X to you, but you are only harmed if you decide that X harms you.

If you need to put it in more modern terms, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," plus the serenity prayer.  Hmmm... nutshell, Hamlet... too much?

Eh.

Anyway, Epictetus tells you to live in accordance with "nature."  Whatever "nature" is.  This is actually a common dodge for ancient philosophers.  Nature.  Nature is... um... [waves hands] it's the gods or stuff we don't understand, but probably can't control, and also my gut-level moral intuition that I don't want to have to explain so don't ask me and if I just say, "nature," I don't have to 'cuz nature!

[Dodge.]

Look, there's a lot of great stuff in Enchiridion, but can we call a dodge "a dodge?"

Anyway, Epictetus (like most stoic philosophers) said that if you live in accordance with nature rather than trying to control that which you cannot, you'll be fine.  Where you go wrong is fighting against "nature."

There is wisdom here.

Where it gets weird reading Epictetus in the modern era is... remember he was a slave.  To him, slavery was part of the natural order.  No, I'm not going all post-modern on you.  I'm saying he was wrong, and that this is his "nature" hand-wave coming back to bite him on the ass in the leg.  Get it?  Epictetus's leg?  No?  C'mon.  Classics jokes kill at the last party you'd ever want to attend!  Where was I?  Oh, right.  Epictetus and his reliance on "nature."  If you asked him to make an argument in defense of slavery, could he?  No.  He would fall back on the nature argument, or the metaphor that some writer chose to cast you in one role, or another, or something like that, but could he defend the institution on moral principles?  No.  He wouldn't even really try.  He'd tell you to accept whatever your role is.

Which is pretty creepy.  He had wisdom to impart, but his acceptance-- his assent, in the language of stoicism-- to slavery is something that is harder to stomach in the post-Enlightenment era, remembering that yes, it was the Enlightenment that provided the philosophical and political rejection of slavery.  Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the world, and throughout history, until the Enlightenment provided the arguments against it.

That was long after Epictetus, who just assented to it.

Epictetus wasn't really much of a political philosopher.  He just told you how to live, and the gist of it was that there was a price to pay for tranquility, but those prices are only external, and hence irrelevant.  It's still hard to stomach the various passages about the beating of slaves and his cold-blooded philosophizing about beating slaves.  Remembering that he was a slave.

And yet there is a great deal of value, I think, in many of his lessons today.  You may have noticed, but while slavery still exists in the world (cough, cough, China), we honor and celebrate Juneteenth tomorrow because emancipation was the first major step toward the fulfillment of the promises in the Declaration of Independence.

People suck.  I'll say it, even if Epictetus wouldn't.  Epictetus would go so far as to say that if someone breaks your arm, you are only truly injured if you decide, in your own mind, that you are truly harmed.  There is flesh, and there is your mind.

Epictetus tells you that when your spouse, your child, or other loved one dies, remember that all people die because that is the nature of things.  Someone was loaned to you, and you had to return that person, whom you did not own.  Get over it.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

No human is capable of living like this to the full extent that Epictetus says.  What you are capable of doing is thinking about the reality of what happens, putting reality in perspective, and changing your perspective based on reality, and that's what Epictetus tells you to do.

So consider that slavery is not part of the natural order, whatever Epictetus thought that was.  Emancipation happened.  A promise was fulfilled.  The world is better, we mark and celebrate it.  Why?  Reality.  Understand reality and put events in perspective.

What, then, are the minor perturbations in your life?  There are ideologies that tell you to dwell on them, focus on them, make them the center of your life, and to decide that you have been injured by them, and injured grievously.  It is one thing to disregard Epictetus's assent to slavery, and quite another to disregard his core advice that we have the power to decide how we react to that which we cannot expect to control, and that we must assess with a cold, objective eye.

And no, little piggy, there are good things, and bad things.  Slavery is an objective wrong.  Emancipation was an objective good.  We assess their magnitudes with a clear eye.  With that same clarity, we must assess the reality of the world today, and no, I'm not going to say the goddamned serenity prayer, but just picture Frank Costanza yelling, SERENITY NOW!!!

Ranky Tanky, "Freedom," performed live.  The studio version is on Good Time.