Diogenes vs. Seneca: Scorn, grace and the philosophy of addressing moral rot

 The proverbial "grumpy, old man" is forever decrying the moral decline of civilization, and I do not know the precise age at which I earn the temporal right to make such declamations without the attendant dismissal, dismissal by lack of authority being as fallacious as argument by authority.  Yet, something is rotten in the states of America, and indeed, beyond.  We held the kabuki theatre of the New Hampshire primary this week, and afterwards, I indicated that my thoughts have turned in this direction.  Yesterday, we saw a verdict that Donald Trump must pay $83 million to E. Jean Carroll.  He won't pay, but the verdict is something of a moral victory, amid such moral rot.  Amid widespread moral rot in the body politic, what is the proper rhetorical response?  My appeal to the proper, translation issues notwithstanding, is itself an indication of philosophical schools of thought, but let us take at least a brief moment to consider the rot, itself.  My purpose is not a full elaboration.  I have other goals in mind for this morning, and my heterodox analysis is unlikely to appeal to orthodox partisans of either party at this point anyway, so my assertion of pervasive moral rot would require more discussion than my purpose dictates.  If you have a side, your side is rotten, and I have already elaborated on that point. 

Briefly, the right is an authoritarian cult of personality.  It is devoted to no principle, but instead, to the worship of the most amoral sociopath in the history of American politics, who has already tried to steal a presidential election through means including a violent insurrection.  He rejects democracy, and all Western, classically liberal values while feting dictators.  And he's a lying rapist.  A party in thrall to such a figure is a party that has lost its way, and the Republican Party, as we saw yet again with New Hampshire, believes in Donald Trump, and nothing else.

The Democratic Party, as I have written, found itself lost after the passage of the ACA, because healthcare was the last major piece of the New Deal/Great Society agenda.  It cast about for a new direction rather than shifting to classical conservatism, by which I mean, declaring victory and defending that victory.  The direction it selected was identitarianism.  It has become toxic, as divisive as Trump, it has enacted destructive policies at the state and local level derived from identitarianism (see, for example, refusal to arrest or prosecute criminals, and the consequences in urban areas), and by extending identitarian ideology, embraced terrorists and anti-Semitism.

Donald Trump cozies up to Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, the Squad cozies up to Hamas.  Trying to compare the moral rot of either decision seems like a pointless endeavor, like asking how many demons can dance on the head of a bamboo shoot stuck under the nail bed of a dissident for torture purposes.  The former torture and murder political opponents, the latter torture and murder Jews, and if you believe in virtue, you reject all.

And you see the moral rot.  You see the moral rot within the Republican Party, within the Democratic Party, amid the ethnonationalists and reactionaries backing Donald Trump, and on college campuses, where anti-Semitism is now impossible to ignore for everyone except the DEI infrastructure that has, as its remit, the management of such problems, except that the ideology of DEI is intrinsically, to its core, anti-Semitic.  The ideology of DEI is derived from critical race theory, the name given to the model by co-founder, Kimberle Crenshaw.  In her foundational article, "Mapping the Margins," as I often remind readers, she explicitly rejects the philosophy of universal humanity.

Every group and every movement that rejects universal humanity inevitably comes for the Jews.

The strange thing to realize is that as horrifying as Donald Trump is, unlike the left, the monsters he fetes aren't advocating my genocide.  The left fetes monsters who do advocate my genocide.

And yet to compare one monster to another is to make the wrong comparison.  That is not Cato's way.  Cato's way is to stand uncompromising, rather than to choose one monster over another.  Compromise is necessary in normal politics, but when beset by monsters, be they right-wing authoritarians or leftist "allies," to use a word, of terrorists and genocidal anti-Semites who twist and pervert the word, "genocide," virtue requires choosing no monster.  Cato was accused of blinding himself, and pretending to live in Plato's Republic, but at a certain point, the moral clarity of Cato is required.

See the rot as it is.  The question is how to address it.  Maybe don't do what Cato did, in the end, but the question I pose for this morning is something more modest.  How should one address it, rhetorically?

Consider two models, Diogenes of Sinope, and Lucius Seneca.

Diogenes of Sinope, better known as Diogenes The Cynic, is rather misunderstood, or at least contested in the historical record, not having left much of a written record himself.  Mostly, there are stories about him, passed down through sources like Diogenes Laertius (different guy-- the name, "Diogenes," was like John back in the old days).  Cynicism, as a philosophy, is not what you think when you consider the colloquial use of the word today.  Colloquially, the word means having a bleak, negative or pessimistic view of human nature, distrusting people, or something of the sort.  The philosophy meant disregarding meaningless social norms, "shamelessness," and living according to virtue without any ambition for material wealth.  Shamelessness, by the capital-C Cynic's definition, is not what you think.  It means being unconcerned with the scorn of others, if that scorn is rooted in the violation of arbitrary rules.  Arbitrariness, though, is the key to that guidance.

The Cynics were strict moralists with respect to non-arbitrary rules.  They were pacifists, they would not steal, they simply did not care if you looked down on them for their appearance, attire or other such trivialities.  Shamelessness, for Diogenes, was different from shamelessness for Trump.

For Trump (and his ilk), we say that he is shameless to indicate that he commits moral sins and brazenly refuses to accept any social opprobrium for those sins.  He takes pride in his amorality.  That is not what shamelessness meant for Diogenes and the Cynics.  Consider how Trump would feel if he were forced to walk around in shabby clothing, appearing poor.  He would feel the "shame" to which we refer in capital-C Cynicism, because people would point and laugh, after all of his boasting and posturing.  That is what one must extirpate.

Consider the following important lesson.  One of Diogenes's followers, Crates, was Zeno of Citium's first teacher.  Zeno, of course, was the founder of the Stoa, to which Seneca was devoted in its later, Roman incarnation, but we'll get to that.  Anyway, Crates told Zeno to follow him around carrying a big pot of lentils, which was heavy and awkward, and Zeno looked embarrassed, so Crates whacked it with his staff, broke the pot, covering Zeno with the lentil soup, and Zeno ran off in... shame.  Crates yelled after him, scorning him, and telling him that nothing bad had happened.  Why?  Because if anyone looks askance at him for being covered in lentils, it matters not one whit.  That is the kind of shame to be extirpated.

With that, though, comes the scorn.  Crates, like Diogenes, was an asshole.  A strict moralist, but an asshole.

For the capital-C Cynic, moralism and assholery are not incompatible because scorn is a moral lesson, if properly applied.  That's a big if.

Diogenes was also Epictetus's hero, and his model of virtue.  If you read through the Discourses, you will see that Diogenes was basically the only person that Epictetus truly admired, aside from Socrates, because Diogenes lived a life unconcerned with anything but virtue, according to Epictetus's reading.  Of course, Epictetus was kind of an asshole too, so he'd overlook Diogenes's famous assholery.

Indeed, what really made Diogenes The Dog famous was his sick burns.  He did not suffer fools, liars, fops, nor anyone of the sort.  And even if you presented yourself otherwise, he still wouldn't suffer you, just to test you.  Diogenes was an asshole, and he got away with it because he was funny.

Well, to the extent that he got away with it.  He got the shit beaten out of him rather a lot.  So I don't know if that counts as getting away with it.  But he was funny, so maybe it was worth it.  After all, his sick burns are recorded, thousands of years later, and the assholes who beat the shit out of him are forgotten.

But as Marcus Aurelius reminds us, eventually Diogenes, too, will be forgotten, so do not worry overmuch about your historical memory.  Concern yourself with virtue.

Regardless, Diogenes would not suffer Trump, nor any of the fools nor sycophants around him.  He would not suffer the leftists who navel-gaze their narcissistic lives away, bemoan their non-existent victimhood, signal their virtue by decrying non-existent "systems" of oppression while doing nothing, and then praising the rape and murder of innocent civilians by a group whose founding document reads exactly like Mein Kampf written with an Arabic accent.

I suppose that paragraph was a little scornful, wasn't it?  The difference is that Diogenes would have been funnier.

Let us consider, then, the relationship between scorn and a more modern variation of shame.  The Cynics rejected shame, conceived in terms of arbitrary social practices.  This was pre-postmodernism, which now that I type it, sounds rather silly, but you get my point.  The reason every social constructivist and Butler-ian Jihadist (c'mon, that one was funny) goes immediately for clothing is that fashion and gender norms really are socially constructed, but any other social constructivist argument is much harder for the Butler-ians to make.  So that's their argument.

Yes, yes, fine, fine, fashion really is socially constructed.  (Note the twin ironies that most straight men do not really care about fashion in modern America, and Gender Studies is a field populated mostly by groups other than straight men).  Of course, it is also "socially constructed" that men play guitar and women play flute.  These observations are equally interesting/boring/worthless, but the Butlerians have made academic careers reiterating the clothing point, and mesmerizing impressionable 18-year-olds with it because they are in the categories that are interested in clothing and don't know the difference between hybrid picking and cross-picking, and perhaps in another society or another era, I'd care about clothing in addition to dressing differently, but that, too, is a boring observation.

Indeed, Diogenes and the Cynics made the fashion point far more effectively, two thousand years earlier.  The difference is that they did not feel the need to throw away the concepts of truth or morality in the process because they were capable of distinguishing the arbitrary from the non-arbitrary, rather than committing to the fallacious syllogism that X is arbitrary therefore everything is arbitrary.

Scorn that which deserves scorn, but to what end?  If you're funny, like Diogenes was, maybe the joke is the point, but those who followed him did not believe so, and Crates did not believe so.  And from Crates, Zeno did not believe so, so we consider what we learn from Zeno.

Zeno learned a lesson from the scorn.  He felt shame wrongly.  He was shamed for feeling the shame, and redirected his thinking.  I used the word shame in two different ways in that sentence.  Did you notice?  In the second occurrence, the word referred to the Cynics' conception, of embarrassment for failure to meet arbitrary social norms, and hence feeling the weight of social judgment.  In the first occurrence, he felt a proper moral judgment, from his teacher, indicating lack of virtue.  This is something closer to Socrates, who taught that one should be unconcerned with the opinions of those who are unwise, but if one is judged harshly by the wise, one should take note and corrective action.  Zeno, believing Crates to be wise, felt a form of shame that we define differently.  He learned, and grew.

Shame, in that more modern sense, can serve a purpose if properly placed.  If one recognizes proper moral judgment, and feels appropriate remorse, we might call that a form of shame, and if we take corrective action, a purpose has been served.

Can scorn serve that purpose?  Conditionally.  The conditions are that the one scorned must be open to correction, capable of the modern form of shame (not the Cynics' rejected form of shame), and have enough respect for the source that in the Socratic tradition, the one scorned takes a lesson rather than feeling reasonable in rejecting it on the same Socratic principle.

Trump, of course, is the wrong form of shameless.  He feels the form of shame that Zeno did, prior to Crates's lesson, but he is incapable of the modern, moral shame.  He is uncorrectable, and he respects no one.  To scorn him teaches him nothing because he is incapable of learning.

Trump, though, is the extreme example by whom we consider the principle.  If one scorns, is the subject of the scorn teachable?  Is the subject of scorn willing to consider the possibility of being wrong, capable of the modern form of shame, and does the subject have enough respect for the one heaping scorn to consider the approbation to be worthy of consideration?

If not, then the scorn serves no purpose.  Self-amusement, the expression of one's own bile, but anything beyond that?

Is there an audience?  To what end might scorn serve for an audience?  Consider, again, Crates and Zeno.  I started with Diogenes, but I seem to be writing more about Crates.  False advertising, or just the consequence of writing and letting the writing take its own direction?  Well, do I look like a guy with a plan?*

Anyway, Crates made Zeno uncomfortable in front of an audience, yet the audience's laughter was not the goal.  If Crates merely wanted to make the audience laugh at Zeno, then Crates would have been a shit.  However, the point was to teach Zeno that the laughter was irrelevant.  The audience was, in that sense, the instrument of the lesson.  Note the difference.

Scorn must have a lesson.  Scorn without a lesson is just assholery.  At best, edgy comedy, which has assholery within it by nature, but there's the asshole.  Without the lesson, there is merely the asshole, and a lesson without a student is an asshole shitting outside the bowl.

That went somewhere I didn't intend.

Get it?

Moving on.

Consider the contrast of Lucius Seneca.  Within the Roman Stoa-- I'd say second wave, to borrow the phraseology of leftist pseudo-intellectuals, but that's just more assholery-- Seneca was something of an anomaly.  The Stoa made its way to Rome through Posidonius and Panaetius, and took a rather different form from its original founders, Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus.  Musonius and Epictetus were, in many ways, quite similar to Chrysippus, although more focused on the ethics than the snark-quotes "physics" of the philosophy.  They were, however, kinda douchey.  They were also hardcore, basically ascetics.  Seneca was not an ascetic.  One might think of him as more moderate, creating the impression that he was more Peripatetic in his philosophy, but he still owed more to the Stoa in his belief that virtue was first and foremost.  He simply did not believe that one must be ascetic in the same way that Epictetus, for example, did.

Seneca, of course, was extravagantly rich.  He did, however, make a practice of living for periods of time in self-imposed poverty to demonstrate to himself that it was no great imposition.

Anyway, while Epictetus and Musonius preached virtues such as magnanimity and beneficence, Epictetus leaves us with many surviving lectures in the form of the Discourses.  And he was hardly magnanimous to his students.  He was an asshole.  Scornful, even.  Yet scornful with a purpose, as a devotee of Diogenes.

Seneca's writings show more the practice of that magnanimity.  The grace and beneficence that Epictetus advises.  The point, for Seneca, is that it is a virtue for you independently to be beneficent even in the face of vice, and that you, too, are imperfect, and will require similar grace.

So don't be a fuckin' asshole.

The scorn with which Diogenes "taught," and with which Crates "taught," if we call it that, requires an extreme arrogance, yet beneficence of the form advised so regularly by Seneca is itself attached to humility.  To be scornful requires a kind of assurance that you will require no such grace yourself.

Diogenes would laugh at any suggestion that he required grace, laughing off even the beatings he received.  Yet Seneca took a more mild approach.  Perhaps it was strategic, having to interact as he did with Nero, who would certainly not take kindly to scorn, but regardless, the irony is that the moderation and mildness that Seneca advised was more clearly evident in his writings than in Epictetus, who demanded it forcefully and scornfully.

Here, then, is the Seneca distinction.  How confident are you that you require no such grace yourself?  The more strict and consistent your moralism, the less need you have for that grace, but of course, the more one deviates from the pure, ascetic path of Epictetus and Musonius, the more forgiving a follower of the Stoa must be, as Seneca was.  If Epictetus lived a life sufficiently disciplined to allow him to use scorn as a lesson, perhaps Seneca did not, knew it, and showed the appropriate grace.

Seneca compromised enough that he stayed close to Nero, and true, he tried to reform Nero to some degree before that pesky business of treason and exile, but he was certainly compromised, and he knew it.

Here, then, is the question when faced with moral rot.  There is some value, of course, in the magnanimity of grace, as advised by Epictetus and Musonius, even if they did not show it, but behold, then, the hypocrisy.

Consistency and hypocrisy, then, come into the picture.  Seneca understood his own shortcomings, and through that, the true importance of grace and magnanimity.

Does that negate the value of scorn, in all circumstances?  Without that, there would be no Crates, no Zeno, no Stoa, and no Seneca.  Yet scorn without purpose, without direction, without a moral is somewhere between bile and entertainment, and whatever value there may be in the latter, it is lesser if it does not serve something greater.  The joke from Mel Brooks's History of the World, Part I was that Comicus was a stand-up philosopher, and some have been, but the difference between Don Rickles and George Carlin is that George Carlin's scorn had moral lessons.  Rickles was just fuckin' hilarious.  Is there value in that?  Sure, but times change, tastes change, and Carlin is forever.  More Diogenes than Seneca, to be sure, but his scorn contained moral lessons.

Yet without the confidence that one will not need similar or related grace, going down that road is fraught.  Is it worth the moral compromise for a cheap laugh, if one can even get it?

Philosophy was once about teaching the difference between good and bad, right and wrong.  The cardinal virtues.  Universities are corrupted, their moral purpose is lost, just one more place of moral rot amid decay.

And yet I return again to Steven Pinker's long-term analysis.  Life expectancy increases.  Standards of living, literacy rates, and every other measure indicate long-term, secular improvement in life on Earth.  Within a secular trend, there are perturbations.  There are many forms of perturbation.  Such a word, "perturbation."

There is no single rule regarding scorn or magnanimity.  Scorn can work.  Magnanimity can work, and you may require grace yourself.

Big picture.  Long-term, life is getting better on Earth.  Your scorn or magnanimity will not change that.  You are not Crates, I certainly am not.  That, itself, has implications for your actions, does it not?

Then again, what do I know?  Diogenes would fling shit at me while hurling a one-liner at me in Greek that would hurt worse than anything if I remembered enough Greek, and Seneca would give me a knowing half-smile.  But they're dead, so go read someone who knows a fuckin' thing.

Anyone who did not see this one coming is clearly not a Gen-X hipster.  Jeff Buckley, "Grace," live.  Yes, he was one of the great singers of the era.  Note, too, some of the guitar tricks he learned from Gary Lucas.

*  One might note the Joker's rejection of material wealth as praiseworthy.  He likes cheap things, as he says.  Yet, he seems to take the smaller lessons rather than the more important ones.  Kids, don't do that.