Whatever happens, happens rightly.

Recently I've been reading my long-neglected copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. For those of you who are not familiar, Marcus Aurelius was the Roman Emperor between AD 161 - 180. He was the last in the series of 'The Five Good Emperors' -  Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pious and himself. This time (96-180) is often considered the height of the Roman Empire, where the borders reached their fullest extent, the exterior walls were built and the citizens within enjoyed relatively long years of peace and good governance. 

Marcus fitted the Platonic ideal of a philosopher-king. Invested with supreme power he was also a thoughtful and mediative man. He wrote Meditations whilst on the campaign trail fighting the Germanic tribes as a stoic guide to life and as a personal diary to himself. Stripped down, his philosophy was that life is essentially inconsequential, but what determines a worthwhile life is acting rationally and for good and not to be emotional about temporary highs or lows for they are as nothing in the broad sweep of history.

The above quotation - Whatever happens, happens rightly* - piqued my interest. It summarises in just four words, a whole philosophy and is thus a very powerful sentence. It appears on the surface to embrace a form of karma; that we are unwitting actors within a cosmic Fate of which we have no control but I think it goes a little deeper than this.

One has to understand where Marcus was coming from in order to do this full justice. I think the following quotation helps clarify a little more:-

Many grains of incense fall on the same altar: one sooner, another later - it makes no difference.**

Like the wisdom of Solomon I'm so fond of in Ecclesiastes, Marcus details the outward futility of man's actions. In this example, incense falling on the altar being a metaphor for successive waves of human generations, Marcus points out the folly of human vanities. The short term seeking of pleasures, accolades, profit, will be all be forgotten in the grand scheme of things.

A gloomy message, yes? And yet no - a realistic message, for Marcus discerns patterns and repetitions in human drama. Let's look at another quote to demonstrate:-

Reflect often how all the life of today is a repetition of the past; observe that it also presages what is to come. Review the many complete dramas and their settings, all so similar, which you have known in your own experience, or from bygone history... The performance is always the same; it is only the actors who change. ***

Anyone who has lived a few years can see the truth in the above and smile in recognition. This is even more emphatic for students of history. In politics, war, economics, human relations, there is, as I quoted previously in different article, 'nothing new under the sun'.

So far so rational. But what about the 'happens rightly' part? Doesn't this suggest some moral agency in what happens in life? Some 'good' pre-determined outcome? I would be equivocal about this. I suspect Marcus is using the word 'rightly' in a mechanicalistic manner, that universal laws of nature and humanity will always reassert themselves - like some cosmic regression towards the mean. For example, a forest may be cleared but, left to itself, it will grow again. 

However, despite this, Marcus also believes in being rational, humane and good. In fact he believes that this is the only point of life; to live a 'good' life. And whilst one can only control oneself, the more good in the world, the better the outcomes and the higher the level of, temporary, human happiness. Nothing is perfect, everything has to re-won, the lessons of history always have to relearnt but, given a reasonable and sympathetic character, then things can be made better. And, that is what is important in life.

My quibble - if I have one - is that whilst I agree with much of Marcus' gloomy observation about each generation having to relearn the lessons of the past, is that I have a stubborn belief in the Enlightenment's idea of progress. Although each generation does have to relearn history and human relations, it does so not from some ground zero each day but 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.

Knowledge, inventions, the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech, transparency, capitalism, food production, cheap transport, fast communications, the universalisation of knowledge via the internet, better health, drugs, sanitation; these are things that are spreading at the fastest rate ever in human history. We - pace Marcus - living only in the present - tend to ignore these advances but they are there and they are real. ****

So, what are we left with as base material concerns are stealthily obliterated? How can the sentient person avoid spiritual degradation, a creeping ennui? By doing good. Personal kindnesses. Rationality. Reason. Thoughtfulness. Curiosity.

The real battle, as suggested by Marcus Aurelius and other ancients texts, is, and always has been, individual and internal. And this is a fight that has to be won every day.

Firstly, avoid all actions that are haphazard or purposeless; and secondly, let every action aim solely at the common good. *****

Normal service resumed in the next article where I discuss the latest series of The Voice.

Laters

Tim

Tim's Blog RSS

NOTES

* Meditations - Book IV, 10

** Meditations - Book iV, 15

*** Meditations - Book X, 27

**** One of the problems with a 24 hour media and - dare I say it - ignorant journalists with no understanding of history - is that the sensational, the temporary, the critical always wins the battle for attention against the long term, the underlying trend, the comparative. We are, as a world, empirically, more free, richer, healthier, better fed than EVER before. That is not to say that there aren't problems nor that there aren't temporary set-backs but, if you compare the world with 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, let alone 500, there is no comparison that we are better off in so many ways. Whether we are happier or more spiritually fulfilled is a completely separate issue, however.

***** Meditations Book XII, 20

Originally published 2016 

The Good Life - Part 1

“society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

— Karl Marx - The German Ideology*

The other day I gazed at my Twitter feed and saw the same news item retweeted and commented upon by several of the people I follow. Making the same points with various degrees of humour or waspishness. I was literally gazing down at my own personalised echo chamber. Comforting, affirming and totally corrupting.

We all know - or at least I hope we do - that to live the good life, you should be understanding, humble, a seeker or truth and knowledge. What is a good life? Well, read my dissection of Marcus Aurelius here. We should all try to widen our sources of information, and gain new perspectives and thoughts.

This feeling grew after the election in December. I should have been happy - and I was - but a feeling in me grew that perhaps I was missing something. On a whim I trimmed my right wing and libertarian sources and upped my left wing and radical sources. I always had a few (George Galloway, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard) but now I wanted left wing voices to be more represented on the panels of my thoughts. My politics is complicated and I wanted my sources to reflect this, to challenge myself.

But last week I went further. As any reader of this blog knows, I have interests in Roman history, history generally, architecture, London and art. But my Twitter feed did not reflect this. So I actively sought out Twitter feeds that nourished what I actually like beyond the narrow prism of politics - archaeological finds and digs, art exhibitions, great architecture from around the world.

And so my twitter feed - my guilty pleasure - is now (for now) more representative of me as a whole, including the better half of my soul. When I look at my feed I want to stray from Trump’s tweets, to a campaign to save a Roman villa in Gloucestershire, to what’s happening next door at the Tate, to the painful internal process of good solid Labour MPs as they try to work out why they got the recent kicking from the UK electorate.

The same with books. The same with podcasts. The same with YouTubing. Music. 2020 has to be the year of diversity of thought, that most important but under-rated of qualities. It is a central pillar that buttresses ‘a good life’.

Next week, I discuss that how reducing your alcohol intake, eating moderately across all the food groups, quitting smoking and exercising regularly might actually make you more healthy. It’s part of my new series; Stating the Bleeding Obvious.

* Footnote - the Marx quote… This always struck me as ridiculous when I read this back at University. We all had to study Marx a lot, and this quote seemed to summarise the unrealistic nature of communism as envisaged in The German Ideology. But if one substitutes work and replaces it with thought, then, not so crazy…

The Wisdom of Neil Diamond

So, I’ll be welcoming some of you here from LinkedIn. Your first visit probably. Welcome.

Pat yourself on the back; you are the curious, the trendsetters, the pressers of random hyperlinks. Well, enter of your own choice, hand in your prejudices along with your coats, disrobe yourself of received wisdom and take a glass of my Voltaire cocktail (a little rum, a little vermouth, a dash of old fashioned free speech). There’s space down there on the carpet at the front.

So, history… Again. Maybe I have delighted you long enough? I should let some of the other ladies have a go? No? Okay, history it is then.

In my LinkedIn article I distilled the whole of human history down to seven life lessons. As you do. Like some fucking middle management Yoda with a penchant for Suetonius, I draw my unwilling readers in like that goddamn tractor beam in Star Wars. Yeah, from the first movie, in the original trilogy. The good ones. And now, like the Millennium Falcon, you are held captive on my Death Star along with the regular crowd of ardent readers; potential girlfriends checking me out, Mick Taylor fans, Indonesians, ex-girlfriends stalking me, that sad nutter from some basement in Didcot.

Let me quote from the article to give those of you who didn’t read it a flavour. Life lesson number six which - I think anyway - is one of the best:-

 We are the stories we tell.

 For several years I’ve been working on a riff about people being the stories that they tell. Of course, I probably stole the idea from a hundred different places. But I believe it. Nothing summarises a person (a nation, a culture) more than the stories they tell about themselves. Think about it. When you tell a story about yourself to friends or colleagues, how do you cast yourself? Hero? Villain? Put upon martyr? Joker? It doesn’t take a Freud to notice this.

Socrates does not sleep easy tonight because I think I gave the old pederast an intellectual kicking. Yeah.

But how pretentious was the article? Let me just consult my digital meter. OMG! The needle is pointing to ‘head firmly up arse and modelling it as a rather fashionable hat’ pretentious. That’s how much. With a feather.

Of course I quoted Ecclesiastes and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. What again? Regular readers here will know they are the only two books I’ve ever pretended to have read. I’m a poor man’s philosophe. But in the kingdom of the blind, the man with two trip wires tends to come out on top.

But all the same, I’m kind of liking the feeling of being some sort of urban philosopher with jokes. The cap fits and I’m snapping that brim smartly. I mean, hasn’t everything I’ve been writing here on this website been comedic philosophy? Bon mots, bon-bons, bonfire of the vanities?

Yes, yes it has Tim.

Well anyway, welcome, bookmark the page. It’s a journey we’re all on children, a little wisdom and humility and ridiculousness will go a long way.

“I am, I said.” says Neil Diamond. “And no one heard. Not even the chair.”

All about that. Thank you Neil.

Tim's Blog RSS

The Seven Traits of Curious People (remix)

Whoops! I did it again.

My Linkedin profile now proudly bears another article, another blind stumble through the dark alleys of wisdom. Yes, I recently posted The Seven Traits of Curious People. All very worthy and an exciting read, no doubt.

Why curiosity, Tim?

Why not, arsehole?

Seriously, why?  Explain to us your thoughts in this windswept and ill-visited corner of the internet?

Okay. Let's lift the curtain behind the creative process this one time shall we?

At university I studied some evolutionary biology and psychology. Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, some bollocks by Marx (obligatory at Sussex), Durkheim's Protestant Work Ethic, Hobbes, Rousseau, Masters and Johnson and Shire Hite (for the more racy stuff). Recently, I've been reading my copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, marvelling at Ecclesiastes and listening and purusing Jordan Peterson. 

What interests me is the un-variability of the human condition. Again and again, Marcus Aurelius returns to this theme; how everything has been done before. Human emotions and dramas that is. Okay so we have a laptop and a mobile phone, Tinder and central heating but the pride, the wants, the seeking of status, the lies we tell others and ourselves; not changed. 

And this interests me. Whilst we perfect the material side of life, the spiritual aspect remains the same. Marcus was, of course, a stoic who believed in the Pagan Gods. Solomon was a wise but over indulged King who sought meaning in life when none appeared to him  (all is vexation and vanity). He moved away from his god (Jehovah). 

Where rests truth and where lies meaning?

Fuck knows, to be honest. But let's be curious about everything, open our eyes and seek answers, however small, however insignificant.

Or maybe I've just turned fifty and so have tripped over the stone marked 'existentialist crisis'?

But I haven't the money for a red Ferrari, I don't seem able to attract women twenty five years younger than myself and I can't grow a ponytail. So, navel gazing philosophy and flimsy theories it is then.

As usual. Or as Danny Dyer - sage of our time says - Ter-wat!

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Some words on impermanence

The thing about repetitive, quotidian behaviour is the seeming sense of permanence, of things always remaining constant. You see this especially as a commuter where you get up at the same time, perform the same actions to get ready, make the same journey to the station, pass the same people, stand in the same place on the platform, sit in the same carriage with the same people, do the same things on the journey, get off at the same platform and pass the same people as you walk to work.

Example: I know as I leave my house around 7:36 I will pass at the intersection a group of four kids, two on scooters, as they head towards school. After twenty seconds, they will go one way and I another. This has been happening for months now. And yet I know, that this glad happy morning – for them – will end and end very abruptly in one, two years never to happen again. And although I may walk the same route, I will never come across this foursome again.

How many groups of happy, singing, shouting children have I passed in a work career going all the way back to pre-history? Thousands. Maybe I sit amongst them as I write this on my commuter train. Maybe some achieved their youthful dreams they carelessly chatted about on those mornings when they crossed my path. And maybe some didn’t. Maybe most didn’t.

So, it’s with sadness that I see school kids on my commute every day. It reminds me how very temporary everything is, even things that seem forever permanent. So very quickly it all ends and then never happens again. Like friendships. Or your children at various ages (Slipping Through My Fingers describes this perfectly).

I’ve also mentioned this in the past in relation to buildings. How the sense of permanence hides, in fact, a constantly changing landscape and bit by bit, brick and mortar, things set in stone crumble like the happy group of school children or the person next to you on the station, who you smile at for ten years and then, suddenly, is gone.

Impermanence.

Tim's Blog RSS

Whatever happens, happens rightly

Recently I've been reading my long-neglected copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. For those of you who are not familiar, Marcus Aurelius was the Roman Emperor between AD 161 - 180. He was the last in the series of 'The Five Good Emperors' -  Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pious and himself. This time (96-180) is often considered the height of the Roman Empire, where the borders reached their fullest extent, the walls were built and the citizens within enjoyed relatively long years of peace and good governance. 

Marcus fitted the Platonic ideal of a philosopher-king. Invested with supreme power he was also a thoughtful and mediative man. He wrote Meditations whilst on the campaign trail fighting the Germanic tribes as a stoic guide to life and as a personal diary to himself. Stripped down, his philosophy was that life is essentially inconsequential, but what determines a worthwhile life is acting rationally and for good and not to be emotional about temporary highs or lows for they are as nothing in the broad sweep of history.

The above quotation - Whatever happens, happens rightly* - piqued my interest. It summarises in just four words, a whole philosophy and is thus a very powerful sentence. It appears on the surface to embrace a form of karma; that we are unwitting actors within a cosmic Fate of which we have no control but I think it goes a little deeper than this.

One has to understand where Marcus was coming from in order to do this full justice. I think the following quotation helps clarify a little more:-

Many grains of incense fall on the same altar: one sooner, another later - it makes no difference.**

Like the wisdom of Solomon I'm so fond of in Ecclesiastes, Marcus details the outward futility of man's actions. In this example, incense falling on the altar being a metaphor for successive waves of human generations, Marcus points out the folly of human vanities. The short term seeking of pleasures, accolades, profit, will be all be forgotten in the grand scheme of things.

A gloomy message, yes? And yet no - a realistic message, for Marcus discerns patterns and repetitions in human drama. Let's look at another quote to demonstrate:-

Reflect often how all the life of today is a repetition of the past; observe that it also presages what is to come. Review the many complete dramas and their settings, all so similar, which you have known in your own experience, or from bygone history... The performance is always the same; it is only the actors who change. ***

Anyone who has lived a few years can see the truth in the above and smile in recognition. This is even more emphatic for students of history. In politics, war, economics, human relations, there is, as I quoted previously in different article, 'nothing new under the sun'.

So far so rational. But what about the 'happens rightly' part? Doesn't this suggest some moral agency in what happens in life? Some 'good' pre-determined outcome? I would be equivocal about this. I suspect Marcus is using the word 'rightly' in a mechanicalistic manner, that universal laws of nature and humanity will always reassert themselves - like some cosmic regression towards the mean. For example, a forest may be cleared but, left to itself, it will grow again. 

However, despite this, Marcus also believes in being rational, humane and good. In fact he believes that this is the only point of life; to live a 'good' life. And whilst one can only control oneself, the more good in the world, the better the outcomes and the higher the level of, temporary, human happiness. Nothing is perfect, everything has to re-won, the lessons of history always have to relearnt but, given a reasonable and sympathetic character, then things can be made better. And, that is what is important in life.

My quibble - if I have one - is that whilst I agree with much of Marcus' gloomy observation about each generation having to relearn the lessons of the past, is that I have a stubborn belief in the Enlightenment's idea of progress. Although each generation does have to relearn history and human relations, it does so not from some ground zero each day but 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.

Knowledge, inventions, the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech, transparency, capitalism, food production, cheap transport, fast communications, the universalisation of knowledge via the internet, better health, drugs, sanitation; these are things that are spreading at the fastest rate ever in human history. We - pace Marcus - living only in the present - tend to ignore these advances but they are there and they are real. ****

So, what are we left with as base material concerns are stealthily obliterated? How can the sentient person avoid spiritual degradation, a creeping ennui? By doing good. Personal kindnesses. Rationality. Reason. Thoughtfulness. Curiosity.

The real battle, as suggested by Marcus Aurelius and other ancients texts, is, and always has been, individual and internal. And this is a fight that has to be won every day.

Firstly, avoid all actions that are haphazard or purposeless; and secondly, let every action aim solely at the common good. *****

Normal service resumed in the next article where I discuss the latest series of The Voice.

Laters

Tim

Tim's Blog RSS

NOTES

* Meditations - Book IV, 10

** Meditations - Book iV, 15

*** Meditations - Book X, 27

**** One of the problems with a 24 hour media and - dare I say it - ignorant journalists with no understanding of history - is that the sensational, the temporary, the critical always wins the battle for attention against the long term, the underlying trend, the comparative. We are, as a world, empirically, more free, richer, healthier, better fed than EVER before. That is not to say that there aren't problems nor that there aren't temporary set-backs but, if you compare the world with 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, let alone 500, there is no comparison that we are better off in so many ways. Whether we are happier or more spiritually fulfilled is a completely separate issue, however.

***** Meditations Book XII, 20