173. Augustine, not a Cynic

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And I'm back after a week pause, Augustine took forever. My two upcoming greening events are short ones so shouldn't prevent my posting steadily at least through the end of The Road To Character. 

Berkeley 4th of July

The night before, I discovered the bus I've always taken to the Berkeley Marina no longer goes there. There is another bus that does get you there, but the official trip planner software can't give you a sensible trip plan, so I had to work out my own from the schedules and route maps. I ended up arriving an hour early because I wasn't confident in the information I was getting. 

The event itself was the same as ever, though the food area wasn't as busy as I remember and we had more staff than normal -- not ideal for me since I like to keep busy. Still, I did my thing and things were in good shape when I left at 8:30 before the fireworks started. I walked out all the way to San Pablo Ave, as I had planned, where I could catch a bus to downtown Oakland. This is where the evening took a turn for the Berkeley weird.

I turned the corner onto San Pablo and headed for the bus stop right past the corner, but then made a quick u-turn and waited at the corner because there was a very angry, ranting crazy woman pacing into the street from the bus stop. I probably waited five minutes for the bus, and the ride to Broadway in Oakland took about twenty minutes -- of course she got on my bus -- and she never stopped ranting. I was standing or sitting far enough away that I couldn't actually understand her words, but my favorite part of her presentation was when she, periodically, took off her long wig and waved it in the air at the person who was unfortunate enough to be her current audience.

Already tired from my eight hour (on my feet) shift followed by my long walk from the Marina, just listening to her endless ranting made me even more tired. I can't imagine what that would be like. I would not want to walk a mile in her shoes.

To my surprise, she didn't transfer to BART, so I rode into SF in peace. What I was actually looking forward to was finally taking advantage of my late night senior rate discount on the cable car up to my house. It's still $3 for a seven block ride, which is why I haven't done it, but at the end of a day like this it's worth every dollar. But the cable cars weren't running. Instead there were free shuttle buses. So I actually saved an extra $3, but still haven't managed to take advantage of my discount.

Augustine

p193 Brooks gives us an account of an incident in Milan when Augustine encounters a beggar who has just finished a good meal, had a few drinks, and is joking and joyful. Augustine finds himself envying the beggar who has such a satisfying and stress free life. This causes him to question his own entire way of life.

Now this incident with the satisfied beggar is puzzling. For one thing, if anything this should have turned him into a Cynic in the classical sense. What seems to have struck him here -- the beggar's satisfaction after a good meal and a few drinks compared to his own ceaseless striving for recognition and success -- was Diogenes's whole point. 

p195 Then there's the incident where, as a teenager, he steals some pears for the thrill of it, and later wonders about this and thinks it is a consequence of original sin: Dostoevsky would love this story but I fail to see the "originality" of the sin. What is more remarkable is the socialization by which most of us learn not to steal pears. That the "thrill" he felt at 16 is related to that socialization, the violation of it, I don't doubt. But the wonder is that we are usually able to control ourselves, not when we fail to do so. 

The ever vigilant, invisible sky fairy is one clever way to get children to not steal pears, but it certainly isn't the only way or even the best way. You can almost see evil (in this case the thrill of violating good) as a side effect, yet another unanticipated consequence, of the moral sense we are trying to inculcate in the young citizen. A feral child wandering in from the wild might pick and eat a pear or even pick a pear to throw at something, but could that feral child derive a thrill from picking someone else's pear? I don't see how.   

Next - 174. God's Presence

70. A new book

Previous - 69. When cities work

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Alice Herz-Sommer

I may be reviving my Regieren blog soon, but not quite yet. The reason is the latest book for my book club, that I started reading yesterday,

A Century of Wisdom: Lessons From the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor 

by Caroline Stoessinger, Spiegel & Grau, 2012

I have to admit I didn't think this title sounded promising, but, as usual, it's a mistake to generalize about people, even Holocaust survivors. That at 108 she sites the Stoic Epictitus as a guide to life, in particular his statement, "He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things he has not, but rejoices for those which he has," quickly won me over.

Philosophy

Being me, you can't just drop this quote into my mind without it having consequences. (Yesterday I only read the Forward by Vaclav Havel and the Prelude by the author.) When Epictitus enters my mind he brings along his buddies Epicurus and Diogenes. After a tasty lunch,  I started thinking about Epicureanism -- in the academic, not the popular, sense.

Being cheap, I have a natural affinity for the principles of Epicurus. The cafes I frequent tend to have decent (veggie) food at reasonable prices (and usually good WiFi.) Even my favorite Burmese place has comparatively cheap prices (it's location half way to Hawaii helps with this.) My regular pizzerias are not places I would take an out-of-town visitor devoted to sampling the best pizza. 

A purest Epicurean (a vegan to my veggie) would opt for even simpler and cheaper cuisine. In fact you could probably make a philosophically Epicurean argument for Fast Food. But what's the point of living a life spent trying to elude cravings you can't easily satisfy? If you are that keen to keep disappointment and longing at bay you should probably opt for suicide as the perfect (and simple) way to avoid all future problems. I can't believe Diogenes never suggested this, so this probably isn't an original notion. 

And speaking of the most famous Cynic, while a modern Cynic would probably be a dumpster diver, I think she would have the sense to prefer dumpsters behind upscale restaurants. 

Need + meaning + story

But all this was yesterday and I had almost forgotten about it when I ran into an article written by the Dalai Lama today on Facebook. (Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded.) I think this is completely true, though I would like to add a Victor Frankl note and add the importance of meaning. While being needed can give a life meaning -- in either the superficial sense of having a reason to get up in the morning, or the more profound sense of the suicide bomber who wants his death, and therefore his life, to have a meaning to some cause or other -- this relationship between need and meaning is not always present. (And this sense of meaning for the suicide bomber connects back to the philosophical advantage of death vs all the contingencies of life.)

But in addition to "need" and "meaning" there is also my old friend "story." Riding the bus this morning to my favorite breakfast place -- while thinking about all this -- I noticed an advert on the side of a bus for the latest TV show by an English actor (Hugh Laurie) who recently wrapped up a long run on another, very interesting, show ("House").  I could come up with a list of other actors who have made similar transitions recently, but why did they have to leave good shows with established audiences? I would argue the reason is that the long running shows had run out of compelling stories. The material had played out, like a vein of gold in a mountain.

What people (and we may as well say Trump supporters, since that's what we're really talking about), want is to be needed, for their existence to have meaning, and to participate in a compelling story. I still hope they will be satisfied with scaring society to the point that society is forced to address these social requirements, but this is the same level of hope I have that the California drought will end or that all the people in my building will suddenly compost their waste properly -- more of a wish than an expectation.

Next - 71. Election 2016 + Alice