But Fear Itself
An engraving of the Angel of Death visiting homes in Rome during the Antonine Plague.
Unlike most of the media, Stoic philosophers knew this pandemic was coming, and can offer simple advice about how to survive it. By Fred Pawle.
“How should people be thinking about the way they’re behaving?” an earnest Patricia Karvelas asked on ABC Radio National this week. Good question, although she was asking the wrong person.
Karvelas was interviewing Steve Allsop, of the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University, in response to the institute’s finding that Australians were spending their newfound downtime drinking more alcohol.
Allsop’s reply was the usual ABC-endorsed platitude about increased alcohol consumption leading to more accidents and domestic violence. “Drinking heavily is the worst thing you could do just now,” he said.
This may be true, but neither Allsop nor Karvelas acknowledged that the supposed increase in alcohol consumption, from a survey of only 1000 people, might also be the result of stressed workers and their bosses making the most of a brief, enforced holiday. Most people outside the ABC and academia know that the pressure to survive will be even more intense once the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, so there should be little cause for alarm about ordinary people taking a breather right now.
It was difficult to find satisfying answers to Karvelas’s question anywhere on the ABC yesterday. Instead, its website homepage contained a surplus of superficial stories about coping with the crisis, including one about young housemates passing the time in isolation by indulging in casual sex, and another about the anguish of sports fans who have been deprived of Friday night footy.
This is a shame because now is a good time to seek answers to big questions, especially since the adversity some people are already facing is being perceived as unprecedented. Twenty-seven years of continuous economic growth has lulled us into assuming that life was meant to be easy.
It is reassuring, therefore, to be reminded that the most succinct definition for dealing with external challenges was expressed 2000 years ago by Epictetus, one of the original Stoics: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
It should be no surprise that a philosopher who lived 2000 years ago thought adversity was inevitable, but what might surprise us today is how well his guidance suits COVID-19. Why, it’s almost as if he knew that one day the false comforts of modernity would be disastrously disrupted by an unforeseen, uncontrollable force of fate and nature, compelling us to, as Karvelas says, “think about the way we are behaving”.
Epictetus was a major influence on the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ruled from 161AD to 180AD, a period that makes life in the age of COVID-19 seem mild by comparison.
Marcus not only had to deal with continuous military conflict but also the Antonine Plague, which lasted for 15 years and killed an estimated 5 million people.
Marcus’s response to the plague was not to flee Rome, as most wealthy people did, but to remain, surround himself with the best advisers, and tirelessly focus on the twin challenges of stopping the disease from spreading and keeping the Roman economy running.
He led by example, refusing to show fear, attending funerals and delivering speeches. After years of being exposed to the plague, Marcus succumbed to an illness (whether it was the plague is not known) in 180AD, and died within days.
When, on his deathbed, he saw his closest advisers already grieving his imminent death, he famously said, “Weep not for me. Think rather of the pestilence and the deaths of so many others.”
Our own leaders might not be quite at Marcus’s level yet, but they are handling COVID-19 better than most others around the world. The pact between Marcus and the Romans should be a reminder to those people today who bemoan our politicians while simultaneously putting their hands out to survive the crisis. Just as we boldly expect excellence in Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the national cabinet, our leaders in return should be able to expect us not to rely solely on government handouts to solve our problems.
The Stoics aspired to live faultlessly but they were quicker than most to admit their imperfections. Epictetus said his own critics didn’t know him very well because he had flaws he hadn’t revealed to them yet.
Seneca (4BC-65AD) didn’t so much admit to flaws as flaunt them. He was a political player, adviser to the tyrant Nero, and late in life accrued extraordinary wealth. But he also endured eight years in exile on Corsica as a young man, and wrote plays and essays about virtue, ambition and frugality. “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor,” he wrote.
The late Australian art critic and historian Robert Hughes wasn’t convinced. He said Seneca was a “hypocrite almost without equal in the ancient world,” whose praise of moderation “unhappily bears little relation to the real facts of (his) life: he was a mercilessly greedy usurer.”
Perhaps, says author James Romm in Dying Every Day: Seneca At The Court Of Nero, but he also “cherished sobriety, reason, and moral virtue” and “did his best to temper the whims of a deluded despot, while continuing to publish the ethical treatises that were his true calling.”
That Seneca could have lived a life of both frugality and material success, of virtue and political chicanery, is a pertinent reminder to us that Stoicism is not all parsimony and detachment. There’s hope for all of us.
Which brings me back to Karvelas and Allsop. The Stoics would not begrudge us enjoying an extra glass of wine during this period of mass house arrest, as long as we also use the time to “think about how we’re behaving,” and, more importantly, prepared ourselves mentally to endure the challenges ahead with wisdom, resolve and, as far as possible, independence.
COVID-19: Read the MRC’s coverage of the debate in Australia and around the world