And speaking of ethos: check out this case study in manipulative character-witnessing, as practiced in our courts of law. Who would or could testify to your character, how credible would they be, and does it matter if anybody'd ever heard of them?
We should be happy as Zeus, said Epicurus, if we're warm, fed, and unworried about the continuance of those conditions. So why aren't we, most of us, most of the time? Possibly because we worry too much and work too hard for things more costly than the bare necessities?
Many "great philosophers" have denigrated pleasure (g'r), but they were all fed and clothed and confident. The most egregiously un-Epicurean statement in this vein was Kant's: "Whoever wants to be happy must remain indifferent to pleasure and pain." Spoken like a stoic curmudgeon, Manny.
Or like a Vulcan. Michael Chabon, former philosophy major, novelist, now show runner for Picard, has a marvelous rumination on Vulcan indifference and parental withdrawal in the newest New Yorker. The vaunted Vulcan way of logic was really "just good old repression, of the sort practiced by human fathers."
Vulcan Stoics suffer in silence, and deny the reality of pain. Epicureans say you shouldn't ignore your symptoms.
We heard about set-point theory last time, as regarded by positive psychology. But the idea that our subjective happiness level is set for life is not "the whole truth," though, if therapy ever actually works.
Yesterday apparently was Kindness Day (a good excuse to recall the kindness of Fred Rogers). The Epicurean position on kindness and generosity towards friends and strangers is that if it's real, you don't have to work hard at cultivating it. "It flows naturally from your affection..." Or as Kurt Vonnegut said, there's only one rule babies..."Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
"Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail." Jailbird, prologue
And, the largest kindness: “We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.” KV's last speech, April '07
Some questions for today: Why be moral? Is our culture hedonically sexist? Does consumerism ever make you happy? How do you pick your friends? Have you experienced the hedonic treadmill, and do you know how to unplug it?
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