Marcus Aurelius is constantly writing to himself. He's like, look, don't think about how you might lose the things you love in the future, return to the present, and realize they're here right now. And in worrying about them, you're missing out on what's so good about them. So I want to start with a quote.
Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honest as possible? While you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul? What's that mean to you? I can start.
So that's a very famous passage from Socrates' apology. And then, twenty four hundred years ago, Socrates, the kind of founder of philosophy, was put on trial by the Athenian government for, among other things, corrupting the youth of Athens. We're asking too many hard questions and being a bit too aggressive and pushy about whether Athens was pursuing the things that were really valuable in life versus just kind of inflating their own egos. And one of the things I love about that quote, we shout that and read it to undergraduates here at Notre Dame quite a bit.
You can imagine somebody saying to their enemy or like their opposition, you guys don't care about the right things. All you care about is money or all you care about is fame. You don't care about what's really good. But Socrates is not saying that to his enemies.
He's saying it to his friends and students. That's one of the quotes that got him into trouble is he's going around to people he really cares about and saying like Paul, I think you're getting too addicted to these cultural lies about money and honor. And I really think you need to work harder on like going after things that are really worth having. And that was a threatening idea in Athens.
Why was it threatening? Well, I mean, so for one thing, Athens is a direct democracy, right? And so the ability to argue and the ability to persuade people could be literally a life or death matter, right? If somebody got up and accused you of something in front of the assembly, you just had to stand up and you had to argue.
You had to say like, this isn't true or this is why somebody else owes me a bunch of money or whatever it might be. And so the ability to just win arguments at all costs is something that was a really valuable skill. And they're actually professional, you know, we call them argument or debate coaches. They're called the sofists, right?
Who would be hired, often by sort of the wealthy in Athens to train Athenian citizens on how to argue, right? And it's easy to see how you might lose the truth in all of that, right? Or lose a desire for the truth, lose a love for the truth. Because if it doesn't matter whether your argument is true or not, if it just matters like whether you're persuading people, there's not really as much incentive, right, to focus on whether your reasons that you're giving are good.
So this is one of the reasons why I think Socrates is such a revolutionary figure, but then his own time and also ours. I mean, as we sort of did the research and we were looking at ancient Athens, I was just struck by how many parallels there are between the complaints that Socrates has about his own time. And the complaints that a lot of us have when we sort of look at the state of political debate or the state of debate on Twitter and people trying to sort of own each other on Twitter, you know, just exert some sort of power without any sort of respect for a love of the truth. And that's, you know, it's an over generalization.
It's not always the case. It's not what's always going on. But it certainly resonates, right? The message sort of resonates.
And as I read, you know, Socrates's critique, I just constantly found myself nodding along and thinking like, I recognize this. Why did he end up being killed then? Yeah, good. This is the question from the last 2,400 years.
I mean, so much philosophy has been written, starting with his student Plato about how did this go so wrong? This is one of the things I love about reading Greek philosophy is that, you know, you can empathize with these guys. I don't know. I suspect a lot of your listeners are like me and you look around.
It's 2022 and you just think, how did we get here? Like, what exactly got us to the point where this is what we're fighting about in the news and this is how I'm living my life for, you know, allegedly the charges against Socrates were that he was corrupting the youth that he was encouraging atheism or the rejection of the Greek religion. The weirdest one is that he worships things below the earth or is too interested in things below the earth. And again, it's had to give that his time.
People were like, what is his charge? You know, one of the one of the hypotheses that I think makes most sense to me is put yourself in the shoes of the Athenians. To make decisions, you have to do them democratically and people have to vote. And I don't know if you're part of like a local school board right now or if you're part of an office, it's deciding you're like policy for coming back to work.
Anytime you need people to vote to make an important decision, you really need people to be lined up and together and agreeing with each other. Otherwise, it's really, really fraught and very painful and stressful, especially if you think that the other bad decision might get made. And so for Athens, they made all their big decisions. We're going to war.
We're going to levy a new tax. They made all the decisions that way. And somebody like Socrates going around encouraging people to question the status quo or question the culture is going to be once you see it working. And it worked like you got people to think like, maybe I'm not so right.
Maybe I shouldn't believe what the louder guys telling me. Then you also start to lose confidence that we're able to vote on anything anymore. And that can be really scary if there's a lot on the line. I think too, just to kind of jump in here, you know, one of the really powerful moments in the apology is where Socrates is given the choice to either go free.
You can totally go free, but they say, you go free. Like you can't keep asking questions. You can't keep doing this thing that you've been doing or we're going to kill you. Like those are your choices, right?
And of course, he chooses to die. He says, the unexamined life is not worth living. This is something that like we put on stickers here. Is that his response during the trial?
Yeah, it comes in the apology. Yeah. That is a fucking boss move like unbelievable response. I think that's great.
I mean, the other thing they say is like, well, what do you think your sentence should be about that? He says, you guys should give me free lunch for the rest of my life. He literally says, you're from five meals. He was kind of trolling them.
I mean, this is why he is totally trolling them. He knew where this is going. Yeah. But I think one of the reasons that's so powerful for me is because, you know, a way of focusing in on what you think are the most important goals in life or the most important good things in life, right, is just to ask like, what are the things that if I didn't have them, my life wouldn't be worth living.
You know, Aristotle famously says, you know, without friends, a man would not choose to live. They'll get every other good. And to me, you know, that just strikes me, right? I think like, yeah, gosh, you can imagine somebody who's totally wealthy to have, you know, they're physically fit and healthy and everything else.
But anyway, friends, you think there's something deeply lacking in that life, right? And so in choosing not to continue to live if he can't engage in this kind of question, if he can't pursue the truth with other people in his community, Soggy's is really just saying like, this is the ultimate good. This is the ultimate goal in my life. And if you're going to take that away from me, you might as well take my life too.
That like, I don't know, even now, like gives me chills. It's sort of, you know, is the reason why I think philosophy professors see him as sort of the martyr kind of hero figure in philosophy. And I think, you know, it's a worthwhile thought experiment for us too, just to think like, you know, what are those good things in our life that we'd be either willing to give up our life or that just, you know, without which we would say, yeah, our life is not worth living or certainly not as good as it is now. I think this can kind of sound like, you know, literature, not realizing that this is a real, a real trade-off that people face even now.
So I was really moved this summer reading about faculty members in philosophy departments in Hong Kong who are faced with this decision of going to jail if they continue to teach certain kinds of political philosophy or if they're willing to stop teaching that, then they can keep their jobs and... What type of philosophy is it? Philosophy about liberal democracy. So like John Rawls and like Western style arguments about how decisions should be made in a democratic liberal republic.
Rawls in particular is kind of the flash point because he's on a lot of curricula. And there are faculty members who are threatened directly with the government, with jail sentences or losing their jobs, who I think are pretty brave. I read this and thought like, gosh, what would I do? Would I be willing to change my class to avoid going to jail?
Or would I think like, there's no point in me claiming I'm a philosopher or living in this world if I can't ask the questions that I think we need answers to? That's a good way to kick off any subject area, right? Like if that's the guy that was, you know, that's your Jesus Christ. It's going to make some pretty bad-ass people downstream from that.
I didn't even know that about Hong Kong because they're not... Hong Kong is a separate nation-state independent of China, right? Or is there some Chinese influence that's coming over the top of that, which is causing issues? It's quite complicated at the moment.
This is definitely not an area where I'm an expert. I've had the chance to spend some time at these universities in Hong Kong doing philosophy, and they have really vibrant, totally amazing philosophy departments. But yeah, the mainland China and the People's Republic is taking over more and more governing control over Hong Kong as a part of this process of Britain giving up control. And so facing some really hard questions about what the nature of education is.
I mean, it's just two very different mindsets about what's really valuable, and it's institutionalized in these particular people having any hard decisions. One thing, yeah, that this reminds me of is there's this great series of episodes on this American life about Hong Kong, about what's going on. And it's actually just fascinating. I know nothing about the political situation in Hong Kong.
But one thing that comes out in that series is just how education is a flashpoint, as you're saying. It's kind of... It's got this power, right? Like what you're teaching in the schools.
It's got this generational power, which is humbling to think about in our own context. Because I think it's easy to get lost in all the different debates that we have in academia or wherever else. But it does hold the kind of power of what you're teaching, what you're learning, what kind of community you're building up with people that you're asking questions with. It's got political impacts.
And I think the critical thing to remember about Socrates is it's not that he was willing to die for a particular belief. I mean, there are a lot of academics and a lot of people with ideas that I think it would be horrible if they said they'd be willing to die for them. Because their ideas could be wrong. They could be dumb.
People have dumb ideas all the time. Socrates was willing to die for the right to ask questions, like a right to try to figure out the truth and to be satisfied about the truth. And that is worth defending at great lengths. But not necessarily saying like if you don't believe me on this particular philosophical theory, I'm going to burn this place to the ground.
That's that's antithetical to philosophy. Yeah, it's so fundamental, right? There was a conversation I had a couple months ago to do with free speech and where free speech begins and ends. And there was a justification that the only type of speech which shouldn't be permitted is that which further restricts free speech.
So if you try to employ your free speech to limit other people's ability to use free speech, that actually starts to cross a line because it's inherently self-defeating. And that's kind of what you're talking about here. It's not necessarily a particular point of view with regards to a type of philosophy. It is the process that undergirds the ability to do philosophy itself.
It's like saying, like, you're not allowed to do philosophy. That would be one of the implications of it. So rolling the clock forward to what you guys are doing now, what does this have to do with leading a good life? Yeah, we actually talked about this in the first chapter of the book.
We talked about all of the adventures we've had in teaching philosophy over the last four years where we try to ask these really hard questions to hundreds and hundreds of 18 year olds and kind of like like the match and watch what happens. I think one thing that we've learned and we really try to share this with the reader in the first chapter is a lot of folks are frustrated right now by realizing that they have pretty persistent disagreements with other people about hot lightning issues, about racism, about how to handle a global health emergency. And they think that strategies that we get recommended to us, one strategy which I feel like I read about all the time in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education is how to mold people's minds to agree with you using like subtle techniques. So how to like get Paul to come around and wearing a mask by using rhetorical tricks and say, oh my gosh, this is sophistry, like this is totally not the ethical way to treat people who disagree with you.
Another approach is like why your arguments are better than the people who disagree with you and how to know that your arguments are better. And that's also not going to help you make any progress at trying to figure out how to get on the same page and improve our beliefs. Plato in the Republic, one just talks about how frustrated he is with trying to argue with people who spend all their time thinking about winning arguments. But then he also says we have another option which is to first like remind ourselves when we start to get into these fights, why we care in the first place about this issue and like why it matters to us to get it right rather than just to win.
Plato has his students in the Academy doing all these exercises like math problems to just remind themselves that they still like getting the right answer, even if it wasn't the answer they initially started out with. And he thinks like cultivating that feeling of like wanting the right answer rather than defending the answer you currently have is it's a better option. And then we get this Algory of the Cave in the Republic where he's like what if there's like better answers about absolutely everything and not just math problems and what if like if you tried harder you might get those as well and how much how beautiful would it be to be outside the cave, how much better would it be the outside the cave with your friends and not just by yourself. And starting to kind of we call it fear of missing out but philosophical fear of missing out like if you kind of feel like there could be something better that we could achieve by cooperative discussion of this issue, same with the truth rather than just trying to win the argument then maybe maybe watching that would help decrease some of the tension.
I think too so the way that I sort of experience, you know the method that Socrates is employing and in some ways this is related to even the title of our book, the Good Life Method like thinking about you know rightly ordering the values that you have in pursuing the truth or you know in thinking about what matters in your life and what your goal should be. The way I connect it with our contemporary especially like a very contemporary situation is you know maybe 10 years ago or so I used to read a lot of op-eds that had the following form they would say like look we all disagree about things but as long as we get all the views out there on the table and eventually like the truth is going to rise to the top and we're just going to figure it out right and then it turns out that when people start making arguments with no regard for the truth at all, this strategy just doesn't work right in the book we call this you know after Perry Frankfort you know calls this bullshit right just making arguments without any concern for the truth at all. It's just bullshit right so you know you can't have a policy a personal policy or sort of institutional policy that just says look we take every single argument that comes out there and we put them at exactly the same level and eventually we're all going to agree there's going to be a consensus. Now where that does work is if you have some shared value underlying the arguments that are getting on the table and here's how I think about it and experience it I argue with my mom like all the time like this is like the way that we show that we love each other as we call each other up we're like there's this article about something and I think you're wrong about this and we go back and forth.
And the reason I think it works for us whereas it definitely doesn't work for me on Twitter or on Facebook or you know social media is that my mom and I care both about each other but also about the truth like we genuinely you know not always I mean it's like easy to kind of get to a position where like I just want to be right. But we really care we really think look we're both going to be better off if we know the truth about this even if that means that you're wrong if it means that I'm wrong if it means we're both wrong. So I think you know I don't have a deep diagnosis of like why we're so politically polarized or why we've gotten to a position where you know we use argumentational bullshit to just kind of like push the different positions that we have to try to change politics or whatever it might be I don't know why exactly that is. But I do know that you know Plato and Socrates and Aristotle are on to something where they say part of the problem a huge part of the problem is that we just don't have this really fundamental attitude a love for the truth.
We don't have in relationship and in community with other people and we have that we can rediscover that or reawaken it it's going to make a huge difference. I think the problem is that you have perverse incentives going on here if somebody was constrained by the truth then their argumentation would be less effective because the race to the bottom is the person that isn't constrained by the truth can use more limically hijacking language or they can be more inflammatory or they can understand your linguistic programming or whatever tactic it is that they need to be more effective if you decide to play if I decide to play football and I'm constrained by the rules of football but you decide to pick it up and run with it under your arm like it's rugby then I there is an asymmetry in terms of how effective we can be at playing this game because you've decided not to play by the rules so yeah there's two ways to do it right one way would be to say we need to have very very hard and fast rules about the game that makes it incredibly highly sanctioned if you decide to pick the ball up and run with it under your arm. The alternative which is what you guys are suggesting is to have an emergent bottom up social enforcement mechanism where all of the players on the field would stop and go make you can't pick the ball up stopping your dick. So you have sort of this top down or bottom up approach but yeah I think increasingly at the moment the bottom up approach because of how tribal everybody is no one wants to restrict their own teams ability to win and generally at the moment there is such an anti-authoritarian like what gets called authoritarian now there are some authoritarian policies out there but it's a word that gets used an awful lot to describe like any type of intervention that occurs from the top so it's kind of hard to work out how to just get people playing by the rules of the game again.
Well and this is why again you totally need Socrates and you understand why he was in such a bind at the end of the apology because you very well could decide I care about the truth I'm going to be willing to change my mind I think a big cultural problem we have right now is if somebody looks like they change their mind about an issue that they really care about they get beat up like people. And it's saying I'm wrong will get you fired that will get you canceled so but you can be the kind of person you think what caring about the truth. Is so important to me that even in a completely screwed up system where I'm not going to win football games as a result of it or where I might my job at risk that's why Socrates is saying you got to care about this more than your job you've got to care about this more than winning. It's got to be that important because to make it a part of your life you're going to take some risks that part of the living philosophically living a good life doesn't mean that you're just going to get everything.
Aside from the avoiding culture war topics and stuff like that how have you guys defined what a good life means what's a good life mean to you. Yeah that's a I mean one of the sort of structuring principles of using in writing the book is you know we tried to look at different what we call virtues and we're working in a virtual tradition. I should maybe just sort of say you know the way that we're thinking about virtues here is as human excellence is you know so we're thinking about virtues in the way that aerosol things about virtues. So what are the traits of character what are the habits of soul you know if you want to put it sort of in different language that are required to flourish as a person to be happy.
And so one of the ways that we organize the book is you know each of the chapters looks at a different virtue or a different kind of class of virtues. So we go through you know the beginning of the book we talk about the love of truth we talk about generosity and the ways that you know people think differently about generosity and what it means to be a generous person how you should structure and order your financial life. We talk about love and attention and care how should you relate to the people in your life and responsibility is one of my favorite ones and how you can take personal responsibility for things. So we go through these right each of the chapters is kind of a picture of a virtue and hopefully one that you can see related to an actual life we give a lot of personal stories as we go through and say look this is how we think about generosity you know theoretically like as well as others but this is how we try to live it out in our actual lives.
And so what we're hoping emerges is you know a picture of what we think are you know really important virtues for a good life so that our readers can kind of see that see themselves reflected in each of those stories and then quickly evaluate and say like yeah this how I think about generosity to or no totally not if you guys are on. You say that a remarkable feature about human history is that we all started wondering philosophically about how to live better lives at roughly the same time between 600 and 300 BC. What why do you think that happened. We've got that question once or twice now I feel like this is where we show how little we know about the history of the world.
We should say you know what you call about the book of like that was when the records all start popping up so you got to see us in the you dynasty you've got food working in Southeast Asia. You've got the Jewish wisdom tradition that's really getting fired up and writing like Joe Ben Ecclesiastes and start to think really hard about this whole God question in a philosophical way and then you got your Socrates Plato Aristotle dream team operating in Greece. And it is I mean 300 years is actually not that long it's a drop in the bucket for humans and so it's pretty nuts that just you know spanning a bunch of different parts of the world. They're all issuing theories that are different in some respects but the core operating system is shockingly similar humans have a certain way that we are right now.
We're not going to be human 2.0 like a version of us that would be better and that we can't help but worry about and want to be. But we don't quite know how to get from where we are to what that version is and we're not even 100% sure aerosol talks about being an archer who kind of sees the target off in the distance but doesn't have good enough vision to know exactly how to hit it or exactly what it looks like. And folks think we're going to need philosophy and we're going to need systems of education to try to figure out this target and we're going to be miserable if we don't find it. So then it gets weird obviously like food is have very different vision of the target than the Greek philosophers do and Confucius is not 100% clear about whether everyone has that target or it's really just people in the true dynasty that need to hit their target.
So it's not to like try to lump them all together but this that there's this kind of recipe let's start developing schools and training systems and try to be a lot more systematic about figuring out what it is that we're trying to become. Cool and some of these cultures are interacting with each other but it's not like they're right on top of each other. So that's a bit of like the mystery aspect of like what was going on in human development where we're all just kind of turning on to this stage at the same time. Yeah, and one of the things that we talk about in the book and the air settle talks about ad nauseam like across all the text they rise is that you know reflecting on our lives as a means of improving them is something that's just baked into us right you thought this is like our function or like part of our nature that we are self reflective We want to think about how to get better.
I love you know the example that Megan often gives about is like you know dogs don't do this they don't they don't sort of wake up and they think man how could I be better at fetching right let me read a book about fetching they just like they fetch and they're either gray that or they're terrible at it right. But human beings we use the you know like we use our mind and we do it in community with other people through conversation to get better right and so I think that's just sort of fascinating evidence that Aristotle was certainly on to something and you know figures in these other traditions that talk about it as well. But there's just something really attractive right all humans by nature desire to know this is a quote from from the beginning of the metaphysics by our style humans desire by nature to know that's just a value that's baked in I don't know I think that resonates and I think it's sort of evidence by all of these different traditions popping up at the same time. I love the way Plato and the protagonist is giving has Socrates giving a speech about how you really need to start teaching your kids math and philosophy like do it early and he's talking with his friends and his friends are like why is this such a big deal for you and he's like look you know this is a paraphrase obviously but he's like animals have a lot of advantages they've got fur they've got sharp teeth they've got a lot going for them in this whole survival game just this is given to them.
But we are a furless toothless kind of awkwardly designed creatures that featherless by the only thing we have is our way so if your kids don't develop that like the ability to kind of make far-sighted plans and trade offs that's what they're talking about in that passage. We are screwed like we're not going to make it is the only advantage that we've got in this game. Have you seen the meme of a guy and a dog next to an open landscape and there's a thought bubble coming out of the guy and it's a computer and it's a car and it's a money tree and it's other shit and coming out of the dog it's just a small representation of the landscape that they're seeing right it's like a comment on the fact that the reason that the dog is happy is because the dog is able to be present and the humans unhappiness is because he's constantly ruminating about all the shit that he needs to do. There's something about that that kind of triggers me a little bit I always feel it regularly comes up and it always makes me feel a little bit I don't know just pissed off because like implied in that is if we were able to tune our cognition down.
To some sort of more base level we would be happier that the dog is somehow superior or it's the dog's got it right because it made the choice it's like no no no it is working at its maximum capacity the dog is thinking about going for fetch without trying to become better at playing fetch because it can't think of that if it was burdened with the depth of thought that humans have it would have all of the ruminations and all of the awful reflections that we do as well there's something about that that always pisses me off I don't know why. I love that I think I love it like you get mad at that I do the same thing I look at these means I'm like calm on. I think you know I think one thing that's interesting that this just really calls to mind for me is the stoic tradition right so we talk about stoicism at the end of the book and about how human beings they can sort of capture what's good about you know what's happening with the dog but we do it in a really distinctive way right we do it in a contemplative sort of way. And so here's what that means look yeah we've got all this other stuff going on and it's a huge advantage like I would never give up the ability to like you know rationally think about my life and organize it and appreciate it in an intellectual way like what I love about my family and all these other things.
They're just incredible things like a bunch of downsides a bunch of terrible stuff that comes along with that right loving my son but also knowing that like the world could intervene and frustrate this in some way gives me deep anxiety about the future right. And that's the downside right so you know it's great that we can think that there's this downside because of what we do about that fact one of the things that's really fascinating about stoicism and the stoics is they say the answer to that problem is philosophy right. What you're supposed to do is you're supposed to come up with meditations or exercises or ways of intellectually contemplatively putting yourself in touch with reality not again not in the way that the dog is going to be in touch with you know. I think the meme is mistaken even like you know attributing this as a thought of the dog and the dog is there's no representation actually sorry I'm gonna get out of like the philosophy of mind of animal.
But you know it's just it's just there whatever well for human beings right. One of the things that we can do is we can look at our representation of the way things are I might lose you know my son in the future be estranged from him or whatever and we can use our contemplative capacities to make sure that those are attuned to reality in the right sort of way right so Marcus Aurelius is constantly writing to himself he's like look don't think about how you might lose the things you love in the future like return to the present and realize that you're right now and in worrying about them you're missing out on what's so good about them that you could be present to them that you can be sort of tethered to reality in the right sort of way. So only that's just you know fascinating to me about about the Stoics and a lot of traditions in philosophy around the time they're writing is that they think that you know the answer to the problems that arise with intellectual. It's actually to go through those capacities to go through contemplation and Aristotle writes about contemplation at Great Link and I do think that's actually something that in our culture we sometimes sort of lose right we think of I don't know contemplation is this weird isolated monastic sort of thing that like some weirdos do but like I'm not not gonna do that but really like you know the Stoics Arizona thing they're not this is absolutely central for dealing with exactly the kind of problems that they were referencing.
Well think about what most people are trying to do or what a lot of people are trying to do with their daily lives either consciously or subconsciously they're trying to escape from that contemplative practice they're using caffeine to make themselves move faster or alcohol to make themselves move slower and down regulate the resolution that they see the world with phones to distract themselves and Netflix and sex and extreme sports and you know pick your pursuit. The other kind has a quote where he says we don't want peace of mind we want peace from mind and that distinction of us just a Paul Bloom who you may know psychologist from Yale now in Toronto he interviewed a dominatrix and she said nothing captures attention like a whip. And what she meant was that if you get slapped in the face for the next five seconds you don't think about anything and that's a very rare but beautiful situation to be in it was our way looking down the pipe of a dominatrix where I know either with a weapon hand. But it's true right you have this opportunity to escape the ruminations from your mind and this is I think again like that's what the person that made that mean is trying to create look if only we could be like the dog if only we could dial back the resolution that we see things with.
You mentioned just a thought come up there you mentioned snow season awful lot about a ton of stoic scholars on the show around holiday Massimo Piglucci Donald Robertson. What is it about stoicism that's made it so sexy in the modern era like wise epicureanism or Taoism or you know cynicism why why are there no other renaissance is and do you think if you could put a couple of bets if you could invest in some different philosophies do you think that will see renaissance for some other ones coming soon. I can start off on this so I've got my own pod theory about why stoicism is having its moment but first of the first thing I'll say one of the things we try to show in the book is that so system is part of this much bigger, longer, more interesting and very good tradition philosophy called virtue ethics which gets going with the Greeks you find versions of it in China but if you really like the general thrust is so system but you don't like some of the recommendations or some of the goals seem shallot you that's okay because it's you know there's other versions of this kind of philosophy that you might find a lot more use out of and so we encourage you think about stoicism in context of this bigger kind of philosophy. I think stoicism is really exciting and appealing to a lot of folks in the United States right now because first the Stoics the Stoics are about finding ways to thrive in hostile environments.
So Marcus Aurelius Seneca these guys were all dealing with the hot dumpster fire that was the Roman Empire. They were important men of like public life so I mean some Stoics were full time wackadoodle philosophers but a lot of them were people with day jobs like significant prominent honor inducing day jobs but who also had the big kind of problems and this philosophical view seemed to help them thrive in light of challenges rather than being pummeled by them and you know you look at all of the changes even happened during our lifetimes the fact that the internet has totally revolutionized every aspect of how we think and interact and communicate that's happened just the last two decades that's crazy. The way that we've dealt with political changes the fact that we're in a mature empire that's having its own kinds of puzzles so we can see a lot of ourselves in these Romans who were dealing with their problems and we might want to see that we're like them because they did okay and Marcus really did okay in the end. I think also there are some really helpful psychological therapies that the Stoics suggested and modern psychology is made really effective probably the most obvious one is cognitive behavioral therapy this idea of your facing anxiety which we all do and you might have thought that you just have to live with it or it's your own problem.
So if you're not there or exercises that you can undertake to start to control your emotions negative emotions and so took that extraordinarily seriously and I think a lot of us find ourselves in the situation right now where we want that we want that benefit. Yeah and let me make so I'll make a prediction and that is that I think virtue ethics is in one way or another the thing that sort of comes next and here's why I think it so I think I think it's totally right that stoicism you know gives us these practices these meditations they're empirically grounded but it also gives us a bit of substance a philosophical substance to sort of grab onto and say you know not only does this breathing technique work for me. So I think that's a very important thing to note connects up with my purpose as a human being and it connects up with this rational sort of contemplative nature. Now one thing that's really crucial to this though a picture and then I guess I would really push it a stoic you know contemporary stoic on if I had a chance to talk to them is the Stoics actually have some pretty crazy views in the background but the reason they're so optimistic that if you get in touch with reality your anxiety is going to go down is because they think the cosmos is divinely ordered right and a lot of contemporary stoics well you know okay we'll take some of that or we won't take some of that or maybe it's metaphorical or whatever it might be.
The various forms it takes is that there are versions of it that sort of don't assume substantively some of these pictures these metaphysical pictures that I think a lot of people today don't assume right some people do and you can kind of plug in sort of theistic pictures or whatever or even look at like Augustine and see how he tried to manage that kind of stuff but a lot of people you know if you're just like you know secular person out in the world looking for a great philosophy a lot of the stoic is a resonates but then you start thinking gosh like I don't know if I think that you know there's this sort of cosmos that's divinely ordered and whatever else there's news that we all share. So my thought is if you keep digging philosophically virtue ethics is just this incredible territory where you can start coming up with resources and tools to come up with a substantive philosophical picture that you actually believe that you think is you know this is the right picture of course Aristotle has this you know he's got a view of a human nature in our function our purpose. Again you know going to Augustine you know the Christian philosophical tradition has these but again I think as people continue to look for more and more substantive philosophical views behind the things that they find really useful and helpful. The virtue tradition is just totally you know full of these rich pictures that yeah that are really appealing in their own way.
What do you think is a tool or a couple of tools that virtue ethics has which still is missing massively. I think you know just really distinctive pictures of the human person right and distinctive pictures just practical pictures of how we can take something like our view of what we think we are what we think our function or purpose is and translate that into really practical advice right if you look at the ethics from Aristotle and the beginning of things really fascinating right the form of the book is it's actually either lecture notes that he sort of wrote or that somebody that was taking his class road on a class that he was giving about how to be happy how to achieve you diamond the right how to flourish as a human being. And so if you look at it yeah there's really abstract theoretical stuff right at the beginning he says look I'm gonna give you an argument about what your function is about the purpose and meaning of life is and then immediately we jump into and here's a virtue that you know in light of that fact you've got to acquire and here's what it looks like here's what friendship looks like and he's giving arguments or he's not just saying trust me he's saying here's my argument about why friendship is really important. And so for most of the book he's looking at these really practical issues giving you arguments and then he ends up kind of like zooming back and saying okay so let's like tie this all together and let's look at you know what this entails in the very end.
But for me I mean that's that's you know it sort of shows the power of virtue ethics you can have this really substantive theoretical view but you immediately get into just really practical issues really practical advice about the things that we care about how you should spend money or razorkins or you know whether you should practice a religion whatever it might be kind of the way that those big questions sort of show up or appear in our daily lives or experience. That's one of the huge sort of strengths of virtue ethics. I think one thing I found a little bit irritating about the kind of contemporary American version of stoicism that's really popular right now is if you ask them kind of what the goal is we talked about trying to figure out that target you're trying to hit with your arrow. A lot of times it sounds to me and this might be a little bit uncharitable like the goal is kind of invincibility like to make myself immune from bad things that might happen.
I would have said indifference but yeah. It might be a way to put it. And again I don't know about you like that's not my goal I when I think about what a really good person is sometimes it's somebody that makes extraordinary sacrifices for others. And in ways that's not going to tribute back to their own glory and like has this kind of concept of a comic and this is really certainly things that's like this too so I'm going to be fair to necessarily pin it to the Romans.
But when you listen to some of the stoic technology driven a metaphysical self health advice right now it's like I'm going to use those is to make sure that I win every argument with my board. And it's like no man the whole point of it was like you are mortal. And you are a non for non sharp teeth covered organism that depends on other people. And it would be better if you if you were a little bit more vulnerable like there are some really great goods that come from come from suffering for other people and last suffering to happen to you.
And I think that you know certainly like Christians in Rome at the time were really critical of how into the into this the Roman Empire was getting because it was also making the Roman Empire cold. That's the thing that I struggle to kind of pass out stoicism doesn't seem to have a ton of joy in it to me or certainly not. I'm not going to try and be like an advocate for your philosophy needs to account for hedonism but you know people like to party we like to find pleasure in the moment and it seems like there isn't really much room for that in stoicism. One of the things that shocked me as I went back and read Marcus Aurelius this like last time I read meditations like every couple months now I teach it in different classes.
One of the things that shocked me is right you know at the beginning of the meditations he's giving a list of people that he's grateful for and the things that he's learned for them and one of them I forget who he's talking about he says you know I'm grateful that he showed me how to be the same man in all conditions even during the like this period where he lost a child. And I read that and I was like whoa dude back up like you know to be totally indifferent to something like that like that struck me as you know kind of not monstrous but you know the wrong way to go right so to have the resources to say look there are times where it makes sense to tie your happiness up with the happiness of another person. There are ways in which we flourish and we're happy only if we're flourishing together that to me is a really powerful idea and I think you know we can swing sort of too far to one end or the other and we can start thinking well our happiness consists and you know being super wealthy or having these external goods and okay now we're going in the wrong direction but again one thing that I think you know Virginetics provides resources for is just a kind of balance out some of that kind of the pejorative sense of stoicism that you know you sometimes hear people talking about which I do think is a real danger. What role do you think the truth has in the good life then.
Yeah I mean well yes I go all the way back to Socrates you know I find our students will often tell us that the line that we quoted from Socrates at the beginning is the thing that really sticks with them after the class right the unexamined life is not worth living. It's this idea that's again shocking especially in our time sort of a deeper commitment to the truth than even to my own goals in life or to you know winning arguments online or whatever else. I take that just really really seriously I think if I can become the kind of person who cares more about the truth than winning arguments who cares more about the truth. Then you know my status or whatever it might be if I can become a little bit more socratic in that way.
I think you know that's sort of like Socrates serves as an exemplar here for me you know for those reasons. I think I've been reflecting a lot right about this a little bit in the book about the Elizabeth Holmes trial she was convicted on for a broadcast. We were writing about her when we're writing about William James a year ago when we were working on the manuscript and we were thinking man this whole news cycle is going to be over by time this book comes out nobody's going to care about our philosophical. Nailed it we can release.
Nailed it. We totally nailed it. We have up in the office where I work in Notre Dame we have some pretty vigorous debates about how a good person should feel about that trial. I was a very young medical device entrepreneur in Silicon Valley dropped out of Stanford and started heavily marketing this blood testing technology she was trying to develop he's really small math of blood to determine various diseases.
And like everybody she got caught up in this culture that values like fake it till you make it like just pitch really hard and you can your dreams can out strip reality with respect to technology and she raised all this money and Walgreens started like trying out her blood testing technology and the whole thing fell apart because at the end of the day. Her blood test don't work like she can't get accurate data and you reflect on her case and you won psychologically and culturally you totally understand how she got into this mess because we there are so many really tempting advantages to being somebody who who just wants something to be real but doesn't care that much about whether or not it's true. And there are so many success stories like Steve Jobs of like it worked he lived this way he lived his life his way to work out for him. But one of the reasons why we think it's really important to pause and make philosophy part of your life and why we think it's desperately important that kids be taught it at elite colleges before they go work for companies in Silicon Valley is you can't you can't believe that myth like you have to believe that there's some truth out there that's worth like making the anchor of your decision making or otherwise you know practically speaking you might end up in federal prison in San Francisco but even just like you know speaking for her soul and other entrepreneurs and founders is like you might end up being the bad guy in history like the person you sold everybody snake oil.
Well let's let's tune that up a little bit more think about the fact that over the next hundred years what moderately likely I would give it maybe a 50% chance that we're going to see super intelligent general artificial intelligence right over the next hundred years 50% chance. If that is done by somebody who is more concerned about being first and being right the control problem and the alignment problem are not going to be fixed and we're all going to be paper clips like we're going to make Nick Nick Boston's nightmare so if that happens this is your so right like when the externalities of your decisions begin to become civilizational collapse. You need to have a more fundamental grounded. Immergent idea that everybody agrees on to do with how the world should be run and.
Trying to think what is good for humanity at large when you can impact humanity you know it's all well and good thing about the fact that Socrates was talking about this and who could he impact the people that were within his. The field is voice could reach that's it you know the guy didn't even have a megaphone let alone the ability to completely rework every piece of electronics on the planet to kill us. It's not so much really gives me some optimism for philosophy at least as a field one of the talk about in the book is in the 20th century virtue ethics really got this huge boost. Right around the time of World War two and afterwards and one really concrete reason that happened was nobody saw the atomic bomb coming.
And nobody saw like complete total war fash is coming and then they happened really fast and people realize holy cow we better have a kind of ethical theory and a sense of ethical goals that is going to be able to cope now with living in a world where you can wipe everybody off the planet. And then you see like Iris Murdoch and was a man's comb and full of the foot and all these philosophers rushing into think okay like we need to think about this we need to think about how we're going to read dial because the game has changed and philosophy is really good again at that like goal finding activities hopefully for the good and you can also imagine like you know fascism was also fueled by a kind of philosophy. We hope we get it right but you definitely can't have this technological advance without the accompanying philosophy. Yeah and just even going all the way back to Socrates, he described as a gadfly as sort of somebody who is able to stand outside kind of dominant narratives in the culture and sort of just pick at them and just say you guys are like are we really sure that this is the thing that we want or are the arguments that we're making that like you know this tech platform is going to transform the world for the better.
Like is that right like what are the assumptions here about what kind of people we are about what kind of community that we want to actually have. What are the assumptions are those true and so you know one thing that gives me a bit of optimism is you know that's something that like you mentioned he could just do on his own it was it's sort of you can form yourself you can you know again we use the language of craft your soul by doing a little bit of philosophy knowing a little bit of philosophy and then you know doing some exercises or doing some meditations you can sort of change yourself so that you're disposed to care about and stand up for the truth in circumstances where it might be incredibly difficult or maybe a lot of social pressure not to write. That's what we were talking about the very beginning right the fact that you have how do you say competing narratives and competing influences on people that makes changing your mind or having a nuanced view or being anything that isn't one extreme or the other. There are very few you know Scott Adams is the guy that wrote the deal that creator.
Oh yeah yeah do you follow him on Twitter. Okay. Alright that's good that's for the benefit of your sanity so Scott Adams was very pro trump he was very sort of right of center with a lot of things over the last couple of years right. However he's incredibly skeptical around this vaccine skepticism stuff that was seen that's coming out on the internet at the moment and this is just spurring his entire audience out he's getting ratioed every single tweet on Twitter he's getting annihilated because his audience can't work out they pattern matched him as being this one person and then when he rolls forward and doesn't continue to follow their projected trajectory for him.
They just lose their shit and he's getting I feel bad for the guy like you thought that you had this person in your corner but the reason that you liked him was because he was able to arrive at a place that was. Independent and it was heterodox at least for what a lot of people from his background were thinking about popular writers and stuff like that and now he's done the same thing again but because it doesn't align with your interests you don't like it. Yeah and think about like the incentive structure there I don't know this is something I think about sometimes because you see a lot right you see somebody like rises to prominence because they've got it there they're speaking some sort of uncomfortable truth or they're talking about something a lot of people want to be talking about and then all of a sudden there's an orthodoxy that forms around that very quickly and the minute they apply that same sort of reasoning and they say hey I'm gonna be open minded and think about some other other topic like you're saying. So we co-opted you about this one you want to try now.
And the thing that really strikes me is so from their perspective okay once you've climbed to the top of Twitter or wherever it is you've gotten a job in politics or whatever it is that you wanted to do there is so much of a temptation to use that power to kind of ride that way or say okay yeah you're right you know what I will sort of panda or whatever it might be and that's kind of a cultural sort of cultural sickness or whatever it might be. But again what can we do about that as individuals will we cultivate if we craft our souls to make ourselves more immune to that sort of pressure and to say yeah I could walk away from you know whatever it is that these people care about hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers or whatever it might be and my life would still be good why well because influencing those people that's not what it's about at the end of the day for me what it's about is actually like you know pursuing the truth and having these kind of virtues I think that's you know I think that's tough. Now you don't need to agree with Scott Adams I use Sam Harris is this example all the time Sam consistently get shit on by the people that last week said that they loved him because he falls on both sides of the argument a lot of the time you know you had someone who was anti woke anti Trump anti BLM riot but anti Biden progressive policies and you like how who else is holding all of these opinions at the same time but the reason that I believe Scott genuinely believes what he says the reason that I trust him and the same reason that I trust Sam is he pays a really really high price to hold those views. I presume that he believes what he is saying because if he didn't why the fuck would you choose to say that like why would you decide to go down this like slow motion car crash torpedoing of your own audience.
Maybe I look let's just say how much I can destroy myself. I'm not sure if you read Nietzsche half the time that's a legitimate psychological hypothesis man this guy just wants to watch and burn. What's the thing you are. The authenticity of really owning the consequences of your beliefs, you know I figure like William James.
William James is a philosopher writing in like late 1800s in America. And he has this really famous essay called the Will to Believe which is basically about times when you when you believe things even though you don't have enough evidence because it's just an important part of the kind of vision of the good life that you're going after. What that means makes is it's not the case that like you can have consequence free beliefs like taking a risk with your beliefs and ideas is just as serious as jumping out of a plane with a parachute or going on a rock climbing expedition like there's there's legitimate goods at stake with your intellectual life. And so that's why this is hard like this is why you learn philosophy and you think and practice and have help because there are costs to getting things wrong but there's also cost and not trying.
I'm not trying to figure out what's right. So I'm going to be to see the agency made into the book it's one of the most important traits that I think that anyone can have it's something that I try and cultivate myself all the time. Have you got a story from history about agency that you can tell me. Yeah so the philosopher that we rely on in that chapter and we talk about agency and responsibility is very closely tied together right.
So the philosopher relying on there is Elizabeth Anscombe who I just adore I love Elizabeth Anscombe she's a virtue ethicist middle of 20th century and she's writing about about human action right and how we try to figure out when we're acting well when we're acting wrong me how do we measure that. And one of the huge insights that comes out of her work is that it really depends how we describe how we tell the story of our action right a lot of things hang on that so the example that I give is you know it's just an example but it illustrates it. I show up late to a meeting I can tell the story of my action in one way I can say look all the traffic was so bad and I tried my hardest and here I am you know and in doing so I excuse myself I sort of say look you know I did everything I could I care about the right things and I get wrong. I can take responsibility by describing you know look I just slept in I didn't care enough right I didn't leave time for traffic I took a risk and yeah look at your hands.
Okay so the way that we describe what we tell the story of our actions and they can be simple ones like arriving to be really complex actions that take place over a long period of time with the people that we care about. This is going to like crucially determined like whether or not we're taking responsibility whether our agency is sort of being deployed rightly or wrongly right. So one thing that we rely on and scone another philosopher Bernard Williams for is this idea of using what Williams calls morally thick concepts like virtue terms like generosity or you know anger whatever it might be to interrogate and ask questions about the stories that we're telling am I telling stories that always make me the hero right and if so are they true it doesn't seem like they could possibly be true right so why why tell them right how do I go back and start telling more accurate stories or start even just asking questions about my intentions in the first place right. So I think this is one of the things that we get you know from the virtual extension from and scone that again can just sort of practically and does practically change the way that I present myself in the world or that I think about actions that I'm going to be undertaking in the future how do I tell a story that's not just sort of you know good story about it.
How do I tell the true story about it and what does that sort of say about me about my character about intentions. What about generosity it's an interesting one I had Scott Barry Kaufman on the show talking about he's an expert in Maslow and he was talking about the hierarchy of needs and he was adamant that after actualization you get to transcendence and transcendence is when you then go beyond yourself and you give to other people. How what was the angle that you guys came to charity or generosity from. I've been thinking about this question for a while because ever since I've been teaching philosophy and certainly since we started teaching on Good Life here at Notre Dame I've taught Peter Singer who has these really interesting super practical pieces of advice for how to make your money into a part of your moral life.
And what Singer tells his students at Princeton which is fascinating I love reading about it is he's got all these really smart 18, 19 year olds who are also morally serious and who care about other people and care about their more reasons. And he says look there are a lot of people out there in the world whom your money could help more than your time or volunteer or thoughts and prayers. Like you could literally change the world you could save people from malaria if you earn money and then do the hard thing of committing all of it to these really efficient ways of enhancing lives. And they'll teach this class and get some students will sign pledges to try to pursue a high income in at least a more permissible way so they're not going to become like drug dealers but they might get work for a hedge fund or a really big banking unit.
And then make as much money as possible make themselves into a vehicle by which money is converted from the economy in the West to these really needy people elsewhere in the world. I think it's so revolutionary to kind of look at charity in that way and giving in that way is kind of the story that we've been told around charity is that it's sort of this cottage industry that you're supposed to do that the person that goes and gives their time at the soup kitchen is that is the virtue that they have when you realize through the effect of altruism movement or like 80,000 hours of wibblin's thing that if you are able to be an absolute force of nature at generating wealth and then you just decide to give it away that is that is your best way to help a lot of other people but it runs quite counter to this sort of like homey very kind of homespun style charity that's been an area that we've seen a lot recently. Oh yeah, no I mean it weighed a lot on me because I read those arguments and singer makes a really good point those children in Africa there's somebody's children in the South Sudan likes people love them they matter that just the system has been set up in such a way that their lives are valued much less than the lives of people directly surrounding us and at the time when Paul and I were getting started with teaching our God and good life course my youngest brother was getting ready to go to college and we have a very our parents are really low income and so the question became like how much money would I be willing to put towards my brother getting a really elite education and the answer I didn't have to think very hard about it all is like man I would pay double my mortgage down payment for his college but then you know I had this pause especially I was teaching our students that amount of money could save on average seven people's lives what I killed seven people to send my brother this is a fucking problem with singer stuff this is the problem because as soon as you go down that there is a boy drowning in the lake next to you you don't get your shoes wet it's over the next village it's in the next country you just every I struggle to not feel like an asshole at all all the time but the last point is to make you feel like an asshole so so what are the things that I got thinking about in the poll and I started working on really hard and we got to that chapter of the book is singer gives a very practical advice what kind of advice would have a virtue at this is give it tells you like no seriously you're kind of smart 18, 19 year old with the capacity to make a lot of money but also the capacity to join the Peace Corps or the capacity to like start a family practically speaking how can I help you figure out how you can make a morally serious difference without just assuming that like you know we can imagine the kind of cultural default which which is of course give a whole lot more to people that are biologically related to you than you give to people who are far away and of course whatever you feel is the right way to spend your money is the right way to spend your money which is very untillous ethical like you know you've lost me try justify decisions that you don't want to make but it's hard for us to it's hard for a lot of people to decide to change or morally evaluate their financial plan so we want to get into that it's a it's a weird one especially when a modern phenomenon like wealth wealth acquisition comes crashing up against kind of this like old dusty or what feels like an old and dusty academic subjective philosophy oh my gosh I think about this a lot I just get my only therapy couch one thing I think about quite a bit is I don't want to be the kind of person that measures a good life in terms of money we know that from Socrates like don't do that to their lives disaster so then you think okay well I'm in my job at a big corporation how hard should I negotiate for a pay raise or how thin should I complain about how much I'm being paid if I literally don't care about money and my needs are met and you might think the answer is none but then that gives you pause it certainly gives me pause because you think but it's also grossly unfair that women are paid less than men that some people who I think is like work is in fact objectively less economically valuable and get paid more because if they are so you want to fight individually against that those forms of discrimination or injustice but at the same time when all this paradox in your head of not wanting to care about money and use it as a way of keeping score but you're also using it as a way of keeping score on justice so how to resolve that I think is a puzzle a lot of people certainly women and people in marginalized groups are like dealing with that every single year it's a weird one it's an interesting one thinking about how how to ethically use money and money acquisition and chasing it without becoming captured by it or without being emotionally invested in it talk to me let's say that someone's quite seduced by the idea of virtue ethics and wants to make a crack at it what would you say are the most accessible books the best sort of introductions where would you get people to start I mean like I don't know just to plug our own class here at Notre Dame we actually have a whole website where we just put the whole class online basically or all the text that we read in the class online so you can go to Godingoodlife.nd.edu and you can just see sort of how we walk through texts from history of philosophy we've got a lot of annotated texts so you can read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics but with some pointers and some help to understand the weirder distinctions that he's making on such one place you can start to look I mean probably the even better place would be to buy our The Good Life Method book that we wrote based on the class which is really designed for readers who are coming at this not as a college course but as somebody who's just really curious about starting to build philosophy into their life and we have every chapter ends with every chapter tackles a different kind of question of the good life that comes in as from philosophy and we start off little with like how to have better political disagreements with folks using Plato building up to like how to be a better romantic partner and parent using Irish Murdoch and Bertut at the system we talk about work life balance and all the ways philosophy makes that question a lot different than you think it is and build up to like what are you going to do about this religion thing what are you going to do about death. We have a lot of practical exercises but also just like it's hard to sit down and start reading philosophy we don't recommend that you go to Barnes and Noble and buy an each a book and just sit down try to read it from beginning to end.
It's going to be hard because it was written in a different time and it was meant to be put in context but one of the things we do in the book is if you're just getting started try to give you all the hand holds so that it feels really like you're making progress at the right pace and really understanding things and our students we taught this material to thousands of Notre Dame students right now have really loved this system and it's worked for years with us so we're hoping it'll have a much bigger audience now. Well that will be linked in the show notes below Paul Megan we made it we made it to the end thank you very much for coming on it's been really really interesting it's nice to hear a different side of philosophy coming out and I really appreciate you guys are flying the flag for some sort of reemerging and less unknown philosophers in this modern world so thank you. Thank you Chris. Thank you so much this is really fun.