How to Be an Epicurean

4

The Story of Humanity

The human beings who lived on earth in those early days were far tougher than we are … [T]hey were not easily affected by heat or cold or unaccustomed food, or any physical malady. During many lustres of the sun revolving through the sky, they lived random-roving lives like wild beasts … What the sun and rains had given them, what the earth had spontaneously produced, were gifts rich enough to content their hearts.

Lucretius

Although they belonged to the highly developed civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Epicureans were fascinated by the recognition that human beings had not always lived in cities or practised farming, industry and commerce. They were aware that their ancestors had formerly lived in families and tribes with little political organisation. They understood that they had only later come together into federations, empowered kings and magistrates, and enacted laws and systems of punishment for offences and crimes. Relying on the manuscripts of Epicurus, as well as on the knowledge of his contemporaries about the distant past, Lucretius thought deeply about the origins of civilisation, and in the fifth book of On the Nature of Things he narrated the story of humanity, drawing important conclusions about technological progress, human happiness and political oppression that deserve our continued attention.

The State of Nature and the Rise of Civilisation

Lucretius describes the earliest phase of human life as dangerous but in many ways attractive. Adults lived as solitary foraging animals (presumably carrying or followed by their children). Many were ‘caught by wild beasts and provided them with living food for their teeth to tear’, while others died of their wounds ‘as no one knew anything of medicine’. But, says Lucretius pointedly, ‘Never in those times did a single day consign to destruction many thousands of men marching beneath military standards; never did the boisterous billows of the ocean dash ships and sailors upon the rocks.’ People died of famine, but not of surfeit; they got poisoned accidentally from eating the wrong thing, whereas ‘nowadays they make away with themselves more expertly’.

Fire was not stolen from the gods, as the Greek myth of Prometheus had it, nor was it a divine gift. Rather, Lucretius explains, forest fires were frequent in those early days, caused by lightning or the friction of tree branches rubbing against one another. People figured out how to capture, control and preserve fire, and this marked a turning point. They grew used to warmth and drew together to live as families in huts. They learned to cook their food, and living with women and children made men gentler and more obliging. Human language, which Lucretius saw as just another form of animal language, was invented, along with crafts such as plaiting and weaving. Although they fought with stones and clubs, early humans could not do each other much damage. There was relative equality and relative freedom without priests and judges to lay down the laws and threaten punishment.

Lucretius’s reconstruction has been largely validated by archaeologists and students of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Anthropologists have noted the ‘preference for equality’ in small and simple societies and the resentment of anyone who begins to act in an aggressive manner. There may be a headman in larger tribal societies, but his main function is to negotiate with outsiders, not to make rules for insiders, and he does not normally distinguish himself in dwelling or dress. How, then, did human beings make the transition from living in small, relatively egalitarian groups to oligarchies and imperial bureaucracies? In these political structures, wealth and power are concentrated in a small number of hands, and a very few rulers make decisions affecting the experiences and even the survival of millions of their subjects. For, as Lucretius emphasises, though he perhaps exaggerates the uninterrupted harmony of archaic life, warfare was unknown. All motivation to attack the neighbours was lacking, as well as effective weapons for doing so.

Lucretius is vague about how this happened. He supposes that ‘those endowed with exceptional talents and mental power’ invented new and admired practices and that kings appeared who rewarded their favourites and built cities. The invention of money brought in a new political era. ‘Later, wealth was invented and gold discovered, [which] robbed the strong and handsome of their prestige; for as a general rule … people … follow in the train of the rich.’

In Lucretius’s account, archaic society came to an end with a chance discovery, the discovery of the metals: copper, gold, iron, silver and lead. People observed how, in the immediate aftermath of a forest fire, metals oozed and ran out of rocks and solidified in new shapes. Here was a material that was far harder and more durable than wood and that, unlike stone, could be formed as one wished. Human ingenuity took over, and with metal technology came agricultural slavery, class divisions and brutal conquest. ‘With bronze they tilled the soil, and with bronze they embroiled the billows of war, broadcast wide gaping wounds; and plundered flocks and fields; for everything unarmed and defenceless readily yielded to the armed.’

Contemporary archaeology bears out Lucretius’s view that cities, trade and warfare evolved rapidly with the introduction of metal technology. With the plough and draft animals, human beings could now till vast fields and grow, store and trade grain, the new staple of the diet of the poor. With saws and hammers they could build houses, walls and fences to keep people indoors and livestock segregated. Carts for trade and travel could be furnished with wheels and drawn by domesticated animals. Tools applied to mining brought up precious metals and gems. With the new abundance of food wrested from the soil, populations grew and markets expanded. The art of shipbuilding made long-distance travel possible. A vast gap began to open up between rich and poor. The rich were those who persuaded or forced others to work for them in the fields, to manufacture tools and ornaments, to build dwellings for them and to fight their battles. The poor were those who had no choice but to enslave themselves to the rich.

This process involved gains and losses. Life became safer in some ways, and the countryside was beautified, ‘attractively dotted with sweet fruit trees and enclosed with luxuriant plantations’. Village life remained idyllic, Lucretius thought. People would lie in the grass in friendly company and ‘there would be jokes, talk and peals of pleasant laughter’. Bedecked with garlands of flowers, they amused one another with simple, rather clumsy dances. Singing was a good remedy for insomnia.

At the same time, everything got worse in other respects. Shipbuilding made long-distance warfare possible. Iron spears were far deadlier than Stone Age weapons, and there was now more to fight for. In the cities, the rich began to vie among themselves for wealth and power, and a period of bloodshed and chaos ensued. ‘[T]he situation sank to the lowest dregs of anarchy, with all seeking sovereignty and supremacy for themselves. At length some of them taught the others to create magistracies and established laws … The reason why people were sick and tired of a life of violence was that each individual was prompted by anger to exact vengeance more cruelly than is now allowed by equitable laws.’ If humans had not invented law and bureaucracy, that would have been an end to our species. But they did. Criminality was suppressed, enabling wealthy civilisations to advance further with the building of roads, the erection of palaces and the creation of artworks.

As we now know, ancient artisanship produced objects of utility and beauty for trade and domestic use, but only by making use of slave labour in huge urban workshops. The concentration of settled populations fostered learning in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and other sciences, as well as the great feats of ancient engineering. It also produced a parasitic upper class that lived from the hard labour of others, enjoying their rents, tax revenues and inheritances, but at the same time gnawed by anxiety over managing and retaining their wealth. Whether rich or poor, Lucretius observed, ‘human beings never cease to labour vainly and fruitlessly, consuming their lives in groundless cares, evidently because they have not learned the proper limit to possession, and the extent to which real pleasure can increase’. Ambition, aggression and corruption render societies that appear externally to be flourishing internally rotten.

Authority and Inequality

There are two especially important features of Epicurean prehistory. First, the Epicurean account invites us to reflect on the nature of power and political authority. Second, Lucretius’s account of the gains and losses of civilisation will resonate with anyone concerned about the effects of technological progress and development on human well-being and the well-being of the rest of life on our planet.

Political authority, in the Epicurean view, does not belong to nature. It exists ‘by convention’. That is to say, there are many forms of government, all of which depend on some form of human acquiescence, and what we define as criminal behaviour and what penalties we impose on lawbreakers are matters of human decision. Rules such as ‘an eye for an eye’ do not constitute natural justice; they rather reflect good or bad decisions about appropriate punishment. Penalties such as a certain number of years in prison for kidnapping, murder or fraud do not fit the crime in any objective sense. They have simply been deemed appropriate by lawmakers, sometimes for no good reason.

The significance of the Epicurean view was considerable. It challenged the prevailing assumption that authority and justice were defined in advance of human decisions and agreement. The Epicurean invites us to distinguish between naked authority – the raw exercise of power: the power to make laws, to establish rules for institutions, to inflict suffering on others, or to reward them with what they value – and legitimate authority, arising out of human agreement.

The original human interpretation of political authority was theological. In archaic and tribal societies, the gods were or are conceived as owning the land and its living beings. They, or subordinate spirits, are imagined to lay down laws concerning permitted and impermissible actions where the rest of nature and other people are concerned. In some tribal societies, divine ownership entailed judicious use of natural resources, especially game, along with other rules for living, strongly or weakly enforced.

In any case, theological accounts of political authority emphasise the power of the gods to punish actions that escape human notice. The Judaeo-Christian-Islamic Bible opens with an account of God’s creative power and his legislative authority. It describes his instructions to the first human pair in his personally owned garden, their disobedience and the terrible consequences of their disobedience. The authority of God’s first prophet Moses, who commands people to leave Egypt and form a new nation, is authority conferred upon him by God. And in Christian political theory, temporal rulers are theorised as placed and held in power by God and as owed a duty of obedience in light of their origin. For the religiously orthodox person, if God didn’t want some particular person to be president of the United States, that person would not be president, so whatever that person does must be consistent with God’s will.

A rival and equally influential tradition regarded political authority as built into the very structure of the universe. Epicurus’s predecessor, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, thought it obvious that the cosmos is hierarchically organised. The superior, he said, always rules the inferior. The heavens rule the earth below them, causing the seasons, which cause weather, which determines the food supply and reproductive behaviour. Many animal species have dominant individuals; masters rule their slaves; men rule women; and women rule children. This is the natural order of things, he maintained, and it would be perverse to question it. His views on natural domination offered one regrettable interpretation of the ancient ideal of ‘life in accord with nature’.

In the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, there could be tension and conflict between the Church’s own wealthy hierarchy of the Pope, the archbishops, the bishops and the lesser clergy and the secular emperors, kings and princes. Both had the power to raise revenues and to make rules. No ordinary person, no peasant farmer, or merchant, or artisan, or small landowner could doubt that the power to command, punish and reward descended from above. The forms these commands, punishments and rewards took did not depend on the agreement of those affected, but only on the social class into which they were born. As a result, there were different legal standards for the privileged and the poor, for men and women, and for different categories of persons such as the hereditary nobility and the clergy. The relative invulnerability of the socially powerful permitted extraordinary abuses: the waging of private wars and raids to increase wealth and dominion; the execution of rivals and confiscation of their estates; favouritism towards the incompetent; and the sexual abuse of women and children.

In the medieval and early modern periods, it has been estimated that 80–90 per cent of the population of the Holy Roman Empire were peasants or renters, tied to the land, paying tithes, rents or taxes to their landlord and serving as soldiers when required. The clergy, the aristocracy and craftspersons made up the rest of the population. Indoctrination in the form of weekly sermons inculcated the duty of obedience. Revolution, a literal turning upside down of social relations, putting those at the bottom on top and those on top at the bottom, was seen as a crime against God and nature. The assurance that Heaven awaited those who endured their sufferings and deprivations and patiently practised humility was offered on a weekly basis. The sufferings and deprivations of the people were by implication trivial as compared to those of the great martyrs, including Jesus himself, as the iconography of the churches emphasised.

Did those at the bottom passively accept their subordination? Were their lives uniformly miserable? As historians have shown us, village life had its share of joys and sorrows. Yet history is dotted with slave revolts and peasant uprisings prompted by taxation demands and starvation. Most rebellions were successfully put down, yet massive changes occurred between the 17th and mid-19th centuries. The transformation of these feudal societies based on the privileges and duties of the different social ranks into commercial societies based on the idea of contracts between equals has been studied from many points of view. The recovery of the Epicurean history of humanity, the distinction between nature and convention, and the Epicurean conception of justice as an agreement to avoid harming and being harmed, played an important role in rethinking questions about the legitimacy and scope of worldly powers.

Up until the mid-17th century, when Thomas Hobbes appeared on the scene, the idea of natural domination as well as the idea of divine legislation went largely unquestioned. Hobbes’s revival of the Epicurean idea of the ‘social contract’, which I’ll explore in Chapter 12, though it is still authoritarian rather than democratic, is the basis of much modern political theory, with its clear insistence that government exists only for the good of the governed.

The Lessons of the Past

One of the most important insights to take away from Lucretian prehistory and its reworking is that the purpose of political authority is to reduce interpersonal violence and to make life secure for all. A second insight is that our political and legal systems have been shaped by chance discoveries and new technologies. A third is that while life under civilisation offers a range of marvellous goods and experiences, uncontrolled and concentrated wealth and ambition make exploitation, warfare and corruption inevitable.

There is no cosmic plan in history, no destiny towards which we are inevitably travelling. No divinity is guiding us or watching out that we do not make mistakes that unleash nuclear war or that render most other species extinct and the earth uninhabitable. Chance discoveries are still possible, and human ingenuity is seemingly inexhaustible. But the search for power and gratification by the few at the expense of the many is an inevitable feature of civilisation that could be better controlled than it is, even if it can never be banished once and for all.

Another important insight emerges from the Epicurean history of humanity. Human beings invented government. We like to think of government as authority awarded to those most deserving of it, to people who have proved their commitment to the general welfare and their understanding of how the world works by presenting their beliefs and plans to the public, and by standing up to interrogation in competition with others. But we need to keep in mind that modern governments are the successors of originally kleptocratic, clan-based regimes that relied on secrecy, conspiracy, violence and intimidation to obtain and retain power and wealth and to practise violence against other groups. To a greater or lesser extent, they have either retained or shed the earlier characteristics of government. The best governments are those that have transcended their origins, rejected the seizure of power by force and fraud, and are now dedicated not to the enrichment of the clan, but to the welfare and best interests of the governed. The worst governments are those in which most of the original features of government are intact.

PART II

5

Ethics and the Care of the Self

The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. For if someone has these things and is confident of having them in the future, he might contend even with Zeus for happiness.

Epicurus

I … do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a sensible form.

Epicurus

Ethics is the study of how to live and what to do. As Epicurus says, it is about personal ‘choice and avoidance’. It is about my decisions on what to pursue and what to avoid, and avoidance is as important as choice.

Pleasure and Pain

The Epicurean believes that nature is the ultimate source of the ‘oughts’, ‘mays’, and ‘may nots’ that play an important role in human life. He regards sensory, emotional and intellectual pleasures as the goods worthy of being chosen – though ethics, as the following chapters will show, puts limits on these choices. He regards physical and psychological pain as the evils to be avoided and prevented. Nobody, Epicurus thought, has to command us to care for ourselves in this way. Nobody naturally seeks out situations of physical pain, anxiety and fear; nobody avoids situations that bring gratification, relief and release of tensions. That goes for so-called masochists as well. Masochists seek and obtain pleasure and release of tension by stimulating their fear and pain receptors.