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Alexandra Hudson on the Soul of Civlity (Episode 84)
688 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael
In this conversation Caleb speaks with Alexandra Hudson, the founder of Civic Renaissance and author of The Soul of Civility.
They discuss why politeness is overrated, the Stoic theory of political change, numerous contemporary and classical role models – intellectual and political theory, and what it means to be a good citizen in the modern age.
Pre-order The Soul of Civility
(03:04) Introduction
(12:04) Civility as Aristotelian Mean
(15:33) Politeness – Overrated?
(21:47) Might Makes Right
(26:08) The Immaterial vs Material World
(30:11) Role Models
(34:55) Politics as War
(38:04) Porching
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Transcript
Living Stoically Without Knowing
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people are staging this sort of proto-stoic revolution without even knowing.
00:00:05
Speaker
You know, like Joanna had never sat down and read Epictetus before or meditations before, but she's living it out. And so many people like her are. And how beautiful is that? That there's this embodiment of these ideas and they're life changing.
Introduction to StoA Conversations
00:00:18
Speaker
Welcome to StoA Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Citizenship and Stoic Politics
00:00:35
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Alexandra Hudson, the founder of Civic Renaissance and author of The Soul of Civility. Epictetus has a line where he urges us to not be unfeeling like statues, but maintain our natural and acquired roles towards nature, parents, siblings, children, and fellow citizens.
00:01:01
Speaker
It's that last area, that area of being citizens that we talk about, what it means to be a good citizen in our modern age, especially the question of what does it look like to interact with other citizens, others, about politics in a virtuous manner.
00:01:20
Speaker
Along the way, we discuss why politeness is overrated, education, the stoic theory of political change, and touch on numerous contemporary and classical role models, both intellectual and political in nature. Before we jump immediately into it, I have two quick announcements. Alexandra's book, The Soul of Civility, is going to be published on October 10th.
00:01:44
Speaker
Before then, if this conversation stands out to you and you want to grab the book, go to alexandraohudson.com, slash book pre
Stoic Mindfulness Workshop Announcement
00:01:54
Speaker
-order. Pre-order it and Alexandra has put together a nice set of gifts that you'll be eligible for. So do check that out, especially if this conversation resonates with you or you find it provocative.
00:02:08
Speaker
The second announcement, I am running a free workshop next week, October 12th. It's entitled, How to Think Like a Stoic, Stoic Mindfulness. We're going to be talking about what stoic mindfulness is, how to practice it, and most importantly, it's going to be an interactive workshop. So I'm looking forward to the discussion.
00:02:32
Speaker
If you want to register for that, go to stoameditation.com slash workshop. All right, here is our conversation. Welcome to stoic conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and today I am speaking with Alexandra Hudson. Alexandra is a writer, popular speaker, founder of Civic Renaissance, and recently the author of The Soul of Civility.
Power of Storytelling
00:03:00
Speaker
Thanks so much for joining.
00:03:02
Speaker
Thanks for having me Caleb. Let's start with this broad question. What's your story?
00:03:08
Speaker
My story, I'm passionate about the way that ideas and storytelling can change people's lives and can change our world for the better. I've always been riveted by the life stories of great men and women who transformed themselves for the better than by virtue of that changed the society that they lived in. I was raised in a home that was incredibly intellectually curious. Both my parents are very
00:03:36
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Credentialed they have graduate
Intellectual Curiosity and Education
00:03:38
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degrees. My father is three masters in his PhD and is a professor of cinematography and rhetoric My mother has stars in law and government and so but all that to say they realized that Education was a way of life. It wasn't just something that happened in the classroom curiosity having this fundamental wonderment about the world around you was not Schools did not have a monopoly on that classrooms did not have a monopoly on that and often
00:04:04
Speaker
Unfortunately, schools and mainstream education can be antithetical to curiosity and lifelong learning, which is the highest and the best life. So being raised in that sort of environment, I consider just a supreme gift and really informs what I love and who I am.
00:04:19
Speaker
I came into my own intellectually and in college and took a lot of inspiration from the civic Renaissance humanists. And it's kind of funny. I didn't come to my education that in the classical world until later, like it was it was kind of through the lens of the of the Renaissance.
00:04:36
Speaker
and a lot of the thinkers, the Renaissance, it was obviously a rebirth of antiquity, like they were rediscovering Plutarch and Cicero and also the Greeks as well by extension. And so I fell in love with the classes kind of tangentially. I encountered the Renaissance first and then revisited the classics later, kind of on my own after school.
Renaissance Humanists' Influence
00:04:57
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However, what I loved about the Renaissance humanists in particular was twofold.
00:05:02
Speaker
they had a high view of humanity and the human person. And a lot of them were Christians and they had this high view of humanity because they thought God, humanity was the pinnacle of God's creation in the natural world. And that the highest and best life is fulfilling, is cultivating our humanity and fulfilling our potential artistically, intellectually, creatively, politically, and just expressing
00:05:23
Speaker
the noblest and most beautiful versions of ourselves and the cultivation of our personalities as individuals in relationship with others. And I loved, so that humanism, first of all, I loved. And secondly, I loved their reverence for the past and the ideas and the thinkers that have come before us. And not just for, you know, idle intellectual interest, it was especially the civic Renaissance humanist, which is the second wave of humanism in the Renaissance.
00:05:50
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where they wanted to take the ideas of antiquity and questions of the good life and what it means to be human and apply it to the here and the now. There was a real explicit interest in making people's lives better, applying it to the public square, applying it to leaders.
00:06:06
Speaker
So taking ideas and applying the best of the past and applying it to the needs of the present. That's what really inspires me about, about, about the Renaissance. And that's why my publication and dub stack, my newsletter is called Civic Renaissance, paying homage to that sort of ethos. And so your question was, you know, what's my story? That's, that's kind of my, my story in a natural who I am being really intellectually curious and loving education. I ended up pursuing and being invited to have a role.
Education System Critique
00:06:35
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at the United States Department of Education. I was at the single largest institution in the history of mankind dedicated to student instruction.
00:06:43
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And it was rather devastating to realize that they didn't care about education, at least not how I had been educated, which was a reverence for beauty and goodness and truth and lifelong learning and intellectual curiosity. And I lasted about a year in this really kind of divisive time in Washington, DC, and in a very intellectually stifling environment.
00:07:08
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And I left and threw myself into the books and the thinkers that I loved again, you know, revisiting scripture, revisiting Aristotle and Plato and just people and thinkers that had really formed me earlier on and asked these questions like, what does it mean to be a human being? And what is the bare minimum of respect that we are owed to others by virtue of our shared humanity? And what does that look like in person, even when we disagree? Because again, I just endured this really vitriolic year in federal government.
00:07:38
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in Washington DC. And that was sort of the moral foundation, the lens through which I approach this question of civility. And five years later, it's now a book that I'm thrilled to say is available for order and available to the public. I'm really, really grateful to be able to share that with the world now. So my book is called The Soul of Civility, Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.
Curiosity as Life's Ethos
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Excellent. Excellent. Very good. Well, one question I'm curious about is, is there something specific, perhaps you think your parents did to cultivate that interest in the intellectual life education in the highest sense? Because of course you always encounter people who have these, either this background or these parents who are very interested in that world, but for whatever reason, these people don't pick it up themselves. So I'm curious if maybe there's something that your parents did or perhaps something that's unique to you.
00:08:32
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It's really just who they are. They're both incredibly voracious and curious people. Like I remember growing up, my dad always had his nose in a book. He was always lost in his own thoughts and just a dialogue with the greats constantly and my mom.
00:08:47
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She, again, to this point about education not being something that happens exclusively in a classroom, my mother homeschooled me for first grade, but she had enough curricula and textbooks to see me through multiple doctoral degrees. At every turn, there was just an enrichment activity, and I went to a combination of public, private, and charter schools for my education, and yet
00:09:14
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my mother's resources, um, you know, and song and poem and mnemonic devices, like they were so helpful to help me and they helped me succeed in the classroom because of what we did outside the classroom. So it really was just this, you know, ethos, this like wraparound holistic environment that had a high view of the life of the mind and, and just a wonderment and a joy. It was, you know, education and learning and curiosity as a, as a lifestyle. So you ask me what they did. It was just who they are.
00:09:44
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Um, and I actually have, I just created a, a, a gift for anyone who orders my book. It's a, it's, it's one of several resources that I created as a, as a gift. It's called, it's an ebook called cultivating curiosity, the hidden secret to the life well-lived. Cause I do believe that cultivating a curiosity can be cultivated and be, I think it is a central ingredient to an enriching personal life.
00:10:11
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just approaching every person, every experience with a sense of awe and wonderment and gratitude and just curiosity. Like, what can this teach me? What can this person teach me? What can this experience, good or bad? And often bad. Having that disposition of curiosity can really be powerful.
00:10:30
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And seeing us through, how can this teach me something? How can I grow through this? Just that sort of reframe and how we approach even toxic people, even uninteresting people. That's one thing that I think is really important. There are no uninteresting people, just uninterested people.
00:10:50
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And every single person, I believe, has something that they can teach us. So all that to say, what did my parents do is just who they are. And I'm so, so grateful for that. But it's something that anyone can do, starting right now. Within their home life, they want to create a culture of curiosity and learning. It just takes picking up a book or a podcast and letting
00:11:13
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That's the fun part about auto didactism. That's the fun part about lifelong learning. It's all the benefits of school. People, I think, like to learn. We're geared for self-improvement, and unfortunately, often have schools done.
00:11:28
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in our, in our world today, especially the West is it takes the joy out of it. You know, it's all about teaching to tests and living in a box and moving from box to box classroom to classroom period to period and like fulfilling core requirements as opposed to letting us follow our intellectual interests that I think we all do have, but unfortunately that gets like beaten out of us in formal schooling all too often. So I'm grateful that because of these, this intellectual support and sort of architecture that my parents raised us in.
00:11:56
Speaker
There were times where I hated school, hated formal school, but because of this home environment, I'm so grateful to have had. I didn't win. That's good. Do you think that this
Civility vs. Politeness
00:12:08
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description is fair? Civilities that Aristotelian mean between an empty form of politeness and aggressiveness. What do you think about that framing?
00:12:16
Speaker
Interesting. In my book, I talk about my time in government being this education in two extremes to use your framework. My mother, let's just step back one more step. My mother, she is the manners lady. Her name is Judy, the manners lady. I was raised in this home environment that was really attuned to etiquette and manners and social expectations and norms.
00:12:45
Speaker
I remember I'm like constitutionally allergic to authority. I hate being told what to do. I hate, especially if no one can give me like a rationale for what to do it. So I always had this sort of skepticism about arbitrary norms of do's and don'ts, but I generally followed them and they generally served me very well. They helped me succeed in school and in life. And one thing my mother always said was that manners mattered because they were an outward expression of our inward character.
00:13:13
Speaker
And then, all of a sudden, I find myself in government, and I'm confronted with these two extremes. On one hand, there were these aggressively hostile individuals. They were willing to step on anyone to get what they wanted. And you knew exactly where they stood. You knew what kind of person they were. They didn't know bones about it. They just seemed they were who they were, and you understood that. You knew how to operate within them. And then there was other contingent.
00:13:41
Speaker
And at first glance, I thought that they were my contingent because they were smooth and they were polished and refined. And then I realized, though, but they were the kind of people that would smile and compliment you, flatter you one moment. And the moment you never no longer served their purposes, they would stab you in the back, all while smiling.
00:14:00
Speaker
And I realized that those two extremes, they were two sides of the same coin because they were both about instrumentalizing others. They were both willing to do whatever is necessary to succeed, to get ahead. And they were just different means of achieving the same selfish, self-agradizing ends. And so I define civility in my book.
00:14:26
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as the bare minimum of respect that we are owed and owed to others by virtue of our shared humanity, by virtue of our equal moral worth as members of the human community. And that sometimes that requires being impolite, doing and saying things that might offend people, telling people hard truths.
00:14:46
Speaker
you know, talking politics and religion, like we need to talk about those. That's often, it's often said, you know, don't talk about politics and religion at the dinner table. Like you don't want to make someone uncomfortable if you disagree. But like human flourishing and especially modern liberal democracy requires talking about those questions of origin, purpose, and destiny, the meaning of life, questions of the highest order that politics and religion reflect on. And so to answer your question,
00:15:15
Speaker
Is civility a golden mean between the two? It's maybe. It's certainly an alternative. It's certainly an alternative to these two extremes. So maybe. I think I tentatively accept that. I may have to think about it a little more. Well, would you say that politeness is overrated today, or is that too broad of a brush? It's a great question. I think that civility and politeness are
00:15:45
Speaker
often conflated. So there are two contingents today. There are many people that long for this bygone era of chivalry and gentility and decency across divides, as if there was this golden age of civility in American public life. And that contingent uses politeness and civility interchangeably.
00:16:08
Speaker
And then on the other hand, there are people today that think civility is a tool of white supremacy, of oppression, of the politically powerless and oppressed, a way to silence disagreement and appeals to politeness as a way to say, no, no, no. We can't talk about race or gender or anything that's not the status quo. We don't do that in polite society. And both those contingents, those that long for this bygone era of gentility and chivalry and civility, and that contingent that thinks that it's a tool
00:16:38
Speaker
oppression and to keep the powerless in positions of powerlessness. They conflate these two ideas. They use them interchangeably. And I think most people do. They don't have a meaningful, there's no meaningful framework by which to disentangle them. And I think it's essential that we disentangle them. It's actually not, it's understandable why we do this. If you go to dictionaries right now,
00:17:03
Speaker
these words, civility and politeness, are defined in terms of the other. Samuel Johnson, 1755, his very first English dictionary, he defines these two words in terms of the other. Politeness is in the definition of civility, civility, the definition of politeness. So it's understandable why we do this. I just think it creates a lot of confusion about what we want in the society and what we should even aspire for and aim for. So I make
00:17:28
Speaker
a case for disentangling the two. I say politeness is manners. Politeness is a technique. It's etiquette. It's outward actions, gestures. Civility is a disposition of the heart. It's a way of seeing others as our moral equals. And again, worthy of respect in light of that. And sometimes respecting someone
00:17:52
Speaker
means telling a hard truth and not being polite, not papering over difference and diminishing and sweeping difference under the rug. That requires robust debate. And the etymology of these two words supports that distinction. The Latin root of politeness is polier, which means to smooth or to polish. So again, politeness is about the external. And it's about polishing over difference, papering over difference, as opposed to giving us tools to grapple with difference head on.
00:18:21
Speaker
Civility comes from the Latin root kivitas and it's the root for city citizenship And and that's what civility is. It's the habits of a citizen in the city it's the habits of a democracy it's the habits of any human community and Again requires telling hard truths like respecting someone enough to do the hard thing Not the easy thing which is you know, not telling the hard truth and not the patronizing thing which is not telling the hard truth
00:18:48
Speaker
And so to your question about whether politeness is overrated.
Importance of Civility
00:18:53
Speaker
Yes, it absolutely is in the way that people often think that if we could just get along and talk nicer together, that's enough. And there have been really valiant efforts, especially in American public life in recent decades to do that. But what we learn from those and many other efforts is that
00:19:13
Speaker
Just talking nicely and having more politeness, more manners, that's not enough. There has to be a fundamental reorientation of our priorities and our disposition towards others, seeing them as a human being worthy of respect. And if we don't have that, then the empty gestures of politeness are worthless. Politeness can be a tool, an important tool of facilitating conversation across difference.
00:19:39
Speaker
modulating who we are and what we believe in order to better communicate and get along with others, but without the disposition of civility, it's useless, it's alone, it's not enough. Right, right. Yeah, it reminds me of the principle or relationship advice to have the fight, just have the fight. Sometimes it's better to bring up any initial form of conflict initially, rather than avoiding it.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yes, I think you're absolutely right that conflict can be this powerful tool of intimacy and growth and it can strengthen a relationship.
00:20:20
Speaker
And I think too often today, though, we don't do conflict well in that we avoid it entirely, which is what politeness might do. We're pressing it, smoothing over it, like sweeping the conflict, deferring it. Or we do conflict badly, where it's very aggressive, it's ad hominem, like it's here at the moment and we're attacking people. And it's not tempered by human dignity. It's not tempered by the respect that we owe to others.
00:20:48
Speaker
And that we owe ourselves too. And this is a key part of my understanding and definition of civility and why it matters to society, that we are hurt when we treat others poorly. We are so interconnected as a species in a really beautiful and profound way that when we debase someone, we're cruel, we're malicious. It doesn't just hurt and debase the other. It deforms our own soul as well.
00:21:16
Speaker
And this is, this is, you know, you sound like you're a student of Aristotle. Like this is a very Aristotelian idea. Like virtue is a habit and moral habits for good is a virtue. Moral habits for ill is a vice.
00:21:28
Speaker
And so in that way, and I'm happy to talk more about this and this question, especially in the context of philosophical history, but, you know, just like virtue is its own reward, vice is its own punishment. That's the case for civility as well. It's its own reward. And being malicious to others is its own punishment because it hurts us.
Virtue as Its Own Reward
00:21:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think it seems like we've either lost or perhaps never fully had this idea that vice is its own punishment. And typically there's going to be a focus on either victims, which of course matters quite a lot, but there's
00:22:05
Speaker
very little focus on the vicious suffering, the results of their own misdeeds or the opposite, the virtuous being rewarded or admired merely just because of what, what they did rather than whatever results obtained. Exactly. In my book, I put Machiavelli and dialogue with Socrates on this exact question. You often hear this, you know, cliche like nice guys finish last, right?
00:22:34
Speaker
Like in this question and in philosophical moral history as well, like can you be a good person, person of integrity and bound by morality and decency and succeed in life? And Machiavelli said no in his account of power. And this is like just purely a descriptive, not a normative account. He's like, no, people who are bound by morality, especially Christian morality and love of others and charity, they fail, they suffer.
00:23:03
Speaker
And people that are bound by the logic of, you know, Thrasymachus from Plato's Republic, like might makes right, like the logic of power and doing anything to get ahead, they tend to succeed in life. This is Machiavelli's account of power in human history. And then Socrates' response to that would be, again, you know, what's your definition of success?
00:23:28
Speaker
Is it worldly success? Is that what matters most? If the promotion or the car or the house or the wealth, the prestige, the power, if that's your goal and you achieve that by doing anything necessary, but you can't sleep at night, that's its own punishment. The fact that you've hurt others along the way to gaining these material temporal gains, again to this point that Socrates and others after him have made that virtue
00:23:58
Speaker
and living a life is health of the soul and vice is sickness of the soul is what he says. And so virtue and civility, treating others with decency, that's its own reward, vice, incivility, cruelty, malice, its own punishment. So it may seem like nice guys finish last or may seem that, you know, people who are willing to do and say anything succeed, but at the end of the day, it's his own punishment. They have to live with themselves.
00:24:25
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I think sometimes it's missed how truly radical Socrates is, where if you first pass, you look at the apology and it's a tragedy.
Socrates' Radical View on Virtue
00:24:33
Speaker
Socrates is killed unjustly, but Socrates' view of what happened is he wasn't harmed at all. He did the right things and everything that was outside of his control, the Athenian actions, those happened as they were fated to, as it were.
00:24:52
Speaker
And it's a tragedy for the Athenians who made the mistake of justly sentencing to death. Right. And this is why the Credo, the Credo, he doesn't escape. Like his wealthy friend invites him like, come on, like, let's get you out of here. You don't deserve to die. And Socrates says, no, this is what my peers have condemned me to. And he goes on into his death. I think my favorite platonic dialogue is the phato.
00:25:16
Speaker
that gives such a robust and noble vision of the philosophic life and the human soul where Socrates doesn't fear death. As you mentioned, he relishes that he looks forward to it because finally, he was someone that didn't bathe. He wore rags. He barely ate. He was just totally someone that diminished the life, the temporal life, the carnal existence because he was so passionate about ideas and passionate about the life of the mind.
00:25:45
Speaker
And so when finally the opportunity presents himself for him to shed his mortal coil and like not be distracted by hunger and thirst and having to, you know, wear clothes and do all these things that we have to do to survive, like no longer being distracted by the needs of the body. Like what a gift he, you know, Socrates says to just have his immortal soul like elevated into eternity and unified with beauty and goodness and truth. I,
00:26:09
Speaker
love Plato more than Aristotle. I put my cards on the table, just like I love platonic dialogues. They're vivid, they're rich and vibrant. But I do think that the life of the body matters. And again, to my how talking about the civic humanist, I think that there is a noble and rich life to be had now. And I do believe in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife. However,
00:26:38
Speaker
I don't believe that, I don't think it's right to diminish the body and the here and the now for any hope of a life to come, which is what Socrates and other ascetics, those who prescribe to asceticism after him did. I just think that there's too much joy and richness to be had here and now to give all that up.
00:27:01
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, you do have the sort of the Platonist or Neoplatonist reading of what's going on that almost comes to really dismiss the body or even hold in contempt in some sense, where on some of the Gnostic visions, the material world becomes part of the creation of some evil demiurge or what have you. And that really does seem to divorce you from
00:27:26
Speaker
either in the Aristotelian sense or in many other Hellenistic philosophies, what you are, you're not merely a floating, immaterial substance, but you're either bound to a body or in some sense made up by a body and this vision of being a purely
00:27:44
Speaker
immaterial thing that needs to free itself from its material cage. There's not nothing to that idea, but taken to its extreme, it does seem to divorce you from what you really are. And by the ancient vision, if you're divorced from what you really are, you're divorced from your good or your purpose. Right. And as human beings, we're mind, body and spirit. And I think what's interesting, I think Plato is a really good counterbalance to our current moment that
00:28:14
Speaker
The world we live in now values
Pascal's Inner Life Priority
00:28:16
Speaker
the body. You know, it's a cult of ambition and success and power, and also scientism, like that we, what we see as all there is, and if it can't be proven by science, then doesn't matter, doesn't exist. And so I think that thinkers that remind us that they're, you know, all that we see is not all that there is, that in fact, arguably, that's not the most important thing that we can see, and that there is fallibility in science as well, that there's the
00:28:42
Speaker
I love Blaise Pascal, who's all throughout my book. He has this great line, La Cordeaux. The heart has reasons that reason cannot understand, that there's more to us than just our mind. Again, he's someone that really had a high. Again, Pascal is the 17th century French polymath who was a generation after René Descartes. He's in the thick of the Enlightenment. He's this genius. He invented the first computer, the first calculator. He invented the first omnibus system in Paris.
00:29:11
Speaker
invented the vacuum, like just a litany of achievements and just this prodigy, child prodigy in scientific innovations. And yet he had this conversion experience to a kind of radical Christianity, a very extreme version of Christianity, where he realized that all of his scientific pursuits didn't matter if his spiritual and internal life wasn't vibrant and robust. So he ended up abandoning his
00:29:36
Speaker
scientific pursuits and just thought about and just nurtured his interior life nurtured his immortal soul and you know in a kind of a very Socratic way kind of prepared himself for death for the rest of his life He locked himself in a room and just thought and wrote and contemplated the good until he ultimately lived a very extreme isolated lifestyle until he eventually died So I don't think he's a model person in all ways, but he definitely has rich ideas that I think again are really important antidotes to our
00:30:05
Speaker
very materialist scientific moment now. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Forgiveness and Learning from Flaws
00:30:12
Speaker
Yeah. There is something to finding a role model who maybe perhaps is too extreme in their implementation, but moves one or moves a culture in the right direction. I think that's such a great point that we live in this culture of heroes and villains, like, like you're either perfect and if you're not perfect, you're a villain. And, and to your point though, like what about having heroes?
00:30:35
Speaker
that have a villainous aspect, or not even a villainous aspect, like Pascal, he lived a really extreme lifestyle that I wouldn't recommend. But even in people's failures, we can learn from that. And instead, we live in this era of strange perfectionism, where we expect everyone to be
00:30:55
Speaker
complete and whole and have it all figured out. And like changing your mind about something is considered a sin, like it's flip-flopping, right? Or making a mistake, an error in judgment, losing your temper, like being caught on camera at like not your best moment and all of a sudden you're canceled and you've lost your job and you're destroyed because of one aspect of who you are, one mistake that you've made. Even if it's 30 years ago, you know, like that's so reductive of the human spirit.
00:31:24
Speaker
because it's not seeing us in the fullness of who we are. And the fullness of who we are, as Blaise Pascal said, is the greatness and wretchedness of man. That's how he views the human condition. We are the pinnacle of God's created world and his conception. And yet we are capable of descending down with the beasts, being malicious and barbaric to one another. And that duality is in all of us.
00:31:51
Speaker
without fail. And so to expect perfection is unrealistic. It's untenable. I love Alexander Pope's insight. The English poet, he says, you know, to err is human. To forgive is divine. And I've heard it said elsewhere really insightfully that, you know, we live in this post-Christian era.
00:32:12
Speaker
that we've kind of perverted Christianity, we've kept the Christian tenets of condemnation and judgment for sins, and yet we've lost Christian notions of charity and compassion and forgiveness. So this adulterated quasi-religious obsession with purity, and that is incredibly degrading to what it means to be human and the human spirit. Yeah, that's really interesting. It does seem like there's a,
00:32:39
Speaker
When you look at role models, heroes, there is a requirement of purity, which often just isn't going to be met, which leaves people in a position of nihilism, where we have an exercise in our stoic app when stoic practice is to contemplate a sage, a role model, and often a number of people will struggle thinking of who's an actual role model or even a fictional person to look up to.
00:33:05
Speaker
there's that challenge that if you're in that position, then what are one's values at all? Or if you think they're unattainable, what in what sense are they going to be actionable for either yourself or others? I love that exercise. And I think a model
00:33:21
Speaker
in the Stoic vein and era is Plutarch, the Greco-Roman moralist. So he was of the Greek descent, but a citizen of the Roman Empire. And he wrote these famous biographies of famous Greeks and put them in dialogue with famous Romans. And again, he is of Greek descent, but a Roman citizen, but he didn't have an ax to grind. This is not like pro-Rome or pro-Greek propaganda. He's like, no, I'm going to identify virtue
00:33:51
Speaker
in putting these lives and these people's stories in dialogue and praise it. I'm gonna identify vice and I'm gonna condemn it. It doesn't matter where it is or who's done what. And I think that's such a valuable use of history and storytelling. He's a remarkable historian. He's not only really academically rigorous in how he gathered these life stories, but he's a great storyteller and he harnesses the power of storytelling in a remarkable way. And again,
00:34:21
Speaker
He shows the greatness and wretchedness of man. Not any one of these biographies is pure hagiography. It's not just saying, look at this great person who's just the best. And we want that in a society. We find it really difficult. And that'd be an interesting line of conversation maybe for another day about what is it about our culture that makes it so hard for us to grasp nuance and have multiple things to be true at one time, especially about a person.
00:34:48
Speaker
Like again, we want to reduce people and things to black and white, good or evil, right or wrong. And that's just not who we are.
00:34:56
Speaker
Well, one question I should ask about is, you know, in political argument, often you find yourself in a position where it seems like the other side is more interested in winning than pursuing the truth. Or it seems like they've decided that it's politics is the domain of war. And you can try think about, you know, this is, give my arguments and so on, give my reasons for thinking what I believe is true. But whenever you do that, when talking to some people, it seems like you're playing
00:35:25
Speaker
a different game than what they are playing. So how do you think about that, being in that position? I think you're absolutely right that, and I think this is a continuation of what we were just talking about narratives of right versus wrong, good versus evil, that are in our minds and then perpetuated and enforced in our media culture and everything around us. That if we reduce the world and others to narratives of right or wrong, good versus evil,
00:35:55
Speaker
then the other is not someone to be reasoned with. They're not someone to respect even. If they're an evil person, a bad person with bad ideas, harmful ideas, ideas that will hurt others, then
00:36:10
Speaker
It's scorched earth, you know, vanquishing them is the only objection. And that's the danger of this sort of holy war, like righteous indignation that is so pervasive in our political rhetoric and public life today, where we don't see the other side as comprised of people who are worthy of respect by virtue of our equal moral worth as members of the human community, by virtue of our human dignity that we all share, even when we disagree.
00:36:41
Speaker
When we consume and imbibe and accept these narratives of right or wrong and good versus evil, it becomes easier to do and say things and to be unshackled, right? Unbound by the natural limit that respecting someone by virtue of our shared humanity would present on us. There are certain things that you don't do. You don't say to someone, to your kin, like your fellow
00:37:04
Speaker
fellow human being. And I love that etymology of kindness. Actually, it comes from the Old English word for kin and kinship, which is like, you know, your family, but that's what kindness is. It's treating not your kin, not your family as if they were. It's sort of a universalized morality, like the sort of tribe, the morality and the logic of tribalism is
00:37:29
Speaker
ingrained in us and it's like a natural way that we survive because we protect us and our own people who are like us and our families and but yeah the logic of kindness the logic of civility kind of universalizes that morality and no it's not just the lives and well-being of your family and those that you like and are like you that matters actually we we do have a basic obligation not a limitless obligation but they're at least a basic one to those that are not like us and not part of our kin and that that kind of
00:37:59
Speaker
Etymology of kindness tells that story in a beautiful way. Right, right. So I suppose there's always a question when if you're in an argument like this, perhaps you might be mistaken about you being the person who is being rational, being fair. There's always that bias towards oneself. But it seems like truly in some situations, the other party is not engaging in the same terms. So I guess this is something I haven't figured out
00:38:29
Speaker
personally, but what's the next step there? Do you continue in a sort of Socratic fashion and that is nothing to you and it's merely important that you do what is best, what is virtuous, or is there some other route where perhaps you just don't engage with those people or something of that sort?
Stoicism and Self-Improvement
00:38:48
Speaker
So I'll tell you a story, probably one that you and your listeners already know, but
00:38:53
Speaker
When Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome, he endowed four schools of philosophy. For the Aristotelians, he endowed the Lyceum. For the Platonists, he endowed the Academy. For the Epicureans, he endowed the Garden. And for the Stoics, he endowed the Stoa.
00:39:13
Speaker
the front porch. And I love, there's so much that I love about that story because of course the Stoics represent my theory of social change. And I champion Stoicism throughout my book, sometimes using the language and sometimes just use the ideas, but that we can't change others, but we can change ourselves. And that if enough of us choose to kind of reclaim our civic sphere and reclaim what we can control, we can change the world. I have no doubt of that. But that's what's frustrating
00:39:42
Speaker
to lots of people today that they just yell at the people on TV and yell at Washington, yell at their public leaders, and they're frustrated that no one's listening to them and no one's changing, right? But that's really not what they can control or what they should control. And what does it look like when we dig in to what we can control and be a better neighbor, a better spouse, a better parent?
00:40:08
Speaker
And again, cultivating the fullness of ourselves, we can bring the best version of who we are to others and show what better for the people in our immediate vicinity. And I think, so you may know that story, but what you might not know is that this tradition of the stoa and poaching is alive and well. And so I tell the story in my book about a woman named Joanna Taft. So I live in Indianapolis. Now, part of my story is that I left very toxic Washington DC and moved to Indianapolis, just like eager to escape
00:40:38
Speaker
the cesspool of the divided nature of our public life. My husband's from the Midwest, from Indiana originally, and it was my decision to move here. I just had to escape. And one of the first people we met when we moved here was this woman named Joanna Taft. We met her at our church, and after church, she comes up to me and says, hi, I'm Joanna. Would you like to porch with us today? And I'd never heard the word porch used as a verb before, but I said, sure, we didn't know that many people there. So we go to her home, and she has this great big 1905
00:41:07
Speaker
Victorian home with a huge brand, a huge friend porch. And for Joanna, the porch is a social statement. It's the subversive movement of exactly what we've been talking about, reclaiming our social sphere. And it's her opportunity every week to stage a rebellion against our atomized and divided status quo that wants to reduce us to one aspect of who we are. So she's intentional about curating people across different races, different political beliefs, different parts of town even.
00:41:37
Speaker
So often we're just captive to the people that we see on a regular basis, that we go to school with, go to church with, work with, right? But like giving people an opportunity to intermingle from across these different barriers and spheres.
00:41:50
Speaker
And to just be people. There's no organization. There's no like structured conversation. It's just an opportunity to, you know, have a few nipples and have a dialogue and strike up a conversation and a friendship with someone that you've never met before. And so there's a lot to say about the importance of places like that, these sort of quasi public spaces to building social trust and restoring civil society and
00:42:16
Speaker
rebuilding bonds that in turn support our democracy and human flourishing. I have a lot to say about that.
Community Building Through Stoicism
00:42:21
Speaker
But at a very real level in a way that's like relevant to to this community is that people are staging this sort of proto stoic revolution without even knowing.
00:42:32
Speaker
You know, like Joanna had never sat down and read Epictetus before or meditations before, but she's living it out. And so many people like her are. And how beautiful is that? That there's this like an habitation, this embodiment of these ideas and they're, they're life changing. Like I, my life was changed by Joanna's kindness. And I know I'm not the only one, like people who live their lives according to that logic. Like I can't change the world, but I can change myself.
00:43:00
Speaker
Like Joanna has made Indianapolis a beautiful place. And I can name 1,000 people who would agree that she, in just small ways, has touched their lives, elevated their experience of how they live in the world or in this town because of that. And that's powerful. So don't underappreciate the power of one person to change the world. I have this idea in my book, I call it,
00:43:29
Speaker
the malefluous echo of the magnanimous soul. And what I really realized, and I was so drawn to Joanna because she was so much like my mother and my grandmother in so many ways. Again, these people that just lived according to a different logic, like they just breathed life and light wherever they went. There's this great French word in perfumery called syage.
00:43:51
Speaker
And it's the scent that is in your wake as you walk. So it's not just how a perfume smells on you, it's the after effect after you've left the room. You leave this seage, this wake of beauty and scent that's really intoxicating. But I love that imagery of someone who just leaves a wake of light and beauty wherever they go. And so we often hear these stories. They're in the newspaper every day about generational trauma. And someone's in the news for being a serial killer and they were
00:44:21
Speaker
they were the product of two drug addict parents or part of the foster care system or an abusive grandparent or something horrible like that. We're aware vividly and tragically of these stories of one person to cause harm across time and place to the people that come after them or the people that they interact with, their families and their friends. Hobyliology is a great example of that very famous story of
00:44:48
Speaker
one mother who made bad decisions that caused a lot of strife in one family and one community across time and across place. But less often do we hear stories of the inverse, where one person, because of their magnanimous soul and their decision to live their lives according to a different logic, creates not generational trauma and a vicious cycle, but a virtuous one.
00:45:15
Speaker
a mellifluous echo that reverberates across time, across generation, across place. And that was my grandmother, who was the social glue of her family. She passed away three years ago now, but it was a social glue of her family and just touched. She saw every single human interaction as a joy-filled thing, and she just approached it. Every person she met, she's like, it is such a gift that I'm with you right now. It doesn't matter who it was. Her cashier or her taxi driver
00:45:44
Speaker
the person that she sat with on the airplane, like every single person she treated as such a sacred gift. And I don't know, like it's totally otherworldly and totally contrary to the logic of this world where we're like, we're very utilitarian. We're like, let's just get from point A to point B without draining any energy. And like, she just lived according to a totally different logic where she's like giving all her energy away to all people all the time. She's like, she's loved it. She was just like a social animal and she blessed so many people. She puzzled a lot of people. A lot of people were like,
00:46:13
Speaker
What is going on? I don't know what to do right now. Someone's talking to me. It's so uncommon to have just those little strangers talking with someone you're sitting with on an airplane and wanting to know deeply and passionately their life story, which is what my grandmother always wanted to know from other people. Some people are puzzled. My grandmother's passed away. My mom, thankfully, is still with us. And my mother, bless her. She's a wonderful human.
00:46:41
Speaker
puzzles people too. They just don't understand like all the joy and energy. Like where is this coming from? Like there's an ulterior motive, but there's not, there's really not. She just like, they just love people and they bless people wherever they go. And I don't know how they do it. Like I, I struggled to like keep up with both their energy level. Like my mom is an order of magnitude above me and my grandmother was an order of magnitude in terms of like energy and joy above my mother even. And so yeah, we can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. And that's a powerful, powerful idea.
00:47:11
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. That's fantastic. And good examples of models, I think as well. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add or share? Well, thank you for having me. And I hope that everyone listening to this will consider pre-ordering the book, The Soul of Civility, Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.
00:47:32
Speaker
And I've created $700 worth of gifts to everyone who takes the time to pre-order it, including the ebook I mentioned, Cultivating Curiosity, a toolkit called How to Talk to Anyone About Anything, about timeless principles of conversation, and as well as monthly conversations, private conversations with some of the greatest public intellectuals of our day, and of course,
00:47:54
Speaker
It's called four civility books that will change your life. So from the oldest book in the world in ancient Egypt, I kid you not, the oldest book in the world is a handbook on civility to more contemporary books like from our own George Washington. I examined four of them that I think are really insightful to help us understand these timeless principles of living well with others across difference. And so anyway, you can claim that that order gift on my website.
00:48:23
Speaker
And, and, and if you want to stay up to date with the, with the book and, and the life of the mind and auto-idactism and cultivating our potential as human beings, these are all themes I care a lot about. My publication is civic Renaissance. So feel free to join there as well. Excellent. Thanks so much for coming on.
00:48:43
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to Stoa Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to practice stoicism with Michael and I as well as others walking the stoic path, we are running our three-week course on stoicism applied. It'll be live with
00:49:08
Speaker
a forum, interactive calls, that I think will be an excellent way for a group of people to become more stoic together. So do check that out at stomeditation.com slash course. And if that's not to your fancy, you can find links to the Stoa app as well as the Stoa Letter, our newsletter on stoic theory and practice at stomeditation.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.