167. Marcus be all like 😯
(Morning thinking)
I’m reading Meditations again. Marcus is reflecting on the importance of maintaining mental purity and virtue in the face of external negativity and turmoil, maintaining personal integrity while being pulled apart by external forces. Sometimes I can feel as though I'm stretched in too many directions. Too many people with too many competing needs. For Marcus, on the northern boundaries of the Roman empire, it's the relentless effort of holding back those ruddy Germanic hordes. I feel you Marcus.
The scale of our daily problems are different but that's always the way right? Doesn't matter, Marcus is throwing down the wisdom and I'm very much picking it up.
He was talking to himself though. The Meditations was never meant to be a published book. Marcus, one of the most powerful people on the planet at the time, was writing to keep himself grounded and sane.
"They kill, they cut in pieces, they hunt with curses. What relevance has this to keeping your mind pure, sane, sober, just?”
His life is full of yuk and mess and complex untidiness - in the extreme - and he wants to find peace and order while surrounded by the gore of warfare. So he journals.
If he can keep the heid it'll be… “as if a man were to come up to a spring of clear, sweet water and curse it - it would still continue to bubble up water good to drink”.
If he holds his discipline, keeps his mind pure and clean, he can deal with anything. In fact, the cursing interloper could do worse, go a step further than just swearing at the spring of clear water - “He could throw in mud or dung” what a dick! It wouldn't matter though because “in no time the spring will break it down, wash it away, and take no colour from it.”
The spring is pure and so are we, at our core, base programming. Our humanity, untainted by poor choices and the distracting noise of society and culture, is clean.
Marcus goes on to ask… “How then can you secure an everlasting spring..? By keeping yourself at all times intent on freedom - and staying kind, simple, and decent.”
Marcus Aurelius talks about a futile attempt to pollute a beautiful, life giving spring by throwing in “mud or dung”.
He tells us that the spring will eject and break down these pollutants and wash itself clean and clear.
If we keep our minds clean and clear by writing and reflecting and ordering our thoughts we can accept the mud and muck of life and rinse it all out.
The humans of Marcus's era can't make a permanent stain on Nature.
We've upped that game A LOT in the intervening millennia.
He couldn't have predicted the levels, and toxic potency, of the harmful chemicals and pollutants we would develop or the carelessness and arrogance with which we’d spray them about. Does his simple analogy hold up against the power of today's industrialised, often literally weaponised “mud and dung”?
I wonder what the most toxic substances were two thousand years ago? How plentiful were they?
We'd have produced chemicals for tanning and dyeing leather. They extracted essential oils from plants and Rome was a vast city with huge appetites. What else? Metallurgy? There will have been a fair old stink and some slaggy runoff around the back of the blacksmith's gaff. Human urine and faeces! Rome had sophisticated sewage systems for slewing off the pee and poo of one and half million people but they weren't treating or filtering anything. The Tiber river must have had some stanky banks.
But the modern scale of cesspool slurry, our lagoons of concentrated urine, faeces, and pink chemicals that exist around American pig farms, the ranked barrels of uncleanable toxic waste, plastic islands more than a million square kilometers, three times bigger than France, would have been unfathomable to anyone in 160AD. Even a super cool big brain philosopher king.
Where did we imagine we'd wash our mess away to, when it's become a mess that encompasses the whole planet?
Where did we think the Nuclear slag and spoil would go?
I get a lot from reading ancient philosophy, those old Greeks and Romans, the Buddha. I read for peace and in the hope of gleaning some wisdom. I read them to help me make sense of other people and to help me figure a better path through life.
That's why they were writing right? For their own peace of mind and the improvement of others.
But I wonder, thinking about Marcus’s polluted spring, how helpful they can be in a world as dramatically changed as ours. The conditions of now are very different from the realities if then. Aren't they? They do write about intrinsic human qualities, and those won't have changed much, but the humans they observed, the behaviours and characteristics they drew their conclusions from, existed in a very different environment.
Marcus asked how we could ensure the purity of our own mental spring and suggested we make sure to stay kind, simple, and decent. He couldn't imagine the levels of greed and individualistic self indulgence that consumer capitalist, ad based mass media would fuel. The all pervading weight dragging our humanity down would have been beyond the scope of his reasoning. Wouldn't it?
What would it be like to explain to Marcus the billions of pointless hours of lost human potential consumed in doom scrolling? Could he have fathomed the complexity of almost nine billion minds interacting, when, back in his time the global population might have been around 150 million? That's the same as all the folks in France and Germany.
He'd be all like 😯.
The man himself often wonders how his predecessors, great philosopher's and Caesars might have responded to the problems he faced. He could see the repeated cycles of history re-enacted, the same plays with a ‘different cast’.
The stage has changed dramatically.
I think reading old wisdom, stuff that's endured for…
T I M E
…has value. Even despite the disconnect between their lived experience and ours.
We should probably approach any philosophy or belief system as though cherry picking. Run our eyes over the branches, feel things out with finger tips, go lightly and gently. Select the best fruit. Avoid the under or over ripe. These days we probably also want to factor in the effects of air pollution and the proximity of overhead power lines.
When I spend time in the morning with these old dead dudes, (it is mostly men, I’m working on this) I feel connected to a long line of thinking. I often wish I could time travel them up here for their help understanding our modern world.
Do your favourite and long held philosophies, belief systems, heuristics and rules of thumb hold up as well now as they did when they were laid down? Are the old tracks still the best routes to the new destinations now that borders have shifted? Over time everything changes. Even what it means to be human. I think.
Help me out if my thinking is wonky. It almost certainly is. I'm wingin’ this.
You can subscribe if you like. I'd like that.
Thanks for reading. I really do love that you do. You're presence here is of immeasurable value to me.
Thank you. 🙏
Paul.
