On Our "Virtual Route 66" This Week: Mid-Month #RandomThoughts

 

Our team hereby presents a Curation of #RandomThoughts as we look forward to the continued privilege to serve: 

Where did Marcus learn to be Marcus? His biographers all talk about how Marcus was very much a product of his mentors and tutors. We’ve talked about his adopted father and predecessor Antoninus. We’ve talked about his rhetoric teacher Cornelius Fronto. We’ve talked about the Stoic teacher who introduced him to Epictetus, Junius Rusticus. While those three were crucial influences, they didn’t enter Marcus’ life until after he was chosen as the successor to the throne at the age of 17. Before then, there was one person who really shaped who Marcus became. It wasn’t his birth father—he died when Marcus was just three years old. It was his mother. In Meditations, Marcus writes that he often thinks about his mother and when he does, he thinks about… Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it. And the simple way she lived—not in the least like the rich. Where did Marcus get his profound and lifelong commitment to doing the right thing? To kindness? To charity? To justice? It was from her. “Only one thing is important,” Marcus writes elsewhere in Meditations. “To behave throughout your life toward the liars and the crooks around you with kindness, honesty and justice.” That was him channeling his mom. And today, on Mother’s Day, it’s worth celebrating that. For all our debate about how to do good in the world, about what rules create a fair system, Marcus learned from his mother that doing the right thing was pretty simple—you have to be kind. You have to avoid the corruption that can follow wealth and power. You have to keep your heart from hardening. You do what’s right, not because there are consequences for doing wrong, but because it’s inconceivable to you to be the kind of person who would try to get away with something. We do what’s right because it’s right. And we should do it right now. Stoicism is a selfish philosophy. That’s what you’re supposed to believe. That’s what the critics say. It’s not a coincidence that Stoicism is considered self-help and self-improvement. The Stoics did spend a lot of time emphasizing self-discipline, after all. Yet a quick textual analysis of Marcus Aurelius obliterates this notion: More than twenty times in Meditations, Marcus talks about the importance of doing what’s right, talks about ‘the right thing.’ More than thirty times, he talks about the virtue of justice—and he’s not just talking about court cases or the law. He’s talking about how we treat people, the standards we hold ourselves to. And roughly eighty times, Marcus talks about the common good, which he said one ought to serve above all and always. Literally, in so many words, Stoicism is a philosophy about doing good in the world, about doing what’s right not in your own selfish interests, but in the interests of others. Yet far too much of the focus of the Stoic conversation is about individualistic struggles—how to manage your temper, how to get over your fear of death—when it was so clearly intended to be about our collective struggle. “The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. This is the perfect formula because it captures both sides of the Stoic coin. We must be men and women of integrity but also men and women of action—putting that integrity to work in the world. The Epicureans retreated to their gardens, but the Stoics held public office. They tried to raise their families right. They tried to contribute to their community. They served in the military, tried cases before the court, helped the vulnerable and misfortunate. They resisted tyranny—many of them dying in opposition to Nero or suffering exile under other emperors.