Trust, fear, and fate

"It's a long season, you gotta trust it," said Crash Davis. Cards and Nats fans are feeling that this morning, after their teams upended the two NL teams with better season records to take their respective divisions series'.  Braves and Dodgers fans are probably not.

The situation is a bit like the sinking boat scenario we were discussing out on the JUB stoa yesterday afternoon in CoPhi, during our discussion of free will etc. The boat sinks, all aboard are lost, but one would-be passenger who didn't board thinks it must have been his destiny, his "fate" to survive. But what about the actual passengers? Their trust was not rewarded, Crash.

Oh well, says the trusting believer. Life's a mystery. Why do bad things happen to good and innocent people? Why must the innocent die young? Why must the team with 106 regular-season wins now go home watch its inferiors contend for glory? God only knows.

Or the gods, as the interlocutors in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods would say.
Cotta the Skeptic, Velleius the Epicurean, and Balbus the Stoic talk it out in an conversation that's still fresh and relevant. All score points at various moments in the discussion. We're giving it a glance today in Happiness. 

Early in the dialogue, Velleius mocks the idea of a Master Planner god who's got the whole world in his hands. (NOTE, class: this is a different translation than we're reading, cited by J.M. Hecht in Doubt: A History.) "So you have smuggled into our minds the idea of some eternal overlord, whom we must fear by day and night. Who  would not fear a god who foresees everything, ponders everything, notices everything? A god who makes everything his own concern, a curious god, a universal busybody? ...Epicurus has saved us from all such fears and set us free."

I recall being afraid, as a small child, that the god we sang about in Sunday School was snooping on my every indiscretion. "His eye is on the sparrow, I know he's watching me." Yikes! If trust is purchased with fear and thus (for an Epicurean) any prospect of true happiness, it's not worth it. Better to picture the god(s) as indifferent to our fate, uninterested in either protecting, rewarding, or punishing us.

Cotta the Skeptic takes it a step further. "Divine Providence was supposed to be able 'to accomplish anything it pleases' and yet it lets people die." 

And: 

"It follows from this theory of yours that this Divine Providence is either unaware of its own powers or is indifferent to human life. Or else it is unable to judge what is best. 'Providence is not concerned with individuals,' you say. I can well believe it."

Fate? You really can't trust it. Or the gods, or the God, fate's reputed Master Planner and divine engineer. We cannot count on a cosmic ally or savior to secure our happiness. We're on our own. We must cultivate our Garden.

==
The Epicurean Revival. As the annals of history have it, in the sixth century Emperor Justinian had all the schools of philosophy that competed with Christianity finally closed. This was the last we heard of the Epicurean School, whose tradition had remained culturally vibrant for seven centuries. Epicurus had been among the first to propose the atom—2,300 years ago—the social contract as a foundation for the rule of law, and the possibility of an empirical process of pursuit of happiness: a science of happiness. These progressive schools were oases of tranquility, reason and pleasure known as Gardens, where the ideals of civilized friendship flourished and men, women and even slaves engaged in philosophical discourse as equals.

If any set of doctrines can be considered the foundation of the Epicurean philosophy, it would be the Tetrapharmakon: the Four Remedies. For didactic purposes, the teachings were imparted in the form of short, easy to memorize adages. There are, to be fair, many more than four remedies in Epicureanism. However, these are known to be the core of the teaching out of which the rest of the philosophy flows:


Do not fear the gods
Do not fear death
What is pleasant is easy to attain
What is painful is easy to endure

In his Principal Doctrines 11-12, Epicurus argued for the study of science as a way to emancipate ourselves from irrational fears. For naturalists who don’t believe in gods or spirits, the first two negative statements may be translated as ‘Do not fear chance or blind luck, for it is pointless to battle that which we have no control over. It generates unnecessary suffering’.

Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius, in his De Rerum Natura, dedicates long portions of the philosophical poem to explaining how natural phenomena such as lightning and the movements of heavenly bodies are not the work of the Gods and that fear of the Gods is inconsistent with civilized life. Since he was unable in those days to produce a fully scientific theory to explain all these phenomena, he provided several possible theories for many of them without officially endorsing one, and humbly acknowledged that future thinkers would prove the main points of his naturalist and scientific cosmology, which they eventually did. And so we can say that his basic attitude was a sound one, and also that he respected our intelligence enough to not exhibit arrogance and certainty where he did not have conclusive theories. He allowed time to prove him right … and sincere.

That the prohibition against fearing the Gods, and against fear-based religion in general, is the first and main taboo in Epicurean philosophy, remains refreshing to this day.

The second remedy is elaborated in a series of teachings and aphorisms which serve as a form of cognitive therapy to deal with the trauma of death. Among them, the most memorable is the purely hedonistic one. It is summed up thusly:

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not

There is also the symmetry argument, which compares the time after our death to the time before our birth of which we have no memory. Since there is nothing there, why fear it? (continues)