The Exchanges

Q And, and you've ended up focusing on a very specific sort of angle too, which is the connection between stoicism and military. How did that happen?

A Yeah, that's a rather interesting story. Sometime several decades ago, I found myself being called up by the Naval Academy and the, essentially the superintendent and the commandant there in Annapolis. I don't live too far from, uh, Annapolis, Maryland. And they had this massive cheating scandal. I mean, these happen every so often, but this one was a big compromise of what was called an electrical engineering, double E, uh, exam. And, uh, They, you know, were under the glare of Washington, D.C., and it was a tough time for the Navy to begin with, so they called me and said, do you ever teach ethics? Well, I've been teaching ethics for a long time. Well, do you think you could put together an ethics course for us in a week? Which is what I did, and I ended up staying there for almost three years, essentially on secondment from Georgetown, and It was very fascinating. I found myself teaching midshipmen, which is essentially Navy cadets.

AI assessment note: “I found myself being called up by the Naval Academy”

Q like an unhealthy sort of way to do it. If you're, especially if you're not virtuous, if you achieve these things and you've achieved them in a way that is non-virtuous, you've lived a life that is not meaningful then, right? Like you've, you've been mutually exclusive from developing long-term relationships with people that are meaningful. You've been mutually exclusive from being a good person, being exemplar for other people.

A Absolutely. So the traditional, uh, rag bag of goods in a Greek world would be honor, pleasure, wisdom, virtue. And then someone like Aristotle will say, well, which one really is it? And he'll go with virtue and wisdom. And he'll say, you know, honor depends on other people, and they may give it to you on false grounds. You may not have earned it. Same with glory. It depends. It's again, situational. It depends on other people, and it may not be rooted in the right kinds of grounds. So even if traditionally, and remember, he's, the Greeks are coming out of the world of Homer, where your valor and your, um, your honor is everything. He'll say, no, those, that archaic story about honor and glory got it wrong. It's really not how many The Greek word for, for honor is, is the same word as prize. It's not how many prizes you have or how, how thick the band of stripes is and medals is on your, on your breastplate if you're an officer. And it's very conspicuous. You can see it across a room and you just read status right off of how many epaulets or how many stripes the person has. It's not that. It's what's inside, and that's your virtue, and it will have its own kind of honor. It's the honor befitting virtue, and that really is, you know, that's an incredibly important lesson right now. It is very hard in a world driven by how many likes you have on a Facebook page or how many follo…

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. So the traditional, uh, rag bag of goods in a Greek world”

Q And are there ways to do that, that we can use?

A I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind. One is stoic, and then one isn't. One of the stoic ideas is you press the pause button, or you insert some space between the initial input and the reaction. And so they give you some time, they think. You can buy yourself some time between, say, Well, you know, all the, all the biases we carry in our head that lead to pretty unreflective responses, whether we're talking about police brutality, or sectarian violence, or they think that if you can kind of slow down the initial impulse a little bit, you buy yourself a little bit of time. Now, you may have to have some of those responses stored up from another time, you know, and that would be when your journaling comes in. The other side of this is to turn to Eastern practices, which really are not about chatting away in your head, but rather the opposite, not chatting in your head, kind of emptying it. So various kinds of mindful practices where you, you know, a mantra may be the thing that allows you to empty your head.

AI assessment note: “I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind.”

Q Are there non-Stoic ones that come to mind that you think are super useful for making better decisions, maybe Eastern or different branch?

A So Aristotle really thinks that you, I mean, he's going to call a spade a spade. One of the ways in which he thinks that you have to level with yourself is when you're weak-willed, whether it's refraining from, uh, something you know is unhealthy or getting out of a, an abusive relationship. And so he actually asks you to think about the Ways in which you're picturing that moment when you're confronted with How you're going to see a situation which will hinge on that plan you have to get out of the relationship. Do you see the person then and there as their former selves with all the attractive parts that you had thought about? Or can you keep up front in the front of your screen, essentially, the idea of what is so abusive about this relationship or what is so hurtful? And he actually says you have two perceptions at that moment. And they compete with each other. One perception is, you know, it's great. It's fantastic. Another one is it's deleterious to my health. And it's about keeping one forward and the other one Uh, behind. I think a lot of it is that you have to have a fuller story about why the one that you think is really the better representation of the situation should trump. So it's not just, we often think about strength of desire, and I think that's, that's wrong. You know, my desire for that next drink is much stronger than my desire for, for refraining. But it's …

AI assessment note: “So Aristotle really thinks that you, I mean, he's going to call a spade”

Q What stoic practices have been the most effective in your own life?

A So one is, as I was mentioning this pre-rehearsing ills and, um, how to get my mother to talk about death. And, and that wasn't just think about it in advance, mom. It was me realizing that we got to do it together and make a bit of, and go light. Stoics are very much about Uh, you know, emotions can dig in, and so you have to sometimes go light and not be too strenuous in your approach, and so that, that, that's really one. I often try to realize, you know, I want to control a lot more than I can control. Now, I I am not the kind of stoic that says accept and acquiesce by any means. I think that's pernicious. I'm very much about exerting my agency and will to change the world as much as I can, but when it comes to those that are near and dear to me and have their own spheres of agency, I have to know when to back off. This is children, spouses, And that's hard, and I sometimes just have to give myself a little stoic talking to. I'm in charge of me, and I have to give some space to others who have equal autonomy, as much as I'd like them to follow the My dictum. So that's- Exactly.

AI assessment note: “one is, as I was mentioning this pre-rehearsing ills”

Q And are there ways to do that, that we can use?

A I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind. One is stoic, and then one isn't. One of the stoic ideas is you press the pause button, or you insert some space between the initial input and the reaction. And so they give you some time, they think. You can buy yourself some time between, say, Well, you know, all the, all the biases we carry in our head that lead to pretty unreflective responses, whether we're talking about police brutality, or sectarian violence, or they think that if you can kind of slow down the initial impulse a little bit, you buy yourself a little bit of time. Now, you may have to have some of those responses stored up from another time, you know, and that would be when your journaling comes in. The other side of this is to turn to Eastern practices, which really are not about Chatting away in your head, but rather the opposite, not chatting in your head, kind of emptying it. So various kinds of mindful practices where you, you know, a mantra may be the thing that allows you to empty your head. That's not particularly ancient Greco-Roman. That's much more in the Eastern tradition, but I think a combination of them is not a bad idea. I'm not at all for, you know, thinking about bio enhancers to get us into the A better moral place. Um, but I think we've got some tools that are in front of us already.

AI assessment note: “I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind.”

Q Being like water, right? Like taking the shape of whatever's happening.

A Being able to adapt to your circumstances, but not adapt where you're just a blob that has no spine and quite the, you know, doesn't have any backbone. You want to hold on to your character or backbone, but you still want to be able to take in the inflow of information in a way that is wise and prudential. Right. So the Stoics, they're very ancient in this regard. They're not modern. So think of Descartes as modern. So Descartes all about doubt, Cartesian doubt. He's a skeptic. And so we're fallible. We, you know, is this a ball of wax in front of me? I don't know. Can I trust my sense? I don't really know. What would it take to confirm that? The Stoics think you should think about infallibilism because they, they, they got us in a world with The gods and humans all interspersed. We're all in the same cosmos, and the gods are infallible, so we should try to be infallible. So what does that mean in terms of resilience? Well, it means that if you're really, really resilient, and you're really adaptive, then you have this kind of what they call mental reservation. You would say, I'm going to go for a sail today if it doesn't rain. Now, you don't know if it's going to rain or not. You know, we're not listening to the Weatherman's report, but you're going to be able to pivot on a dime if it does, and you're going to, you're going to pull back on your plans. So you're going to be rea…

AI assessment note: “Being able to adapt to your circumstances, but not adapt where you're just a blob”

Q And that object can also be an outcome, right? Like being attached to a particular outcome.

A Absolutely. A consequence that you really want to happen. Absolutely. And so the idea here is that you're going to Take in informational inflow, and you're going to know what to do with it. I mean, it's a high demand, but isn't that after all what we do and, well, we've been doing it during the pandemic. We are trying to take in the best data we can get from science and constantly update our communication about what we have to do given what we know about science. Is the virus a vaccine? Is the vaccine degrading? At what point does it degrade? We might have said the mask didn't work then, but we now know better. This, you know, we are constantly updating information so that we can Be resilient in the face of new input. I think that's very stoic.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. A consequence that you really want to happen. Absolutely.”

Q What are some of the techniques that we can learn from philosophy, and not specifically related to Stoicism, but like, what are some of the techniques we can learn to help us make better decisions?

A First I'll start with just some Stoic ones, because I think they're very good at that. So one of them is this notion that you anticipate pretty visually some of the dangers that could befall you, that you're dreading. So they call it pre-rehearse the ills. You dwell a little bit in the future, and they graduated, and I do this sometimes, from breaking a piece of pottery in your kitchen to getting really annoyed at yourself or your spouse who did it, to think about that in advance so that you're not upended if it happens. Third one, now the stakes get pretty high. Death. You may not want to think about death. You may not want to think about the death of your beloved, and here's a pretty caustic practice, which my undergraduates think I'm crazy when I mention, if your child should die, or when you kiss your child goodbye in the morning, say to yourself, I always knew she was a mortal, a mere mortal. Meaning, We don't live forever. So prepare yourself for your death or the death of your loved ones. Now, again, it comes off in the worst, you know, small s stoic, like harsh, austere, far too stern as a way to control your emotion of uncontrolled grief. But my mother was turning 97 and hadn't yet mentioned death, and I thought this was a problem as the person in charge of her health care. She was still very with it. She read two or three novels a week, but, you know, the subject of d…

AI assessment note: “First I'll start with just some Stoic ones, because I think they're very good”

Q we, how do we do that though? Like, so, so a lot of that sounds like that moment of pause between the second and third layer between feeling anger and And then how do you teach yourself not to reason, but to give yourself a pause so that you can reason, right? And now your reason can take control of your emotions. Like how do we regain control of that?

A So the way they think about it is pretty graphic. They're thinking that you have some time. Now we, we know we don't always have time, but they're reconstructing it as if you have time. So You get, you get this charged impulse that comes in. He's insulting me, you know, and then you get hot and heavy. I'm going to get pissed off. I'm going to get angry. So they think that you can monitor your impression. We call it an observing ego. You watch yourself a little bit. You watch how you're reacting or responding to the impulse or to that affront. And they even have ways of doing it. They're not going to sit you down in a therapist's office.

AI assessment note: “You watch yourself a little bit. You watch how you're reacting”

Q So why does that work? Why does writing, why is writing so effective? I mean, my hypothesis is sort of like, it helps us reflect. It helps us clarify our thinking. It helps us see our thinking. It puts a visual to it. But not only that, it sort of like makes sense of our experience to ourselves. It's that process for us.

A If you put words on your thought, and you actually articulate them a bit, and you drill that articulation into your head, they have actual practices. You know, they're not just meditate at the end of the day, but think in advance, pre-rehearse some of the bad things that could happen to you at the, you know, during this day, and that will get you set up for it. So they're very much about emotions get their power. By having words attached to them, by being discursive, by being thought that is articulated. We know there's a gap between what you think and say and what you actually do. It's, there's not a perfect go-to there at all, and you know, some of my more radical colleagues in philosophy might say, you know, we need Moral enhancement. Drugs. You know, and they'll go in for bioenhancement that closes the gap between cold cognition and hot emotion. So that we can really bring in line what it means to kill that many people with that drone strike. You may be able to say it in your head, but do you really know what that feels like? So we have to visualize and imagine in order to give meaning to these, uh, to the emotional empowerment. And sometimes it's not really just discourse, I think, or just Uh, words. They're, they're the beginning psychotherapists, as I say. They're, you know, in the tradition of any kind of Freudian, or whoever follows Freud. Words, chatting, putting word…

AI assessment note: “emotions get their power. By having words attached to them, by being discursive”

Q So why does that work? Why does writing, why is writing so effective? I mean, my hypothesis is sort of like it helps us reflect. It helps us clarify our thinking. It helps us see our thinking. It puts a visual to it, but not only that, it sort of like makes sense of our experience to ourselves. It's that process for us.

A If you put words on your thought, and you actually articulate them a bit, and you drill that articulation into your head, they have actual practices. You know, they're not just meditate at the end of the day, but think in advance, pre-rehearse some of the bad things that could happen to you at the, you know, during this day, and that will get you set up for it. So they're very much about emotions get their power. By having words attached to them, by being discursive, by being thought that is articulated. We know there's a gap between what you think and say and what you actually do. It's, there's not a perfect go-to there at all, and you know, some of my more radical colleagues in philosophy might say, you know, we need Moral enhancement. Drugs. You know, and they'll go in for bioenhancement that closes the gap between cold cognition and hot emotion. So that we can really bring in line what it means to kill that many people with that drone strike. You may be able to say it in your head, but do you really know what that feels like? So we have to visualize and imagine in order to give meaning to these, uh, to the emotional empowerment. And sometimes it's not really just discourse, I think, or just Uh, words. They're, they're the beginning psychotherapists, as I say. They're, you know, in the tradition of any kind of Freudian, or what, whoever follows Freud. Words, chatting, puttin…

AI assessment note: “emotions get their power. By having words attached to them, by being discursive”