Cancelled For Calm? - The Perils Of Stoicism In A Rabid Political Age

Baxter listened to his friend go on about the state of the world - wars provoked by an arrogant, intellectually disinherited President, black people still oppressed by white supremacy, gays, lesbians, and transgenders scurrying for cover to flee a Christian Gestapo, desperate asylees hunted down like dogs, and a warming climate 

'What? Have you nothing to say?'

Baxter was worried about his longtime friend, a man he had known since childhood who was seemingly coming apart at the seams.  The friend reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of clippings, reprints, and dog-eared reports, and thrust them in Baxter's face.  'What's wrong with you?', he said.

Bob never used to fly off the handle like this.  Something had come loose somewhere and it showed. 'White around the gills' was the way Harry Angstrom described his son in Updike's Rabbit at Rest. Bob instead was purplish, a worrisome cardiac color in a man of his age which only deepened the more he insisted on Baxter's complicity.  

 

Bob had not always been this way, and in his bright college years was a happy-go-lucky Yalie, eager to please, a comedian, a dissident angry only at Paul Weiss's 'adumbration' and philosophical quagmires. 'Speak English', Bob hollered at the painting of John Trumbull, patron of Trumbull College, imitating the firebrand he imagined himself to be, harmless, outspoken, with the proper diffidence in the presence of the great man. 

It was only when the Reverend William Quimby Parsons, university chaplain and civil rights activist convinced him that he was nothing without commitment, and wasting his time parsing Blake and Coleridge was not exactly it.  Join me, the parson said, on a Freedom Ride; and from that moment on Bob got religion. 

  

Baxter on the other hand had grown up 'Mediterranean' - la cultura de la hamaca, let sleeping dogs lie kind of sybaritic leisure - a pleasurable, enjoyable, uncomplicated love of mild interest in church, passionate interest in family, and an equal love for cooking.  'Ronzoni, sono buoni' the advertising slogan for a popular Italian American macaroni became the meme for the family - not Italian exactly but adopted in spirit, an eclectic mix of Latin que sera sera and the sunbaked ease of the Mezzogiorno. 

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective.  In regard to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes." A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy," thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole. 

 

And so it was with Bob, thought Baxter, a dog tied to a cart and compelled to go wherever he goes. Nothing in his upbringing could have led him to such fidelity, such political certain, such impossibly prophetic visions.  No, Bob liked bladderball, trips to Smith, summers on the Vineyard, and panty raids on Hadley Hadley Hall.  

'It was Quimby', said a classmate, who reminded him of Cotton Mather and the New England Puritans who had a hand in founding Yale - 'sour, dried up old men who couldn't get enough of God, horny bastards who burned women at the stake because they couldn't have them.  Quimby paraded through campus like he owned the place, sanctimonious prick that he was, and Bob fell for him hook, line, and sinker.'

Baxter wasn't sure.  Such a transformation from the Mediterranean devil-may-care spirit he inherited somehow to the impossibly sanctimonious tart he had become could not have been the work of one man, no matter how seductive he might have been. 

In any case shortly after Bob's harangue about the horrific state of the world, he cancelled Baxter. It was bad enough to have former colleagues who were Republican, conservative, and right wing, another altogether to have one who simply didn't care. Diffidence in the face of evil was the worst sin of omission. Commission - political activism although on the wrong side of right - was far more acceptable than this lack of will, this sickening flotilla of indifference. 

Baxter wasn't surprised and saw it coming.  Bob had definitely turned a corner from around which there was no return. His timbers had been shivered, he danced with St. Vitus and Turkish dervishes.  He had become untethered. 

Nick Carroway, a principal character in Fitzgerald's book The Great Gatsby, expresses this patient, respectful stoicism of Baxter this way:

In my younger days and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone', he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had. 

He didn't say anymore, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.  In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me a victim of not a few veteran bores. 

 The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men...The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.  Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. 

And so it was that Baxter made his way easily through life until the American culture became toxic and politically unbearable when good people like Bob became fevered and intolerant and had no use for the kind of Christian stoicism practiced by the fictional Nick and the real Baxter. 

'Keep your head about you when those around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you', said Rudyard Kipling in memoriam of the calm resolve that characterized good breeding and self-confidence; but warned that the composed, non-judgmental person may misunderstand the nature of such ignorance. 

Baxter did not misunderstand or misjudge Bob.  On the contrary he understood quite well the nature of true belief, a seditious infection, a viral disassembly of reason and judgment from which no absurdity was surprising. 

Well, let it be, said Baxter characteristically.  His summers were delightful, his winters cozy, and his unencumbered life a pleasure.