The Stoics are the people on the top of the hill. They are applying Epictetus' maxim that says "What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens." (Discourses, 1.1.17).
(Image courtesy: Nate Hagens.)
(Image courtesy: Nate Hagens.)
There comes a point in which you have to acknowledge reality: Business as usual, BAU, is dead. Not that it would be impossible to avoid, or at least soften, the imminent disruption of our way of life caused either by resource depletion or climate change (or both). But that implies making sacrifices, renouncing something today for a better world tomorrow. And people are just not going to do that. We are not wired to plan for the future. We are wired to exploit what we have at hand.
The recent global events have shown that humans, worldwide, are unable to see priorities. The richest country in the world, the US, has turned its back to what science says about our faltering ecosystem, pursuing the impossible dream to return to an imaginary world of happy coal miners as England was at the time of Charles Dickens. The US is not the only example of a society that desperately tries cling to the old ways, refusing to change. Practically every country in the world is pursuing a dream of economic growth which, at this point, is just as impossible as a return to coal.
Does that mean we have to fall into despair? Some people seem to have arrived at this conclusion: there is nothing that can be done, therefore nothing that should be done. After all, what was so bad with the Middle Ages? And, anyway, human extinction would surely solve a lot of problems. Other take the opposite view, desperately hoping for some technological miracle that will lead us to leave the earth, colonize other planets, and mine the inexistent ores on asteroids.
What is to be done, then? Over the years, I found myself closer and closer to that group of ancient philosophers who lived during the times of decline of the Roman Empire who called themselves "Stoics" and who themselves the same question: what's to be done? The answer was given by Epictetus in his "Discourses:" It is "To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens". (1.1.17). And, after all, Seneca, to whom I credit the idea of the "Seneca Cliff", was a stoic, too!
So, here is a picture of the vegetable gardens that we planted in the courtyard of a building of the University of Florence (here it is shown with two students who have volunteered to take care of it). We plan to plant many more of these gardens. And, in this way, we make the best of what's in our power and we'll take the rest as it naturally happens.
