Today's Stoics

In the process of looking for a pre-school for Helena, we've had lots of failures: too expensive, the lady who wanted to kiss every one at every time, the dirty school...  This week, though, we ran into a failure that taught me something about philosophy and how it can go wrong.

When I was growing up, I didn't know about the Waldorf School movement: there is one where we live in Santa Fe, but I don't know how common it is in the United States.  On paper, it's pretty awesome, with lots of wooden, back-to-nature toys, children who get to establish the rhythms of their own learning, loads of play; sort of like Montessori on steroids.  On hearing that a new Waldorf School was opening up close to home, we took Helena there to see if it might work.


I could list any number of things I hated about the place (and I don't use hate lightly; my friends know that it is hard for me even to dislike something), but let me concentrate in just one: everywhere the teacher went and every time she talked to a child, she sang.  She may have thought that she was a kind of Snow White, whistling with the birds and intoning the rhythms of the seasons, but the monotone of her voice, the lack of dynamic difference, the sameness of her diction... it gave every action, every emotion, and every event exactly the same bland flavor.  By the end of the visit, I was grinding my teeth with fury every time the woman opened her mouth.

The Stoics, a philosophical movement that was particularly strong during the Roman Empire, valued one virtue above all others: ataraxia, or equanimity.  For them, the most important thing was to cultivate a life and a mentality so that the world could not perturb you, that you could continue to live well regardless of the slings and arrows that outrageous fortune might hurl against you.

Though I would never have called myself a Stoic, I've always rather admired the strength of character I thought I saw in the philosophy.  What I had never understood is how annoying it could be.  Many people who adopt the New Age, "eastern Wisdom", or call themselves "mindful", have the same way about them as the insufferable teacher at the Waldorf School.  They want to appear a rock in the middle of a torrent, a calm in the storm.  The teacher's sing-song -- and perhaps the contrast with the energy of children, who are the least stoic of all beings, and wonderful for exactly that reason -- brought this kind of an attitude to a reductio ad absurdum: it became simply intolerable.

Were Marcus Aurelius and the other great stoics as insupportable to be around?  Maybe... and if so, we're best with their philosophy in the dust bin of history.