Life Without Games, Part VII

[readoldthings]

Strength was with his hands in all that he did and the feet of the strong god were untiring. From his shoulders grew an hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at anothers, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed. And truly a thing past help would have happened on that day, and he would have come to reign over mortals and immortals, had not the father of men and gods been quick to perceive it.

Hesiod, Theogony

The Monster

We come at last to the purification of the Epithymia, the appetite.

In the Republic, Plato compares this part of the soul to a monster with many heads. In his certainly had the image of Typhon, the hundred-headed offspring of the Earth and Tartarus, the pit of Hell.

The task of overcoming the Monster is not an easy one, and in a real sense is the work of a lifetime. And it's also something that everyone must do for themselves; no one came into this world with your particular stack of appetites, desires, passions and vices, and no one else accumulated the habits that locked those things in place in the same way that you did. And so all of the advice I give must necessarily be general, and some of it may not work for you. That said, I want to give a couple of suggestions here. But first, I want to start with a discussion of what-- in my experience-- does not work.

What You Resist, You Strengthen

In the Republic, as we've seen, the three parts of the soul are compared to a man, his trusty lion, and a monster; but they are also compared to a king, his warriors, and the peasantry. And so the work of overcoming the appetites and establishing Justice in the soul may be compard at once to a battle, and to ruling a population.

We will do well, then, to look for advice both from military and political science. To that end, I want to share a few selections from a pair of Chinese sages.

First, Laotze, from the Daode Jing:

To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him.

Next, Sun Tzu, from the Art of War:

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to capture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment, or a company entire than to destroy them.

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

The highest form of generalship is to baulk the enemy's plans; the next best policy is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.

Very often, when people take on the work of overcoming their appetites-- their passions, in the older way of speaking-- they do the exact opposite of what Sun Tzu tells us here. We all know what our worst habit is, and we know that it consists in the regular indulgence of our strongest desire. If you want to change your life, the way to begin is usually not to make a direct assault on this behavior, whatever it is.

Unfortunately, this is an area where the Christian tradition can be unhelpful and even counter-productive. I don't happen to know if this concept, or a related one, exists in Eastern Christianity, but in Roman Catholicism the concept of mortal sin stands directly in the way of any productive approach to the passions.

Mortal sin is the belief that there are certain sins that simply can't be repented without the help of a preist; die after committing one of these but before getting to the Confessional, and it's straight to Hell with you. The net effect of this belief is to turn the process of overcoming the passions into a dire emergency, which is exactly the opposite of the frame of mind that you actually need to maintain in order to do it. And this in turn produces varying levels of neurosis, starting with what's called "scrupulosity." 

The Twelve Step tradition is another one for which I ordinarily have a great deal of praise. Here again, though, a very uhelpful habit prevails, similar to the idea of mortal sin. This is the concept of "going out." If you aren't familiar, in groups like AA or NA, a recovered alcoholic or addict who takes a single drink or drug is said to have "gone out." This is usually expanded to include even things like "near beer," which is 0.5% alcohol, or taking a second painkiller if one is prescribed one a day. Once a recoveree has "gone out," all of the "Time sober" which they had accumulatd immediately evaporates. Upon returning to their regular meeting, they have to identify as a "newcomer" in their "first 30 days of recovery." The negative effect of this attitude should be obviously, and I've seen it work its destructive magic more than once. A person accumulates a fair amount of time sober, and then in a fit of pique or an absent moment takes a single drink or, perhaps a second oxycodin. Well, now they've "gone out"-- and so they now give themselves permission to go on a bender. They turn up a month later, having drunk or drugged themselves nearly to death. 

Needless to say, these are not the approaches I recommend. 

But what do I recommend?

Ask And it Shall Be Given You

...I'm afraid that's a discussion that's going to have to wait for tomorrow. Last night I received a call that my grandmother had suffered a bad fall and was in the E.R. She's home today but could use somebody to come and help around the house. If you read yesterday's post, the significance will be obvious. I'm out of time for today and should in fact have left the house a half hour ago, so I'm going to have to end the discussion here. We'll pick this up tomorrow. In the meantime, if the readers here wouldn't mind offering a prayer for the health and recovery of Mrs. Sylvia Mandes, I'd be very grateful.