When the going gets tough, the tough get philosophical. As the credit crunch
grinds on and the death toll from Afghanistan mounts, some are turning to
the great thinkers of the past for inspiration and solace. On the wall of
his Princeton study, as a reminder that there is more to life than numbers,
Albert Einstein wrote the motto: “Not everything that counts can be counted,
and not everything that can be counted, counts.” The great minds of the past
may not pay the mortgage, but they can make one feel better about it, by
addressing the larger questions of existence, knowledge, truth, beauty and
justice.
Last year saw a marked increase in the number of people applying to read
philosophy at US universities, according to The New York Times, a surge of
interest correlating with the economic slump. The writings of Karl Marx and
Confucius, after years out of fashion, are suddenly “in” again. The works of
the great economists, such as John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith, are
selling once more, as the public struggles to understand what is happening
and, more importantly, when it might end.
The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu described Wittgenstein as “a kind of
saviour for times of great intellectual distress”. Some may find consolation
in Epicurus or Homer, while others may look to modern sages, such as Hannah
Arendt or that influential latter-day philosopher, Homer Simpson.
If some philosophers seem made for our troubled times, others do not. If the
sayings of Confucius strike a chord, do those of Sun Tzu, the Chinese
military strategist, ring a little hollow as wars continue in Iraq and
Afghanistan? As the Supermen of the City reveal feet of clay, Nietzsche's
paean to strength and power is hard to take, while Hobbes's grim visions of
humanity's innate greed and Machiavelli's manipulations threaten to turn
recession into depression.
Great thinkers should come with a warning, similar to that attached to stocks
and shares: the value of philosophers can go down as well as up; do not
invest more than you can afford.
IN
Confucius
After years in the Chinese intellectual doghouse, the great thinker and
aphorist who died in 479 BC, has been updated, adapted and officially
adopted by China's rulers. During the Cultural Revolution, Confucius was
seen as a symbol of feudalism and tradition, but he is now firmly back in
fashion: Confucius Institutes spread Chinese culture abroad, his philosophy
is taught to prison inmates and party officials are judged on Confucian
principles of family responsibility and social harmony. In the ultimate mark
of rehabilitation, the actor Chow Yun-Fat, star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, will play Confucius in a £10 million film. But Confucius is
more than simply a useful political symbol for the Chinese state. His views
are as pithy today as they ever were, and his aphorism on the ephemeral
nature of wealth stands as an indictment of the age of the subprime
mortgage: “The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man
understands what will sell.”
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt remains one of the most influential political philosophers of
the modern age, whose studies of Nazism and Stalinism explored the nature of
totalitarianism, revolution, freedom, authority and tradition. Arendt wrote
of “the banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann,
raising uncomfortable but eternal questions about whether evil is radical
and abnormal, or a function of ordinary people obeying orders. As Robert
Mugabe clings bloodily to power, and his wife goes shopping for handbags, it
seems that evil is just as banal as it was when Arendt coined the phrase in
1963.
Homer Simpson
The sage of Springfield, voted the greatest television character of all time
by Channel 4 viewers, may well be the perfect philosopher for our times:
boorish, crude, lazy, overweight, incompetent, endearing, loyal and
remarkably insightful. Homer Simpson is a comforting human catastrophe, a
character apparently without redeeming qualities, yet irrepressibly
optimistic despite multiple, inevitable and entirely self-inflicted
failures. His recipe for fatherhood is hard to beat: “Kids are the
best...you can teach them to hate the things you hate. And they practically
raise themselves, what with the internet and all.” Homer has also
enriched the language, adding the term “Doh” to the OED, a grunt which
usually uttered when he hurts himself, behaves with more than usual idiocy,
or realises that something very bad is about to happen, and it is entirely
his fault - a single word to encapsulate our beleaguered age. As we collapse
onto the disintegrating sofa of life in our underpants, Duff beer in hand,
one need only reflect on Homer's eternal words: “No problem is so big that
it can't be ignored.”
Epicurus
The ideas of the Greek philosopher have often (and unfairly) been summarised
as “eat, drink, and be merry”. But Epicureanism is not simply an invitation
to have fun while the world goes up in smoke; rather Epicurus argues that
since we have limited ability to influence events, there is an inner peace
to be found in accepting whatever happens. If quantitative easing leaves you
uneasy, then the Epicurean epitaph might help: “I was not; I have been; I am
not; I do not mind.”
J.M.Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economic thinker of all time, is
back in vogue with a vengeance. Keynes advocated government intervention to
mitigate the effects of economic recession, but his ideas fell out of favour
in the 1970s, when monetarism and the focus on price stability ruled the
day. Today Keynes is king again, as governments around the globe move
robustly to tackle the financial crisis: the bailouts after the subprime
mortgage debacle, the fiscal stimulus packages, boosting domestic spending
and aid to troubled banks and business can all be traced back to Keynesian
thinking. “The sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal
of the orthodoxy of the past several decades,” The Financial Times observed
recently.
Keynes himself might have smiled ruefully at his rediscovery, for as he
prophetically observed: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite
exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist.” In the long run, as Keynes remarked, we are all
dead: but in the shorter term, if Keynes was wrong, we are all in deeper
trouble than we ever imagined.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx is having a told-you-so moment, as the banking crisis finally
demonstrates, in Marxist eyes, that bourgeois capitalism is collapsing under
the weight of its own internal contradictions. Sales of The Communist
Manifesto have risen by more than 700 per cent since the slump began,
according to Amazon, and sales of Das Kapital have doubled. A Tokyo
publisher is bringing out a manga version of Marx's treatise for those who
like their critical analysis of capitalism in comic form.
In perhaps the most remarkable example of resurgent Marxism, a Chinese
producer is planning to stage Das Kapital: The Musical, a theatrical
interpretation of Marx's arguments. All together now: “The battle of
competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities...”
OUT
Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist and author of The Art of War, was the
philosopher of choice in the early part of the Iraq War: his fighting
doctrines, although 25 centuries old, were repeatedly cited by military
commanders in the field and The Art of War was even distributed to GIs. The
Pentagon proudly quoted the master of Taoist strategy: “Sun was well aware
of the crucial importance of achieving ‘shock and awe' prior to, during and
in ending the battle.”
In the light of subsequent events, the upsurge of resistance and the
continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sun's philosophy no longer seems an
infallible key to military success. There is one of Sun's saying that
perhaps should have been taken to heart when the war started: “Appraise war
in terms of the fundamental factors. The first of these factors is moral
influence.” Nicolo Machiavelli
Playwright, poet and political philosopher of brilliance, Machiavelli was
also, one suspects, a complete bastard. His cynical attitude to power and
deceit to maintain power, may carry modern echoes in the age of “spin
doctors” and “dodgy dossiers”, but it is hard to read Machiavelli's
unvarnished love of the lie without a queasy feeling. “A wise ruler ought
never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests,”
wrote the first Machiavellian thinker. Few philosophers have more deserved
their unflattering adjective.
Tony Soprano
The television Mafioso from New Jersey is the obverse of Homer Simpson: he
wants to do right by his friends and family, but greed, rage and brutality
drag him down. The Sopranos is the closest TV has come to Shakespearean
drama, but in hard times Tony's philosophical mantra, when faced with yet
more death and destruction, is not enough: “What you gonna do?”
