The Cynics had a perverse way of arguing a point. Here are a few examples to consider from their oeuvre. The Cynics have something to teach us here. To put it another way: We will never catch up. The book’s authors, the late Donella Meadows and her fellow researchers at MIT via The Club of Rome, used systems modeling to demonstrate that while rates of increase in the world’s population, pollution levels, and depletion of natural resources are fundamentally exponential in nature, our technological capacity to remediate these problems is confined to a linear trajectory. In our new climatic regime of global heating, it remains scripture still, even if not infallible on the finer detail. That landmark indictment of human overreach and excess, first published in 1972 and updated every five years since, is a bible of the environmental movement. When asked why, he replied, “To get good at being refused.”Ģ022 marks the 50 th anniversary of the book The Limits to Growth. Diogenes thus made a habit of begging from statues. Beat calamity to the punch was their strategy for living. Getting by on just a little is a form of exercise, they argued, that will strengthen you and make you impervious to the buffetings of misfortune. The Cynics were not the world’s first ascetics, to be sure, but they have given us that word–from Greek askēsis, which means “practice” or “training.” The metaphor is drawn from the realm of ancient Greek athletics. Their objective in living was to need as little as possible and to want even less than that. Nature, not Culture, was their yardstick. Their public stunts thus served the serious purpose of heightening awareness of what is truly virtuous and worthwhile and what is merely conventional. They sought to be liberated from the shackles of social expectations and tried to see life as it really is, and things as they really are. They responded to this realization by dropping out of polite society. The Cynics were careful observers of human nature and could not abide what they saw there, in others and in themselves: namely, a tendency to luxury, ambition, stupidity, cruelty, and greed. With characteristic self-effacing irony, the Cynics wore their moniker as a badge of honor, casting themselves as their cities’ moral watchdogs, barking truth from the sidewalks and nipping at the heels of the nastiest folks in town. When some Athenian hooligans once tossed Diogenes a bone as if he were a dog, he, in turn, like a dog, lifted his leg and pissed on them. To watch the Cynic power couple Crates and Hipparchia perform their conjugal duties in the streets of Thebes, for example, proved quite an attraction to passersby. What is more, they did all their private business in public view-the whole gamut of activities, from defecating to copulating. The word Cynic, meaning “dog-like” in Greek, was a nickname conferred upon Diogenes of Sinope (412-323 BCE) and his followers by their detractors because, in pursuit of the good life, these freedom-seekers lived out-of-doors and, like stray dogs, got their food from ancient dumpsters and by begging. But he could just as well have been talking about the Cynics, the dog philosophers of ancient Greece, whose merit is the kind we need more than ever these days, not for Heaven, but for the here and now. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” Twain, of course, had my Fido or your Fluffy in mind, and on that score, he was entirely correct. Mark Twain once quipped “Heaven goes by favor.
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