In Ancient Greek, the word aítion—meaning “cause” or “origin”—invokes the idea of a vast, miasmic chain, stretching deep into the nebulae of recorded time. Aetiology, as the study of historical origins, requires a profound awareness of the mercurial qualities of temporal change, and the incisive ruptures that sometimes intrude on an otherwise tranquil continuity. This is especially the case when that study is applied not just to the chronology of events, but to the ebb and flow of ideas—the warp and weft of the conceptual and the ontological—which, for the most part, goes unnoticed by the casual observer.
The obscurity of our ideas—the fact that our concepts are hidden from us in ordinary, everyday language-use, and are made transparent by the self-evidence with which they are routinely affirmed—belies the deep-rooted influence they have over us. We live intentional lives, and the scope of our intentions is determined, in no small part, by what we conceive of as real and good to begin with. Subtle changes to the intentional landscape—what today we might prefer to call “ideological shifts”—can seriously transfigure the proportions and directionality of individual and collective action. And while a certain measure of plasticity is no doubt necessary for cultural adaptation, radically new—quite possibly pernicious—ideas suddenly becoming mainstream is a persistent risk that every form of human community must manage.
The ancient historian Herodotus wrote that, for the Greeks, it was Hesiod and Homer who “taught … the descent of the gods, and gave the gods their names, and determined their spheres and functions, and described their outward forms.” Without the talents of these faceless poets, it’s hard to say what would have come of Greece—or of us, for that matter. Without the names and outward forms, the spheres and functions, of the ancient gods, who is to say what alternative course history might have taken? Similar levels of influence may be attributed to modern ideological fabulations which, however incoherently presented, hold sway over vast multitudes. There is, perhaps, a secret truth behind the whole foaming welter of history: what “governs all,” much like Heraclitus’ lightning, is the invisible power of mythopoetic license.
Percy Bysshe Shelley alluded to this sentiment when he wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley’s poets have estuarial minds; like the ecstatic rishis of ancient India, they are tasked with maintaining a cosmic order (Ṛta) and, through intense, unrelenting exercises of mental heat, mnemonically sustain its vitality. Changing the point of origin, drawing from an alternative poetical tidal mouth, will entail not only a different cosmology, theology, ontology, or an altogether divergent “grammar of creation” (as George Steiner had it), but, in fact, an alien life form, an entirely altered set of socio-cultural comportments and affordances. As William Blake put it: “the Eye altering alters all.” And this goes especially for the mind’s eye.
Modernity’s Epicurean font
The secret legislators of the Greeks were Hesiod and Homer. Similar enumerations could be made for Romans and Christians. But what of our legislators? If every culture is a “relatively spacious prison” (Henry Adams), who, we might wonder, designed ours? We haven’t been Greek or Roman for quite a while, and since at least the 18th century, we have been trying our very best to ignore the sign of the Cross. If no longer confined to these more antiquated prisons, then where, currently, have we been situated? One of the greatest curiosities of the present day is that the sacred source, the spiritual font, of the entire modern way of life goes largely unrecognized. The Greeks and the Romans adulated their heroes and their poets, lavishing them with “unperishable renown,” just as Catholics hail their saints and their theologians; and yet, bewilderingly, the ‘garden god’ Epicurus—poet, hero, and saint of modernity—remains just one name among many. “Unacknowledged” indeed.
The oversight is glaring. Whatever the reasons for his relative anonymity as a thinker, Epicurus’ influence on world history is both ineluctable and profound. The entire strain of philosophy known as utilitarianism, which stretches all the way from Jeremy Bentham, Henry Sidgwick, and John Stuart Mill to today’s New Atheists and effective altruists, is simply refurbished and updated Epicureanism. Karl Marx, especially in his student years, was a thoroughgoing Epicurean. So was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose sensibilities paved the way for romanticism. Nietzsche, if not strictly an Epicurean, was at some point at least partial to Epicurus’ “heroic-idyllic mode of philosophising.” Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, and Thomas Jefferson were all Epicureans. The same goes for Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Isaac Newton. The list goes on and on. In fact, even if one has never read anything by Epicurus, or by his populariser Lucretius, or by any of the names listed above, one is likely to be an Epicurean of some sort. Many are Epicureans by default for the simple reason that they are modern, and that the rediscovery of Epicureanism was the aetiological point of origin for modernism.
This may come as a shock—indeed, it should come as a shock—but most facets of modern life were pre-empted by the Epicurean world view. What German sociologist Max Weber referred to as die Entzauberung der Welt—the disenchantment of the world due to the rational processes of secularization and bureaucratization, which he regarded as distinguishing features of modernity—finds its origin in the Epicurean notions of an atomistic cosmology and a species of politics prefiguring that of 17th and 18th century social contract theorists. In fact, liberal government as such, the principles of which were implanted by the Locke-inspired Jefferson into the founding document of the most powerful country on earth, bears the indelible mark of Epicurus. Indeed, when the “Author of America” wrote that singular, marbled sentence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”—he was merely giving evidence of what would later be confessed in a letter to his friend William Short: “I too am an Epicurean. [And] I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”
The modern inflection point, the ideological aítion of our age, can be dated back to the time when Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) was rediscovered by the Italian bibliophile Poggio Bracciolini in the 15th century (even as the influence of this event would only be felt, to a much more significant degree, in later ages). As a rhapsody on Epicurus’ long-forgotten lore, De Rerum Natura has succeeded the Sermon on the Mount, codifying, in an awkward parallel to Jesus’ ministerial exhortations, the ethical landscape of a nascent cosmopolis. The invisible threads emanating from Lucretius’ grand vision have pulled us, involuntarily, in directions congenial to the paradigm espoused by that vision. As such, nothing about our modern predicament is strictly “self-evident” (as Jefferson would have us believe) or would follow straightforwardly from anything so value-neutral as scientific insight. The landscape we inhabit has been designed in piecemeal fashion over the past few centuries, to the cadence of Lucretius’ hexameters.
Disenchantment
By giving definition to our aetiological ancestry, we can at least try to give an account of our modern environment. For anyone even remotely worried or bewildered by today’s social and technological developments, this, by itself, should provide a modicum of hope and relief. After all, identifying an aítion has cosmic ramifications; it touches, not without a hint of blasphemy, on the arcana imperii—the “secrets of government,” with government conceived in the broadest sense, as Shelley (yet another modern admirer of Lucretius) would have understood. It will allow us to gauge the full circumference of our existential schemata; newly invigorated, we might try to unfasten the “mind-forg’d manacles,” if only by the tiniest bit. Insofar as the Epicurean aetiological roots of modernity contain an inner logic that propels our civilization in predictable directions, we may even be afforded a glimpse of the fate that inevitably awaits us so long as we collectively refuse to consider real alternatives.
To reiterate, the Epicurean project is one of disenchantment. The result of this project, so far, has been staggering. For instance, the now widespread attenuation of our religious impulses was first brought on by an Epicurean species of theological commitment called Deism. Supported by many luminaries during the Enlightenment, Deism entailed a radical separation between the Supreme Being and his creation. God became a deus otiosus, an inactive god, who sets the universe in motion, but does not afterwards interfere much with its operation. The universe, in turn, became a great clock, crafted by a divine watchmaker, and then left to its own whirring devices. Suffice to say, by introducing the notion of a deus otiosus, the stage was set for the procedural demystification of the universe. (In more familiar terms: It did not take long for the watchmaker to go blind.)
On the political front, Epicurus promulgated an ethical disposition that was every bit as atomistic (and materialistic) as his physics. Just as matter is composed of atoms—indivisible, indestructible, tiny globules—which are capable of forming dynamic, temporary bonds, and joining together in “flaring atom-streams,” so modern personhood is buoyed between individualism and massification, which turn out to be two sides of the same coin. As Hannah Arendt put it succinctly when writing about the paradoxical makeup of the past century’s totalitarian movements: “[Such] movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” The liberation of the sovereign individual and “the revolt of the masses”—the two hallmarks of modern politics since 1789—are each other’s complement. Both presuppose an apolitical, hedonistic approach to politics that is unbothered by overarching purposive orientations.
The injunction given by Epicurus to his disciples—láthe biosas, “live unnoticed”—went hand in hand with a disavowal of genuine political ambition: “I spit on the beautiful, and on those who marvel at it emptily, when it brings forth no pleasure.” Beauty, for Greek aristocrats, was a corollary of glory, which meant Epicurus was condemning the fruits of political and martial accomplishment. In providing an alternative to aristocracy, Epicurus eschewed the Platonic option of sublimating the Greek instinct to “beget in the beautiful” and instead held on to a strikingly legalistic, prototypically middle-class perspective. As he wrote in one of his Principal Doctrines: “Natural justice is a pledge guaranteeing mutual advantage, to prevent one from harming others and to keep oneself from being harmed.” Politics is hereby stripped down to accommodate the priorities of shopkeepers and private citizens—those who compose the unphilosophical, “appetitive” class.
As Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “For the [bourgeoisie], indeed, the state [has] always been only a well-organized police force.” For Epicurus as well, policing or state-mandated conflict-resolution is all that proper government should aspire to. Under his unacknowledged influence, political life has largely dispensed with teleological orientations towards virtue and the common good. The modern role of government goes no further than the utilitarian business of economic management, facilitating a maximally hedonic lifestyle for as many as possible.
As I have said, the very architecture of modern liberalism—canonized in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and others—is founded on Epicurean principles. Contrary to more classical republicanism, which held humans to be political animals by nature, the liberal framework took the spurious view that human nature was asocial and society, by consequence, unnatural. Within this framework, the alternatives offered by Hobbes and Rousseau are often staged as ideological opposites, with the prior believing in the inherent wolfishness of man, and the latter convinced that people are by nature good, and only become corrupted when they join with others in society. In fact, both are deeply problematic perspectives on political life, viewing man as radically autonomous in the state of nature and society as either an imperfect solution to the Hobbesian war of all against all or as a vicious impediment to what Rousseau lauded as humanity’s intrinsic narcissism. In both cases, society is a check on—rather than an outgrowth of—human nature; the only difference is that whereas Hobbes praises such artifice, Rousseau declares war on it.
Moreover, if we take a closer look at Book V of De Rerum Natura, we encounter a continuous saga incorporating both Hobbesian and Rousseauian elements. The picture painted by Rousseau belongs to the remotest period of human history, when men had “simple hearts” and were each “by instinct trained for self to thrive and live.” By contrast, a darker, more Hobbesian state of nature emerges only in a lapsarian phase, after humans have discovered speech, fire, and money. It was in this second phase that “men wished glory for themselves and power” and succumbed to a war of all against all in which “each man sought unto himself / Dominion and supremacy.” To exit this state of total war, Lucretius suggested a proto-Hobbesian (or even proto-Lockean) approach:
Some wiser heads instructed men to found
The magisterial office, and did frame
Codes that they might consent to follow laws.
For humankind, o’er wearied with a life
Fostered by force, was ailing from its feuds;
And so the sooner of its own free will
Yielded to laws and strictest codes.
Indolence and indifference
More recently, it has been revealed that this was only an imperfect, intermediate, and, above all, all too human solution. Despite the atheism that followed from transposing the Epicurean conception of a deus otiosus onto familiar Christian mythemes, moderns never totally dispensed with a divine ideal; in fact, many aspire to become otiose gods themselves. This, at least, has been the primary motive and drive behind a strain of German romanticism going all the way back to Friedrich Schiller, culminating in Nietzsche, and even finding residence in the neo-Marxism of prominent thinkers of the New Left, like Herbert Marcuse. While classical liberalism demands that we yield to the “laws and strictest codes” mandated by a Leviathan magistrate to ensure our physical and psychological safety, the bohemian mind is offended by the imposition of any fetters on the free flow of his creative excesses. As John Stuart Mill put it when criticising the “pinched and hidebound … character” of the average bourgeois:
Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing they think of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done; they shun particularity of taste and eccentricity of conduct as much as they shun crimes.
The contemporary, “self-actualizing” bobo combines the “nonconformist” mindset of a bohemian with the means of a well-to-do bourgeois. Unbeknownst to himself, the bobo wholeheartedly agrees with Schiller when the latter insisted the Greeks had
transplanted to Olympus what should have flourished upon earth. Guided by truth itself, they caused both the seriousness and the toil, which furrow the cheeks of mortals, and the vain pleasure which smoothes the vacant countenance, to disappear from the forehead of the celestials—they freed the ever-happy from the fetters of all motive, all duty, all care—and made indolence and indifference the enviable lot of divinity; a merely human name for the freest and noblest existence.
In Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters as in De Rerum Natura, we find that it is the gods who most closely follow Epicurus’ advice to “live unnoticed.” Secluded as they are in a tranquil, otherworldly playground called the Intermundia, the gods live the most carefree and meaningless lives imaginable, resembling the untethered existence of perfect atoms. In the advanced, post-industrial society of today, this ideal of fast-and-loose puerility is best approximated by bobo cosmopolitans, with many of the world’s megacities and paradisial enclaves starring as shoddy stand-ins for the Intermundia.
The current malaise surrounding progressive politics slots perfectly well into this unfortunate social configuration. In the thought of, for example, Marcuse, we encounter a political motive to turn away from the strictures of popular sovereignty and instead engage in a “Great Refusal—[a] protest against that which is.” Inspired by the mythical archetypes of Orpheus and Narcissus, who, according to Marcuse, represent “the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature,” the middle-of-the-road neo-Marxist activist has largely dissociated from common life, which is considered an impediment to ‘genuine,’ untrammelled expressions of individuality.
As such, social individualization does not just routinely lead to a “revolt of the masses”; it has also fostered a more slow-going “revolt of the elites.” As the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in his book of the same name:
An aristocracy of talent—superficially an attractive ideal, which appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on hereditary privilege—turns out to be a contradiction in terms: The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues. Their snobbery lacks any acknowledgement of reciprocal obligations between the favoured few and the multitude. Although they are full of ‘compassion’ for the poor, they cannot be said to subscribe to a theory of noblesse oblige, which would imply a willingness to make a direct and personal contribution to the public good.
Neo-Marxism, together with the censorious climate it has engendered, revolves around a set of irresponsible luxury beliefs that have allowed post-industrial elites to wrap their deracinated libertarianism in a veil of prosocial values. The result—sometimes dubbed ‘woke capitalism’ or ‘bobo consumerism’—is an ongoing revolt against the commercial republic that first created the conditions in which the new aristocracy were able to flourish. Like the Epicurean gods, contemporary elites lack true nobility because they have been deprived of the duty to be involved in aristocratic governance. Noblesse oblige is simply foreign to our snobbish, run-of-the-mill jetsetters; as such, it would be ridiculous, given the current political climate, to expect it from them.
The offshoot of cybernetic theory called post- or transhumanism is yet a further step in the ongoing development of our Epicurean present. As it was laid out in the Transhumanist Declaration of 1998, this movement assumes that “humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future,” which involves, among other things, the possibility of thoroughly “redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of ageing, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and [even] our confinement to the planet earth.” What social and political movements have encouraged only in the abstract, could soon be reified by integrating ever more radical strains of technology into the most intimate parts of the human organism. The Epicurean dream of passing “in long tranquillity of peace / Untroubled ages and a serene life” will never have seemed so attainable—even if it comes at the risk of becoming ever more dependent on the acquisition and maintenance of precarious new augments, and rendering ourselves increasingly vulnerable to their mismanagement or outright abuse (as works of dystopian literature have been warning for decades).
What the real world cannot provide, cyberspace just might, and in due course it may even become impossible to distinguish between the two. In his novel Snow Crash, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson identified this seamless integration of reality and virtuality with a name that today is more commonly associated with Facebook’s parent company. It is unclear how he came up with the name for the “metaverse,” but its similarity to the Greek for Intermundia—metakosmos—is uncanny enough to suggest the contrivances of a collective unconscious. Even here, in the remote corners of speculative literature and technocratic corporatism, Epicurus’ presence can be felt.
What things like liberalism, fully automated luxury communism, capitalist realism, “the Thing,” transhumanism, and the metaverse all have in common is an Epicurean conception of false nobility and otiose elitism that many in the West (and beyond), regardless of station, implicitly or explicitly, have been brought up to consider a most “enviable lot,” or even “the freest and noblest existence.” To “live unnoticed” in a state of “indolence and indifference,” devoid of “all motive, all duty, all care” we may ultimately have to retreat from the world altogether—or, in fact, have it irrevocably transfigured, which amounts to the same thing. The question we face is a simple one, a really simple one: Do we want this future for ourselves? Because if we do not wish for our reality to become a boundless, shapeshifting simulacrum devoid of anything that would be worth talking or thinking about, we may just need to rebuild the entire modern worldview from the ground up.
As a final stitch in this aetiological tapestry, I should note that in 1841, Karl Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. Near the very end of that dissertation, he favourably quotes a passage by Lucretius which goes right to the heart of what we should be asking ourselves:
When human life lay grovelling in all men’s sight, crushed to the earth under the dead weight of religion whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quarters of the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash and growling menace of the sky … Therefore religion in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies.
The question that suggests itself is as straightforward as it is elemental: were we truly lifted level with the skies—or did we, in fact, remorselessly tear the skies down to earth? The answer we give to this question could decide where—if anywhere—we go next as a civilization.
