{2 } EPICTETUS AND THE ART OF MAINTAINING CONTROL

Transcription

1 {2 } EPICTETUS AND THE ART OF MAINTAINING CONTROL Rhonda Cornum was working as a flight surgeon in the 101st Airborne Division during the First Gulf War in February 1991, when she was sent on a mission to rescue a fighter pilot who had been shot down. Her own helicopter was shot down, and crashed into the Arabian Desert at 140 miles an hour, instantly killing five of the eight crew. Cornum survived, although both her arms were broken, a ligament was torn in her knee, and she had a bullet lodged in her shoulder. Iraqi soldiers surrounded the crashed helicopter, and dragged Cornum out by her broken arms. They put her and another member of the crew, Sergeant Troy Dunlap, into the back of a truck. As the truck bumped along the desert road, one of the Iraqi soldiers unzipped Cornum s flight suit and sexually assaulted her. She couldn t fight him off, and tried not to scream, but every time he knocked her broken arms she couldn t help crying out. Eventually he left her alone. Sergeant Dunlap was chained up next to her, unable to help. Ma am, he said quietly, you re really tough. What d you think, I d cry or something? she said. Yeah, I thought you would. That s OK, Sergeant, Rhonda said after a while. I thought you d cry too. They were kept prisoner in an Iraqi military compound for eight days. Cornum has said of the experience: Being a POW is the rape of your entire life. But what I learned in those Iraqi bunkers and prison cells is that the experience doesn t have to be devastating, that it depends on you. 1 Rhonda tells me: When you re a POW, your captors control pretty much everything about your life: when you get up, when you go to sleep, what you eat, if you eat. I realised the only thing I

2 { 26 } Philosophy for life had left that I could control was how I thought. I had absolute control over that, and was not going to let them take that too. I decided, well, there was the old mission of rescuing the fighter pilot, and now circumstances had changed, and I had a new mission, to get through this. She did survive, and didn t give away any confidential information. Nor did she feel herself permanently traumatised by her experience. She told one interviewer: You re supposed to look at being sexually molested as a fate worse than death. Having faced both, I can tell you it s not. Getting molested was not the biggest deal of my life. Cornum clearly possesses in abundance the character-trait that Americans call grit, and that the British call a stiff upper lip. This attitude, which is the essence of Stoicism, doesn t mean she hid or denied her emotions, as the popular understanding of the word stoic might suggest. Rather, her emotions followed her recognition that there was simply no point in panicking over aspects of her situation that were out of her control, and that it made a lot more sense to focus on what she could control. And she insists that people like me, who aren t as naturally tough as her, can learn this resilient attitude. She tells me: There are people who are just naturally resilient, who look at problems as challenges to be overcome. Some people even see adversity as opportunities to excel. I recognised that I had those skills, and others didn t. What we have learnt since then, is that the thinking skills that lead to resilience can be taught. Cornum is now in charge of a new $125-million programme that the Pentagon began rolling out in November 2009, called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, which aims to teach resilience to each of the 1.1 million soldiers serving in the US Army. The programme, which the journal American Psychologist described as the largest deliberate psychological intervention in history, 2 was developed by Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology. 3 Seligman s concept of resilience is based on the idea, originally from Greek philosophy and then picked up by CBT, that you can teach people how their beliefs and interpretive

3 Epictetus and the art of maintaining control {27 } styles lead to their emotional responses, and then teach them how to dispute their irrational beliefs Socratically, and to replace them where necessary with a more philosophical perspective. The aim, in the words of the programme s promotional video, is to teach American soldiers how to take control of your emotions, before they take control of you. In other words, the US Army is trying to raise a generation of resilient philosopherwarriors, using the philosophical ideas and techniques that Athenians, Spartans, Macedonians and Romans used to cope with their own gruelling campaigns, at the dawn of Western civilisation. Is it really all down to your thoughts? There s an obvious objection to this sort of therapy: are emotional disorders really always the fault of your beliefs? Aren t they sometimes caused not by your beliefs, but by the terrible situation you re in? Focusing too narrowly on a person s thinking might ignore the environmental stresses that are harming them. The reason that only 3 per cent of UK troops serving in Iraq were found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as opposed to around 17 per cent of US troops, is not necessarily because American troops have less resilient beliefs. It may be because they were in some of the worst fighting, and were serving tours that were twice as long as their British allies. 4 Nonetheless, even in truly dire situations like the Iraq War, we do still preserve some control over our situation: our response to it. No one can take that freedom away from us. And we can steer our way through the worst situations, by focusing on what is in our control, without driving ourselves crazy about what we can t immediately control. Cornum told a group of troops in 2010: I approached every problem I encountered, whether it was failing an exam or a disease or getting shot down and shot up the same way: I would fix what I could fix and I wouldn t complain about what I couldn t. 5 Cornum doesn t think of herself as a Stoic, but

4 { 28 } Philosophy for life the technique she practises and teaches was actually best described by a Roman Stoic philosopher in the second century, called Epictetus. The slave philosopher Epictetus was born into a situation of minimal control. He was born a slave, in the town of Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey, in AD 55. His name means acquired. Some accounts suggest he was beaten up and tortured by his first owner, and his leg was broken so badly he stayed lame his whole life. However it happened, he was certainly lame, poor, without family or freedom for most of his life. But he was lucky enough to have an enlightened second owner, called Epaphroditus, who allowed Epictetus to study under the greatest Stoic philosopher of his day, Musonius Rufus. The word Stoic comes from the Stoa Poikile, or painted colonnade in the corner of the Athenian marketplace, where the original Stoics gathered to teach their street philosophy to anyone who wanted to listen male or female, freeman or slave, Greek or barbarian. Stoicism 0riginated in the third century BC, a century after the death of Socrates, when Greek city-states were being conquered by marauding empires. Its philosophy was a means of coping with that chaos: Stoics claimed that if you use your reason to overcome attachments or aversions to external conditions, you can stay unperturbed under any circumstances even if your country has been conquered and a tyrant is torturing you on the rack (this idea is one of many similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism, which I explore further in the appendix). Their philosophy of inner freedom and external defiance spread to Rome in the first century BC, where it was taken up by leading Roman politicians and used as a philosophy of republican resistance to imperial tyranny, in a movement known as the Stoic opposition. Like Jedi knights resisting the Galactic

5 Epictetus and the art of maintaining control {29 } Empire, the Stoic opposition were constantly clashing with the imperial government and being imprisoned, exiled or executed. Epaphroditus eventually freed Epictetus, but Epictetus made the unusual career decision of becoming a Stoic philosopher himself, which immediately put him in the cross hairs of the imperial regime. Epictetus was exiled when the emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from Italy in AD 94. He travelled to Nicopolis, a bustling town in western Greece, and there carried on his teachings. He was never particularly well off, but the influence of his ideas carried through time and space. It is said the emperor Hadrian travelled to Nicopolis to talk to the old man. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian s heir and a great philosopher in his own right, was probably more influenced by Epictetus than by any other thinker. And thanks to a student of his, Arrian, who took notes in his lessons, his ideas have passed down into the modern age: Thomas Jefferson, Lawrence Sterne, Matthew Arnold, J.D. Salinger and Tom Wolfe all used his ideas in their own work and lives. His Discourses helped me overcome my own emotional problems more than any other book of philosophy. Epictetus philosophy of resilience Epictetus drew on his traumatic life to inform his philosophy of resilience. At any moment, as a slave, you could be beaten up, tortured or executed. As a Stoic philosopher, you also faced the constant prospect of imprisonment or execution. How, then, could a Stoic stay calm and mentally strong in the midst of so much uncertainty and oppression, when their ability to control their own destiny was so hampered? How could they hope to remain the captain of their soul? Epictetus answer was to remind himself constantly what is in his control and what isn t. On the first page of his Handbook, we read: Some things are up to us, and others are not. Epictetus makes a list of the things that are not in our control (I ve added a few):