School of Life



Seneca: Anger management guru?

 Alain de Botton is a Swiss philosopher and author who doesn't believe in God.  But at least he sees a loss to humanity when people think God is absent.

In a Wall Street Journal piece he lists some of the things Christian faith provides that are lost in today's secular education.  They include how to "find meaning, understand themselves, behave in a moral fashion, forgive their fellow humans and confront their own mortality," as well as "advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or how to cope with the news of a medical death sentence."

Continuing de Botton's list, teaching "emotional or ethical life skills:  how to love our neighbors, clear human confusion, diminish human misery and leave the world better and happier than we found it."  Dealing with anger and "understanding the tensions of marriage" are others on a representative but incomplete list.

De Botton laments that "our universities have never offered what churches invariably focus on: guidance."  It's probably because most colleges embrace moral relativism.  This is a squishy framework in which moral judgments are subjective and up to the individual.  Its corollary is since there are no objective standards everyone should tolerate behavior that others have decided is moral.  How can universities provide guidance when there are no common standards of right and wrong?

No God, no Christianity, no moral framework, no guidance.  To attack this void de Botton and other writers, academics and artists have started a "new kind of university" in London.  It's called the "School of Life" and it uses "novels, histories, plays and paintings" for guidance.  Dostoyevsky's Anna Karenina teaches about marriage, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about death, Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems about filling the God-shaped hole in your heart, and ancient philosopher Seneca speaks of anger management.

Seneca's formula is a hoot.  He believed anger resulted from a person's failure to achieve optimistic expectations.  The solution:  before you get out of bed, think of everything that might go wrong that day.  Then when they happen you won't be surprised and - voila! - you won't get angry!  Pessimism is the key.  Who knew?

Maybe this works, but pessimists tend to be negative, hopeless and no fun.  Pessimism (borderline depression?) is a high price to pay in service to an egotistical  conviction that there's no God.

De Botton believes mankind has an inner drive to invent God.  If he suspended his condescension and substituted "seek" for "invent" he'd be onto something.  He could then accept biblical guidance that's worked for thousands of years.  Instead, he relies on cultural works, which still doesn't eliminate morally subjective decisions - it just passes them along to whoever designs the curriculum at the School of Life.

It's good that de Botton recognizes  the void left by rejection of God.  But it's remarkable he doesn't see it as evidence that He exists and knows mankind well enough to effectively guide us.

See what Seneca’s daily pessimism looks like in practice: click on

http://sophrosyne.radical.r30.net/wordpress/?p=6032

and fast forward to 16:40. The guy is Alain de Botton.

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