A sign of HOME

"Where the Hellenistic philosophies excelled was the production of what could be called secular religions. They were based on self-help–oriented doctrines often borrowed from the earlier philosophers but interpreted and presented in a way that made more direct sense to a lot of people. I’m calling them graceful-life philosophies to distinguish them from other philosophy. Their goals were practical happiness, and they were not merely theoretical about it: they provided community, mediations, and events. In this they were more like religions, but they did not identify themselves as religions and they had remarkably little use for God or gods. The Hellenistic graceful-life philosophies had a lot in common. The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one’s path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home. They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time. Thus the cosmopolitan doubter looks back on earlier generations with bemused sympathy—they were mistaken—and looks upon believing contemporaries with real pity, as creatures scurrying through the forest, idiotically searching for a way out of the human condition. After all, it isn’t so bad if you just settle in and accept a few difficult ideas from the get-go."

Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson": https://a.co/atAGlEk