Be Athenians, not Visigoths

"Man Cave" vs "the Study"

That's a meme I am quite fond of and struck by. And it's probably a testament to our times, not in a good way. It's no surprise that people, especially men, are reading less than they have in the past fifty years or so. Beyond that, people are mostly mired in a sea of superficial content which they are constantly scrolling through with the attention span of a gnat. 

And I don't mean to be snotty and pretentiously above all that. I am certainly guilty, too.

However, I was recently thinking about a line from David Foster Wallace's profoundly simple commencement speech, "This is Water." As DFW describes the mundane banality of adult life when we are wrapped up in the frustrating tedium of sitting in traffic on the way home from work, he opines that our ego leads us to dwell on the negative. While our natural default setting is to be annoyed at all the other people who are in our way, we do have a choice in how we think about any situation we are in. More importantly we have options in what we choose to think about.

And, that wonderful little epiphany -- easier to acknowledge than to practice -- got me thinking more deeply about how we choose to spend our time and what we choose to think about. It reminded me of another commencement speech, albeit one that was never actually given. It comes from a favorite writer and thinker of mine, Neil Postman. I've used this piece on occasion with my writing students, and it's a valuable piece of advice for how we choose to live. Basically, Postman tells the story of two notable groups of people in the history of western civilization, the Athenians and the Visigoths. And Postman's advice is to choose to be an Athenian, not a Visigoth. 

Athenians and Visigoths: Neil Postman’s Graduation Speech - First Things 

The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. But we do know a great deal about their accomplishments. They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them—Democritus by name—conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology.

I'd like to think I spend more time practicing the Athenian pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. And, granted, this is to acknowledge that ancient Athens wasn't some utopia of goodness, peace, and wisdom. But we like to live and think by dichotomies for a reason, and in a comparison of better and worse ways to live, the Athenian-Visigoth split is a pretty decent divergence of paths. 

I certainly hope I am choosing to be a better person most of the time. And, keeping in mind DFW's advice, I hope I can remember more often than not to choose an attitude of grace and compassion, of empathy and understanding, of caring and kindness, as opposed to living with judgment and suspicion and contempt. 

As Longfellow once wrote, "Act that each tomorrow finds us further than today." Here's to getting better, one choice at a time.