There is a genre of self-help motivational videos on youtube male readers may have seen in their recommendations. It could be characterized as “Zyzz motivation,” as most of the videos use images of and music associated with the late fitness influencer Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, better known as “Zyzz”. There seem to be quite a few of these videos, geared towards a young audience, all following a similar theme: clips from “woke” culture, such as content produced by Buzzfeed, mukbang content in which people gorge themselves on fast food, interviews and speeches by prominent feminists and “healthy at any size” advocates, followed by explosive dance music paired with videos of bodybuilders, powerlifters, olympic athletes, billionaires, and occasionally popular intellectuals. The titles of the videos invariably use a format of “reject [postmodern cultural value], embrace [traditional patriarchal masculine value].” A fairly typical example is presented below:
The description of the video contains a quote attributed to Socrates, decrying “What a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
The theme of the videos reflects a fascinating cultural schism: on the one hand, it proclaims, there is a politically correct mainstream culture which advocates weakness, gender nonconformity, moral relativism, bureaucracy and in general a world without meaning or purpose, in which there is no reason to strive, achieve, or learn. On the other, it advances an unabashedly hypermasculine worldview, in which one’s purpose is to achieve personal perfection, perhaps in any number of ways, but with a clear bias towards aesthetic beauty and capacity for violence, either of which are to be achieved through hard physical work.
Students of history will find nothing new here: this is all simple reactionary rhetoric, with all the subtlety of a bronze age warrior code: life is to be lived for glory, honor, and the mastery of one’s weaknesses. The dynamics surrounding this ethic and its antithesis are many, and much ink has been spilled analyzing them, but my interest in particular lies in the how we think about the ideas of virtue and personal cultivation, and the relationship they bear to politics. There is enormous cultural tension around the question of how one ought to live a good life, and why, and interestingly these ostensibly personal concerns seem to have enormous political impact.
In Aristotle’s ethical thought, the individual is in a sense central-the focus of the study of ethics is that of how to achieve the best human life. But the way this is done, in Aristotle’s view, is ultimately not an individualistic quest for personal growth (though he does encourage that)-rather, it is to be achieved through politics, conceived as the legislative function of communities. There are some people, certainly, who can flourish through their own wisdom and discipline-but most need a system of laws to coax them in the right direction. The purpose of the political community is nothing other than to create the conditions which allow for the greatest degree of human flourishing.
But setting aside Aristotle’s methodology, he has been characterized as a perfectionistic philosopher-he starts from the belief that there is a good, and all beings strive towards what they imagine it to be. He believes everything has an end, and we are best when we are living in accord with this end, so much so that he describes this end itself as happiness, a far more all-encompassing use of the term than our relatively facile concept of it as a vague “feeling good”-so much so that the use of the term in translation is a controversial subject among scholars of ancient philosophy.
In book X of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle comes to a conclusion which shouldn’t be particularly shocking, coming from a philosopher-the happiest human life, he claims, is the life of study. But this is followed by a particularly striking passage:
Such a life [of study] would be superior on the human level. For someone will live it not insofar as he is a human being, but insofar as he has some divine element in him. And the activity of this divine element is as much superior to the activity in accord with the rest of virtue as this element is superior to the compound. Hence if understanding is something divine in comparison with a human being, so also will the life in accord with understanding be divine in comparison with human life. We ought not to follow those who exhort us to ‘think human, since you are human’, or ‘think mortal, since you are mortal.’ Rather, as far as we can, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element; for however much this element may lack in bulk, by much more it surpasses everything in power and value.
An unabashed endorsement of humanity reaching towards immortality seems like it would fit comfortably in a red-pill motivation video. Yet, the theme of an element of divinity being present in human beings has a long history, and has always been associated to some extent with radicalism, and ultimately with the political left. Much was made of this attitude towards reason and transcendance of human limits in the work of Leo Strauss, who epitomized his philosophical view that reason and revelation were in unresolvable tension in the history of western thought as “the tension between Jerusalem and Athens”. The Athenian view, with its faith in reason as a means of overcoming human limits, is critiqued for its hubris (another very Greek attribute), its disregard for tradition and the dangers of radical change, and its misplaced faith that through empiricism and rational thought alone, people and their societies can be markedly improved over time.
In The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin would trace a path of reason through human history in what he termed a “legacy of freedom,” arguing that the same humanistic impulses are found in the alternative scriptures of Gnostic Christianity, carried in varying forms through proto-Protestant sects and the peasant revolts they occasionally sparked, culminating eventually in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the French and American revolutions, and the socialist and anarchist traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Each of these movements is characterized as stages in the dialectical development of belief in the capacity of humans to surpass their limitations, and to attain, through faith or reason, a genuinely higher state-whether of personal connection with god, of political order, or of technological and scientific attainment.
Concurrently, of course, there has been a conservative tradition which has developed in a similar way. Conservatives will often cite two major works-Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France-as representative of this strain of thought. They make an argument for the value of tradition as such-the importance of institutions and of belief systems which can contain “the mob”-the undifferentiated mass of working poor who, such thinkers note, are not particularly rational, and left to their own devices will fall into hedonism, embrace authoritarian demagogues, and in general produce anarchy in the worst sense of the term. Since the fascist and communist catastrophes of the 20th century, much has been made of, in particular, Stalinism and Maoism as the worst outcomes of utopian thought.
For what it’s worth, Aristotle shared this belief, and clarifies the need both for common people to follow the example of great men, rather than to try to capitulate a model of virtue ethics for themselves, and to be steered by a set of laws which he imagines best legislated by a meritocratic aristocracy. Aristotle has a little something for everybody, but it is certainly true that he was no believer in equality and is quite confident that most people are irretrievably stupid.
But it is useful to entertain utopian thought experiments, if only to draw some worthwhile conclusions. To Aristotle, the purpose of the political community was to facilitate a virtuous polity. But of course, if any such thing were achieved, law would be rendered immediately superfluous.
In truth, the world we live in is built on the presumption of distrust. We lock our doors, make passwords, collect money in private bank accounts, live in armed nation-states, all on the basis of a belief that those around us could, at any time, pose a threat to us. One only has to imagine how differently one would behave if one knew they would never be robbed, never be attacked, never be allowed to go hungry or forced to sleep outside, to see how profoundly this fact alters our behavior. How differently would nations be structured if it could be known with full confidence that each one was equally committed to pacifism, and neither had weapons nor the will to use them? Would there even be nations at all? Would there be money? Class distinctions?
Consider climate change. Would such a society have any problem addressing an issue like the excessive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, freed of the need to maintain military and economic domination over one another? Would any individual feel compelled to contribute to the problem by working in industries which polluted the atmosphere, if they could trust a commonwealth to care for their needs regardless of how they spent their working hours?
In this way, the vast problems of geopolitics become reduced to the most mundane of personal concerns-the way humans treat nature is, as Murray Bookchin maintained, determined by how humans treat one another. A good world can only be created by good people.
This is the sort of argument we are accustomed to hearing from someone like Jordan Peterson, who will make the case that our perceived political problems are in fact externalizations of personal problems. From him, this is mere social quietism recast as paternalistic realism.
But a similar, and far better argument is made by Leo Tolstoy. His philosophy is to some degree clouded by his religious fanaticism, but his latter philosophical works, particularly his denunciation of the Russo-Japanese War, Bethink Yourselves!, are famous for their uncompromising moral clarity:
Jesus said, “Bethink yourselves”—i.e. “Let every man interrupt the work he has begun and ask himself: Who am I? From whence have I appeared, and in what consists my destiny? And having answered these questions, according to the answer decide whether that which thou doest is in conformity with thy destiny.” And every man of our world and time, that is, being acquainted with the essence of the Christian teaching, needs only for a minute to interrupt his activity, to forget the capacity in which he is regarded by men, be it of Emperor, soldier, minister, or journalist, and seriously ask himself who he is and what is his destiny—in order to begin to doubt the utility, lawfulness, and reasonableness of his actions. “Before I am Emperor, soldier, minister, or journalist,” must say to himself every man of our time and of the Christian world, “before any of these, I am a man—i.e. an organic being sent by the Higher Will into a universe infinite in time and space, in order, after staying in it for an instant, to die—i.e. to disappear from it. And, therefore, all those personal, social, and even universal human aims which I may place before myself and which are placed before me by men are all insignificant, owing to the shortness of my life as well as to the infiniteness of the life of the universe, and should be subordinated to that higher aim for the attainment of which I am sent into the world. This ultimate aim, owing to my limitations, is inaccessible to me, but it does exist (as there must be a purpose in all that exists), and my business is that of being its instrument—i.e. my destiny, my vocation, is that of being a workman of God, of fulfilling His work.” And having understood this destiny, every man of our world and time, from Emperor to soldier, cannot but regard differently those duties which he has taken upon himself or other men have imposed upon him.
“Before I was crowned, recognized as Emperor,” must the Emperor say to himself: “before I undertook to fulfil the duties of the head of the State, I, by the very fact that I live, have promised to fulfil that which is demanded of me by the Higher Will that sent me into life. These demands I not only know, but feel in my heart. They consist, as it is expressed in the Christian law, which I profess, in that I should submit to the will of God, and fulfil that which it requires of me, that I should love my neighbor, serve him, and act towards him as I would wish others to act towards me. Am I doing this?—ruling men, prescribing violence, executions, and, the most dreadful of all,—wars. Men tell me that I ought to do this. But God says that I ought to do something quite different. And, therefore, however much I may be told that, as the head of the State, I must direct acts of violence, the levying of taxes, executions and, above all, war, that is, the slaughter of one's neighbor, I do not wish to and cannot do these things.”
Tolstoy operates from the conviction that life’s meaning is to be found in the Bible, a conviction he came to not so much because he found Christianity rationally convincing, but moreso out of desperation-as an atheist, he could not find a satisfactory reason to live, let alone to live virtuously, and finally came to Christianity because without it, he felt, he could not honestly justify continuing to live.
Yet, Christianity is far from the first or sole system which insists upon the need to live virtuously. In Plato’s Republic, it is argued that life must be lived in accord with justice because justice establishes order between the different portions of the human soul. Aristotle makes an argument not totally dissimilar in the Nicomachean Ethics, claiming that human happiness is achieved by living in accord with the virtues he outlines-to fail to live in accord with them is to fail to be a fully functioning human being. He believes that pleasure and satisfaction must necessarily be a part of this happiness, though mere pleasure is not the end goal of happiness.
Virtue is encouraged for similar reasons in Buddhism as part of the Noble Eightfold Path-without right action, right speech, and right livelihood, one cannot free oneself from suffering. Of course in the Buddhist context, this is not the same as organizing one’s soul-to become enlightened requires overcoming the illusion of the self, and the self goes fairly unquestioned in the Western philosophical tradition-yet the end result is remarkably similar.
Tolstoy makes a parallel, and perhaps subliminally identical observation in A Letter to a Hindu:
We do not, cannot, and I venture to say need not, know how men lived millions of years ago or even ten thousand years ago, but we do know positively that, as far back as we have any knowledge of mankind, it has always lived in special groups of families, tribes, and nations in which the majority, in the conviction that it must be so, submissively and willingly bowed to the rule of one or more persons—that is to a very small minority. Despite all varieties of circumstances and personalities these relations manifested themselves among the various peoples of whose origin we have any knowledge; and the farther back we go the more absolutely necessary did this arrangement appear, both to the rulers and the ruled, to make it possible for people to live peacefully together.
So it was everywhere. But though this external form of life existed for centuries and still exists, very early—thousands of years before our time—amid this life based on coercion, one and the same thought constantly emerged among different nations, namely, that in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim through love. This thought appeared in most various forms at different times and places, with varying completeness and clarity. It found expression in Brahmanism, Judaism, Mazdaism (the teachings of Zoroaster), in Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and in the writings of the Greek and Roman sages, as well as in Christianity and Mohammedanism. The mere fact that this thought has sprung up among different nations and at different times indicates that it is inherent in human nature and contains the truth. But this truth was made known to people who considered that a community could only be kept together if some of them restrained others, and so it appeared quite irreconcilable with the existing order of society. Moreover it was at first expressed only fragmentarily, and so obscurely that though people admitted its theoretic truth they could not entirely accept it as guidance for their conduct. Then, too, the dissemination of the truth in a society based on coercion was always hindered in one and the same manner, namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of this truth would undermine their position, consciously or sometimes unconsciously perverted it by explanations and additions quite foreign to it, and also opposed it by open violence. Thus the truth—that his life should be directed by the spiritual element which is its basis, which manifests itself as love, and which is so natural to man—this truth, in order to force a way to man's consciousness, had to struggle not merely against the obscurity with which it was expressed and the intentional and unintentional distortions surrounding it, but also against deliberate violence, which by means of persecutions and punishments sought to compel men to accept religious laws authorized by the rulers and conflicting with the truth. Such a hindrance and misrepresentation of the truth—which had not yet achieved complete clarity—occurred everywhere: in Confucianism and Taoism, in Buddhism and in Christianity, in Mohammedanism and in your Brahmanism.
Tolstoy regards pacifism not merely as a moral philosophy, but as the basis for a new, Christian anarchist society. But even operating from a non-spiritual context as I am, it is perhaps in this sense that we can say morality exists: as the common denominator of the standards of human behavior which allow individuals and the societies they compose to progress unabated, and the logical outcome of how individuals would behave if they were possessed of the sort of boundless, indiscriminate love described by Jesus or the Buddha. The best of all possible societies is the one in which there is genuinely no basis for distrust. Thus, the actions of each individual are inextricably linked to an all too easily rent fabric of love and trust, upon which ethical and sustainable civilizations can be built and maintained. Without this being commonly understood and heeded, civilizations can only be sustained through coercion and domination, and even then only for a little while, and without the resilience to balance the need to protect and expand the structures of power, with the competing need to maintain a habitable planet upon which to build them.
Thus there is a clean continuum between personal virtue, really the manifestation of undifferentiating love, and political order. Virtue is not, then, about displays of heroism or personal development; nor is it about signalling one’s good will to others, or one’s marginalized status. These are mere manifestations of the ego, attempts to satisfy an idea of a self that does not exist. I am presently convinced that rather than any of that, virtue is rational behavior in line with universal love-for all conscious beings, and for oneself.
But, this is no straightforward panacaea-the virtues which derive from universal love are not at all clear to all comers. As has been pointed out many times in response to arguments of this sort, there have historically been plenty of slaveowners who earnestly believed they held people in bondage out of love for them. There are at this moment young girls undergoing genital mutilation, and those carrying it out are in most cases genuinely doing so in the belief that this is an act of love. Gay conversion therapy is defended in this country on the grounds that it is done out of love for people afflicted with homosexuality. It is true, most if not all of these cases are the consequence of delusional religious dogma-but anyone who seriously imagines a world without religion of any sort is, I fear, a utopian in the worst sense.
Thus I cannot endorse Tolstoy’s pacifism, as much as I want to. I cannot deny that if someone were to pose an immediate threat to my friends or loved ones, I would not weigh my love for their attacker against my love for them-to insist on pacifism in such instances would be dogmatic absurdity, and morally reprehensible. To abstain from violence in the name of protecting the state of one’s soul is blatantly selfish; to abstain from it in the name of universal love is poor comfort to whomever you’ve decided you’re too virtuous to protect. Tolstoy never had to put his convictions to such a test-for less fortunate people throughout the world, they are an all too common reality.
And yet, we need a goal, and we need to earnestly strive towards it, and it must be one we can devote ourselves to without needing to abandon our reason. We need institutions and social forms which can provide space for a way of life which is consistent with that goal, and which can carry on traditions and knowledge which may make a more robust and virtuous society than our own possible in the future, however distant it may prove to be. Those institutions, whatever they may ultimately be, will only be as good as the people in them. For all our sakes, we each have to take that responsibility seriously.