These examples show that a courageous person needs not only to be able to endure fear, danger, and opposition but also to endure them wisely, at the right time, for the right reasons. True courage is about facing fear and danger and enduring risk for the sake of an important and worthy goal. A soldier who stands his ground in order to protect his comrades is courageous. Horton shows courage when he refuses to abandon the egg; similarly, in Horton Hears a Who!, the elephant again displays courage when he stands up for and protects the Whos, a civilization of tiny people living on a dust speck whom none of the other animals can hear. So what kind of wisdom does a courageous person need? The second general, Nicias, proposes that courage is “knowledge of the fearful and hopeful in war and in every other situation.”12 In other words, a courageous person has the knowledge to be able to determine correctly which risks are worth facing and which are not. A courageous soldier has enough knowledge and wisdom to be able to determine when it’s appropriate to have hope and stand his ground against the enemy and when it’s better to retreat. A courageous citizen knows when to actively resist a tyrannical regime and when to bide his time for a better opportunity. This is the courage displayed by Bartholomew Cubbins. He may be a simple page boy, but he alone is wise enough to foresee the terrible consequences of the king’s arrogance. And, sure enough, when the oobleck disaster happens, he is the only one who keeps his head and recognizes what needs to be done. He defies the king, telling him what he needs to hear:
Bartholomew Cubbins could hold his tongue no longer.
“And it’s going to keep on falling,” he shouted, “until your whole great marble palace tumbles down! So don’t waste your time saying foolish magic words. YOU ought to be saying some plain simple words!”
“Simple words . . .? What do you mean, boy?”
“I mean,” said Bartholomew, “this is all your fault! Now, the least you can do is say the simple words, ‘I’m sorry.’ . . . And if you won’t even say you’re sorry, you’re no sort of king at all!” (Oobleck)
Amazingly, this lowly page boy has the courage to berate a king who claims repeatedly to be “the mightiest king in all the world,” and he manages to shame the king into apologizing.
In the end, however, even Nicias’ definition fails to explain courage adequately. The problem is that all virtue seems to rest at least in part on knowledge of what is good and bad. Therefore, Nicias’ definition fails to explain what is distinctive about courage, as opposed to other good qualities that a person might have.13 By the end of the dialogue, Socrates and the two distinguished generals have failed to find a complete and adequate definition of courage.
Now, one might wonder about the point of this exercise. Socrates wants a definition of courage. But if Laches and Nicias can do their jobs, why should it matter whether they can define it? But consider: Laches and Nicias are supposed to be two of the best generals Athens has to offer—and it’s their job to teach the young men of the city how to be courageous. Moreover, in battle, they’re the ones who make decisions about when to press forward, when to fall back, and when to cut losses and run. A general who is fundamentally confused about courage—the central martial virtue—won’t be able to make these decisions well. How can he lead armies and teach his soldiers to be courageous when he doesn’t even know what it is himself? And more importantly, how much do any of the rest of us know, when these men who have spent their lives facing death and risk know so little? It’s worth mentioning that, although the historical Laches and Nicias both had some successes during the war, they are best known for their failures, for battles in which they led the Athenians to defeat. Given this history, we have to wonder: Did their simplistic and unexamined ideas about courage contribute to their failures?
Even as he challenges the generals’ unexamined beliefs, however, Socrates nevertheless helps us—the readers of the dialogue—to develop a deeper understanding. After reading the dialogue and thinking about the examples, we realize that courage does often involve standing firm, and, like Horton, having endurance of soul and not abandoning your “post” in the face of obstacles and fear. But it also requires a sort of wisdom or knowledge to understand when it is worth holding firm and when it is better to change course. We can see this clearly in the contrast between the stubbornness of King Derwin and the wisdom and foresight of Bartholomew Cubbins. Even if we still can’t define courage precisely, we nevertheless come to have a clearer idea by examining our beliefs and thinking about these kinds of examples.
Simple It’s Not, I’m Afraid You’ll Find
Should you turn left or right . . .
or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind. (Places)
It’s pretty rare for most of us to undergo the kind of intense cross-examination of our beliefs and values to which Socrates submits the characters in Plato’s dialogues—we’re usually too lazy, complacent, or polite to “test every detail” of our lives, let alone someone else’s. So why does Socrates think it is so important? How does subjecting yourself to philosophical examination help you to live a better life?
According to Socrates, our biggest problem is that, most of the time, we just don’t realize how stupidly ignorant we actually are about the things that matter. Dr. Seuss puts it nicely in the passage above: We have to “make up our minds” about how to live and what paths to take, but it’s hard, harder than we realize. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates explains how he has devoted his life to talking to anyone he meets, young or old, rich or poor, and asking them questions about virtue and happiness, about what is good and worth pursuing in life. And he’s discovered that, although people almost always feel confident, for the most part they understand very little.14 They think they already know everything they need to know—in many cases, as we saw with Laches, they can’t imagine that there could be any doubt! But, when Socrates puts their ideas to the test and challenges them to explain or support their claims, or to show how their beliefs fit with other things they believe, they can’t do it. Like the Sneetches, Mayzie the lazy bird, and King Derwin, it turns out that they don’t know as much as they think they do, and they often have to learn the lesson about their intellectual arrogance the hard way.
This wouldn’t be a serious issue if the things about which people are ignorant were trivial or if we could muddle along well enough with our half-truths and conventional clichés. But, according to Socrates, our situation is much worse than that. The matters upon which people are the most ignorant are, at the same time, the most important and fundamental questions about life. Moreover, the beliefs people have about these matters are often not just ill considered, incomplete, and inconsistent, but disastrously false, so that they end up wasting or ruining their lives. As Socrates says, they come to “attach little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things.”15 In other words, our priorities wind up being the opposite of what they should be.
For example, many people with whom Socrates talks believe that happiness comes from wealth, possessions, and social status. They think that the more you have—the bigger your estate, the fancier your chariots, the more power and influence you wield—the better off you are. We see this attitude (and its consequences) in Dr. Seuss’s story “Gertrude McFuzz.” Gertrude is “a girl-bird” with “the smallest plain tail there ever was. One droopy-droop feather. That’s all she had. And oh! That one feather made Gertrude so sad” (McFuzz). She is sad because she defines her self-worth by the quality and quantity of her tail feathers, and when she sees another bird with two fancy feathers, she wants more. She thinks that if she had more and prettier feathers, she would somehow be better than the other birds. She therefore eats pill-berries from the pill-berry bush until she has so many tail feathers that she can’t fly.
Yertle the Turtle, the king of the turtle pond, makes a similar mis
take. Life on the island of Sala-ma-Sond is warm and happy for the turtles, but Yertle wants more. He decides that he needs a higher throne: “If I could sit high, how much greater I’d be! / What a king! I’d be ruler of all I could see!” (Yertle). Yertle defines his worth as king not by the wisdom of his decisions or the well-being of his subjects but by how high he sits and how much he can see. In pursuit of his goal, he calls in hundreds of turtles for him to sit on, to make his throne higher and higher so that he can see and be king of more and more things.
Why do people define themselves and their self-worth in this way? In part, it’s because they believe (in a vague, confused way) that the goal of life is to outdo or get more than others. They decide how worthy or happy they are, not by looking at the real conditions of their lives, but by comparing themselves (superficially) to others. Money, social status, and power thus provide ways of keeping score and figuring out if you are getting more or doing better than others. According to this way of thinking, the political, social, and economic community exists primarily as an arena for the cutthroat competition for wealth and status—the winners use guile, brashness, and luck to get more; the losers are too weak or stupid or gutless to compete.16
Now imagine how a person with this worldview would approach his life, choices, and relationships. Because he believes that happiness results from outdoing others, he would focus on doing whatever he thought would get him more, regardless of the consequences. He’d ignore or devalue anything that didn’t appear to help him get ahead. More importantly, he’d have no scruples about doing anything it takes to get an edge—whether it be eating pill-berries, cheating, taking steroids, tyrannizing other turtles, pawning off worthless credit default swaps, or something even more sinister. Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax is a powerful cautionary tale about the tragic consequences of the blind and unscrupulous pursuit of profit. When the Once-ler arrives in the beautiful land of the Truffula Trees, populated by singing Swomee-Swans, frolicking Brown Bar-ba-loots, and splashing Humming-Fish, he sets up business cutting down the Truffula Trees to make and sell Thneeds. His sole desire is to “bigger” his profits: “I meant no harm. I most certainly did not. / But I had to go bigger. So bigger I got. / I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads. / I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads [ . . . ] I went right on biggering . . . selling more Thneeds. / I biggered my money, which everyone needs” (Lorax). The Lorax repeatedly warns him about what he’s doing, but he doesn’t listen, and eventually his greed destroys the entire Truffula forest and drives away all the wonderful creatures, so that he is left alone in an empty factory in a toxic wasteland. The Once-ler’s unquestioned desire for money—“which everyone needs”—blinds him to the terrible consequences of his actions.
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates consistently argues that any person with this approach to life has no chance of finding true happiness. As the characters in Seuss’s stories eventually discover, it isn’t wealth, possessions, or power that make life happy and good. According to Socrates, what really matters for happiness is the condition of your soul (psychê in Greek)—that is, your mind and character, the kind of person you are. If you lack wisdom and integrity, if you value your own profit and self-interest over what’s just and right, if your guiding motivation is a hubristic desire to outcompete and overpower others, you won’t live a good life. You may well succeed in getting the money or power or whatever it is you thought you wanted, but it won’t make your life genuinely satisfying or worth living. And, because you are so fundamentally ignorant, you often won’t even realize what’s wrong! You’ll feel in conflict with yourself, deeply unsatisfied with your material gains, but you won’t see that the problem lies in your own ignorance about and lack of concern for what really matters in life.17
Most people are not as blatantly dishonest, selfish, and opportunistic as Yertle or the Once-ler. All the same, we do have unexamined, contradictory, and false beliefs that tend to undermine our happiness in less obvious but no less real ways. For example, since the fifties, the United States has seen a trend toward working harder, longer hours in order to afford bigger houses farther from our workplaces, requiring us to spend more and more time in traffic. Like the Once-ler, we’ve biggered our houses, biggered our cars, biggered our hours at work, biggered our productivity and GDP. We have more material wealth than any country in the history of the world! But as a result, Americans increasingly have less and less time left over to spend with family and friends or to devote to nonwork activities, such as hobbies or community service. Has it made us happier?
Looking at the evidence, the answer seems to be—emphatically not! Despite increasing material wealth, Americans are not happier. Research consistently shows that the factors that most contribute to an individual’s happiness include spending time with family and close friends, hobbies, and contributing to the community, and that the thing that people most hate is spending time in traffic.18 Yet people keep making choices that result in them spending more time at work and in traffic and less time with family and friends! But still they wait, thinking that someday, somehow, things will get better. They are waiting for a better job, a promotion, a new office, a new car, or maybe just a bigger television or fancier smartphone—something new to relieve the stress, disharmony, and boredom they have created in their own lives through their choices. These people are stuck in, as Dr. Seuss says, “a most useless place”:
The Waiting Place . . . for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go / or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go / or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or No / or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite / or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night / or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break / or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting. (Places)
Socrates and Seuss would agree that, when someone gets stuck waiting like this, something has gone fundamentally wrong with his way of thinking about “the most important matters” in life. Someday, he says to himself, I’ll be happy! The problem is that someday never comes, and he doesn’t have the courage or imagination to try something different. He needs to reexamine what he really values and what really makes him happy rather than just accepting the same old ideas about what he ought to value. Perhaps we need to leave the old, well-worn paths behind, and, like Seuss’s protagonist, “head straight out of town!” (Places)
The Places You’ll Go: The Journey of Life
You’ll look up and down streets. Look ’em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street.
And you may not find any you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. (Places)
If, as Dr. Seuss suggests, life is a journey, a fantastical adventure or game, how do we decide where to go, what paths to take? Once we strike out away from the well-worn paths of conventional wisdom—once we challenge what “everyone” believes and start asking questions—we’ll find that there are no easy answers. So how do we deal with what life gives us so that we can live the good and happy lives that we want?
According to Dr. Seuss, the answer is clear: You have brains in your head, feet in your shoes, so you need to use them and do the best you can with what life gives you. In other words, humans are rational beings, and we need to use our rational capacities to make the best decisions we can. In Plato’s Crito, as Socrates is facing a difficult decision about whether or not to escape from prison and avoid his execution, he tells his friend Crito: “We must therefore examine whether we should act
this way or not, as not only now but at all times I am the kind of man who listens to nothing within me but the argument that on reflection seems best to me.”19 Socrates faces an ethical dilemma. If he escapes from prison, he’ll be breaking the law and betraying all that he’s stood for in his life. But if he stays, he’ll be executed and leave his children without a father to care for and protect them. Either choice is ethically problematic. But because he’s spent his life examining himself and others and thinking about happiness, virtue, and other ethical issues, he is able to make a better decision and choose a better path.
In the Phaedo, Socrates’ friend Simmias provides a very Seussian metaphor for the situation we face as we navigate the journey of our lives: “One should achieve one of these things: learn the truth about these things or find it for oneself, or, if that is impossible, adopt the best and most irrefutable of men’s theories, and, borne upon this, sail through the dangers of life as upon a raft
. . .”20 As we sail through life, we’re going to face new situations and challenges that our previous life and experiences haven’t prepared us for. We’re going to have setbacks and failures, slumps and loneliness, hazards and dangers that we’ll need courage and wisdom to traverse. And “when you’re in a Slump, / you’re not in for much fun. / Un-slumping yourself / is not easily done” (Places). Especially in a rapidly changing world, we’ll continually face new challenges and new “games” that we need to learn to play in order to succeed. Sometimes things will go our way, but often, they won’t. The person who is able to live best and most successfully is someone who has developed the ability to think rationally and thoughtfully about what really matters, who can learn from her mistakes and continually improve the raft upon which she sails the seas of life, and who can make wise decisions. As Seuss says, “Life’s a Great Balancing Act” (Places). The key is to find the right balance.
Dr. Seuss and Philosophy Page 3
