A Philosophy for the Powerful

Once animated by revolutionary ardor, our secular intellectuals have reached a dead end. Today they pen books that reassure the powerful, providing a justifying mythology for America’s ruling elite. That’s the only reasonable way to read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern , a new book by Harvard English professor Stephen Greenblatt.

The Swerve recounts the discovery in 1417 of Lucretius’ philosophical epic On the Nature of Things by Poggio Bracciolini, a Renaissance humanist. This Latin poem, which was written a few decades before the time of Christ, presents the materialist philosophy of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. Greenblatt’s conceit is that the materialist philosophy given such memorable poetic form by Lucretius and restored to Western readers by Poggio revolutionized our conceptions of the meaning of life.

Recipient of the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2011, The Swerve sports the usual features of high scholarship: endnotes (42 pages), long bibliography, acknowledgments thanking professorial eminences. But I found myself gasping at the clichés masquerading as history. Monks sit in dimly lit dungeons contemplating cruel disciplines that they can inflict on themselves and others. For Christians, “Pleasure is a code name for vice.” The medieval world loathed the body and repudiated erotic desire.

Meanwhile, Greenblatt’s heroes, the Renaissance humanists, see through Christianity’s hypocrisy and mendacity. They are healthy men who enjoy life when they are not rummaging through monastic libraries in the noble pursuit of the surviving manuscripts of ancient literature that reveal a more humane pre-Christian past, one of genial pluralism and love of beauty with no hang-ups about pleasure. Lucretius is a patron of “dangerous thoughts.” Epicurean philosophy, which reduces everything to the interplay of material particles, or atoms, is “essentially erotic” and holds that “the universe is inherently sexual.”

Nietzsche warned against the comedians of modernity, by which he meant writers who tell easy stories about the corruptions and ignorance of Christianity while cheerily retailing a new alternative. The Swerve is not a contribution to our understanding of early modern history. It should instead be read as an upscale version of The Da Vinci Code ”or a Classic Comics version of Jacob Burckhardt.

It’s a shame, because Epicurus the philosopher and Lucretius the poet are important thinkers who are well worth serious consideration today, not the least because materialist views are so widespread. They understood and explained the spiritual appeal of a reductive materialism.

They held that everything that exists is made up of atoms. Their atomism had nothing to do with observation and experiment. They were attracted to atoms because they prized their simplicity or indivisibility (which is what atom literally means) and indestructibility. Atoms are infinite in number and remain in ceaseless motion, eternally combining in all sorts of configurations (such as you and me), and then dissolving (as our bodies rot after death).

Simplicity, indestructibility, infinity, and eternity”each suggests the invulnerability and deathlessness that Greeks ascribed to the gods. Epicurus held that true happiness comes when we become as much like atoms as possible, which is to say as indivisible and indestructible as possible. Since we are made up of atoms that will eventually disperse when we die, we cannot be indivisible and indestructible in a literal way. But we can live as if we were by cultivating imperturbability or peace of mind. If Epicurus had given the Sermon on the Mount, he would have pronounced: Blessed are those who are untroubled.

Unperturbed and untroubled. “Waste not, want not” is an old truism, but older still is the truth “Want not, want not.” So Epicurus counseled careful disciplines of desire. “If you wish to make Pythocles rich,” Epicurus wrote to someone about a mutual friend, “do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.” This strategy, argues Epicurus, will bring true pleasure, for “by pleasure we mean the state wherein the body is free from pain and the mind from anxiety.” As we all know, the reduction of desire is easier said than done, and his genius was to see the therapeutic value of materialism. If we recognize that everything is finally reducible to atoms”and that our lives, our culture, and indeed our world is but a passing, accidental configuration of atoms that will eventually disperse”we gain critical leverage over many of our desires, thus making it much easier not to want.

On the Nature of Things was and remains compelling because Lucretius uses his poetic gifts to draw his readers into the desire-reducing therapy of materialism. Concerned about the fate of your soul? Have no fear, your soul is but a temporary configuration of atoms. Do you fear death? Please remember that death is just part of the natural dissolution of all things, and when you die you will not suffer, because when you die you will be no more.

Lucretius also recognized, perhaps more so than Epicurus, that our lives are also agitated by our cultural ideals. He did not have at his disposal modern critical theory to unmask the pretenses of power, nor could he appeal to modern sociology or psychology to explain how we are socialized to embrace prevailing norms and ideals. But his materialism was enough. Who could be so foolish as to imagine that conquests and victories make one whit of difference? Do the indivisible and eternal atoms care if Rome falls?

Our sexual desires also agitate our souls. In a long and important passage in On the Nature of Things, Lucretius takes aim at Venus. The passion of lovers is “storm-tossed,” he writes, threatening the terrible pain of longing and anxious worries about betrayal. However, a thoroughgoing materialism can deliver us from these dangers as well. If we realize that sex is just a bodily function, a matter of friction and not spiritual communion, we can free ourselves from love’s profound threats to our tranquillity of mind. And should we be smitten, Lucretius advises us “to lance the first wound with new incisions; to salve it, while it is still fresh, with promiscuous attachments.” This seems like a hedonistic counsel, but it is not. Here as elsewhere, the therapy Lucretius seeks is disenchantment.

In The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts the indolent, troubled world of upper-crust young Americans during the Roaring Twenties. A Yale graduate from an old-money family, Tom Buchanan is the most conventional character, and in the opening scene he expresses a conventional upper-crust view. The white, northern races” that is to say, virile, strong, commanding men like Tom Buchanan”rightly rule. The mansion overlooking the Long Island Sound, the horses, the trust fund”he holds them in accord with the higher justice of racial evolution. It was a convenient social philosophy for American elites, one expressed most consistently in the doctrines of Social Darwinism, which provided a seemingly scientific justification for the impulse of the powerful to think of themselves as exempt from the old and limiting constraints of duty and conscience.

Today’s convenient philosophy for elites is a new materialism. Greenblatt demonstrates no interest in the ways in which Epicurus counseled modest desires and adopted a largely ironic view of society. The Swerve moves in the opposite direction, blustering again and again about the beauty-loathing, eros-denying evils of Christianity, and sighing in the usual postmodern way about pleasure and desire.

But on one point Greenblatt is true to On the Nature of Things , and this is the therapy of disenchantment. “Human insignificance”the fact that it is not all about us and our fate”is, Lucretius insisted, good news.” Indeed it is good news for Harvard professors, and for anyone else in positions of power. As materialism disenchants, the principles and norms and standards by which we can hold the powerful accountable melt away.

Postmodern nihilism often baffles religious men and women. How, we wonder, can people live if they think their lives have no meaning? Greenblatt’s selective celebration of Lucretius helps us understand why. Like the Social Darwinism and racial theories that eased the conscience of Tom Buchanan and gave him peace of mind in his supereminence, a materialist philosophy reassures those who hold power today. Because nothing we do in this vast cosmos governed by the laws of nature matters, because nothing lasts, the elites can do what they want and nobody can criticize them.

Lucretius’ poem is colored by a spirit of rebellion against prevailing opinion, but Epicurus was more consistent. He counseled his followers to conform to local custom, because given the truth of materialism it obviously doesn’t matter one way or the other. Stephen Greenblatt enjoys highlighting Lucretius’ spirit of critique, “speaking truth to power,” as they say. But an astute reader of The Swerve will sense that he recognizes that materialism provides the perfect philosophy for justifying the status quo. Rich and successful people should not be limited by the residual cultural power of Christianity”or by anything else. They should be free to pursue beauty and “deep pleasure” unhindered by . . . anything.