Why we need a bit of melancholy

As someone raised in a tradition that comes very close to what in the Western culture would be termed stoic (I happen to be very attracted to the writings of Seneca), I often wonder about the modern aversion to the melancholic disposition. 

Wondering perhaps is a wrong word. I’m appalled by how deeply entrenched is the psychological trait of cheapening joy in popular Western culture in its constant attempts to avoid, at all cost, the effects of sadness that sometimes make us appreciate joy more and deepen our commitment to life.

The Spanish-born Harvard professor and philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) put it well when he said: “Serious poetry, profound religion are joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself.” No doubt he would be at odds with our age and would be regarded by it as weird, even masochistic.

Chasing the thrill is the ultimate motive of our age; hence the obsession with sex or drugs, extreme sports and such things that come with addiction to adventure, perverted and otherwise.

Religion is one of the things whose joy is lost to the average modern man, or is sought for wrong reasons. In fact, our age finds religion irritatingly limiting. There frequently is general suspicion or thinly veiled hostility towards it.

Religion is no longer hated because it is intolerant (or something like that), but because it refuses to conform to the secular spirit. This is why wishy-washy religion, without rigorous precepts, is accepted, even celebrated, as being open-minded and enlightened. Here, open-mindedness is defined by how much one acquiesces with the spirit of the world.

Secularism has become predominantly hedonistic and egotistical. It has adopted a spirit of organised conscience that fosters fundamentalist intolerance, almost the same position which religion took during the Middle Ages. This is where a stoic disposition comes in handy in my coping with the world.

Stoicism is not necessarily the best outlook of life, for it is bleak and melancholic. But it is reasonable. “To an egotistical, hedonistic modern audience, Marcus Aurelius’ strictures on pleasure and the indulgences of sleeping, copulating and over-eating seem neurotic, and Stoicism itself seems over-rational and joyless” (Marcus Aurelius: A Life, by Frank McLynn, 2009).

It is easy to dismiss most of Marcus Aurelius’ philosophical advice in our age; in fact, his modern admirers tend to cherry-pick what suits them and ignore the rest as rambling of an agile but senile mind.

Stoicism is a temperament of a mind that is inertly turned towards self-awareness, towards constant attempts to improve not just its individual ethics but also collective social behaviour.

I’m certain our age would profit much by making a detectable melancholic streak an indispensable part of its hedonist culture.  After all, it is clear to most of us that there’s a spanner in the works of our nature. Stoics understand this as well as the fact that we live by advancing towards death, hence an attempt to strip the journey of cant.

The presence of salient serenity and incorrigible courage in the stoic temperament cannot be by coincidence. It is a resigned sense of natural acceptance, like the grain of sand to the desert. By and large, the stoics are quite reasonable, and as Marcus said: “What is reasonable is consequential social.” Social in antiquity’s language does not mean gregarious but, in our modern parlance, useful for collective upliftment.

It is to me no wonder that the Church Fathers identified stoicism as the helpful life outlook towards answering the call of Christ.

The Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, a contemporary stoic, put it poetically in his 1967 song “Suzanne”: “Jesus was a sailor when he walked on the water. And he spent a lot of time watching from his lonely wooden tower. And when he knew for certain, only drowning man could see him, he said all men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them.”