Brian Minhinnick
Preface
Modern people are faced with a perplexing existence. In the span of a few thousand years (just a tiny fraction of the time humanity has existed on Earth) we’ve gone from being tribal hunter gatherers to being post-industrial, globalized, netizen consumers. While those of us lucky enough to live in developed countries experience far less physical stress than ancient humans did, we face an avalanche of mental stressors instead. Homo sapiens did not evolve to face the life of a modern person.
Our prehistoric ancestors were blissfully ignorant, illiterate, and short-lived. They never faced decisions about whether or not to open a new credit card, what type of employment to seek, to sext or not to sext, which politician to vote for, which website to trust for their news, or 24/7 multimedia coverage of the most cruel and heinous crimes against humanity being commited around the globe. From the time we wake up in the morning there are blinking, beeping screens in front of our faces, vying for our attention, tugging at our emotions and trying to manipulate us into making decisions that benefit other people instead of ourselves. The emotional urges which used to benefit us in our struggles for survival in pre-agricultural times are now used to trick us into being fat, helpless cattle who are completely dependant on the corporate trough and have only the vaguest of understandings of the system which farms us and is destroying the planet around us. Such an existence is understandably bewildering, and at times can feel like a hell born from the demented union of Upton Sinclair and Franz Kafkas’ nightmares.
All this leaves us to wonder, how can we live long and prosper in the face of such challenges? There are thousands of self help books and gurus out there, all adding their static to the noise constantly assaulting us. How do we know which one is right? The only way to defeat ignorance and to realize ourselves as fully active and conscious human actors is to have a system for filtering useful signals from the noise. To build such a system, we must be able to recognize our emotions, acknowledge them and then gain control over them by not allowing them to control our decisions or actions unless it would be reasonable or logical. Further, recognizing that good and evil are relative constructions, we must adopt an ethical code which tries to do the most empircally measurable good for the most people.
This is easier said than done of course.
What examples are there for us to follow down this path to stoic enlightenment? The character Mr. Spock from Gene Rodenberry’s popular science fiction universe, Star Trek, is an excellent example. Mr. Spock has been featured in media for decades, and is one of the most popular and recognizable characters in Trekdom. He is half human, and half Vulcan, an alien race who supress their emotions due to their species’ past capacty for sudden and irrational violence. Sound familiar? Roddenberry’s fictional Vulcans can be seen as embodying two traditions from our own real world philosophies. The ancient Greek and Roman tradition of Stoicism enjoyed popularity for thousands of years, and advocated the control of one’s emotions, logic, and knowledge as the keys to living a good life. The second philosophy is John Stuart Mill and followers’ ethical system, known as Utilitarianism, which says that the most good should be done for the most people possible, and that is what ’good’ is.
The Way of Spock will explore what we can learn from these two philosophical traditions, using examples from Star Trek media, with a particular focus on Mr. Spock and other Vulcan characters. By reading this book you will boldly go where Vulcans and Roman Emperors alike have gone before, and learn to walk the path of a Stoic sage.