The Daily Stoic - Professor M.D. Usher on Living in Accordance with Nature

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

Ryan talks to professor M.D. Usher about his new book How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, the philosophical contradiction of the ancients practice of slavery, what the Stoics mean by living in accordance with nature, and more.M.D. Usher is a University of Vermont alumnus and joined the UVM faculty in 2000. Before attending UVM as an undergraduate he apprenticed in Germany as a post-and-beam carpenter and later earned his Ph.D. in Classics at The University of Chicago.Watch the Stoic (and life) Lessons of Hunting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9IBcoOit_4 Shopify has the tools and resources that make it easy for any business to succeed from down the street to around the globe. Go to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now.Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Make your mental health more than just another New Year’s resolution, with Talkspace. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC.Reframe is a neuroscience based smartphone app that helps users cut-back or quit drinking alcohol. Using evidence-based tools, techniques and content, To learn more go to JOINREFRAMEAPP.COM/stoic and use the code STOIC for 25% off your first month or annual subscription. Download Reframe on the App Store today.Novo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. This year, get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at bank novo.com/STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wanderer's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. When I first got my farm out here in the country six, seven years ago now, I had this little sign made and it's a, it's a, a couplet from the, the poet and satirist, Juvenile.

And it says, you ask me what I get out of my country place. The profit, gross, and net is never having to see your face. And I don't know, I like that part of the reason we moved out of the country was to have a quieter life, more introverted, philosophical, uh, studious life. Um, and it's been all that in so much more, um, but it's also given me paradoxically a better connection to nature, which the Stokes talk about, and to other people and to humanity. There's something about working the land, interacting with nature, raising animals, just watching the sunrise and set on the same little tank we have behind our house that gives you a connection to generations and generations and generations of people who've lived

a lifestyle in that specific land. The farmers who owned it before us, or the ranchers who owned it before us, the Native Americans who traveled these plains before them, and the animals who lived here before, you know, homo sapiens made it to America. There's just a sort of a profound connection. And as it happens, you know, the Stoics

were often farmers, certainly outdoors. As I talk about in today's interview, Mark's really, some of his most beautiful passages are about nature. Cato the elder, that would be Cato the younger's great, great grandfather, his essay on agriculture is one of the oldest documents that we have in the Latin language,

and it's all about how to be not just a farmer, but a profitable successful farmer. It's a fascinating document. We've done a bunch of daily stoke emails about it over the years. So anyways, when this new book came out, this book, how to be a farmer, an ancient guide to life on the land, by the Princeton University Press, whose series I have raved about, I carry how to be a leader here in the Paniportch bookstore, their translation of Horace, how to be content, their Seneca and Epictetus series on anger and freedom and death. We carry all these books to the beloved.

If you haven't read them, you should. You can check them out at thepainteaportch.com. I'll link them in the show notes. This new one, I was really excited, not just to read, but to interview the author, MD Usher, is a professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Vermont. But he also happens to be a farmer, and they own and operate the works in days farm, which is itself a little classical illusion you may or may not have got. They raise lamb and chickens

and they even make maple syrup there in Vermont. I wanted to have a conversation about farming, about nature. Remember the Stokes talk about living in accordance with nature. I felt like there was no one better to have this conversation with than Professor Us So, I was very excited to have this. And I am recording this the day after Thanksgiving, in between two days of deer hunting. First day, not so successful. I'm hoping tomorrow will be a little bit more successful, hoping to get a nice buck to get us through a good chunk of the year. And then I always like to have the deer processed and give out as much as I can. Two friends and family. You might not be pro hunting, but I do. And I did write an essay about this that will link in the notes as well, about the sort of stoic connection to hunting. Why I think

everyone should at least do it once. And if you're getting angry about this, I totally understand, but read the essay first. I think you'll like it. And read this new book, How to Be a Farmer, An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land. There's a wonderful little chunk in here from Musoneus Rufus. There's stuff in here from Kato the Elder, and a bunch of other fellow travelers along with the Stoics. And I really enjoyed this conversation with Professor Usher, and I think you will too. enjoyed this conversation with Professor Usher, and I think you will too. I loved the book. I live on 40 acres outside of Austin, Texas.

So I'm always interested in what the ancients have to say about country life. I thought I'd start us in the most controversial place we could possibly start with, which is reading about Kato the Elder. He is this sort of fascinating, he writes one of the first essays on agriculture, one of the earliest things we have surviving in the Latin language, books that is, seems to be this sort of frugal, efficient, down-to-earth guy.

And then you're reading about him, and Plutarch tells us about his attitude towards his slaves, which I found that to be striking to say the least, basically that he would sort of wear them out, grind them down into dust, and then sell them to get rid of them, even, and Plutarch, who didn't seem to have much in the way of a problem with slavery, even he found this to be reprehensible. I just I thought we'd riff on that for a minute. Yeah, well, you're right about that. When they're worn out, you throw them away. And in fact, the kind of terminology he uses to talk about slaves is similar to the terminology that Callie Mella uses when he talks about donkeys in the book. So, they're

fools, right? They're a useful tool on the farm, but no, it is reprehensible. And it's sort of a white noise running in the background of all these texts because Roman farming was a slave industry, really at all periods, however, if I can put in a quick however, you do see people to crying the practice. Not only do you see bonafide stoics to crying slavery as an institution like Sennaka is famous letter of, you know, they're serowy, but he says, emo hominage, they're men too, people too. But you find people like Pliny the Elder talking about these Latifundia that were staffed by staffed, that were run by slaves and saying that they're the ruin of the Republic, that the ruin of the empire that we now live under. So, you know, there are voices that were of discontent

to the institution, but, you know, there was no, there was Spartacus, but I mean, there was no, nobody to say definitively, we need to get, you know, the rid of this. It struck me as an analogous to the founding of America, you sort of have these two agrarian societies It struck me as an analogous to the founding of America. You sort of have these two agrarian societies that are deeply philosophical. And you have people sort of questioning the institution

and then Washington just like Kato sort of famously gets down and works in the field. So he knows how backbreaking the labor is. They all have this sense that, or often have this sense that, or often have this sense that there is something reprehensible about it. And they would look at the people who were particularly cruel, and they would see that as a moral evil, and yet sort of all, for 2,000 years, essentially leave the institution

as it was. Well, thank goodness that the ancients had one one up on us on that regard and that slavery was never a racial institution. It was never a racial issue at all in antiquity. It was a residual of war. And so, you know, you and I, Ryan, could find ourselves as slaves, you know, just by being in the wrong, wrong place at the wrong time. Polybius was a slave, and he worked for the Skippy, I was in the root of Greek, piece of Roman history in Greek. So it was conquest- It was conquest-based.

It was conquest-based, but it was also universal, one just the Romans. I mean, I think slavery or slavers might be like the second oldest profession, if you know what I mean. Sure. It's been around since the dawn of Mesopotamia and before. And yeah, you look at the Spartans, right?

And it's this sort of fascinating warrior culture and it only exists because it sits atop a system of exploitation and plunder effectively. Right, and they had the, of course, they had a whole institutionalized form of slavery of their own. It was, right, it wasn't chattel slavery, but the Helots that basically provided them

fed the, fed the war engine of Sparta. All right, well, yeah, I just thought, I thought it was fascinating because you have these people, and actually, I've talked about this before, but there's this fascinating letter that Jefferson writes about sort of comparing American slavery to Roman slavery. And he says, you know, where is, he's like, where is our epictetus, where is our Terrence?

You know, his rationalization was like, that the Romans, they had like better slaves because you were sort of trying to rationalize the inferiority of African slaves to justify the horrendous cruelty of chattel slavery. It did feel like the Romans were more of two minds about the slavery than 2000 years later, the Americans were, that the Americans had sort of deluded themselves a little bit more about it. And maybe this goes into the new world and the diseases.

And they seem to have made a more biological argument for it, which obviously does not hold up well. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's again, it's something that you can't shake. You can't deny, but thankfully, we've outgrown it. Now we have woofers. Yes. Yes, for people who don't know what that is, it's a magical way that anyone who

owns a farm or property can get free labor, but by accepting volunteers on your farm, which is actually how I got into it. My wife and I were thinking about doing it and she said, you know what, before we do something like this, I'm gonna actually go work on a farm and she ended up working on a farm that's now our neighbor out out here. That's great. Well, that was a smart move and now our neighbor out here. That's great.

Well, that was a smart move and we're glad to work out. Well, let's talk about something less negative in slavery. Let's talk about the philosophical magic of composting. That was one of my favorite chapters in the book. Good, thank you. I like that. It was fun to do. It was fun to think of it in those terms.

So you're referring to the passage of the Cretus from the Day of the Natura. I think it's book two. No, it's book one. I can't even remember early on in the Day of the Natura, where he uses the example of regenerative cycles of nature to illustrate the point that the philosophical point of atomism and epicureanism in particular that nothing comes from nothing or returns to nothing. So the idea is that you've got just a whole big bunch of energy or stuff out there if you want to look at it that way with atoms, small little bits of stuff, but that there's that way with atoms, small little bits of stuff, but that there's, nothing's lost or nothing's gained in organic transfer

in this universe that we live in. So, the Crecius uses that argument and he looks to farming in particular and to the soils and that things are just broken down into their constituent parts and become something new. Just like you and I will be broken down into their constituent parts and become something new, just like you and I will be broken down into our constituent parts and be pushing up daysies later.

That's essentially the argument. And it just dawned on me like this is a philosophy of compost. It's a closed loop dynamic, but closed loop regenerative system that really represents what the biosphere fears all about. And it's remarkable that I find remarkable that Epicurinism, Adamism in general, kind of saw that even if they were wrong, that everything was reducible to substance as opposed to energy. It was a pretty keen insight, I think, on their part. I think they trumped the stokes on that, in my view. No, it's pretty incredible that, yeah,

we're talking about this slave society that's so backwards in so many ways. And without basically any scientific tools whatsoever, they're also writing poems about how the universe is made up of atoms. And they get something so right, even though they weren't totally correct about it, but they were largely right, you know thousands of years before we had any real way of proving it one way or another. Right, there's two ways to look at that. I mean, I at least I find people look at it two different ways. Some people will say like, wow, they must have, you know, had some sort of secret inside or of secret insight or knowledge to have them think that way.

But I look at it more pragmatically. The book I published just before this one for Cambridge was called Play-Dose Pigs and other ruminations. And essentially, what it is is the back story of sustainability and complexity science in ancient thinking, and not just philosophy, but also like, you know, religious systems, how they are sort of systems oriented. But so the power of analogy of thinking analogically, I mean, that just does not go away.

I mean, analogies are not perfect, but if you have a analogic mind and you think that way and you cultivate, you know, analogies, you can stumble upon something that is accurate because when everything is, it's about a relationship and a ratio and if everything is connected, you're bound to kind of stumble on something that's close to the truth. Well, that goes to the analogy you made, which is that the same thing that happens to our plants and food and a tree that falls in the woods is also what will happen to us.

And so there is this profound philosophical implication for coming to this idea of regeneration. And it's a source of comfort for the Epicureans that, you know, you don't have to fear death because, you know, nothing bad is going to happen afterwards. And it also is a positive value that, you know, you should enjoy life, you know, while you have it. Gather your rose buds while you may. Do so temporarily, right? Not, you know, it's not a pleasure seeking heat in this viewpoint Not, you know, it's not a pleasure seeking heat and this viewpoint that, you know, we commonly associate with Epicureanism, but it's something that we can just enjoy our friends, enjoy the life and time we have,

and we should, we must. Has living out in nature and raising livestock particularly, has it changed your relationship with death? I have found, I think that was the thing that surprised me most, just like, even if you take really good care of everything, even if you're on top of it. I mean, I had to kill a possum like three days ago that was in my chicken coop in the middle of tearing

some of my pet chickens to shreds, and just the sort of the ordinaryness of life and death in the sort of agricultural life. It's just so, I mean obviously it would have been commonplace in the ancient world as well, but it's I think so in such stark contrast to our antiseptic lives in let's say the city that I think it does force you to chew on some of this stuff a bit. Absolutely. And the only way you're going to get it in the modern world is if you like, you choose it. I mean, because we are so technologically disconnected from nature and those processes, and it's almost like an ideological decision you've got to make

that I'm going to experience this because I know that this is what it, part of what it means to be a human being. And I need this, you know, whether you become a farmer and it becomes your profession, that's another matter. But, you know, there's a day when everybody knew how to kill a chicken to eat it, if you were going to eat it. Sure. And a killing a possum, you know, over a chicken wouldn't bother, you wouldn't think twice about it.

Of course you would do that. You know, once upon a time people were pragmatic and they lived much more closely to, again, the whole life cycle, life and death both. So, Dancery, the front part of your question is that, yes, being doing this, farming, we raise sheep, you definitely see it all the time. You, I mean, the moment when a lamb and a, and a you, a mother of you, is most susceptible to death, is at that moment of birth, which is like hugely paradoxical, right?

Sure, that's when they're both in and in. Talk about regeneration. Exactly. So, but, but it's also the most beautiful moments, right? And you, you know, that use got the genetic memory to, no, we call it instinct knows how to lick that lamp off. The lamp knows how to respond and find the otter. It's like, you look at it and it's like a miracle, but it could all go south in like, you know, five minutes, right?

Depending on, you Depending on whatever. And then sometimes things happen where a mother's reject their young. I mean, that's not like a freak thing of nature that happens a lot. Right. And I've always thought like, hmm, is that just bad genetics?

Is it just a bad mother? And do we have to call that you? Because she just doesn't have that instinct well, good enough to warrant keeping her. And I've come around to the view that actually I think they know what they're capable of. I think that what happens when a mother rejects a baby, offspring, is that she knows what her carrying capacity is. Like she's kind of aware, I don't think I've got enough milk for that.

Or I'm like enough milk for that. Or I'm like super exhausted after that, particularly a difficult birth. Yeah. And it's like, it's a calculation that she's making. So anyway, when you're involved in farming, how would I also have learned that? That's just anecdotal. That's not a scientific statement that I just made. But it's something, how else would you come to it and how else could you

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You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. And then to go to the point about Cato and his relationship with the slaves, you then sort of get this weird insight into, like, there's this financial component, right? You're like, how much have I got to spend, like, whether it's on veterinary care or time and energy, right?

Like, your decision of like, should we call this lamb because it's not a good mother? There's this sort of weird element where you're forced to make these decisions that are sort of matters of life and death in some cases. That yeah, and you know, outside of, I don't know, the army or the upper echelons of politics, people are just not ordinarily in a position to make.

We've deferred that authority elsewhere, and suddenly you're the one that decides, hey, is it worth, I bought some cows, when we bought our place that came with some cows that the person had had the property before us had run and they sort of told us they were much younger than they actually were. And it turns out they're very, very old and then you've got to make a decision, hey, are you going to spend, you're going to call a vet out to put this very old cow down?

Are you going to let it starve to death? Or am I gonna have to go out there and dispatch this animal who's eaten out of my hand, you know, personally, and suddenly, again, life and death isn't this abstract thing or this thing that happens to you and you feel sad about it, but it's a thing that you're an active participant in.

That's a whole other element. Totally true. It sounds like you already know how to be a farmer. These are some of the things that really distinguish, the hobbyist from somebody who really does it and must do it. And there's a whole bunch of, you know, you know about the Stoics.

There's a whole bunch of necessity involved in farming. You know, like this massive, you know, oppressive necessity that you just have to face and you have to do. But the notion of profit, and you write that as per versus it is to our way of thinking today and unacceptable as it is, you know, because Kato is looking at his slaves as tools and as, you know, instruments, instrument, the instrumentum is what instrumenta is what he calls them Of course they're dispensable, you know like any tool once it's worn out you start away now It's you know that's that's

That's awful. Well, I'm way to think about it. Yes, but The thing about profit that you mentioned is also something people fail to see. And actually, frankly, I don't engage with myself to the same degree that a real farmer will have to because sure I have a daily job, right? I write books and I teach classes. I'm really happy for that day job, but we're bigger than just a hobby farm, so we know it doesn't.

But the word for profit in Latin, you may know this, is fruit juice, which means fruit. So for a farm to be fruitful, fruit to osus, means for it to be profitable. And the ancients were really down on bad farming. I mean, the modern Italians are already kind of food showviness and kind of like landscape showviness in some ways. They're very, very regional, particular about stuff. And that's a compliment, by the way,

not I've put down for the Italians. The Romans were the same thing. They looked at property that was unused and they thought, this is a waste. You know, in fact, that's what they called it, a wasteland. And so we have, we have that kind of that view on the part of the Romans that, you know, land is meant to be managed and used, not exploited, but used sort of in a cooperative way to produce fruit juice, which is food and profit. No, to go to one other point about this life and death that I thought was interesting is so it's dear season here in Texas. And so my sister was visiting for Thanksgiving. And I went yesterday, I didn't see anything.

I'm going to go probably tomorrow. And I said, hey, you should, you should come with me. Just come sit in the deer stand. We'll spend a couple hours together and maybe we'll get a deer. And she goes, ah, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to see like, I don't, I don't want to touch a dead animal is basically what she said. And I was like, you know, I just watched you spend three hours

holding a dead turkey all day, you know, cooking it and prepping it as if it was very different than what I'm about to go do in the pasture. And in fact, you know, this deer, which roams freely and wildly on the property because they don't have high fence, is probably, and certainly the way I'm dispatching it, is far more humane and natural and timeless than this factory farm's turkey that we bought,

even though we tried to buy something that checks a various boxes. And so it is interesting how we, it's not that we think we're above it. We just don't want to know about it, right? We just sort of detach ourselves from it and then act as if that sort of removes our culpability, but we're fine to have other people do it in our names. Yeah, this woman named Alexis Shotwell wrote a book called Against Purity came out a couple years ago and I used it in the other book. I just mentioned to you, Plato's pigs, where she basically says, yeah, that's like the Western European,

the white Western European American problem is that we think we can live a life free of toxins and completely intercept us our lives. You kind of can with the technology that we have, but it's a false life. It's a false consciousness. It's not going to get you anywhere. In fact, it's going to be harmful in the end because you get defamiliarized from what makes us human. I mean, we're animal people or animals too. So, yeah, what you're describing is interesting. I really think that I've always thought this, but I'm thinking about it more recently that, the ancients were, they were earlier than we are.

They were closer to both the perils and prospects of their environments in pretty much every respect. I mean, they saw death, they were agents of death. They were closer to all these things. And they had a, just a, I think it yields a sensitivity in a strange way to describe it, a sensitivity. Once you know what that is, like having to kill an animal or dealing with death on the farm, which happens all the time,

you actually don't become desensitized to it. You just kind of become, you realize it for what it is and it gives you kind of an outlook that I would just describe as, just the ability to react sensibly and earnestly, carefully. I don't know what the right word is No, I agree it's you sort of it

When you feel it, it's like you're connecting with something that was always there like I suppose it's a very sort of primal or Essential part of who we are so like when you when you go hunting let's say or you have to Dispatch an animal in the farm or whatever, there is this sort of unfamiliarity, this sort of, you know, the nerves of it or whatever. And then you also, I think as it goes on though, you're like, not that I'm meant to do this, but you're like, I'm more familiar with this than perhaps I would have imagined I would be. Well, there are people who say like once a hunter gatherer, always a hunter gatherer. I mean we just sort of sublimate that in other ways. So is it better to then be just a hunter

gatherer? Probably, at least to know how to do it. Yes. And so that's really interesting. But anyway, go ahead. I was just going to say that that's, you know, we got into farming for ideological reasons. I mean, it wasn't just we weren't born into it and my wife from Manchester, England, she's a city girl. I didn't grow up with that. But we were very intentional, like, you know, in a Peruvian kind of way, deliberate about wanting to make this connection that you're,

we've been talking about for the past 10 minutes here. And that has been the, I think that's been the best takeaway from farming. I mean, you know, it's developed, it's kind of, it's been developmental for me as a person. I think I'm probably a better person for it. And certainly more patient than I ever used to be in my life because you can't make a donkey go anywhere that doesn't want to go or even a cow or sheep. Sheep will go the way you don't want them to go. So you just can't yell at them. You can't beat them with a stick.

That doesn't, none of that works. And you just have to learn to kind of cooperate, you know, cooperate with them. So there's idea of man dominating nature. Oh, I think that's kind of a myth too. You've got to cooperate with nature. Otherwise you get nothing out of it. When nature is sort of the logos,

nature is the rhythm and you're connecting to it and going along with it. And maybe you can direct it a little bit one way or another, but it is a reminder of who's in charge. It's true. That's a good way to put it. Tracking is, we just talked about hunter-gatherers. Tracking is a great example of that. You have to kind of, like a Kalahari bushman, whatever, tracking an animal, you have to cooperate with all the signs that you're seeing and put them all together, and you have to be patient. And signs that you're seeing and put them all together,

and you have to be patient. And you can be, you know, this persistence tracking can take, you know, days before you get your quarry. So that is character building. Well, I want to talk about donkeys in a second, but I think when people hear that you're operating this farm, I imagine one of the reactions is that that's somehow very different or unusual for a philosopher to do, which is I think an interesting, I don't want to say indictment, but it kind of is an interesting indictment or at least statement about Where philosophy has gone because in the ancient world they would have been seen as like this as one of my favorite chapters in the book and I think it's one of the only ones that actually is directly from Estelle you have Musoneus Rufus saying that and for people listening Musoneus Rufus is epic teetuses

philosophy teacher Musoneus Rufus basically says Titus's philosophy teacher. Moussini's Rufus basically says, there is no better profession for a philosopher than a farmer. Specifically, I think talks about shepherds as being, you know, even down further in the types of farmers. But talk to me about the connection between philosophy and farming. Okay. Well, let me just say about Musonius. What he, the two main things he says that farming is good for,

is that even though it involves physical work, even though it involves physical work, it's not the kind of work that will distract you from ruminating and thinking about all the things you need to think about to become a better person. So it provides that kind of time for self-reflection and cultivating the mind. Again, paradoxically, you work with your body, but that work is kind of frees you to work with it, to kind of cultivate the mind. And the other thing he says that's good about it is that you're kind of on the spot. And you're also under, under somebody's watchful eye. In other words, usually farming is somehow a cooperative venture, involves other people, and particularly he

talks about, you know, the teacher and the student working out in the fields together. Well, if you get pissed off or you show impatience or you show lack of character or if you show laziness or intolerance of somebody else's faults, well, it's on full display. People are going to see it. So it kind of holds you accountable in a way. And I see this with my wife. I mean, she's a better person than I am. You know, she will, you know, I mean, she's, she's got the patience of Job and she has that just by nature, that kind of cooperative approach to everything. I'm more of a, let's just get this over with and fix it and do it and go on to the next thing, whatever it is. And, you know, I've learned really from her how awful, you know,

some of my attitudes are, and it, where does it come out? It doesn't really come out in my human relationships. It comes out in, in, in interacting with the animals when you get like inpatient or you, because they can feel the energy, right? They can, they react to the energy and the actions are taking in. Yeah, I, I've driven cows through offense because I wasn't taking my time. I got frustrated and now it's like, now I've got to spend six hours fixing this fence. All right. So yeah, anyway, so that's that's one thing. The other thing that and it's not it's not even a Greco-Roman idea per se though it does have some resonance with stoicism and idea per se, though it does have some resonance with stoicism that I get out of farming is this notion of like darmic detachment. So in other words, you do your like in the Bhagavad Gita, right? Arjuna

doesn't, he's terrified. He's, you know, repulsed by the notion that he has to kill his cousins on the battlefield. And then Krishna comes down and tells them, you know, well, in Vegas, it's a long discourse about you need to do what your duty is in life, whatever that is. For him, it's a warrior, Arshm is a warrior. And so you need to fulfill that duty in life, but you need to act with detachment. So in other words, you need to be kind of emotionally detached from the activity that you do, or maybe psychologically detached. It doesn't mean you're going to be a robot or anything like that,

but you have to actively cultivate this notion of being detached from the results of action. Do it with all your might. Farming teaches you that like nothing else because the outcomes are so unpredictable. Whether you're a crop farmer Depends on the weather or you're an animal farmer also depends on the weather, but it depends on so many different things I mean sheep 101 is like whatever chem go wrong will go wrong and a sheep wants to die. That's the first given Sheep will want to die. I mean, so you're trying to prevent that. You do everything you can, but then still you come up short.

So to be able to cope with that, you have to, I found that you just have to have this, you know, you do everything you can, you do well, you do it to the best of your ability. You make sure you close that gate, you make sure you're thinking in the future, you're planning properly, you're not lazy, you're not forgetting, you're not forgetting, but you're not putting something

off, procrastinating. But at the same time, you still just can't think that it's a guarantee that it's gonna come out the way you want it to because it won't. Yeah, I think of the Gita, it says like you're entitled to the labor, but not the fruits of the labor, to go back to the thing you were saying earlier. And so, you know, at the core of stoicism is this dichotomy of control.

What's up to you? What's not up to you? You control if you do everything right, but you don't control if it rains. You don't control if they come down with this or that. You don't control if a coyote comes or a mountain lion comes or you don't control what your neighbors do. For me, the country life thing,

the animals I'm okay with, it's the, you know, it's the other people who choose to live out in the country that tend to test my patience for the most part. Yeah, but I live in the People's Republic of Vermont. You probably have it too. I mean, like, you know, I say this, the wonderful part about being in the countries you can do whatever you want, the worst part about living in the countries that everyone else can do whatever they want. And for some people, that means collecting, you know, broken down cars in their front yard

or burning their trash or shooting an AR-15 off in the morning. And you know, that just goes with the territory and all you can do is accept it and try not to load the people that you live next to. Right. Well, it has that passage in there about good neighbors. You know, good fences make good neighbors, but you have to also cultivate that relationship, especially, can. And have you found that farming has made you a better philosopher and classist, or is it challenge, is it, is it fought for the same resources? Well, it certainly has changed the tack I'm taking in my,

my thinking and research and writing. So when I wrote that book, Plato's Pigs, that was the moment where I kind of put all the eggs in one basket up to that time, we've been farming for about 20 years. Up to that time, I had kind of lived a double life, right? I was, I was classisist by day and farmer at home and never really thought about integrating, you know, them philosophically speaking or in terms of like, you know, worldview. And I mean, I had thought about it,

but I never thought about doing it professionally like writing about and being public about it. But with that book, I did merge the two. So I used my training and my aptitudes in for, you know, in classics and my experience in farming to come up, you know, with basically an argument that, you know, the West is not, I mean, basically the canonical literature of classics has a lot to say that speaks to us in contemporary terms about sustainability and about holistic interconnections of things in nature and how we need to be a part of that. And so in that way, I think it has made me better classicist because I think I'm more useful now. I mean, I think I actually think maybe that I feel like,

what I say and what I'm thinking and feeling about, what I'm reading in these ancient texts matters, because it's translatable. I mean, I mean by that, translatable into life choices, even into something as know, crazy, something as crazy as policy making, you know. And so the book I'm writing now is kind of about that. You like the title, it's called, Sukundum Naturam, and it's, you know, according to nature,

and the overarching argument of the book is that, is that it's kind of like that, the creitious passage that, you know, if nature works this way, you know, as a closed loop dynamic system, then the economy should work that way too, right? And so should the decisions that we make that, you know, within that, within the economy. So how are we gonna power the grid? Well, solar energy is makes sense. So does wind energy because it involves that same principle that exists in nature of a closed loop dynamic system.

So there's an analogical thinking that can take you a long way because we have the technology to actually implement these things. Do we have the technology to actually implement these things. Do we have the will? No, probably not. And do we have the kind of economy that can tolerate it? No, not yet, but we need it. So anyway, don't you think? I've got to imagine that you have a set that of skills and a certain self-sufficiency that's probably anomalous amongst your philosophical peers, right? That again, in the ancient world, would have been, it would have been the exact opposite. You know, like Socrates is a soldier.

Musoneus Rufus is a political advisor and does all these other things. It is interesting how as philosophy has become more and more specialized, I do feel like the philosopher, man or woman, has become more of a sort of an academic figure than a sort of a real-world person who is unlike you, or sort of contrasting with you, not down in the earth, touching real things, doing real things in the real world. That's true. I mean, one of your guys, when I say your guys with a stoic sage, Clientys, you know, used to be a gardener.

Yeah. He was a water carrier. Exactly. Antes, you know, used to be a gardener. Yeah, he was a water carrier. Exactly. And at some time, a boxer, you know, so they did have life experience. You're probably familiar with Pierre Hadot. Yes.

Philosophy is a way of life. You know, I read that when it first came out in English translation, and I'm rereading it now, some of it in French, because I'm in. All the time favorite books. Well, okay, well, it should be because it was revolutionary. And I'm kind of, I read it back then, but now I'm rediscovering it.

I just love that because the argument that all ancient philosophy, even from the elites, like Plato and Aristotle, was all about how to live well, how to live a full, true, full life that is in sync with the way the world really is. No holds barred. Like, you know, whatever it takes to reach that point, that's what ancient philosophy was all about. Yes, there are these petty arguments within it, but ultimately, that was the thrust of it. And so you're right, the entrance had it. It was a lifestyle, a way of life, and not just something taught in universities.

Well, it's like they all had, you said you have a day job. It's like the Stoics all had day jobs. And then philosophy was the secondary practice, right? Even in meditations, Marcus really talks about how philosophy basically can't be your stepmother. Philosophy has to be your real mother, and then you have this other thing that you do. But I sort of saw it as a balancing act.

You have your real world experience where you're interacting with real people and you're being challenged as a merchant or a soldier or whatever. And then you also have your philosophical practice and the two are informing each other just as you found that, oh, hey, my understanding of a farm and philosophy now creates real insights

that can inform policymakers and consumers and fellow farmers. you know, policy makers and, you know, consumers and fellow farmers, because I, but, but either one of those independently would not have been as fruitful. Right. That's why I like the whole generation of like the people, you know, the World War One, you know, poets and a lot of the people who served, you know, in either World War One, World War Two, that were, you know, people of persons of letters, you know, people who were living very at or philosophically inclined, you know, the Brits especially. Who? The Brits especially. Yes, it's like a whole generation of poets and writers. Exactly. And then there's just, there's this, it gives an authenticity to their work for me because of that life experience.

I mean, it wasn't farming, but it was, you know, it was a life or death kind of experience. And it changed them. And, you know, sometimes harm them, but it was, there's something that gives that authenticity to me. I mean, Bitcoin Stein wrote the Trock Tottos while he was like in the trenches of World War I, for instance, even like go back a couple of generations. René Descartes wrote, you know, the discourse on method when he was like serving as a mercenary in the Dutch army. And he was like locked himself in a room for some quiet time and to think about what's really important. And he writes the discourse on method. So I think, I I think T. Lawrence was talking about how to translate the Odyssey or the Iliad,

you have to have done a variety of things to be able to speak to Odysseus' experience. Yeah, the sort of the philosopher adventurer is an archetype that doesn't really exist as much anymore these days. I guess you get Lawrence of Arabia quoting the misdeus, when he's on trial, and then he carries Apulias as Golden Assam

as saddlebag when he's out there fomenting the herb revolts. Anyway, that's a different generation and had its own problem, no doubt about it, but there is something about the Vita contemplativa and the Vita activa meshing that is really important, now more than ever, because we're losing it. And I don't remember the Latin expression,

but also the sort of sound mind in a strong body. The idea of like active body, active mind is also I think something that you can lose if you just sit behind a desk all day. True. Main sauna, in corporate sauna. That's you do. What do we do? We do. What are we doing now? what do we do? We do. I'm a test call day. What we doing now? Well, so talk to me about living with accordance with nature because I feel like of all the stoic phrases that I hear people ask about the most and that I probably, if I'm answering it, feel like I'm on the shakiest ground. This is one of those things that is repeated incessantly amongst the philosophers, and it's like no one bothers to actually define what it is. Maybe it's just one of those things that gets lost, but what does it actually mean?

All right, well, I'll go out on shakie ground here too on a limb. So, well, it means many things, even in antiquity, it meant many things because, because nature is a slippery concept. You know, it can mean so many different things and it's, it's, it's not a fixed entity. So, but like, I'll just give a couple of examples. So, we talked about Lucretius before. So, living according to nature for an epicurean means that your ethics proceeds from your physics. So in other words, the ethical system that you have is based on an understanding of how the world is strung together and how it works physically, like, no, so scientifically, we would say. That's what the Epicurean's meant

by living according to nature. The Stokes had a different cosmology and a different picture of how the universe was sprung together, but they still had that same idea that your ethics should proceed from your physics. They fudged it a little bit. I think they kind of adjusted their physics to fit their ethics, but they used this image, you're probably familiarged it a little bit. I think they kind of adjusted their physics to fit

their ethics, but they use this image, you're probably familiar with it, of the egg. So, like, you know, stoic, stoic, the stoic philosophical system is like an egg. So, you've got the outer shell is logos, is like logic, but logic, not just like formal logic, but discourse as well, like just speaking. So the arts of Lagos are the chef. The ethics is the white part, the album and then the physics of the yolk. So what does it mean to live according to nature for a stoic? I have an idea. I'm going to spring it on you now. So the concept of oikéosis in stoicism or affinity for each other. Affinity for each other, but I'm going to say it, I'm going to be even more general than that are affinity or our relationships to our environments because stoic use this

term in many of the examples that they give come from the animal kingdom. So an example is animals know what they're supposed to do by instinct, we say by instinct. And they never, they don't, they don't veer from that. I mean, they're pretty consistent. They have this instinctual urge to do the right thing according to their nature. We call it modern modern scientific terms,

it's called proprioception. They're aware of what they're doing bodily, physically in the environment that they occupy, whatever that is, could be an amoeba, could be a deer. Humans, the stoic said, we have a problem, and the problem is reason. Now, the problem is also a tool, but the fact that we have the noodle means that we can deceive ourselves or we can make, we have will, we have volition, we can choose the wrong course of action. of not living according to nature. And so therefore we need to fix it. And they had the whole solution of, you know, getting, getting back to nature and meant,

getting back to human nature, where virtue was everything. And rationality was the access point for, for that, that, that, that, that, that. So, this notes, I actually kind of think it's like the first environmental philosophy, where they, where philosophy where they argue that human beings and human beings like animals need to stay within the bounds and the confines

of what they were created for, for lack of a better word, what they are by nature. And so, so Kundum Nathuram, in that way of thinking, is knowing your limits and knowing your bounds and knowing your proper reactions and actions and how all those fit together with that environment. So I don't know if that's one answer to that. So what's a modern application? Here's what I think about that. You've heard of the concept of like bio-memory, right?

Where you invent Velcro from the way like seed pods, stick on, whatever that's called, I don't know, the technical terminology, but Velcro was invented that way. And they invent all sorts of gadgets, based on how things work in nature, because I think, well, nature's got a good design, we can mimic that, flight, et cetera.

Yeah, I mean, I think that this, it's kind of like a form of bio mimicry. So as the world works, so should we model to the degree that we can, the way human societies work or the way our interactions with others work on those sorts of relationships. So I have been a little curious though then, how does living in accordance with nature bump into what they call the naturalistic fallacy? Like just because it's natural doesn't mean that it's right or just because it happens in nature doesn't mean that it's right. Right. No, that's true. And I think the stoic answer to that would be that we have,

human beings have a soul for one thing. They believe that, and we have rationality, which is a component of that soul. So we have a dimension of experience, we also have recursive thought and consciousness. So our interaction would be different because then other species in nature for that reason. And so that we would have to define what was what was quote unquote natural for us, factoring in those elements as well. I think that would be what the Stokes would say about that. But it's not so simplistic, it's just because it exists in nature.

Go out and do likewise. Yeah, I don't think that that's what they're suggesting and recommending. And that's not what I'm thinking and suggesting recommending to. There's something also qualitatively different about a human being. Animals don't write books about us.

We write books about them. There's something to that. But that's a bit the mystery of consciousness is something we're not going to solve that here today. Now, I mean, one of the things I, I think, loosely connected to this that I've always found the most compelling in some of the Stoke ranks, particularly in Marcus Aurelis, just, you know, supposedly this sort of dour-depressive guy, I've always loved the observations about nature, which made me think he was much more agrarian or outdoorsy than we perhaps think.

You know, he talks about the way that grain bends under its own weight, talks about the flex of foam on a bore's mouth, the way that ripe olives fall from the tree. He clearly spent a lot of time outside looking very closely at things, being very present. And then there's a great phrase from Sena Kowri who says, you know, the whole world is a temple of the gods. The idea of the farm or life or the outdoors is this sort of temple, this magical place,

kind of in the way that John Murat talks about it. I feel like we don't talk about that enough, particularly with the Stokes, that they were in love with the natural world. Yeah, that's terrific. I mean, you know, for Marcus, I mean, he wrote the meditations while he was in a tent, you know, on campaign in Asia.

So he was seeing plenty of the outdoors. And you're right. I mean, and both the Greeks and the Romans, they had great affection for their environs. And yeah, maybe you're right, that we don't think about that enough from the Stoics. But just sort of going through the, I think, like the transcendentalist,

it's sort of like you go outside and you really look at what nature is, the canvas of nature. You're sort of looking at the world through the eyes of a poet or an artist. Again, the stoics are supposed to be seen as these sort of depressive sort of resigned figures, but to me that seems very at odds with the love of beauty that

comes through in their philosophical writings. Yeah, and I think you're right about that. And the Epicureans were that way too, because the school of Epicurus was called the Garden, because that's where they first met and that idea of spending time together in nature. Yeah, it's resonant. So do you have donkeys? We have donkeys.

How many of you got? Just two. They're called Turks and K-Coss. That's where we'd rather be in Vermont February. I've got two donkeys also. I bought one when someone was liquidating a petting zoo, which is about the saddest craigslist that I've ever seen in my life.

And then I bought another one also from a lady on Craigslist. And they're wonderful. They're like big dumb dogs with the stronger opinion about how things should be. That's a good description. Ars came to us in a similar way. They were, and I can be down from people who were horse people who had these animals and they were moving to North Carolina.

And they couldn't take them with them. And one of them actually was a therapy donkey. So it's like a certified trained therapy donkey. That would be Turks. And what do you use them for? For us, they just hang out with the cows and they keep away like coyotes and mountain lions and stuff. Now, having verified that they actually do that. Well, so one day one of them came back all cut up and the vet thinks that he he'd he got in a scrape with a mountain lion or something like that. We haven't lost anything to mountain lion, so it's hard to prove a negative, but it does seem like they keep things away.

You want to trade donkeys then? I have to. Because the reason we got the donkeys were whereas for to be guard animals for the sheep. Yeah. Because we have one pasture that's about, you know, it's on our property, but it's like across the dead, dead ender road that we live on up in the woods, and it's a big clearing up there. And it's fenced in, but, you know, we always, we lost some land, you know, two years in row up there because of that, because of the, I think the distance from the house. So we thought we'd get the donkeys to solve that problem and they are, they think, they are super

sillious. They think they're better than the sheep. They don't want you to do it. So that's fine. They don't hang out with them. You know, wherever the sheep are, they intentionally go somewhere else. You know, they like to be on their own. So, you. So I think we have two donkeys that aren't really serving their purpose, but I tell you that they're my favorite animals on the farm. They're so sweet. And it's a sweet thing because they're very sweet and nice, but you also get this sense it's like,

they're still dangerous. Do you know what I mean? Like, don't push them. It's like maybe a pit bull or something. Right. Well, they do kick. They can't. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you can't make them, it's like, it's like you get just a cool person. The only way you can get them to do anything is to make them think it was their idea. That's a good way to say that's correct. That's true. I think they will teach you the farmer's patience more than any other animal, right?

Because they they they don't move and they seem to have a way to like not move in a way that's even You know more grounded than even like a large bowl or a cow. Yeah It's like they just won't move. You can't even push them to get a start. I Yeah, it's like they just won't move. You can't even push them together. Start. I've always been like, sometimes I've told this story before, but you know, you can come across a donkey. The donkey doesn't know that you're there. You can just, it'll just stand there for like an hour.

Like it would not loot. Like the stillness of them is something I've taken some philosophical lessons from. The just sort of like the serene comfort with themselves and the not just the total obliviousness to time or urgency or anything but what they feel like doing is kind of marvelous to watch. Yes, yes. Well, that's why probably E. Or is a donkey, maybe like a depressive one. Yes. Somehow it's come to terms with the way the world works, the way it is, and it's accepted. Well, my favorite stoicism story is related to

donkeys. Again, we see the stoics as he's very dour, humorless figures, but supposedly, Cresipus dies laughing at a donkey eating figs. Oh, that's a story. I did not know. That's a great one. Now, he's sitting on his front porch and the donkey walks in and starts eating figs in his garden. And apparently, Cresipus said some joke like, does he need some wine to wash down those figs

and begins to laugh so hard at his own joke that he shortly thereafter drops. Which is quite a way to go, I feel like. Well, there were a lot of donkeys around. You may need to have many, many opportunities to see donkeys in ancient Greece or Rome. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm dealing with that myself. Because so we got these, we rescued these donkeys sort of late.

And the vet told us there was too late to fix the male donkey that we got. It was already like six or seven years old. So we get like another donkey every 13 or so months. And you can't keep them. So we feel like we're in this, they're not worth anything, as you know. So we're in this constant they're not worth anything as you know. So we're

in this constant mode of trying to re-home a donkey about once every 18 months. It's been both a burden but also kind of a wonderful way to connect with people because you're always like, hmm, I bet I could trick this person into becoming a donkey person. And that's our journey. Too bad you're in Texas because I can't tell you how many times we've gotten a call from somebody saying, like, where did you get your donkeys from? We can't find where we want one. Well, because yeah, people do need them.

Yeah. And then, although I guess I can out in the West, there's just an enormous feral donkey population. And Hawaii too. You can see them just walking around in some of these places. Like, I guess from the west, it's from the mines. You know, they had them in the mines and then they just let them go. And now they're just there.

And then in Hawaii, you know, people just let them go on the islands and now they've got a wild donkey population. Oh, amazing. Anyway, yeah, I like them. They're the best. They're the best. Let's see what else I wanted to ask you about. If there's anything else.

Yeah, I guess the last thing just because it pertains to climate, and I do think it's important, how, where philosophically do, what do the philosophers had to teach us about this sort of moment of time that we're in, where, you know, years of neglecting or abusing the climate is coming back to haunt us, we're sort of wrestling with, not just our obligations, but I feel like we're also wrestling with this massive collective action problem, which is how do you do something about it that wasn't totally your fault, but it is now the problem of our time. So what do the philosophers have to teach us, and what does farming have to teach us

as well? Huh, well, there's a passage in the book, as you know, from Plato. And it's not us, it's kind of an outlier passage, because it's not directly about farming. But what it is about, it's about the construction of an ideal society. And it's, it's socrates's first attempt to say what, what, what the ideal society would look like. And it's interesting. I kind of think of it as like he's engaging in playing Sim City, maybe tongue in cheek just a little bit, but I think he's also earnest, where he says that societies come together

because of mutual need. No one is self-sufficient by themselves, so we need each other. And so the idea of cooperation is at the root of city formation. And then he talks about how the people would live in this ideal city. And it would be an agrarian rustic community, ideally. And it would be a vegetarian community. It would be a community that was It would be a community that was self-supporting, you know, by through cooperation amongst themselves. And the reason for that, it would be happy content with what it had within its territory, within its environment, because otherwise you would be encroaching on other people's property

to get things that you want, or that you think that you need, or you want. So because the ideal society doesn't do that, there is no war. And because there's no war, there's no slaves. And Plato paints the picture, it sounds like Edward Hicks, Peaceful Kingdom, where people are, they work by day, naked, out in the sun, and at night, they sit by the fire, you know, and munch eight corners and drink wine.

And he says something to the effect, actually, see if I can get this close to right. He says, they will, they will have sex with one another. They will, you know, they'll mate and they'll, they'll, but they won't produce children beyond their means. He says that specifically. And he says they will ensure that they leave a life similar to the one that they've enjoyed for their progeny. So it's got all the ingredients. Plato was such a genius, really. He understands this systemic view of how society works and how it needs to think about its future as much as its present and that it has to live within limits. So, you know, with climate change, well, if anything, we've exceeded limits on every front. And the biosphere, though, is the ultimate limit. So, I mean, we are living within limits,

but we're living as if there isn't that limit of the biosphere. And I think somebody like Plato has a lot to teach us about that. The other thing about Plato that you just mentioned like how to motivate people, how to get kind of collective action, his analogy or his homology between the soul and the state that the homology between the,

the soul and the state that the republic is big on, right? That the, the tripart soul is equivalent to the tripart state and the cooperation amongst those, the proper cooperation amongst those three parts in both soul and state need to be in order. And that's like the definition of justice. All of that, I think, can speak to, you know, individual, maybe allegorically speak to it, but individual harmony or just living or righteous living in the world, the kind of choices that you make, things that you do, how you view things,

do I need that new television? No, you don't. And in how we make collective decisions, which, you know, we're just a collection collection of individuals formed by mutual need, according to Plato. So we could we could think about that as that homology between soul and state, personal action and civic action, productively, I think. I mean, it's not one for one correspondence, but we have to recognize, I think the recognition of that homology is important. Yeah, Marcus Realis in meditation talks about how what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee.

I think he meant, you know, other individuals, but I also, the sense that the planet is our hive and that we owe an obligation to take care of it and that this sort of idea of leave it, leave it as good or better than you found it, is the sort of inherent obligation that we have as citizens, but also as philosophers and sort of students of wisdom in virtue. Like, you can't, you can't abuse this thing and then hand the check to your children or grandchildren or, you know, literal or figurative, but that's an inherently unvirtuous thing to do. Well, you're familiar with Heracles, Heracles is circles of concern.

Yes. And I think not a guy on your program before or he's written for you, of concern. Yes. And I think that a guy on your program before or he's written for you, Kai Whiting. Yes. He's written a, I mean, he sent me a couple of years ago, a really terrific article, really, on applying Heracles's circles of concern. He actually had this nice diagram that he drew to show how that idea, that stoic idea, is perfectly translatable Now, that idea, that stoic idea is perfectly translatable and to the modern situation of resource use and allocation, how it all works. And so there you go. I think the angels do speak to that problem.

They don't have the science to solve the problem, but the problem that we face is really not a scientific one. I mean, like if your neighbor was polluting your yard, you do something about it. And I think the idea of the circles of concern is how can you apply that same level of outrage as an exact list to where? But how can you apply that same level of concern

to some river that you'll never see in your life? Or the protection of a tree that you won't live long enough to sit in the shade of. But if you expand the circles of control, you get there pretty quickly. And that's why I sort of preserving and protecting the land and the resources. It, it, it really matters. And it's a philosophical pursuit, not just some sort of social justice, environmental pursuit. It's a philosophical pursuit. Right.

And if you, and people could be convinced that you are connected to that tree on the other side of the world in a very real way. You would care about it. Yeah. For enough people feel that way, then maybe something will happen. I hope so, I certainly hope so.

We've made so much progress from the ancient world as we've talked about, you know, whether, let's say with the eradication of slavery, but there are certainly other things that 2,000 years from now, they're gonna look back and be a gas stat. And I think we have an obligation to try to tackle those things

as much as we can in our own time. Yeah, indeed. Professor, this was amazing. I loved the book. I love the Princeton University Press series. I've read like a dozen of these now. They're all awesome, but I was very excited to see this one. And it was an honor to have you on.

Thanks for having me. The next one's about the cynics, and that's coming out next fall. Well, I'd love to talk about that one too. That sounds good, me too. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to The Daily Stood Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it.

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