The Ancients: What Can They Teach Us About Our World and How to Live in It?

I recently added a new volume to my Shelf of Little Books, some of which are not so little but all of which repay re-reading that helps me understand our world a little better with each successive encounter.  The newest resident of the shelf was published earlier this year by Princeton University Press: Following Nature’s Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World (2025) by M.D. Usher, who is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Vermont.  He is also a member of the Department of Geography and Geosciences, the Environmental Program, and the Food Systems Graduate Program.  This is a large portfolio, perhaps explained by the fact that Professor Usher is also, among other vocations, a farmer who is naturally concerned with life in all its forms. [1]

The first question asked, and answered in Following Nature’s Lead is simple: What does it mean to live sustainably in a finite world?  The answers are not so simple, but Professor Usher guides us with wit and feeling.  An early and welcome point he makes is that the so-called Longtermism and Effective Altruism of William MacAskill of Oxford and Sam Bankman-Fried, of Los Angeles for the next twenty years or so, are not sufficient to the tasks ahead of us, for the simple reason that the outlook of the young Oxford philosophy professor and his cohort is “erroneously predicated on the biospheric impossibility of ever-expanding economic growth and the acquisition and accumulation of ever-greater wealth.”  The latter is conceived of as money, and the point of effective altruism is to make a large bundle so you can give much of it away.  But this can be done only after cold-hearted calculation of how you can get the most “bang for your buck.”

Nature is an upper-case term here, defined as “a historically conditioned, polyvalent concept that, because it included humans, is necessarily an intrinsic concern to people living in both urban and rural environments.”  A simple return to Nature cannot be the solution to our problems.  But following the lead of J. Baird Callicott, “Ecological sustainability is a matter of adapting human economic systems to and modeling them on the economy of nature in which the globalized human economy is embedded and in relation to which it should stand as microcosm to macrocosm.”  This argument is straight out of Lucretius and has continued down to us through the work of others, including Herman Daly, David W. Orr, and Wendell Berry.

We, i.e., denizens of the Global North, tend to blame “trains, planes, and automobiles” for our troubles, but these problems are really due to our “misplaced human wants and desires – that is, emotional, psychological impulses and errors judgment and overreach – that are the sources of our catastrophe.”  But:

Whether we like it or not, things will come full circle.  Our world of stunning, yet precarious complexity is destined at some point for recalibration, as surely as all growth in Nature, once it’s reached its apex, must fall to decline.  A Great Simplification awaits, and the wisest course of action is to prepare for it, individually and collectively.  Old ideas can help us here, as the following sermons conspire to convince you.

Professor Usher delivers his message in four sermons, but he does not preach.  He does explain, very well, that we are not the first to notice that things are not quite right, whatever the culture of current political economy would have us believe.  These lessons from the past will be essential if we are to thrive, much less survive the coming Inconvenient Apocalypse.  For those who are skeptical about the trajectory described by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, there is nothing to worry about.  In that case the coal, oil, and natural gas will last all that much longer while we continue to remake a world in which everyone can thrive and in the words of John Ruskin in the fourth Sermon, THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.

Sermon 1. What Chemistry!  Or how to thrive on a planet that is governed by inexorable laws.  These would include the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the entropy law, but as long as the sun shines life will find a way if humans are not terminally stupid), The Law of Conservation of Mass (what we have on planet Earth is all we have, period), Newton’s Third Law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, which analogizes to politics very well).  Each of these is inescapable.  On the other hand, the so-called laws of economics, or political economy in the proper usage, are contingent contrivances of historical, political, and sociological convenience,  And that is all they are.

Atoms came first, among many philosophers beginning more two thousand years before we could have any idea of the structure of the atom.  They were more than a useful metaphor that the world is made of smaller and smaller fundamental structures that govern, but not determine, the world of our senses, both the inanimate and the living, plant and animal.  Thus:

The key to its modern relevance is ancient Atomism’s appeal to reasoned, empirical observation in support of its premises.  While Lucretius’s rich descriptions of natural phenomena tingle with emotion and shimmer with a sense of the sublime, his poem essentially comprises and argument, a demonstration, he believed, of scientific facts.  And while the Epicureans’ (of which Lucretius was one) overarching propose in embracing a materialist, scientific account of the world was to achieve personal equanimity and to pursue quietistic living, what they themselves called ataraxia (“unperturbedness”), it is a short journey from there to an active concern for the welfare of the Earth, our only home (then, now, and in the future, Mr. Musk).  The Earth…is not an abstraction…it is the ground beneath our feet that feeds us and upon which we build our lives – and upon which we inevitably have an impact (and there is no escaping planet Earth, Mr. Musk).

It took a long time to get from Lucretius and the Epicureans to the chemistry of Justus von Liebig and his Organic Chemistry and Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1840).  But the concepts are not all that different.  Liebig was arguably the first biochemist, and his work on the essentials for plant growth was fundamental to our understanding of the living world.  His work led to the development of the fertilizer industry (nitrogen, phosphorus, essential trace elements), but he also decried the “robbery system” of contemporary (mid-19^th century) industrial agriculture (something we now should recognize as a category mistake) with unusual vehemence for a scientist:

Great Britain deprives all countries of the conditions of their fertility.  It has raked up the battlefields of Leipsic, Waterloo, and the Crimea…consumed the bones (phosphorus) of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily…Like a vampire (Great Britain) hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its life-blood.

Liebig understood British imperialism before Germany had properly entered that Great Game.  But his concepts of metabolism (change/exchange) were fundamental to our understanding of life on Earth.  This similar understanding of metabolism has been found in the work of Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 3, 1894) in which the spirit of capitalist production is oriented only toward immediate monetary profit:

This stands in direct contradiction to agriculture, “which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations”…the harmful agricultural practices that Liebig had identified inevitably lead to “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”

What has become the concept of “metabolic rift” has been used in the work of John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito to explain important aspects of the political economy of the Anthropocene.  Critics abound, as is to be expected, but metabolic rift can also be traced back to our forebears in the Ancient world:

Can one practice Epicureanism today?  To the extent that everyone with a rudimentary education now understands that all matter in the universe consists of atoms and their combinations into molecules, we are all Epicureans.  It’s the ethical imperative to live and make decisions as if that were true that we’ve lost and would do well to recover.  To live as if scientific facts were actionable, as if your happiness depended on them, to live simply and circumspectly in the present yet take the long view – that is the legacy of Epicurus.

Lessons to live by.  Or lessons unlearned to die by.  Our choice.

Sermon 2: There Are Gods Here Too.  This title comes from Heraclitus asking visitors to enter while he rests beside his oven because “there are gods here, too.”  The message of this sermon is that the world must be understood as a whole system, as described by philosophers as diverse (and as similar) as Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. [2]  We should remember that health, whole/holistic, and holy are derived from the same root as the conception of each has evolved during the past 2000 years.

Whole system philosophy sounds modern because it is correct, even in the absence of experimental evidence for the unseen atoms, molecules, cells, and other components that make up the living and nonliving components of the ecosphere.  In considering the world as a whole:

Heraclitus’s view…embodies an ethos and ontology conducive to ensuring a sustainable world for everyone.  There is, for one thing, no meaningful “us” and “them” in his worldview…his philosophy’s first principle, which he calls logos, is not esoteric knowledge, but a shared possession, “the same for all.”

Less than a century later, the ecological significance of the complementary philosophy of Plato can be described as follows:

If you believe there is more than meets the eye in the world around you, a view Plato arrived at through reasoned argument and speculative inference (which represents a proto-scientific method that is not too different from how science is practiced today)…you are more likely to treat…(planet Earth)…with intense respect, even reverence, not carelessly or with contempt.

This proper view of the world as our only home has been severely damaged.  If humans are to survive and thrive in the coming world, this ancient wisdom is essential.  It can be described in Hierocles’s Circles of Concern, which begin with the Self and extends outward to Family, Friends, Community, All Humanity, and the Earth.  This idea is extended in the open access article Sustainable Development, Wellbeing, and Material Consumption: A Stoic Perspective. The Stoic’s Circles of Concern dovetail neatly with Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics.  Both provide the mechanism for a better life in our world and that to come.

Sermon 3. Cosmos Out of Chaos.  This brings us to one of my favorite visions from ancient philosophy, Diogenes the Cynic (and nutcase in the current vernacular) dressed in rags carrying his lamp while searching for an honest man in broad daylight.  The other favorite vision is Diogenes living in a large jar. Odd as he was, Diogenes described people very well in the words of Professor Usher:

The problem with Homo sapiens sapiens lies in a fundamental confusion of needs and wants.  We have become dependent…on unnecessary luxuries that have made us physically soft and morally weak.  We are not satisfied with having our needs met but go to costly and harmful lengths in search of novelty and pleasure.  To thwart such social conditioning, the Cynics cultivated autonomy by practicing self-sufficiency.

Cynics took an ascetic self-sufficiency too far at times (water versus wine, raw meat instead of cooked) but the Cynics had a far-reaching, even modern, concern with the self-sufficiency of others.  They also understood negative externalities, the “harmful side effects of and human and environmental costs involved in the production and acquisition of goods.” More than 2000 years later the concept of externality is still mostly ignored among economists.  Diogenes and his followers also had a cosmopolitan – a concept and term invented by the Cynics – cast of mind:

The consequences of our choices, and thus our obligations to our environment and to one another, extend far and wide, and in many directions.  We are inescapably “citizens of the world” and must behave as such.

Yet, we do not, and in some circles solicitude for “the other” – people, regions, nations – is seen as “unpatriotic” weakness.  Can we, in the early days of the Anthropocene only mimic our ancient predecessors and thrive?  No.  But we can learn from them.  And we have, from Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond to Thorstein Veblen to E.F. Schumacher, who showed us that Small Is Beautiful.  The often forgotten or ignored subtitle to Schumacher’s book is “Economics as if People Mattered.”  If the wellbeing of people matters, then the health of the ecosphere must be a primary concern of all:

Titles like Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans are just the tip of that melting iceberg.  But it takes a PhD in common sense alone to see that the ancients’ global impact was nothing compared to what ours is today.  That our most thoughtful forebears decried consumption, extravagance, and excess and eschewed them with such vigor – on ethical grounds, as well as practical ones – is a scolding to us.

We have not listened and we have certainly not heard, but it would behoove us to begin to do both before it is too late.

Sermon 4. THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. [3]  To repeat the questions answered in this book: (1) What is the purpose of a human economy, and (2) How can an economy cooperate with nature to further the well-being of all humanity and the environment?  Professor Usher states that he is “wary of exaggerating the point” but I don’t see the need to be wary at all:

To our detriment we have come to worship the growth economy as if it were a god – an impersonal god, to be sure, but omnipotent nevertheless, an Unmoved Mover plying an invisible hand by whose power all things are set and stay in motion.  We either bask in its beneficent light, of flounder on its choppy seas.  Everyone is at its mercy.

Indeed.  And this is especially true during the time of the Late Neoliberal Dispensation.  It is an oversimplification to say, as I have before, that the most fundamental tenet of Neoliberalism is “The market is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured.”  But it is clear that we must decide whether we want (1) a world in which the economy is for the people, or (2) a world one in which the people are for the economy.  The second violates the categorical imperative against treating people and Nature as means to an end rather than as intertwined ends in themselves.  This has and will lead inevitably to further destruction of people and Nature – the ecosphere – of which we all are a part.  Therefore, the first is to be preferred despite our current maladaptive conception of political economy.

John Ruskin – artist, historian, and critic – is the major channel of the wisdom of the ancients in Sermon Four.  He is mostly forgotten now, but that does not vitiate his importance.  His four-part essay on political economy Unto This Last begins with:

Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious — certainly the least creditable — is the modern soi-disant science of political economy, based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection.

If we are to solve our problems as they inevitably come, the notion that economics is a science rather than a branch of history, geography, sociology, psychology, and politics, however mathematized it has become, must be transcended.  The section “Science and Nescience” [4] describes Ruskin’s extended metaphor of “flowing streams to the sea” to describe the just action of wealth in society.  He then turns the same image against what he calls:

The popular economist who believes that the market, left to its own devices, operates by some natural law, like the physical laws that govern the flow of rivers, namely, “that where demand is, supply must follow.”  To the contrary, Ruskin observes, the course of rivers can be controlled by human forethought and intervention.  “Whether the stream shall be a curse or a blessing depends upon man’s labor, and administering intelligence.”

In our current world, the actual rivers have been dredged and channeled and polluted to the point of sterility.  The critical issues have become ethical and ecological, whether that is recognized or not.  In the words of Professor Usher:

In a world of finite resources free markets will eventually make conditions conducive to freedom impossible.  Everything returns to where it all l began, and on which all things depend, which is our destiny, too: sovereign Nature. (italics in original)

In the early twenty-first century, freedom certainly seems to require acquiescence to the powers that be, whatever their fickle natures require.  In the meantime, so-called “smart power” extends its distracting hand in a “liberal, friendly appearance – power that stimulates and seduces – (which) is more compelling that power that imposes, threatens, and decrees”:

Its signal and seal is the Like button.  Now, people subjugate themselves to domination by consuming and communicating (or a facsimile thereof) – and they click “Like” all the while.  Neoliberalism is the capitalism of “Like.” (emphasis added)  Smart power reads and appraises our conscious and unconscious thoughts.  It places its stock in voluntary self-organization and self-optimization.  As such it has no need to overcome resistance.  Mastery of this sort requires no great expenditure of energy or violence.  It simply happens.  The capitalism of Like should come with a warning label: Protect me from what I want. (italics in original)

This recalls the work of Jon Elster, who has made the case that the only way to fulfilment, whatever the goal, is effort.  To gain a self-mastery that leads to happiness requires concerted effort.  Or in the hackneyed but true words of my coaches long ago, “No pain, no gain.”  John Ruskin understood our predicament 150 years ago:

Taste is not only a part and an index of morality; it is the ONLY morality.  The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is ‘What do you like?’  Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are…

The prosperity of any nation is in exact proportion to the quantity of labor which it spends in obtaining and employing the means of life…not merely wisely producing, but wisely distributing and consuming.  Wise production is a far more difficult art than wise production.

Thank you for reading this far.  Why this digression today?  Because what Professor Usher reminds us in his valuable book is that recovery from Neoliberalism and its attendant pathologies – war, imperialism, climate change, an unnecessarily stark inequality that divides and destroys human prospects, yes, at both ends of our untoward distribution of wealth – will require wisdom more than any other human attribute.  This will be followed closely by humility as the world gets smaller and more local, and consequently more human.  Usher emphasizes that there can be no “whataboutism” in this recovery.  It does not matter that the Ancients did things that we would (claim to) disdain.  They would say the same things about us.  Presentism is the curse that prevents understanding across generations and eras.  Their wisdom is universal, and we have much to learn from them and by way of their interlocutors over the past 2000+ years.

One final word from John Ruskin:

Whenever you hear someone dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware that person…Things are either possible or impossible…If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it…Utopianism is not our business – the work is.

More of the things we can do to live a good life are possible than impossible…

Notes

[1] Professor Usher is also responsible for three other books from PUP: How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land (2021), How to Care about Animals: An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small – Porphyry and Friends (2023), and How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism – Diogenes and the Cynics (2022).  How to Be a Farmer is already on my Shelf of Little Books.  The others will be.

[2] Surveys of western philosophy are common, but still the best so far, in my view, is A History of Western Philosophy (1945) by Bertrand Russell.  The book was not received well by philosophers, as Russell had hoped but that matters not.  NB, it is not irrelevant that I read this book the first time as a college freshman.

[3] John Ruskin (1819-1900): “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” Unto This Last (1862).

[4] OED: Absence or lack of knowledge (1612): “I can yet adde many more needfull particulars, which the Author hath in his nescience omitted.”