becoming a proficiens
progressing toward virtue
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Last week I wrote about the concept of locus of control and provided the following graphic:
One of the points I made was that having a pure internal or pure external locus of control is probably neither accurate nor healthy, though erring on the side of internal is often more useful.
I recorded my interview with my colleague Scott Smith, the chair of the UNH Classics department this past Thursday, with the topic being Seneca and Stoicism. We didn’t discuss this passage specifically, but I want to share it because I think it gets at the essence of Stoicism’s attitude toward the external world:
No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own… in a man praise is due only to what is his very own. Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in-him - they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man's. You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit.
This passage expresses a profound level of belief in the external locus of control. If we were to imagine the social world as a series of concentric circles, for the Stoics I think it would look like this:
The only thing we really have perfect control over is the soul/mind/spirit - I am going to use soul, but you choose the word you are comfortable with to represent that core thing that is you, even if you were to lose the use of parts of your body.
The Stoic perspective is both freeing and constraining. Whatever we have control over, we have an obligation to care for, to nurture, to grow, and to perfect. Scott gave me a word that the Stoics used for the obligation to perfect the self: “proficiens.” It is Latin for progressor, or one who progresses toward virtue. I love this word as it gets at the core idea I am pursuing in this newsletter - what does it mean to move toward a worthy life? To accept that perfection is impossible to achieve, but if one takes up the attitude of a proficiens - someone who is working to progress toward virtue - that is as good as one can hope to be. Scott tells me this was in fact one of the contributions of the Roman Stoics over the Greeks who were much more absolute in their attitude - one was either perfect or not. Since only God (they used this term, though my sense is it was not meant in the way a Christian/Jew/Muslim would use it) can be perfect, no one was perfect. Adding the nuance of being someone who is on a journey in pursuit of perfection to me is much more valuable.
Although I really like the Seneca passage, I think my perspective is more graduated.
While we have the most control over our soul, we have quite a bit of control over our body. The self - body and soul together - are the areas we have the greatest internal locus of control over. But in the social universe, as we move farther from the soul, we have progressively less control or even influence, which is what I am trying to represent by the shading of the concentric circles.
We can lay the locus of control continuum over the social circles to emphasize the point:
On Thursday, August 26, 2023, we had the first Republican party debate between eight candidates for the Republican nomination. Regardless of whether you are a Republican voter or not, where would this event have happened in your social world? I would argue that for the average American, this event was past the outermost ring in the realm of “Everything Else”. As I write this, pundits are arguing over who won. Many say Donald Trump, even though he wasn’t there, followed by Joe Biden - but I digress. My point is, how much control did you have over the outcome of the debate? I think my point is obvious: except for the candidates and their staff, none of us had any control over the outcomes. You could even argue that the candidates themselves had limited control. Much of the outcome of an event like this comes down to luck, even for someone who is well suited and well-prepared for such combat. For the rest of us who were at best spectators, what is the right attitude toward such an event? I think the Stoics would say not to let things outside of our control disturb our happiness.
It is healthy to have an external locus of control with respect to events that are in fact beyond our control. The problem is when we mistake something over which we have no control for something that we do in fact have control over, and vice versa. As a Stoic, I would say I have control over my own actions; I have no control over the actions of others. There are exogenous factors that affect my health: my genes, my environment, accidents. These are things I cannot control. But within bounds, I can control my diet, exercise, use of intoxicants, stressors, etc. Thus, it is healthy to take responsibility for my health behaviors - am I making an effort to eat well, get enough exercise, get enough sleep, but not for random factors like catching the flu.
I think as we move out from the soul to the body to family and so on we have more exogenous factors, and of course we are dealing with people who have their own drives, motivations, and desires. We can’t control other human beings, and it is unethical to try do so, with the exception of our children when they are small. (One lesson from parenthood is it is exceptionally difficult to control children, even when they are small!) To some degree, it is just to try to influence people we care about if we can say with certainty that we know what they should do. But that is part of the problem - our knowledge of what is called for diminishes as we move away from the center of the social circle.
I am not arguing that we have less of an obligation to care for the circles farther from our soul. As a retired soldier, I promised my service to my country, a construct in the “everything else” space, and I contributed, in my small way, to efforts being made by the US government in the “everything else” space. Some of those efforts were good, but almost everyone agrees now in 2023 that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. In March of 2003 it seemed like an absolute necessity to the vast majority of Americans. What I am arguing is that as we progress away from the center of the circle, we know less about what is called for. Invading Iraq has caused great suffering for the people of Iraq, spawned Isis, and done little (or worsened) national security. Therefore, the farther we are from the center, the more humbly we need to come to interactions and the use of whatever influence we might have.
As we move out from the center of our social world, I believe it is much easier to do harm than good because of our ignorance of the true needs of the people we interact with. Even well-intended actions can lead to unintended consequences. I think this is why we have an obligation to care the most about the things we both understand and can influence. While we should not be indifferent to the things beyond our known community, we should also not waste our limited resources on things we do not understand and could, through our ignorance, actively harm. The first thing we should be concerned with is the tending to the self (and the soul). We need to become proficiens. One should ensure one’s own virtue before trying to elevate the virtue of others through public action, especially farther out.