"Soon you will be dead," can be a great
admonition to yourself when trying to put things in perspective. It's also a
common refrain in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the first offering
of our ethics book of the month.
Stay with me. While Meditations was
originally written in Greek by a first century Roman Emperor, it's highly
readable and seems wildly relevant to a modern audience trying to cope with
day-to-day ethical decisions. It's likely Marcus never intended his words to be
read by others, but instead used his written observations to help himself gain
perspective and keep on going even when all about him seemed filled with
obstacles.
Several accessible translations are available in
paperback. While I'm no Greek scholar, nor an expert on Marcus Aurelius, I'm a
fan of Jacob Needleman and John P. Piazza's The Essential MarcusAurelius, (Tarcher/Penguin, 2008) for its language, although it does not
feature all of the meditations. There's something therapeutic about making your
way through the entire litany, recognizing that Marcus' struggles in dealing
with people and leadership were consistent and ongoing. For a complete
translation, Gregory Hays' (Modern Library, 2002) is a good read and the
language quite accessible. (It's also fun to toggle back and forth between
editions to glean the subtle differences in translations.)
Each meditation is short and can provide some perspective
that the woes and travails we face today might not be all that different from
those faced almost a couple of thousand years ago.
"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The
people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest,
jealous, and surly," Marcus writes in meditation 2.1. "They are like
this because they can't tell good from evil." Yet, Marcus copes with this
observation by recognizing that no matter how flawed other people are, they are
still people. "No one can implicate me in ugliness," he continues.
"We are born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows
of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural."
Marcus recognizes in meditation 7.22 the power of
forgiving others their mistakes and that feeling "affection for people
even when they make mistakes is uniquely human." You can do it, he writes,
"if you simply recognize that they're human too, that they act out of
ignorance, against their will, and that you'll both be dead before long."
The right thing, Marcus suggests (and the only sane
thing), is to take responsibility for our own actions. "Ambition means
tying your well-being to what other people say or do," Marcus writes in
meditation 6.51. "Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen
to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions."
As the first pick of "The Right Thing Ethics Book
Club," it's an ancient text that can help to remind us that life's too
short not to recognize that while we all may be flawed, the right thing is to
find a way to work together by remembering we are all human beings, even if
some of us are more meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and
surly that others.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin
(c) 2017 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
