This scroll focuses on Metrodorus’ disagreement with the destitute life of the Cynics, and his doctrine of the natural measure of wealth, which corresponds to that which is needed to secure the natural and necessary pleasures, and to have the confident expectation that we will be able to secure them in the future.

Nature’s wealth at once has its bounds and is easy to procure; but the wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance. – Principal Doctrine 15

Metrodorus argued that some things cause pain when present, but cause even more pain when absent and, therefore, shouldn’t be avoided.  This is the case with health, which requires some work and some inconvenience to secure, but without it we suffer greatly. It is also the case with family members and friends who oftentimes are difficult to understand and to get along with, but whom we miss when absent. 

Indeed, I think that the right management of wealth lies in this: in not feeling distressed about what one loses and in not trapping oneself on treadmills because of an obsessive zeal concerning the more and the less. – Metrodorus

Social Capital

When we invest our time, money and effort in our dearest friends, Philodemus compares this with “those who sow seeds in the earth. From these things … it becomes possible to reap many times more fruits”. He says that the philosopher who manages property will secure his natural measure of wealth, and use some of the surplus generously with his friends. He will be able to count on his friends when in need, and they will also add to his happiness and security in the present. On the other hand, a property manager who is not informed by Epicurean philosophy, will likely avoid spending time with friends, and will deprive himself of the enjoyment of their company and of the many other benefits that come from having good friends.

Philodemus concedes that a good property manager may be immoral or amoral, and may suffer from greed and other vices, and that the practice of philosophy among friends may lead to a shift in priorities that puts losses and gains aside to some extent. However, he says a philosopher may still be a good property manager, and gives advice to help his students enjoy a life of pleasure while managing property. 

Since, he says, “the philosopher does not toil”, some of his advice involves the delegation of tasks to assistants. Earning a living from teaching philosophy is the noblest profession. He praises having a diverse nest egg, rather than putting all of our eggs in one basket: investing seems like a legitimate contemporary outlet for a philosopher. 

Philodemus said that rental income is a dignified way to make a living, as is the gainful employment of others–so long as it’s not in a dangerous or demeaning activity.

Metrodorus sought to demonstrate that the Epicurean methodology of hedonic calculus is highly practical when applied to how we manage our money, our business, and our property.

We believe that the tranquil administration of one’s property does not require great subtlety and that wealth is superior to poverty. At the same time we believe that it’s necessary to hand down a tradition of the most general principles and to outline many details in the treatises concerning the care and preservation of possessions.

Towards the end of the scroll, ancient Epicureans were instructing their students to keep outlines of Metrodorus’ doctrines on economics, saying that it was considered “necessary to hand down a tradition” of the general principles they were discussing. One of the goals of the study of this scroll is to plant the Epicurean conversation on economics and self-sufficiency firmly in the modern world so that the people of our day can relate to the teaching and more easily apply its prudent calculations to their lives. I have distilled the contents of the scroll into Seven Principles of Epicurean Economics. They are as follows:

1. There is a natural measure of wealth (as opposed to the corrupt, cultural measure of wealth), which is tied to natural and necessary desires. Understanding this will provide us with serenity and indifference to profit and loss.

2. There is social wealth in addition to the wealth of things and possessions.

3. Philodemus plainly stated it: the philosopher does not toil. However, we must always remember that toil is evil, not productivity.

4. Association is important in labor. We must choose our company prudently.

5. Our revenue must more than meet our immediate needs: it must facilitate a dignified life of leisure.

6. It’s always prudent to cultivate multiple streams of income, among which deriving fees from the Garden’s teaching mission, rental property income and business ownership, which includes gainful employment of others, have special priority.

7. It’s also prudent to have fruitful possessions. The various forms of ownership of means of production is another way to independence that can potentially relieve us of toil.

Further Reading:

Philodemus, On Property Management (Writings from the Greco-Roman World)

 Horace, Ofellus and Philodemus of Gadara in Sermones 2.2, by Sergio Yona

An Epicurean measure of wealth in Horace

Karl Marx’s fascination with the ancient atomists led him to base his dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus: an early symptom of his future career as a materialist philosopher.  However, from their respective vantage points in history, Marx and Epicurus both reacted against idealists ancient and modern.  In our view, they are all just different flavors of Platonists and it is important to notice the threads that link how these two (and other) materialists have reacted to the prevailing forms of idealism in their generations.

When Epicurus was exiled, thrown out from Lesbos by the Platonists, he nearly lost his life.  Such was the mutual hostility between Epicureans and Platonists from very early on.  There is a narrative in our tradition of exile … and of course of reemergence as sure as there is annual reemergence in nature, because the immediacy of nature can only be ignored briefly, and to our detriment.

Marx’s writings on the German idealists remind us of how easy it is for idealism to divorce us from reality and of how intellectual cultures can emerge that are very out of touch with the tangibles of the surrounding culture, imagining and inventing causes and trends to evident phenomena that oftentimes have more to do with ruling-class agendas than with reality.

In Epicurean therapy, such misconstruction of reality would likely result in misdiagnosing the diseases of the soul.  Philosophy would not be able to heal human suffering, and it would not even be worthy of its name.  This is why Epicurus persistently reminded us to always base our discourse and our philosophy in the study of nature, in great part an ancient euphemism for science.  But the (Christian) Platonists won the culture wars in antiquity and closed the materialist schools of philosophy, and by the time Marx came around, all philosophy was speculation and, in one of his diatribes against the idealists, he said

Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love – Marx, in his Philosophy and Reality

For a concrete example of how materialism keeps us grounded, I should cite an example from recent discussions in the Garden of Epicurus forum on Facebook, one which awakened some passions on both sides.

Faced with the blind praise of free-market neoliberalism, which has been attempting to pass for a contemporary political theory of libertarian ‘autarchy’ in some circles, I had to present the challenge of the Water Wars, the (past and) future conflicts that are expected to arise as water becomes more scarce, insofar as it is privatized.  I also cited the President of Nestle Peter Brabeck, who recently said that people don’t have a RIGHT to water and that it’s a commodity that should be privatized, not regulated.  Water, to him, should be subject to market fluctuations.

The practical repercussion of this worldview, which is rooted in the doctrinal adherence to (neoliberal) free market “ideals”, is that it should be up to the “wisdom” of the markets to decide whether a child (or adult citizen, for that matter) should have access to drinkable water … or to education, or to healthcare, etc.

In my piece The Water Wars, I explain in more detail the potentially catastrophic effects of this way of thinking, if it translates into policy on a global scale, citing specifically the example of Bolivia and how, during its water wars people died on the streets after all the water, including that which fell from the sky, was privatized and sold to an American company (Bechtel).  It was made illegal to gather rain water, and the price of water increased so sharply that retired Bolivians had to go back to work and people had to get their children out of school to be able to afford drinkable water.  These events were mostly not covered by corporate-owned U.S. media.

All these sacrifices –including, literally, human sacrifices as people died on the streets defending their access to a resource that has always fallen from the sky for free–, we must remind ourselves, were made in the name of the free market, a non-entity whose “wisdom” we are being advised not to meddle with.

And so we see that it is not just religious idealism that generates unnecessary suffering when we deny gay people access to health care, or when we stone women for adultery or kill our daughters to defend our honor, or when we –out of undeserved respect for the sincere faith of others– fail to subject a caste of priests who happen to be sexual predators to the judicial process that is due.  Yes, religious humanity still does these things, but there is another moral evil at loose in secular false philosophies that are divorced from our facticity, from recognizing that, without meeting our basic needs, we dehumanize ourselves, and that meeting these needs is a pre-requisite to our full humanity and dignity.

If, rather than blindly follow idealist doctrines  –whether secular ones like the free market, or the religious kind– even when they lead to the unnecessary sacrifice of our humanity, we root our ethics firmly on the Canon, we will never lose sight of the pleasure versus the pain generated by water scarcity and by whether we engage in diligent public management of this and other basic resouces.  We will be able to always recognize (and will want to naturally meet) our basic material needs.

Led by our materialist teachings we’ll be able to conduct hedonic calculus and conclude that, even if (for whatever reasons) we greatly or moderately value free markets, we must abandon its doctrinal adherence for the sake of our survival.  We will recognize, as common sense dictates, that we want to live safe and comfortable lives without water wars, without the global threat of thirst and famine that may otherwise plague the future generations.

Of course, Marx and Epicurus dealt with idealisms and their detrimental impact differently, as Marx was a historical and political materialist whereas Epicurus was an ethical materialist and atomist.  Our ideal of autarchy ensures that we meet our needs without the coercion and violence that political ideologies require of us.  But meet our needs we must: nature gives us no choice.

Materialism is not just needed to protect our minds from idealist notions and the unnecessary suffering they generate.  Truth is invariably a refuge from the ghosts of untruth, and a true epistemology, as well as true notions about the nature of things, help to support us against false ones.

Notice the sense of emergence that is presupposed in materialism.  We believe that, first, there are atoms and molecules, then progressively more complex things.  We believe that from inert matter emerges living matter, and that living things evolve by developing complex symbiotic relations with each other, and only then there emerges egoism, the self, the me versus another in struggle or cooperation, identity and consciousness.

But for the idealist, consciousness is a mysterious word that gets thrown around as if it automatically evidenced a non-natural or supernatural realm.  Worse yet, and in spite of all the evidence that can be attained from the study of nature, they believe that consciousness came first (although it is more complex than inert matter).  While it’s true that living entities have the power to influence their environment, this influence only occurs once they have emerged, once they have evolved consciousness.  But all the living entities emerged from progressively simpler forms, all the way down to the stardust at the dawn of all things.

Contrary to what nature shows us to be true, the idealist has this false notion that, rather than emerge, all things rained down from heaven and are less real, somehow, than consciousness (which, to them, existed earlier than matter), or that material things emerge from consciousness.  They believe that matter is to consciousness what the upside-down reflection of a tree in a pond of water is to the real tree, to cite an example from Hindu scripture.

The idea that the universe is “run” from the top down reflects a worldview that has obviously been favored by the ruling classes from the early times of the divine Pharaohs and god-kings.  It’s old trickery, the vestige of a very old ideology, one that has absolutely no foundation in the study of nature.  When we study nature, we see that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that things evolved backwards: they have always emerged and are always emerging.

Atomism is, therefore, still important.  Matter is the sure ground that we must walk on if we wish to think of ourselves as true philosophers rather than speculators or false-faith-mongers.  Materialism still matters!

Hiram Crespo, Founder of Society of Epicurus

Epicureanism calls for a wisdom tradition that incorporates non-traditional approaches to self-sufficiency, possibly multiple streams of income and early semi-retirement cycles.

A people’s philosophy should not only concern itself with high work ethic, as important as it may be. It must recognize the need for leisure without promoting a lazy attitude. Considering that PEOPLE, not things, provide us with the most value and happiness … and always understanding the difference between subjects (people) and objects (things, and never the other way around) — What does our philosophy say of the creation of value and of productivity?

How do we balance the need for productivity / making a living WHILE not becoming a wage-slave? How do we balance productivity and leisure? This will be an ongoing theme in future articles dealing with autarchy / self-sufficiency, which is not elaborted often enough, or broadly and in detail enough, in Epicurean discourse.  Hence, our Autarchy series of articles, which will be published over the coming months.

On Philodemus’ Art of Property Management Part I

On Philodemus’ Art of Property Management Part II

By R. Hanrott:

Division of labour, an idea popularised by Adam Smith in the “Wealth of Nations”, has done human beings no favors when it comes to knowing how to live. Most of us have to be cogs in one large production line, whether we are factory or government workers. It might have made us more “productive”, but has made us less happy, at the same time as we are generally wealthier and healthier.

Unfortunately, more money and better health cannot take the place of happy satisfaction in work. Studies have consistently shown that, even as real income has risen since the Second World War, the graph of life satisfaction has remained flat in the Western world.

Now there is a relatively new threat to the employee: the short-term contract. If you are an employer, you probably love short-term contracts. With the lack of well-paying jobs, young people have no option but to take what they can get, which is, increasingly, a short-term contract – no health benefits, no pension, no sick leave, no paid holiday entitlement.

And for those who don’t know what these benefits are: they have been, in the past, part and parcel of any career for the generation now retiring or retired. The justification is “flexibility”.  The economists call it “productivity”.

Some people have no option but to take a short-term contract.  Why should one have any loyalty to a company with a guillotine hovering over your head? How can one concentrate 100 percent on a good job, fearing that you will be out of work on such-and-such date? (Four years is the average length of these short-term contracts).

Both sides lose: the boss, because the employee is only just about productive after 2-3 years, and then he leaves. There is no continuity and little institutional memory. The customer is constantly dealing with new people.  One can underestimate the importance of this: the buyer in an industrial firm likes to deal with a friendly and knowledgeable supplier, to have a joke, to persuade him to do favors etc.

But, what trumps customer satisfaction is the flexibility of getting rid of people if profit drops a tad. Very convenient. And none of that messy business about firing – just no renewal notice. Meanwhile, everything is dealt with in a short-term manner. The boss looks no further forward than the next profit statement. Where will we all be in fifty years time? I won’t be here to see it, but you might be!

The short-term contract is one of the most anti-humanist devices ever mass-inflicted on a workforce. No Epicurean would indulge in this form of rule by fear.

I have run a manufacturing company and fail to understand how this negative, defensive, hand-to-mouth system can possibly work. Lovers of the “market” will tell you: “That’s the system. Get used to it”.

Those who prefer to treat employees with consideration and respect find the whole idea illustrates the unhealthy balance of power between employer and employee. Already the average American worker works longer hours, with less vacation time and benefits than anywhere else in the world, and it is doubtful if this is useful and effective for companies. Germany runs a very efficient economy and has generous benefits and adequate vacations. Life has to have some meaning other than work, long hours and no security.

Aside from short-term contracts, there is the problem of the low minimum wage. This is a truly Epicurean cause. Companies are paying a pittance and the rest of us taxpayers have to supplement the income of low-wage workers so that they can have enough to eat. This doesn’t make any sense. Why should we have to subsidize Walmart, to name but one company?  And how can the bosses sleep at night knowing that their workers are having to take the taxpayer charity of food stamps (about to be cut significantly by Congress). Epicurus would point to this as evidence of a disfunctional society.

There is a political movement now at local level to raise the minimum wage. Is there a possibility of political action against the short-term contract?

Robert Hanrott, author of the Epicurus Blog

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“To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart.

At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus told us indeed that ‘God is a spirit,’ but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter. And the ancient fathers generally, if not universally, held it to be matter: light and thin indeed, an etherial gas; but still matter.” – Thomas Jefferson, in his Letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820

While most modern materialists consider themselves atheists, there has been a long tradition of Deist materialism.  It’s appropriate to address the subject of the physicality of the soul during October, when our culture is cheerfully preparing to celebrate the Night of All Souls / Halloween.  What is a soul, after all?  What are we celebrating?

Epicurus taught that the mortal soul is material and atomic.  When I first approached other Epicureans about the physicality of the soul, it was explained to me that the soul, like the body, was atomic and that the atoms that make up our neural network (brain, nerves) constitute our physical soul, which dies along with the body when we expire.

There is no immortal soul: that is a myth, but the soul does exist and it is a natural (and, most importantly, observable) phenomenon.  There exists, therefore, a science or knowledge of the soul, and we cannot hope to effectively dismantle the fraud and the false doctrines of immaterialism unless and until the scientific, naturalist study of the soul becomes commonplace.

There are foods that are particularly good for the brain (chocolate being one of them, also any food that contains Omega 3 oils) and, as with the body, we are to take care of the health of the soul: it must be kept healthy, and philosophy is the main tool for keeping our souls healthy.

The word used by Jesus, Ruach, refers to Breath which is shared by all living entities and is a symptom of interbeing: animals exhale the carbon that trees inhale, and trees exhale the oxygen that animals inhale in a symbiotic cycle.  All life evolved as increasingly complex symbiotic relationships.

Our bodies contain billions of bacteria and cells that, together, compose our being.  We need bacteria to help us digest our food.  We do not exist in isolation: nothing does.  The Buddhists have a doctrine of co-dependent origination which is mirrored, in a way, in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which explains that all things are composed of progressively complex combinations of particles.

Spirit (Ruach, Breath) is, therefore, an animating, organic, observable phenomenon within nature that can be studied.  The breath is the ability to consume energy, and it usually takes the form of a dynamic exchange between organic entities that need each other to survive (we inhale the oxygen that the trees exhale).

While all material things are accurately said to exist and are real insofar as they are made of atoms, breathing and animated material beings exist and organize reality in a peculiar way.  It is the breath that distinguishes the living from the dead.  This is why it is said that God is Spirit (Breath) and that God is the God of the Living.  Nature can be inert or living (characterized by Spirit, breath, consumption), but it is only the living entities that are able to experience and seek pleasure.

The goal of pleasure and the goal of life are non-different.  Life seeks its perpetuity through pleasure: by it we eat, by it we mate, by it we thrive.  This is why Epicurus taught that Nature guides us via pleasure: the tendency to seek pleasure is non-different from the tendency to seek Life.  The mode of nature in which pleasure is not sought is inertia, non-Life … but we are not inert, we are breathing, living spirits.  Therefore, we seek pleasure, which is a sign of a healthy body and soul.

Because the study of the breath is available to the senses and because the breath is a natural phenomenon, a radical redefinition and demythification of the true, impersonal Go(o)d is needed.  While the breath is not a person, it does endow living entities with agency, animation and with the ability to utilize the senses and other faculties, and with the accompanying dignity and enhanced tendency of self-preservation that comes with personhood or animation.

Notice that, in the meditative traditions of yoga and Zen, the entire science of the soul is founded on the contemplation, control, or attentive study of the breath.  We may go days without eating, but we may only go minutes without breathing: it is our main source of animating life-force.  Zen teaches that the ultimate katastemic pleasure (a hedonism of being, not of doing or thinking) is the most simple pleasure derived from wholesome breathing which, because it is the most necessary of natural desires, should enjoy a place of primacy within our hedonic regimen.  Contemplative breathing practices constitute the quintessential abiding pleasure.

The original expression of Christianity contained a strong shamanic component that included natural healing practices such as fasting.  We lose apetite when we are sick so that the body may stop investing the vast amounts of energy it invests in digestion and dedicate itself to healing.  Many in the live-foods lifestyle periodically fast in order to reset the body’s natural healing abilities, with the understanding that the body has the wisdom to heal itself.

Wisdom derived from the study of nature, which we often find in religious traditions, is clearly distinct from superstition.  While there are many false views tied to Biblical belief, there is an ecological component to the God of Jesus, who is imagined as feeding the birds daily.

Look at the birds of the air: they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable than they? – Matthew 6:26

In the midst of (and in spite of) the death cult, there is another Christian tradition: one that is life-affirming, that derives insight from the study of nature and that recognizes the numenic in nature: Nature’s God is an euphemism for impersonal Mother Nature.  It is nature, not a supernatural agent or God, that feeds the birds daily: via natural selection, they have all the needed faculties to survive in their environment.  The impersonality of nature is no less numenic or inspiring.  We Epicureans know that nature is indeed a benevolent teacher who inspires gratitude.

Indeed, the very belief in the incarnation in Christ, and his mystery of the eucharist, is an affirmation of the need for the physicality of God.  Like the Hindus, who consume consecrated food known as prasadam (mercy) that is believed to contain the essence of Go(o)d/Vishnu the Preserver, the Christians recognize a fraction of the numenic, of Nature’s sustaining Go(o)d, in the holy meal, and in Go(o)d made flesh.  How can the Go(o)d of the Living be separated from the act of consumption, which feeds life?

“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!” – Jesus, in Mark 12:27

Even Jesus, who appears to not have known his human father, projected his own hunger for a father figure against the personality of Godhead, making Nature’s God into a Heavenly Father, and not the impersonal God of Nature.  But this is an innocent expression of the error of attaching agency, personality and volition to Nature.  Sadly, many vulgar myths that incorporate even awful things such as genocide and child sacrifice have woven themselves into theistic beliefs and obscured the possibility of a naturalist experience of the numenic.

The heresy of immaterialism is non-different from any of the death cults: the ones that promise virgins upon completion of holy warfare, the ones that propose the zombie apocalypse, these are all variations of the heresy of immaterialism.  They are not about life.  They do not derive insights from the study of nature, but deny nature.  They attribute life to non-being, to non-existence, to things that are not there.  They are Platonic, unnatural.  The true doctrine is a philosophy of Life that is rooted in reality.

It’s probably inappropriate to refer to Nature as a God.  In our tradition, Nature is impersonal, it is not an agent and has no volition.  But if anything is numenic, it is Nature.  If anything is real, it is Nature.  And if anything has spirit, or breath, is it natural, living entities.

Notice how, during the fall, the leaves die and fall and are reabsorbed into nature and feed the life of other beings: plants, worms, fungi.  There is nothing to fear in non-being.  There are no monsters under the bed, or in the closet, no ghosts visiting us from the world beyond this All Hollows’ Eve.  There are no immaterial beings.  Immaterial things, by definition, do not exist.  Non-being, death, is not and does not exist.  We are the spirits, the ghosts.  We are the ones who possess our bodies.  We are the ones who are breathing and consuming and who are woven into Nature’s quilt of interbeing.  The Night of All Souls is our night!  Have a joyous Halloween!

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In my recent visit to the federal capital, I was taken in by the majesty, the beauty and the history of the buildings of our government (and corporations, these days there’s no clear boundary).  If I had not understood the alphabet and was to judge the buildings by their architecture, Bank of America’s building would have been a government building.

Without writing an edict or enacting a law, the government and the banking cartel had articulated messages through the architecture.  The banks are making themselves out to be indistinct from our government and government buildings frequently utilize architectural styles that mirror the glory of ancient Greece, claiming for themselves the humanist legacy of the land that saw the birth of the earliest form of democracy.

It’s interesting to note a land’s architecture and the narratives (and identities) that are woven into it.  There is much that is implicit in the red of Chinese architecture: a state-sponsored narrative of revolution from the top down.  Whether or not we buy into the narrative, the act of displaying it with pomp makes the narrative powerful, relevant, and pervasive in the culture that witnesses the architecture.

A society’s architecture shapes the people’s identity in many subtle ways: by being ever-present, by lurking high above the people, by serving the ruling classes as a symbol of their power and legitimacy, and by the layers of history that nourish a people’s attachment to the sites.  Accidents of abuse and rebellion can at times evolve, within the urban setting, into monuments to the people’s history.  I’m reminded of how the Stonewall Inn, where gays first fought back police brutality in 1969, has become a site of pilgrimage for many LGBT people comparable to the monuments to the founding fathers in DC.  Not all architectural narratives happen from the top down.

And then there are the hidden, and Freudian, narratives, the (perhaps?) unintended ones.  The phallic symbols that embody power, conquest and fertility.  In my visit to DC I noticed that our national obelisk (fashioned after the ancient Egyptian model) was being fixed, curiously during a time in which America’s global hegemony is increasingly being questioned, as if old Uncle Sam was in need of viagra.

We all, consciously or not, choose to identify with various types of architecture according to sets of values and aesthetic tendencies that reflect, I believe, much more about ourselves than we may even know.  In watching science fiction for many years, I’ve noticed the curvy and anarchic urban designs found in films like Star Wars, Planet of the Apes, and other futuristic films (whether utopian or dystopian).  I’ve always been intrigued by how so many science fiction storylines imagine (and intuit) the architecture of the future in this way.  Notice how, in the Star Wars planet of Tatooine, the inner architecture of homes is almost organically curvy and blends into the ground and the land effortlessly.  Like the people of our much-feared overpopulated future, the people of Tatooine live in deserted lands where water must be harvested.

Joseph Campbell, the famous mythographer who mentored George Lucas during his years of incubating the Star Wars narrative, believed that a circular or round form favors wholeness and is a symbol of the Self and of completion.

I say these shapes also promote egalitarian models of relating to each other, whereas a pyramid has obvious classist connotations, and was in fact the most famous symbol of one of the societies that was most loyal to class divisions in antiquity: ancient Egypt.  The recent stirrings of the Egyptian revolution could have only happened long after the ruins of its past glory had been overtaken by the sands.

Notice, for contrast, the openness and flatness of the sites of modern revolutions: plazas and squares like Tahrir and Zuccotti Park.  Notice also how the idea of Occupying a space, owning it, and giving it a new identity (Zuccotti became Liberty Square) becomes an act of writing history, of weaving new populist narratives, and how these narratives that emerge from horizontal spaces explicitly repudiate classism (the 99% versus the 1%).

The futuristic documentary The 11th Hour, in proposing solutions to the present environmental and spiritual crisis that humanity faces, presents ideas for redefining progress by building our architecture and our machines in the image of how nature makes things efficiently rather than with the mindset of taming or controlling nature, which is admittedly the failed spiritual longing of our predecessors.  By embedding our technology into the cycles of nature, we work with her rather than against her and we secure a sustainable future for our descendants in this so-called anthropocene age of our own creation that we are entering.

There is a deeper intuition behind this emerging mindset, which leads me back to my own spiritual and philosophical master, Epicurus, and to the architectural model that he called for.

His schools were Gardens.

Ponder the semantics, the layers of meaning behind the architecture that he meant to favor, the type of covenant with nature that is implicit in the image of the Garden, which served pragmatically as a source of agricultural goods but was also his house and his school.

Gardens, in many of the worlds’ mythologies, serve as metaphors for the earliest and future paradise, the green world full of life that all the desert religions dream of, but to us this paradise is not other-worldly.  It is the space we are called to occupy.  Epicurus wanted his followers to be Gardeners, nature’s responsible, happy and awakened care-takers; and also scientists, the types of sages whose wisdom is derived from the study of nature.  The space he meant for them to occupy was one of serenity and beauty, of civilized pleasure always in the presence of nature.

The Garden is a metaphor for bringing nature back into the city, for being both natural and civilized, and for Epicurus’ dethronement of reason in favor of nature, not to deny or repress reason but to utilize it under the guidance of nature.  In Epicurean cosmology, man must engage in the study of nature (science) but is not destined to tame nature or called to govern nature by force.

Epicurus was very ahead of his day, and yet he is ancient and eternal.  The Earth will go on, with or without us.  She does not need us in the way that we need her.  In fact, viewed from space human civilization looks like a cancer, like a giant bacteria that is attacking and overcoming her.  We ‘tame’ nature to our own detriment.  In order to be spiritually relevant and useful, our narratives of progress must learn from and imitate nature instead of seeking to overcome and control her.

We can read into the architecture of the Garden how nature is built into the home, into civilization, into the polis, the city, into family and community life, how she is invited to be present there in the midst of it all.  She’s not exiled.  We don’t robe her in pavement or cement: we invite her in and she dwells among us.

Written by Hiram Crespo

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