They were the punks of Ancient Athens: drop-outs, anti-consumerists, Greens… meet the Cynics. By MD Usher

The Cynics were careful observers of human nature and could not abide what they saw in others and in themselves: namely, a tendency to luxury, ambition, stupidity, cruelty, and greed.

They responded to this realisation by dropping out of polite society. They sought to be liberated from the shackles of social expectations and tried to see life as it really is, and things as they really are. Their public stunts thus served the serious purpose of heightening awareness of what is truly virtuous and what is merely conventional. Nature, not culture, was their yardstick. Their objective in living was to need as little as possible and to want even less than that.

The Cynics were not the world’s first ascetics, but they have given us that word – from the Greek askēsis, which means “practice” or “training.” The metaphor is drawn from the realm of Ancient Greek athletics. Getting by on just a little is a form of exercise, they argued, that will strengthen you and make you impervious to the buffetings of misfortune. Beat calamity to the punch was their working strategy. Diogenes thus made a habit of begging from statues. When asked why, he replied, “To get good at being refused.”

The Need to Slow Down

The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the book The Limits to Growth. That landmark indictment of human overreach and excess, updated every five years since publication, is a bible of the environmental movement. In our new climatic regime of global heating, it remains scripture still. The book’s authors, the late Donella Meadows and her fellow researchers at MIT via the Club of Rome, used systems modelling to demonstrate that while rates of increase in the world’s population, pollution levels, and depletion of natural resources are fundamentally exponential in nature, our technological capacity to remediate these problems is confined to a linear trajectory. To put it another way: we will never catch up. We must, therefore, slow down. The Cynics have something to teach us here. They are the gurus of degrowth. Here are a few examples to consider from their oeuvre.

Less Is More

The Cynics had a perverse way of arguing a point. A syllogism they were fond of employing to justify their squatting on the steps of temples and sanctuaries, for example, went like this:

Everything belongs to the gods.

The wise are the gods’ friends.

Friends hold things in common.

Everything belongs to the wise.

That, of course, is (mostly) a cheeky gibe at syllogistic logic. But the Cynics’ specious reasoning could take a more serious turn, too, as one ancient biographer recounts: “Diogenes used to say that since the gods lack nothing, the god-like should need only a little.” The end game of the Cynics’ less-is-more approach to self-actualisation is on full display in this ancient summary of their delightfully circuitous thinking: “Even the despising of pleasure is itself most pleasant once it’s become a habit,” Diogenes was keen to point out. “Just as those who’ve grown accustomed to a pleasant life become miserable when they pass over to the opposite condition, so those persons whose training has been the opposite from theirs enjoy despising pleasures with more pleasure than the pleasures themselves.” Capeesh?

Put Up and Make Do

The Cynics lived frugally and ate food primarily for the sake of nutrition. Some Cynics were vegetarians and drank only cold water to boot. To someone who asked Diogenes at what hour one should eat lunch he said, “If rich, whenever you want; if poor, whenever you can.” Diogenes is popularly remembered as having lived in a tub or barrel. In fact, his abode was a large terracotta storage jar or pithos. Since pithoi were used to bury the dead, this choice of accommodation not only advertises Diogenes’s frugal lifestyle, it’s also a statement of the philosophical view that life is a rehearsal for death.

Externalities

The Cynics well understood what economists now call “externalities” or the harmful side-effects and human costs involved in the production and acquisition of goods. In a dialogue attributed to the satirist Lucian of Samosata, an unnamed Cynic likens the god in charge of this world to a host at a dinner party:

“The god is like a good host: He places before us a variety of many kinds of dishes so that we have what is appropriate for us – some things for the healthy, some for the sick, some for the strong, some for the weak – not so that we all may use everything, but so that each of us might use for ourselves what falls in our domain and, of those items, what we happen to need most.”

“Whereas you,” the Cynic continues, addressing his interlocuter, “are exactly like a person who grabs everything out of greed and lack of restraint. You think it’s fine to use it all, including goods from all over and not just what you have close to hand. You don’t think your own land and sea are enough in themselves but import your pleasures from the corners of the globe and always prefer what is foreign to what is produced locally, what is costly to what is inexpensive, and what’s hard to procure to what’s easily acquired…

“The many costly goods you think conducive to your happiness, over which you exult, only come to be yours through misery and suffering. That gold you pray so hard to get your hands on, the silver, the expensive houses, the finely tailored clothing, and all the accoutrements that go along with these things: how much do they cost in trouble? How much in human labour and danger, or rather, in human blood, death, and destruction? Many people are lost at sea for the sake of these things and the people who go in search for or manufacture them suffer terribly.”

This is an extract from a longer piece which appears in Idler 86, Sept/Oct 2022.

MD Usher teaches Classics and Environmental Humanities at the University of Vermont. His latest book How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism, is  published by Princeton University Press.

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