Whatever views we may hold on the subject of Jade Goody, Romans would have found it grimly appropriate that a woman ‘famous’ for appearing on Big Brother should choose to die in the arms of a PR consultant.
Whatever views we may hold on the subject of Jade Goody, Romans would have found it grimly appropriate that a woman ‘famous’ for appearing on Big Brother should choose to die in the arms of a PR consultant. But the Stoics would have been baffled why she and her unhappy demise were thought worthy of such attention from the media.
Stoicism, invented by the Cypriot Zeno (335-263 bc), taught that the ‘divine’ element in man was his rational mind. So the happy life — one in accordance with the course set for you by the god — consisted in ensuring that your opinions, impulses, emotions, desires, aversions and so on were under rational control; if not, unhappiness was the inevitable result. Apekhou kai anekhou said the Stoic thinker Epictetus: ‘restrain yourself and endure’. A favourite Stoic image is that of the dog on the leash. The dog can travel his destined course by acting rationally, and so go freely and happily; or by acting irrationally, and so struggle and be miserable. Doubtless journalists would contend that, by controlling the nation’s base appetites with their rational, restrained and unsentimentalised coverage of Ms Goody’s misfortune, they were spreading happiness far and wide.
Zeno likewise argued that all forms of subjugation were evil, and therefore e.g. slavery was morally wrong. Other Stoics agreed: ‘Justice instructs you to spare all men, to respect the human race, to return to each his own, not to touch what is sacred, or what belongs to the state, or what belongs to someone else’.
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