Lower Your Expectations

There's a quip going around that yesterday's Washington Post editorial summarizes the current administration's policy as nicely as Trump's slogan summarizes his.

Trump:  "Make America Great Again."

Biden: "Try Lowering Your Expectations."

There's an important distinction to be made between policy and individual life. As an individual, in fact many of these disruptions are going to be quite beyond your power to affect. You may be wiser to accept that, and lower your expectations about what your society is able to achieve -- at least for a while. You'll be happier if you focus on the things you can in fact affect.

Indeed, this is the core insight of both Stoicism and Zen/Ch'an Buddhist ethics. For example:

40. Being in the World Without Misery

Huitang said:

What has been long neglected cannot be restored immediately.

Ills that have been accumulating a long time cannot be cleared away overnight.

One cannot enjoy oneself forever.

Human emotions cannot be just right.

Calamity cannot be avoided by trying to run away from it.

Anyone... who has realized these five things can be in the world without misery. 

[Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston & London: Shambala Pocket Classics), 1993]

The Stoic knows that he cannot change very much at all about the world, and so focuses on the few things that are in his power. These chiefly include whether he becomes upset about things he cannot control, or accepts the world as he finds it and focuses his effort on behaving virtuously. This begins with accepting that death is certain, and he must live courageously in spite of its certainty. (Cf. 'calamity cannot be avoided by trying to run away from it.') It eventually embraces all things that cannot be changed: the bus is late, the supply chains are disrupted, the autumn is short and the cold winter is coming, beloved dogs do not live as long as we do, and neither do our fathers. 

So, as an individual ethic, this is excellent advice that lies at the core of wise ethical systems. 

It is less good as policy advice. There are more things that an organized community can do than that an individual can do, and merely accepting that things will get worse was not acceptable even to the Stoics or the Buddhists. Marcus Aurelius was both a Roman emperor and a Stoic philosopher. He did not neglect the affairs of the empire out of Stoic virtue, but rather used his Stoic virtue to focus on what he could change for the better at any moment in time. That Zen Lessons in Leadership book is chiefly intended to capture lessons about how monasteries and communities structured themselves and were led by wise men. The best course for anyone is always to do one's duty, and if one must have leaders their duties entail good leadership. 

While these problems cannot be cleared away overnight that does not mean they cannot be cleared away at all. Oil prices are high because of decisions about pipelines and drilling as much as because of other things. We could be building nuclear power plants near cities to pursue both power and clean energy. We could eliminate punitive government regulations that tie up truckers and ports -- indeed even the current administration waived the regulations on port operating hours as a part of its strategy for overcoming the problems. 

Part of the administration's problem is that it refuses another core Stoic lesson, which the Zen and Ch'an Buddhists also accept: living in accordance with nature. They keep wanting wind and solar power to be the answer, so they act as if the technology were as reliable as they want it to be rather than as reliable as it actually is. Germany is having power problems because they focused on wind, and the wind was light this year. China is having power problems because they relied on hydropower -- which works pretty well in some places -- and then this year there wasn't much rain. Solar power likewise has limits they don't want to accept.

It would be very nice for them if everyone would lower his expectations, or hers as the case may be. Then they might be better placed to act as if the world worked the way they wanted it to instead of the way it does. Somehow socialist economies always come around to "lower your expectations" because expectations at any level prove increasingly difficult to satisfy. Humans have a nature too, one that we have to accept rather than trying to change, and this is the core difficulty of their project.

So in a way the quip was right about the political matters, though quite wrong about the ethical ones. That would be an oddity if Plato had been right that the community should be ordered the same way as the soul; then politics would be an exact reflection of ethics, with the community ordered so as to be brave and moderate, wise and good but simply at a higher level of organization.

In fact Plato was wrong about that; that is the fallacy of composition. What is right at one level of organization is not always right at another. A good family operates on different principles than a good state, rather than the state simply being a higher order of the family. A good person is not merely a good member of his various communities, though the Stoics are correct that it is in communities that individuals flourish. The internal virtues remain important even when one is alone, and even when interacting with strangers with whom one shares no community -- as at war, when courage matters in facing an enemy, and magnanimity might lead one to victory or peace through the establishment of a new kind of community.