Secular Right

Been reading with much enjoyment Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, possibly the gloomiest major poem ever written. George Gilbert Ramsay, who translated it for the Loeb Classical Library, calls it “a profoundly depressing and pessimistic poem.” Just my cup of tea. There’s a 1693 translation, only patchily good, by John Dryden on Google Books. Dr. Johnson used the Tenth Satire as a model for his terrific “Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749).

Here’s what I want to know. After 345 lines of telling us how pointless everything is, Juvenal perks up at the end with an appeal to trust to the Gods. In Dryden’s translation:

    What then remains? Are we depriv’d of will,
Must we not wish, for fear of wishing ill?
Receive my counsel, and securely move;
Intrust thy fortune to the Powers above.
Leave them to manage for thee, and to grant
What their unerring wisdom sees thee want:
In goodness as in greatness they excel;
Ah that we lov’d ourselves but half so well!
We, blindly by our headstrong passions led,
Are hot for action, and desire to wed;
Then wish for heirs:  but to the gods alone
Our future offspring, and our wives are known;
Th’ audacious strumpet, and ungracious son.
    Yet not to rob the priests of pious gain,
That altars be not wholly built in vain;
Forgive the gods the rest, and stand confin’d
To health of body, and content of mind:
A soul, that can securely death defy,
And count it nature’s privilege, to die;
Serene and manly, harden’d to sustain
The load of life, and exercis’d in pain:
Guiltless of hate, and proof against desire;
That all things weighs, and nothing can admire:
That dares prefer the toils of Hercules
To dalliance, banquet, and ignoble ease.
    The path to peace is virtue:  what I show,
Thyself may freely on thyself bestow:
Fortune was never worshipp’d by the wise;
But, set aloft by fools, usurps the skies.

But would a man of Juvenal’s time and place — he was a Roman, writing around a.d. 120 — really have believed in the rather cheesy Roman pantheon? (Which at that point included three or four dead emperors, whose personal foibles were known to all.) We don’t actually know anything about Juvenal, other than what he tells us in his poems, but is it likely? Wasn’t official Roman religion strictly for the common folk — and not much regarded even by them? That’s been my impression from reading authors like Gibbon and Balsdon. Any classicists out there care to give an opinion?

In an era when some (rightly) worry that blasphemy laws may be being reintroduced under the guise of prohibiting speech that gives ‘offense’, here via the New York Times is a reminder that the original approach lingers on in America too:

Mr. Kalman had already formed one such corporation for his information-technology business and now wanted the same status for his sideline as a filmmaker, the better to write off expenses on his income taxes.
The first line on the document asked Mr. Kalman to supply his chosen corporate name, and he printed it in: I Choose Hell Productions, LLC. In a personal bit of existentialism, Mr. Kalman believed that, even if life was often hellish, it was better than suicide.
A week later, the daily mail to Mr. Kalman’s home in the Philadelphia suburb of Downingtown brought a form letter from the Pennsylvania Department of State. His corporate filing had been rejected, the letter explained, because a business name “may not contain words that constitute blasphemy, profane cursing or swearing or that profane the Lord’s name.”
Mr. Kalman felt quite certain, he recalled here the other day, that the letter was some kind of prank. Nobody had even signed it. And though he did not know it at the time, Pennsylvania had granted corporate designation to entities like Devil Media, Vomit Noise Productions and Satanic Butt Slayers.
After a couple more readings, though, Mr. Kalman realized that the rejection was genuine. Pennsylvania, it turned out, indeed had a law against blasphemy…

Read the whole thing.

I’ve long thought that some aspects of modern environmentalism (particularly many of the attitudes and beliefs associated with, to use the shorthand, ‘global warming’) are in a good number of respects ‘religious’.

Here (via the Daily Telegraph) is a story that would appear to give some official support to that view:

A former executive of a top property company has been told he can claim at a tribunal that he was sacked because of his “philosophical belief in climate change”. In the landmark ruling Tim Nicholson was told he could use employment law to argue that he was discriminated against because of his views on the environment. The head of the tribunal ruled that those views amounted to a philosophical belief under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003, according to The Independent. The case is the first of its kind and could open the way for hundreds of future claims to be made in the same fashion, the newspaper reported. Mr Nicholson, 41, was made redundant while head of sustainability at Grainger plc, Britain’s biggest residential property investment company, in July last year.

There is, of course, the temptation to think that any company sanctimonious enough to hire a ‘head of sustainability’ deserves all the trouble it gets. That’s unless, of course,  the original idea behind that appointment was that it should be used as a cynical piece of corporate camouflage – in which case it can only be applauded. 

The following aspect of this story makes me suspect that’s just what it might have been….

Mr Nicholson said that his frustrations were exemplified by an occasion when the company’s chief executive, Rupert Dickinson, “showed contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions by flying out a member of the IT staff to Ireland to deliver his BlackBerry that he had left behind in London.”