Do our ancestors' philosophies shape our decisions?
Justus Lipsius and the long shadow of neostoicism
I’m Alison Peck, a law professor and immigration lawyer, and this is How We Got Here, a walk through our immigration policy past with updates from the front lines.
Wilbur J. Carr’s life merits inspection because of what he overlooked. The biography commissioned by his widow describes in detail his fight in 1924 for a rational system of Foreign Service promotions but gives shallow treatment to his implementation of the Immigration Act of that same year that drastically curtailed immigration based on nationality. During the FDR administration, the authorized biography focuses on Carr’s unlikely retention by the Democratic administration but makes no mention of his actions to discourage consuls from issuing visas to Jewish refugees on the theory that they might become a “public charge.”
Perhaps the book glosses over these controversial subjects because they would have embarrassed Carr’s widow (and the author wished to get paid). Just as likely, the book pays little attention to these subjects because Carr himself paid little attention to them. Establishing a merit-based appointment and promotion system for the consular service (and later the amalgamated Foreign Service) mattered deeply to Carr. Issuing visas to displaced and persecuted Europeans – which in 1924 had become the job of the consular service he oversaw – that was all in a day’s work. Carr used persuasion artfully to achieve his administrative goals but rarely ventured an opinion on policy, which he saw as above his pay grade.
He also rarely allowed himself to feel strong emotions. A colleague described him as having a “peculiarly placid” disposition, and this was no accident. On October 19, 1919, after a rare occasion of losing his temper at work, he wrote in his diary,
there is never anything gained by impatience and loss of temper. It is too costly to be indulged in. Only an unwise man will become angry; only a thoughtless or ignorant man will permit his mind to get beyond his control. It should always be kept completely under the domination of the will, the latter being guided by the highest thoughts of which the individual may be capable.
Is there a relationship between the unwillingness to experience strong emotions and the failure to advocate for the overlooked or unpopular? That’s one question I’m exploring in this work (probably, if I’m being honest, because emotion versus reason is a line I’ve wavered back and forth across over my own lifetime). As Carr recognizes, you can get more work done with a clear head. But, without experiencing strong emotions at some point, can you recognize where your work should be directed?
Echoes of an Early Modern Europe in Crisis
It’s tough to say where a personal philosophy originates. But as I studied the conditions that Carr’s German ancestors left in 18th century Germany, I was startled how much of Carr I saw in the work of Justus Lipsius, the father of neostoicism.
Lipsius was born Joest Lips in Brabant (now in Belgium) on October 18, 1547. Just as he was reaching adulthood, the Low Countries became engulfed in the Eighty Years’ War, an explosion arising out of the Protestant Reformation, revolt against the Spanish Habsburg monarchy, and other tensions. When fighting resumed for the final stage in 1621, the conflict in the Low Countries became a side theater of the Thirty Years’ War that ravaged southwest Germany, home of Carr’s maternal ancestors, until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
The duchy of Württemberg that Carr’s ancestor left in 1737 was still recovering from the Thirty Years’ War, which cost the lives of as many as eight million people, not even counting those who died in the wars that continued to plague the region well into the eighteenth century. These wars profoundly affected peasants, because under-provisioned troops (and they were all under-provisioned, after decades of unrelenting war) survived by quartering with, plundering, and terrorizing farmers. Carr’s maternal ancestors would have inhabited a hell on earth, year after harrowing year.
On Constancy
In 1583, Lipsius, then a history professor at the University of Leiden, published On Constancy, a dialogue in two books. (You can find the first, and most important, of the books in English translation here.) Lipsius sought to revive the Greek philosophy of stoicism in a way that early modern Christians could accept. While some of Lipsius’s later writings describe the duties of leaders, On Constancy prescribes a philosophy of life for the common person suffering the ravages of war.
On Constancy presents a dialogue between the author as a younger man and a wise elder named Langius. Lipsius, on his way to Vienna, stops at the home of Langius in Liège. There, he tells the older man that he is traveling in order to escape the war. “For (said I) who is so hard and flinty a heart that he can anie longer endure these evils?” Lipsius is, in our terms, a refugee.
But Langius exhorts Lipsius to a different approach to escaping his troubles. “Wherefore (Lipsius) thou must not forsake they countrey, but thy affections,” Langius tells him. No matter where he goes, he will carry the anguish with him. The only hope is to change within.
The solution, Langius explains, lies in “CONSTANCE,” which depends on “PATIENCE” and “RIGHT REASON” as distinguished from “OBSTINACIE” and “OPINION.” Langius counsels Lipsius,
CONSTANCIE is a right and immoveable strength of the minde, neither lifted up, nor pressed downe with externall or casuall accidentes. By STRENGTH, I understande a stedfastnesse not from opinion, but from judgement and sound reason. … But the true mother of Constancie is PATIENCE, and lowlinesse of mind, which is, a voluntarie sufferance without grudging of all things whatsoever can happen to, or in a man. This being regulated by the rule of Right Reason, is the verie roote whereupon is setled the high and mighty bodie of that fair oakc CONSTANCIE. Beware here, least OPINION beguile thee, presenting unto thee in steed of Patience, a certaine abjection and basenesse of a dastardlie minde. Being a foule vice, proceeding from the vile unworthinesse of a man’s owne person. But virtue keepeth the meane, not suffering any excesse or defect in her actions, because it weigheth all things in the ballance of REASON, making it the rule and squire of all her trials. Therefore we define RIGHT REASON to be, a true sense and judgement of thinges humane and divine. (So farre as the same appertaineth to us.) But OPINION (being the contrairie to it) is defined to be, a false and frivolous conjecture of those thinges.
Langius goes on to dispute the sincerity of grief for one’s country as opposed to oneself, and (in the most influential portion of the work) reforms the ancient stoic notion of “the Fates” into the supremacy of the will of God, with logical arguments for surrender to it even in great suffering or incomprehensible violence.
These themes, which would have preoccupied the early modern Christian a great deal, probably perturbed Carr little, and us even less. But Langius’s first instruction about the value of Constancie and its distinction from Opinion, sounds like a page from Carr’s own diary.
Stoicism itself was not a philosophy of patient inaction. In Letters from a Stoic, Seneca (whom Lipsius was interpreting) said, “We must therefore rouse ourselves to action and busy ourselves with interests that are good, as often as we are in the grasp of an uncontrollable sluggishness.” Act first, then accept, Seneca says, because the world is unpredictable.
Lipsius (through Langius) emphasized the accepting but not the acting. Even to escape is foolhardy; one must learn to stay; the wise man banishes passion and learns to accept. Langius never attempts to distinguish things about which “Right Reason” may counsel action. Any emotional reaction to suffering, it seems, must be banished as “Opinion.”
The Legacy of Lipsius
This advice makes some sense as a message to civilians caught in the crosshairs of eight decades of bloody warfare. But as a philosophy for a U.S. government official – or even a private citizen – in the twentieth century, it seems dangerously inadequate.
I’ve seen no evidence that Carr ever read Lipsius or was directly influenced by him. His Württemberger ancestor, Michael Finter, could write his name, but was almost certainly a farmer, not someone devoting his days to philosophy.
But some scholars of early modern Europe cite Lipsian neostoicism as having permeated how peasants saw themselves and their circumstances. On Constancy went through eighty editions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and was translated into dozens of languages.
When I discovered On Constancy while researching the Thirty Years’ War, I was arrested by how much it sounded like Carr’s own words. Could a philosophy travel from early modern Europe, across an ocean to a Pennsylvania Dutch farm community in Ohio, and into the heart of a twentieth century government official? If neostoicism did have such a career, did it play a role in shaping Carr’s dutiful silence about the plight of displaced persons and refugees?