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Charles Koch Foundation Funds Eudaimonia Institute and Why Not?

So, the Charles Koch Foundation has funded a $3.7 million Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest. For those Billionaire Clients in Wealth Bondage who do not read Greek, eudaimonia is Aristotle's word for a life well lived, for human flourishing, a good life in a just community. Aristotle was the Tutor (I hasten to point out) to Alexander, a prince in Macedonia, who went on to become Alexander The Great. Alexander is said to have carried Aristotle's work, including the Ethics, The Politics, and Poetics (on tragedy) as Alexander conquered the world. In Plutarch's Life of Alexander, Tutors don't come into it much, but Trusted Advisors do and so do Physicians. When Aristotle got good advice he did not like, from doctors and subordinates, he, in one case, speared the counselor, and in a second had him crucified. His doctors wondered if they would survive their treating him. Of course this is a parable about human flourishing under conditions of great power disparity, isn't it? Is it the kind of input Charles Koch wants from Jim Otteson, a professor of political economy at Wake Forest U who heads up the Eudaimonia Institute? I doubt it. I can only add that there is an unsubstantiated 2,000 year old rumor that Aristotle, Alexander's original Morals Tutor, got so fed up with his protégé's lust for power, conquest, glory and luxury, that he sent a packet of poison in a donkey's hoof, that was sprinkled by a Macedonian Patriot into the great man's cup, which may have been why Alexander died young. 

You could draw similar morals from Aristotle on Tragedy. To achieve happiness...  Do you know that story? How the city was sick and the cure was the conviction of the King himself for high crimes and misdemeanors, so that the King became the sacrifice, scapegoat, or pariah, the pharmakos, whose disgrace and suffering  saved the town? At the end of the cycle, Oedipus blinds himself, and wanders out of the city. "When I had eyes I could not see, now I am blind and can see. Call me happy." Happy meaning it is a happy ending, a just and fair ending, since with the sacrifice of the king, the city is healed of the plague the king's crimes caused. And happy too because the king finally sees what kind of person he really is. He is redeemed because in his self-abasement he affirms the moral order by which he has finally and appropriately been crushed.

When Wake Forest convenes the conference, as I hope they will, on Philanthropy and the Polis, I will go naked, carrying a pottery lamp, in search of the honest man, not that I will have been invited, and not that I am particularly honest. But that lamp in broad daylight is just another old joke, drawn from Diogenes, whose conversation about eudaimonia with Alexander the Great is legendary. This Dumpster at the intersection of Wealth and Bondage is my homage to that great man's (Diogenes's) barrel.  I even have a copy of The Ethics in here, if you want to thumb through it while I take a leak.

American Bacchae

Tutor Skyped me last night at 3 am. Apropos of whatever was on his mind, he said, "Social Enterprises now have as many bottom lines as there were once gods on Mt Olympus. It takes only two to make tragedy, and three for farce. Soon Ovid's Metamorphoses will be taught in business school. They call it 'story telling.' The best stories drive metrics. If only they might read The Bacchae. Reason rules the polis and the great god Dionysus calls for Hillary's head." Tutor may be drinking again. I worry about him sometimes. "If this is what a lifetime of reading gets you, Tutor," I said, "we are better off ignorant." He said,  "You are in good company." Then he hung up. 

The Wounded Healer

The Healer (Pharmakeus) Healed:

The scapegoat [pharmakos] was the purification [to katharma] in this fashion.

After they had burnt the ugliest man of all – as I said earlier –

for the purification of the city during the greatest disasters,

they sprinkled [errainon] his ash throughout nearly the whole city.

Therefore they called this rite purification [katharma] before scapegoat [pharmakos].

The poisoner [pharmakeus] was he who used drugs to kill.

Who chooses, I wonder, this pharmakos who by taking upon himself the sins of society, heals it? Or does the healer rise up to offer his body for burning, tormented beyond reason by a moral illness that plagues his city? And why, then, is the healer also the poisoner, as the drug (pharmakon) is also the poison? "Physician, Heal thyself!," spoken as the healer burns crackling at the crossroads. Out of such death-play comes satire, as out of death life. For the pharmakos who names the truth in the presence of corrupt power - how that ends is badly. But for whom? Not for the media, not for philanthropy, not for those who head our body politic, and not for me either. For I will stick to the positive and take my meds.