Many are already aware of the ancient idea of Memento Mori. Latin for “Remember that you will die”, many practices and artefacts across the history of culture channel this idea in diverse ways. I’d say that probably in European culture the most recurrent Memento Mori artefacts would be paintings, mosaics and carvings portraying skulls and bones. They lie solitary in shadowy environments, or next to beautiful youth to signify the decay already underway. We can also find it in the symbolic depiction of rotting fruits and flowers or dancing skeletons terrorising the living.
But it is in practices, not in artefacts, that I think Memento Mori can exhibit a less macabre, sinister face and instead a more empowering one. Two practices that channel this idea belong to the ancient Greco-roman world. When Roman military commanders would return victorious from a campaign of conquest, the city would celebrate a ‘Triumph’ for them. The commander would ride a chariot at the head of the army, parading through the city’s streets all the way to Jupiter’s temple. The procession would display all the prisoners and spoils of war to the people. It made its way through an arc of triumph especially built for the occasion and then up Capitol Hill. One of the most fascinating aspects of this ceremony is that it seems that the commander was accompanied by a person whose sole job was to remind him time and again that this glory was ephemeral, that he would die one day. Memento Mori. It was supposed to humble the commander who, ecstatic as he was with his victory and the rapturous cheers of his city, could mistakenly think that he was more than a mere mortal, like everyone else.
The second practice has to do with philosophy. From the remaining Stoic writings that we have, there is a recurrent injunction to remember your mortality and that of everyone else, so that you keep your priorities grounded in this unavoidable reality. As many of the philosophies that emerged in the Hellenistic period and were later appropriated by the Romans, Stoicism was chiefly about learning to live a good life. It taught to let go of grudges and the fear of loss while at the same time to be grateful of the things you know aren’t forever. It also taught to maintain an equanimous attitude towards all things in life.
I think that Memento Mori can be a useful practice for some people that are prone to getting wrapped up in insignificant things because they unwillingly lost sight of the broader picture of life, should they want to adopt that kind of attitude.
Nonetheless, I think that in these times we more urgently need a constant reminder of the causes from which our decisions originate. Instead of Memento Mori, we need Memento Causarum: a reminder of our motives.
Just like I said with Memento Mori, where getting wrapped up in small or temporary details can lead you to forget the bigger picture, I think that today it’s easy to go astray from our initial motives as we endeavour to accomplish something.
I think that down the road, as challenges come our way and we need to focus on solving them before setting our aims again on the main goal, the course of our actions becomes muddier. It becomes filled with alliances, enmities, emotional charge, ego-stakes, and shallow cognitive shortcuts. I think that sometimes we can become too engulfed by side-problems like maintaining a pristine reputation, being defensive against our perceived foes or getting back at them somehow, that we forget exactly why we were doing something in the first place. And when I say shallow shortcuts, I mean becoming too attached to specific means of achieving something without stopping to think about why one chose those means in the first place. Therefore, one staunchly campaigns to see those means through while priding oneself of being a determined, committed person of integrity, oblivious to the fact that those means might increasingly be misaligning you from the actual motive behind your initial efforts.
I’m not trying to be judgmental. We can all find ourselves in these situations. It is hard to delve into something very complex that requires working through many layers, and for a long period of time, and not get lost in the details. You begin to shortcut your thinking process by focusing on the more immediate problems and the ones that immediately preceded them. You begin to think about how you can maintain all that you built through your efforts while paying less and less attention to the thing that compelled you to start this endeavour. It becomes even harder in a sunk-cost fallacy scenario where you advanced a good stretch in your work and then when you decide to look back you see how much you deviated from your initial motive. Now you are confronted with a dilemma. Should you scrape a good part of your hard work in order to course correct? Or should you adjust your motive to wherever it is you think you are going? The sunk-cost fallacy is clear: returning to your initial motive would mean wasting all that effort that you put during this stage of your work. Or maybe it’s a matter of survival, you cannot lose face by admitting that on second-thought you didn’t quite mean all of this in the first place. And sometimes this is not a bad thing, you just might have found a better motive down the road. But I think it’s important to go back once in a while to why you decided to do something, what your actual wishes are. I think it’s especially beneficial to find a way to never lose sight of your first motive because since it emerged from a more ‘innocent’, less stuck-in-the-details perspective, it has the potential to get you back on track towards the essence of what you’re trying to accomplish. Even if it might not be the right motive anymore, it needs to be present in your mind the moment you decide to ditch it. It works as a point of reference from which you can evaluate how much your new motive addresses the gist of the issue.
Even more, I think that something similar has happened with our use of language. I think that because we have arrived at such an intellectually sophisticated and culturally abundant level of development, we are witnessing a breakdown in communication. For example, many concepts with a long history of usage that deal with layers upon layers of abstractions (let’s say the term Capitalism, an abstract term that is itself constituted by other abstract terms such as ‘Free Market’, ‘Price Systems’, ‘Liberalism’, which are themselves constituted of other abstract terms) are being used very often in statements and conversations that ultimately are about the battling of one idea against another to convince someone whether one opinion is more worthy of being considered as the right course of action above the other. But if we are getting too involved with the words, we can easily reach a point of getting too invested in the abstractions and not the empirical reality. How can we not unwittingly be distanced from our motives when we are deploying a full orchestra when all we needed was to hear the violin with our utmost attention?
So communication begins to break down when the assemblage of abstractions and selected historical, ideological, personal and emotional interpretations that form our version of ‘Capitalism’ differs greatly from that of the person on the other end. A third-party that could read both our minds would stare baffled at our increasingly sophisticated arguments and counter-arguments and ask: what are we even talking about?
The reality is that we will hardly be able to accurately explain what we actually mean when we say that word, even less will we be able to assure them that we understand their version. Even less than that, we surely won’t able to convince them to change their version for ours. So I think that the empirical reality beyond all over-convoluted judgments is what drives the initial motive. In that primeval state, there are no stakes, no what about-isms, no ‘too late for that’, no fourth degree ironies, no litmus-testing, no canned reactions, and the list goes on. Why do we want ‘capitalism’, or ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ or [insert your ideal societal order]? What are the motives behind our choosing? What were the motives behind those who first formulated these ideas? What about those who later updated them? If all we wanted in the beginning was to make things better for everyone, we can find ways to be reminded of that, clear and loud, once in a while. Let’s make the conversation fruitful, let’s keep our feet on the ground. Memento Causarum.
This rant came from a place of utter frustration with the quality of the debates that are taking over (note that I didn’t say ideas, because I think from my humble place that there are fantastic ideas circulating all around, they just seem to be sucked up and eclipsed by the broader whole, the common talking points, which are of a much lower fruitfulness).
Personally Memento Causarum is a little habit that helps keep me sane. I try to imagine that person next to the Roman commander, basking in his glory. He is gently whispering to him, reminding him of his mortality. But I am the commander, and I am basking in the sophistication and righteousness of my arguments, supported by all these smart public people who seem to know what they are talking about. And the person next to me, maybe an automatic reminder on my phone, maybe someone I made a deal with to mutually remind ourselves and hold ourselves accountable, or maybe a journaling practice, is reminding me of my fallibility. And he reminds me that it is okay if I’m wrong, that maybe if I listen with only my motive in mind to the other argument, theirs might not be so contemptible after all. Memento Causarum
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