Cicero's Tusculan Disputations are best known these days for being the origin of the story of the "Sword of Damocles." But they may also be the site of the first ever use of the "slippery slope" argument. The Wikipedia page for this well-known fallacy attributes the earliest use of the argument to a different work of Cicero's—a treatise on friendship. But the Tusculan Disputations, apparently composed some years earlier, use the image of a "slippery slope" even more directly than the example Wikipedia cites.
In the fourth disputation—on the topic of "mental perturbations"—Cicero at one point makes the questionable argument that it is impossible to tolerate a little bit of vice, without thereby allowing in vice of any proportion. Obviously, there's no reason why this logically follows. It's a classic form of the slippery slope fallacy. And Cicero even uses the metaphor of "slippery ground" to justify it:
"[W]hoever prescribes bounds to vice, admits a part of it, which, as it is odious in itself, becomes the more so as it stands on slippery ground, and being once set forward, glides on headlong, and cannot by any means be stopped." (Yonge trans. throughout.)
Is this perhaps the first "slippery slope" in Western literature—and the origin of all those to follow?
Nor is it the only informal fallacy that Cicero introduces in the text. He also deploys a sub-variant of the ad hominem fallacy—specifically, the "Tu quoque"—when he comes to discuss the topic of enduring pain. The fifth and final disputation concerns whether or not a virtuous person will be happy even under the most extreme outward afflictions, such as torture and bodily pain. Cicero, when pressed on whether or not a virtuous man will remain happy even when stretched on the rack, resorts to a fallacious dodge:
"Is it allowable even for Epicurus (who only puts on the appearance of being a philosopher [...]) to say [...] that a wise man might at all times cry out, though he be burned, tortured, cut to pieces, 'How little I regard it!' [...] What! shall such a man as this, as I said, whose understanding is little superior to the beasts’, be at liberty to forget himself; and not only to despise fortune [...], but to say that he is happy in the most racking torture, when he had actually declared pain to be not only the greatest evil, but the only one?"
In other words—the argument seems to be: Epicurus got away with making this claim, so why not me? He was allowed to be self-contradictory, so, how can you expect any better from me? An example of the Tu quoque fallacy if ever there was one.
Throughout the book, Cicero gives the impression of a man trying to convince himself of something (and not hesitating to use specious arguments to do so). And indeed, he even admits as much. He wrote the disputations under the impetus of a great personal grief—the death of his daughter. "I could not find any better comfort for myself," he writes, than to work on this book of philosophy. It is an extended effort at self-therapy.
Does it work? Is one convinced? The substance of Cicero's argument throughout the text is that nothing truly can ever hurt one, and that we have nothing to fear from either life or death. Death can be no evil, because either of two things must be the case. Under one possibility, we may exist forever as immortal souls suspended in the heavens, free to contemplate the whole Earth and all its wonders for eternity, freed from the prison of bodily appetites and pains.
Or, at worst, we simply cease to exist. We go down into the night of permanent "insensibility," in which we can neither suffer nor experience pain or dread ever again.
But Philip Larkin already pointed out, in a poem, the chief reason why this argument fails to entirely comfort us. He refers—perhaps with Cicero in mind—to "specious stuff that says No rational being / Can fear a thing it will not feel[.]" And to this, Larkin retorts, that such arguments ignore the fact "[t]hat this is [exactly] what we fear—no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, [...] The anaesthetic from which none come round."
The comfort that Cicero prescribes for the fear of death, therefore, is cold comfort indeed. It is much the same comfort that Heine sought in his morphine: "Sleep is good; death is better / But best of all is never to have been born." Walter Kaufmann once declared in an essay, as I recall, that this line of Heine's reflects a distinctly German attitude to death—but it turns out to have been common in the whole ancient world (I have previously traced it to Sophocles and the Book of Job.) And Cicero echoes it in this text as well:
"There is a story told of Silenus, who, when taken prisoner by Midas, is said to have made him this present for his ransom; namely, that he informed him that never to have been born, was by far the greatest blessing that could happen to man; and that the next best thing was, to die very soon."
But if death is no evil, according to Cicero—what about the physical pain that afflicts us in life? This is suddenly a very relevant topic, since the U.S. president has recently deported hundreds of innocent people—with no due process—to be tortured for the rest of their lives in a dungeon in El Salvador, based on no evidence or formal accusation or trial or conviction (to all of which the U.S. Supreme Court's response was a kind of half-shrug).
Could a virtuous man be happy even in Trump's torture-dungeon in El Salvador? We may soon have to ask ourselves that question. And I for one am not exactly satisfied with the fallacious rejoinder: "well, Epicurus said as much. And he's a lousy philosopher who contradicted himself. So, if he gets to say it, I should as well."
Does Cicero have any better arguments to adduce as to how even torture cannot harm us in this life? A few. "[S]till," he writes, "should [...] the pain be so exquisite [...] still, why, good Gods! should we be under any difficulty? For there is a retreat at hand: death is that retreat - a shelter where we shall be forever insensible."
Let him take consolation in that thought who dare—"Creep, wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind," as Gerard Manley Hopkins once put it, in reference to the highly Ciceronian thought: "all life death does end." It is cold comfort—worthy only of a "wretch," in Hopkins's phrase—precisely because it is that final and darkest mercy that the torturer often denies their victims. Even that last, worst mercy is often taken from them, when they are stretched on the rack.
Is there anything in Cicero, then, that can truly comfort us in our affliction? Perhaps only this: his point that the wise man can lessen the blows of injustice and fate simply by being prepared at all times for the worst to come. This, indeed, can help us endure the Trump era: if we remember at every moment that "it can happen here." What has happened to other nations and peoples can happen to us. We really can lose our democracy and fall into the most dystopian sort of dictatorial nightmare.
"[F]or there is nothing that breaks the edge of grief and lightens it more," Cicero writes, "than considering during one's whole life, that there is nothing which it is impossible should happen. [...] The effect of which is, that we are always grieving, but we never do so." Elsewhere: "This ruminating beforehand upon future evils which you see at a distance, makes their approach more tolerable[.]" He quotes lines from Euripides: "I treasured up what some learned sage did tell, / And on my future misery did dwell; [...] I strove, / With every evil to possess my mind, / That, when they came, I the less care might find."
As A.E. Housman once put it—perhaps channelling Cicero (Housman being a noted classicist, after all):
“The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.”
Here, at last, is practical advice for the Trump era. See the dystopian nightmare on the horizon. Know that it is coming. Know that Trump really means to take us there. Forget what seems to you "normal," because it is pleasant. Recall that anything that has happened to humankind elsewhere could happen to us too. Remember that "whatever has been, can still be," as Eliot once put it. Keep your mind on the worst case scenario always—the better to ward it off.
For nothing will enable the rise of authoritarianism faster than neglecting the possibility that it really could happen to us.
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