The new Epicureans.

In a famous passage at the beginning of Book II of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius talks of the pleasure of watching other people endure dangerous situations. As Dryden rendered the passage:

 
   `Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore The rolling ship, and hear the 
   tempest roar. 

It isn't, Lucretius goes on to say, that we are pleased at the troubles of others, but that we take pleasure in realizing that these are troubles from which we're not suffering. Nature, Lucretius observes, in an early probe into the modern horrors of stress, wants only two things--the absence of pain, and the absence of worry.

This is part of the Epicurean art of living, and the way you achieve equanimity of mind is by a philosophical discipline requiring you to follow long chains of reasoning (about the nature of death, for example) and eschew the ephemeral pleasures of luxury and society. Lucretius's imagined philosopher finds it sweet

 
   To see vain fools ambitiously contend For wit and power. 

Two roads to happiness confront us: that of action and that of contemplation. So far as the philosopher is concerned, there is no contest. Worldly commitments demand action, and action often leads to pain and failure. But the life of contemplation cannot fail, because we have withdrawn our hopes and fears from the world, and have understood ourselves as merely one object in a universal scheme. For most people in the past, the contemplative option was not available, or was available only in a religious form, which had its own dangers. The Epicurean contemplative was thus the fine fruit of a rich elite in the classical world, an elite that devoted itself to personal self-fulfilment. It is hardly surprising that the Roman general Fabricius, on learning about this philosophy, hoped that all Rome's enemies might adopt it.

As self-conscious beings, we are of course always in some degree the spectators as well as the participants in our own lives, but modern conditions have facilitated a remarkable shift in the balance between action and reflection. In reflection, we become spectators of the human comedy, and spectatorship as a mode of responding to the world has not only become possible but has even come to dominate the way we live our lives. In its most elementary form, this change results simply from the abundance of leisure we enjoy. Instead of the odd occasion imagined by Lucretius in which someone can watch a ship in trouble from the shore, we can through the media of film and television enjoy the interesting sensation of watching people in dire trouble from the comfort of our own homes. At this most elementary level, the contemporary Epicurean is the couch potato. We are sated on the pleasure of tranquillity as we watch terrible things (real or fictional) happening to others.