Manacles and Meditations

The Appeal and Peril of Pop-Stoicism

There’s a market for mindfulness, and Stoicism is its current best-seller. A YouTube search for “Stoicism” will return “Marcus Aurelius: The Man Who Solved the Universe” and “Stoicism: Become Undefeatable,” just two videos out of hundreds which have pulled in around 8 and 11 million views respectively. The web is teeming with self-professed teachers peddling born-again ancient wisdom with names like “King Stoic,” “Stoic Master of Life,” “Stoic Terra,” “Stoic Wisdom,” “Stoic Motivate,” et cetera, with each permutation on the screen as vapid as its neighbor. 

The Death of Seneca by Manuel Domínguez Sánchez.

Why the hype? What loosed Stoicism from the purview of classicists and historians of philosophy and whipped up such an appetite for it among the general public? More importantly, does this fascination indicate deeper cravings in the social consciousness of our age and cultural condition? Can an investigation into such help us glimpse the limits of our political imagination?

The stony complexion peppering video thumbnails and the self-help sections of Barnes & Nobles alike belongs to Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor from the late 2nd century CE and the icon of modern Stoicism. He is best known for presiding over the final years of the Pax Romana, reinstating hereditary succession among emperors, and for writing a book called Meditations– a modern staple for therapeutic content mills and digital gurus who promise to teach, in quickly digested and forgotten blurbs, the key tenets of righteous ethics and discipline. As one such bite-sized summary explains the philosophy’s central aim: “Stoicism helps us steer through past and present storms into calmer and more peaceful waters. And if our ship sinks and we all drown, we can take peace in the fact that we lived a good life, albeit not as long as we had hoped. Because remember, everything has an end.”

These two-bit glimpses into the ancients’ wisdom fulfill a need in our culture. Stoicism’s alterity is a source of appeal today because it provides an ethos for living in a world that feels restrictive and out of our personal control, but comes packaged in the words of venerated ages and classical sages. Pragmatic texts by classical authors speaking on matters therapeutic, botanical, architectural, and beyond have been a well read genre for millenia, but the most recent rise in the popularity of these loci communes has been exceptionally sudden. Since 2012, for example, Princeton University Press has published 31 new translations of classical texts, largely oriented to therapeutic readings. Among the crowds of canons, Stoicism has distinguished itself by offering a system of practice that anyone can learn and apply in the struggles of their daily life, and it has gained much praise and attention for it.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” When the world seems to exceed the powers of our emotions we, basically, have a choice: either resent the world because we cannot control it, or limit the importance we attach to what affects us and seek only to control our responses. The strength of the Stoic lies in realizing that the power of the individual is in dominating their reactions rather than what they are reacting to– power is ultimately perspective.

Stoicism’s appeal for the therapeutically inclined is palpable. On r/Stoicism, a Reddit community with over 610 thousand members, most of the posts are tagged with “New to Stoicism” or “Seeking Stoic Advice,” to ease the novice Stoics search for guidance on their inner self. The Daily Stoic is another popular site for those seeking peace through affirmations of self-control, and it boasts over 300 thousand members who receive daily meditation guidance straight to their email inboxes. The two aspects of modern Stoicism lend to it both the weight of timeless authority and convenience of digital consumption, both the prestige of millenia and the effervescence of electricity.  

The rise of the mindfulness economy, our modern context for Stoicism, is in many ways a societal response to the perceived thinness of contemporary ethical life, its insufficiency to provide ways for us to realize ourselves as fulfilled and complete people. We live in a novel age, the first that values at least lip service to the range of ethical perspectives. Our culture has cultivated a deeply skeptical attitude toward those projects–political or theological, cults or parties–which seek to enshrine a singular moral order in our country. In America this is a relatively recent development. Of course, we have claimed for a long time to value the separation of Church and state, but it was only in the final decades of the Cold War that our faith in a watered-down universalist Christian social standard began to waver and eventually crumble beneath the economic might of neoliberal globalization. 

It’d be downright callous to chastise people for finding their own way, and trying to ease the feeling that there should be a good way to live without subscribing to theological and moral imperatives. Social ethics provide a path for people to understand both their place in society as a whole, and the nature of their relations to the individuals in it. The appeal of universal ethics is that they make connecting with other people easier because everyone is thinking on similar terms about matters of right and wrong, but also about the roles we are supposed to play depending on our defining attributes, all of which are formed and invested with meaning by the social ethos we are used to. 

Our current epoch is exceptional because we largely lack a universal and given standard for relating to each other anywhere except in the marketplace, where the only distinguishing characteristics between individuals are supposedly those which can be measured in dollars. We choose which commodities to buy, and by the same grace we are free to choose our beliefs. Living a good life isn’t a given, and we are tasked with weighing different approaches to how we live and justifying them by the beneficial or deleterious effects they have. The most important factor for how we evaluate a new lifestyle choice, meditation regimen, or therapeutic self-help book is whether it works, whether it makes our sense of purpose and being more solid and eases the doubts we have about who we are and how we fit into a bigger picture. Without a given ethical system, the responsibility to live well is transferred from a culture to its citizens.

When easing difficulty is the greatest good, it's hardly surprising to see the corners people are willing to cut for tranquility. Stoicism thrives here thanks to its countless supply of quips and platitudes. Have you been offended? The answers to your frustration can be found in Marcus Aureliues: “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Are you anxious? Take Seneca for a spin: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” Frustrated by your impotence to control the life you lead? Return to Zeno of Citium: “Man conquers the world by conquering himself.” 

Eudaimonia, the Stoic term for a well lived life, is primarily a matter of adjustment to the life one already leads, of reorienting your perspective and tempering your emotions. Funnily enough, anyone who has even gotten powerful feelings of any sort can attest to just how difficult training this discipline to make life easier can be.

At this point I hope you’re a tad unsettled. You don’t have to agree with everything I’ve said, but you should have some gnawing sense of disquiet. The appeal of Stoicism today is doubtless symptomatic of a peculiarity of our zeitgeist, but the absence of an interpersonal ethical glue doesn’t seem to be the sufficient reason for Stoicism to be so much more popular than other self-help strategies. Likewise, an ability to be quipped and quoted for tweets can’t be enough, and it’s unlikely that Stoic life-coaches are really that good. There’s something about Stoicism in particular that appeals to a less obvious desire in our society, something most Stoics may not even be aware of. So we are left with the social symptom of Stoicism’s popularity and need to find its cause.

So—why the hype?

Hegel’s critique of Stoicism

Acclimating oneself to chains

G.W.F. Hegel gave his Lectures on the Philosophy of History in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, a period where the Christian doctrine of universal salvation was secularized to bring forth a concept of a universal human essence, innate to the very being of humans. Seeing this advance as a further step in a grand historical arc, Hegel claimed that “the History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.” (§ 21)

Hegel argued that within the narrative of world history a fundamental discontinuity existed between how us moderns think about freedom and the way it was handled by the classical age: “The consciousness of Freedom first arose among the Greeks, and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans likewise, knew only that some are free, — not man as such.” (§21) The freedom that they wrote about is a far cry from any talk about inalienable rights. To maintain the prosperity and freedom which the classical authors enjoyed they relied on laboring armies of slaves and women without say in politics and public life. The dazzling freedom talked about in their texts is ultimately a partial one, applicable only to the select few and unconnected to any rights other than those which are inherited, purchased, or seized; it was the “freedom” to bind other people in chains.

The world in which philosophies like Stoicism were created and popularized cannot be separated, according to Hegel, from the enslaving societies which incubated them. The classical authors of liberty could only think of themselves as men enjoying freedom because slaves were, to them, not really men at all. 

Why could the writings of these classical philosophers who spoke about enjoying a freedom which appears to us so unfree, become popular again? What has changed about the way our culture has begun to think about what makes us free? In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel accuses Stoics from all epochs of failing to see the danger in admiring the freedom of the ancients: “Stoicism could only appear on the scene in a time of universal fear and bondage.” 

That is, only when there is fading faith that freedom is something realized in the material world through the actions we take and relations we have with other people, only in this context could Stoicism again become appealing. In a society far removed from the Classical world the appeal of a Stoic freedom, for Hegel, is symptomatic of a public which doesn’t believe that liberty goes any further than the skull.

The point is not that Stoicism secretly cultivates a desire for chains, but that the deep seated mental ambivalence it masquerades as freedom ultimately makes such horrors permissible. The dangers of this attitude becoming dominant in a population do not need to be expounded on at great lengths– it is no secret that ambivalence lends itself to complicity, and that the historical records of people citing the Stoics in their stands against cruelties are–put gently–sparse. 

The importance of feeling at odds with the world

Less a coherent philosophy as much as a vehicle for self-help life hacks, modern Stoics aim to limit the power that an often abrasive outer world has over our most deeply secluded inner being. As Dr. Nancy Sherman, wrote of “Pop” Stoicism for the New York Times: “In this [Stoic] mind-set, the impact of the outer world can fade away as the inner self becomes a sanctuary. The focus narrows to that self–me, isolated from the social structures that support me or bring me down.”

For all the feelings of health and harmony that modern Stoicism can inspire, the implications of its popularity in our culture cannot be rightfully separated from pressing political concerns. When we as a society occupy ourselves with philosophies which aim to make us feel okay with the world as it is, we will never work to make it better. To say the least, this amounts to shirking our responsibilities as individuals, as people who have otherwise claimed the responsibility to manage ourselves. 

Where would America be without those who refused to accommodate themselves to British rule? Where would it be if our only concern about slavery was to make ourselves okay with it? Would women have ever won the right to vote if suffragettes read the Meditations and believed Marcus Aurelius when he said “reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears”? Can anyone reasonably imagine MLK admiring the Stoics without a laugh? Marcus Aurelius again: “Here is a rule to remember in the future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not ‘This is misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’” 

Stoicism appealed to the ancient emperor Marcus Aurelius and to the slave Seneca alike because the former did not seek to change the world and threaten the conditions of his freedom, and the latter–who’s position of unfreedom made emperors and masters “free”—was content to think himself free because he chose to not challenge his master for keeping him as a slave. The history of the freedoms we enjoy is that of the unfree refusing to tolerate the reservation of freedom for the few, and of the oppressed being unwilling to accept their bondages; put bluntly– there has never been a Stoic revolution. 

We have only gained the freedoms we enjoy today because those before us have refused to accommodate themselves to the world they were born into. There is sense in realizing the limits of what we can control and the futility of chasing headlong after unchecked wishes, but first it must be clear to us that finding ways to tolerate life as it is is an activity opposed to making life better. Especially today, when the future of our political, social, and economic climates are directly endangered by allowing our social status-quo to go on, the appeal of eudaimonia is something we enjoy at our own peril.

What the Stoic’s implicitly deny in their ideas about the right way to live, is that there is incredible worth to feeling at odds with the world, of nurturing the convictions that history has not ended and that what may seem impossible now is still worth fighting for, and that unfreedom is fundamentally intolerable. Freedom is not a gift that has fallen into our laps– it has been struggled for and won by people who have never felt at home in the world they were born into. Our desires are not futile, and our dreams have reality too–we scorn our political imaginations only to our own disservice. It is our responsibility as free individuals to understand the ways that our perspectives on the world and ideas of freedom are not necessary or true for all times, that they are historically limited to the present—and that it is our duty to surpass them.