The Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism is having a moment. Through wisdom, temperance, courage and justice you can create a virtuous, well-lived life. But have modern day stoics got it right?
John KnightonWe start in the Middle East. Hamas has launched the biggest attack on Israel in years.Southern California is under its first ever tropical storm watch.Flames and plumes of smoke lit up the sky in East Ohio after a train derailed.The number of people killed in earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has risen to nearly 50,000.
CHAKRABARTI: This is Ryan Holiday. He says that time of humanism healing a loss of faith, neatly bookended by the ancient Greeks and Romans, is captured by one thing. The practice of stoicism. HOLIDAY : Your opinions are your problem. Epictetus says, look, when you're offended, you have to realize that it takes two to tango. He says, we are complicit in the taking of offense. You don't have to have an opinion about this.HOLIDAY: So I was in college and I got introduced to Marcus Aurelius's meditations. Someone recommended that I read the Stoics and I was sitting at the table in my college apartment, and it's just this magical book.
Questions to ask yourself every single day from the Stoics. What is the worst case scenario? That's the exercise of premeditatio malorum, planning in advance for adversity. HOLIDAY: We've seen a collapse in trust in so many different institutions, schools don't teach the humanities the way they once did, and people have turned away from the church.
HOLIDAY : You're going to die. You could die tomorrow, you could die the day after tomorrow, but it is a certainty you are going to die. You could leave life right now. Marcus Aurelius says, let that determine what you do and say and think.That last bit there was from one of Ryan Holiday's online posts. Holiday is a best selling author of books such as The Daily Stoic, The Obstacle is the Way, Discipline is Destiny, Courage is Calling, and The Lives of the Stoics.
Interestingly, none of them was an Athenian. So Zeno of Citium was from Cyprus. His pupil, Cleanthes of Assos, was from Asia Minor, what we think of as Turkey. And then the third and maybe the most brilliant of these three powerful thinkers was Chrysippus of Soli, also from Asia Minor. Then those three, although they did write voluminously, we only have snippets of their work.
In this case, you just tune in to your favorite podcasts, read a little bit of Seneca in the morning, or Marcus Aurelius in the morning.CHAKRABARTI: As I said a little earlier, when we told you On Point listeners last week that we were going to do this show, we heard from a ton of folks.SOPHIE MAGON: A lot of times now the younger generation has unlimited access to news and horrifying things all the time.
But it's important to realize for someone like me, that we are talking about a philosophy here. Whether these are thinkers who are deeply analytical, and the ethical orientation that we hear so much about from Ryan Holiday and others, was only one branch element of a system that also included, for starters, logic.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so actually the idea of that designing fire or being concerned with the energy that makes the universe actually seems very scientific to me. Energy being the only thing that cannot be created or destroyed, mostly, of all the factors that we know that make up the universe. Beliefs about value and beliefs about the world, and that we can self-correct. So if we are shown that we are mistaken about something, we have the impulse to correct our thinking. When we change our beliefs, we also change the way we feel about things and also the way that we act.
It's not alone that we survive and thrive and flourish. It's with each other in families and cities and in the greater community. And that often gets missed, even in the Roman practice, where it is very much about calming yourself, as Holiday said, at the end of the day, and it's yourself. He's thinking about his failures during the day. And I often think it's very much a bit of self-flagellation or castigation. It's not very common to go through a litany of failures. But it is very much about how you improve. But there's also this sense, as I say, this strand, you see it in this quote from Marcus on the battlefield, he must have been thinking of a cadre and how we need each other to fight.
SHERMAN: This would have been his philosophy. It was taught then, and he viewed Epictetus as an inspiration of sorts, an enslaved person. Epictetus, we know, was enslaved around the time of Nero. But learned philosophy and started lecturing on it and had pithy witticisms that would appeal then and appeal now to the public and Marcus presumably came across them.
CHAKRABARTI: Let me, the idea of the Marcus rule is needing to tough it up. It really sticks with me. But Professor Graver, I know you want to jump. You want to jump in here. It's not just the good self. It's the good community or the ideal community that one is striving to achieve. That's the responsibility, and that is pursued vigorously, energetically, at the same time, recognizing that not everything we try to achieve is going to be achieved.
CHAKRABARTI: And here's Christian Boyd from Waukesha, Wisconsin, who says he's a quasi-practicing Stoic. He's a Presbyterian clergy person and says despite what people think, Christianity and Stoicism can exist together. CHAKRABARTI: So a couple of On Point listeners there reflecting what you Professor Sherman had said earlier about it's not just a way of being, but a system of belief that seems to be really attractive to a lot of Americans now.RYAN MULKOWSKY: My name is Ryan Mulkowsky. I live just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And currently I work as a hospice chaplain and bereavement coordinator, and I also work as a mental health therapist.
CHAKRABARTI: Ryan had been questioning his faith for years, but he says it wasn't until about 2019 that he decided he needed to move on from Christianity. Now, a few years on, he says he's lucky that his parents and in laws continue to love and support him, even if not totally understanding why he left Christianity. He says he still remembers the night when he told his wife.
CHAKRABARTI: That's Ryan Mulkowsky. He's a hospice chaplain, bereavement coordinator, and mental health therapist just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And arise from our rational mind in the same way as our actions and beliefs do. It's true that they don't always feel like something that is under our control. Chrysippus had the wonderful analogy to a runner heading downhill. In the moment when you're running, you can't necessarily stop. But it doesn't mean that running is not something that you chose to do.
But we did get a caller, we got a caller who pointed out exactly this. This is Zubin Billimoria from Los Angeles. So you're trying to let go a little bit of the unruly passions, and train more, train calmer ones, but there are a few critical differences. I've practiced Buddhist meditation in my life, and there's a sense in which you really empty your mind and try to quiet it. And that's part of the idea of the selflessness.
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