A rapid transition

To many people, the world they have been accustomed to for decades, perhaps for their entire lifetime, seems to have transformed rapidly in ways that prove unsettling. Longstanding norms which people take for granted and rely upon, bearing upon matters affecting our common life (ranging from society, the economy, public health, the media, politics, law, culture, education), seem to be unravelling, violated, or even just disregarded.

The rise of distrust and tribalism

This experience doesn’t simply affect individuals. We seem to be witnessing an erosion of trust and a corresponding increase in tribalism. Even if one remains relatively unaffected by this psychologically, the fact that so many other people are responding to what Stoics would call these appearances, exerts a cumulative effect, altering the social world we inhabit. To many people it might feel like they inhabit a world that has not only changed rapidly, but is becoming less familiar, more unpredictable, even more dangerous and hostile.

Shoud we disengage?

One way a person might keep themselves relatively unaffected would be to simply withdraw their cares and concerns from all of these matters, to say “these are nothing to me”. Some might justify this by appealing to Epictetus and the “dichotomy of control”, or referencing Marcus’ metaphor of the inner citadel one can always hole up in, but that sort of retreat from the world isn’t really Stoic.

Read more widely in either of those thinkers, or in the works we have by Seneca or Musonius Rufus, and you find many passages  consistently  conveying  Stoics’ ongoing commitment to involvement within the world, within the framework of interpersonal personal roles, relationships, and responsibilities, and (if possible) engagement in one’s larger community.

What practices or perspectives drawn from classic Stoic texts might help? One that I find useful, which perhaps others may as well, is reminding myself of two things about our current condition.

One of these is the fact that while certain of the challenges or disruptions are novel (for example the rapid proliferation of reliance upon AI systems), the general situation isn’t historically unprecedented. I don’t think it’s helpful to seek out imaginary and anachronistic parallels, like comparing our current situation with the decline and fall of the Roman empire. But it can be heartening to realize that Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus, among many others, were living, thinking, writing, and teaching in equally tumultuous and unpredictable times. Perhaps the seeming stability we got used to in our later modern society was a weird, temporary anomaly.

I take another kind of consolation in realizing that these people who saw their societies collapsing into chaos, corruption, or tyranny managed not only to stay afloat while they could, but to produce useful and insightful writings that still teach us long after those very civilizations they belonged to are gone. And what we derive from reading them, from making a space within ourselves for a conversation with them, are complex, robust, helpful ways of thinking about all sorts of matters important to our own present-day lives.

Face with courage, help restore justice

That doesn’t mean that what we as individuals in the present have to do is produce great, lasting works of literature that someday other people long after we’re dead and gone consider “classics”. That’s just one way of doing something good in the world. We might spend the resource of our time cultivating and living out the virtues.

That would mean not only facing the current situation with courage, but perhaps more importantly doing our best to extend, to enact, to restore justice not just within ourselves and our own actions, but within our wider relationships and our communities. Making wise and temperate decisions about the indifferents that strictly speaking aren’t up to us, but whose uses are up to us, as Epictetus tells us, seems equally needed.

Be the purple thread

I’ll close with a metaphor he uses which might prove a needed exhortation in these times.

Be the purple thread. - Epictetus, Discourses, 1.2

That is something possible for us, and it is something we have control over. Do we give in to despair, fear, sadness, or anger about our current predicaments, anxious about the uncertainties ahead, or being upset over the possibility that what we do doesn’t really matter? Or do we approach matters with a sort of confidence and trust that, even if we aren’t in the end successful, each good action we do possesses a meaning and value? We don’t need to make the entire garment purple, any more than we ought to fix our entire society or world. But we can dye that part of it that lies within the scope of our choices and commitments.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPA- certified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

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