This post is a translation by the author—you can find the original French version here.
Since October 2018, the yellow vest—that venerable accessory to road safety—has become a revolutionary symbol. Every Saturday, tens of thousands of citizens or more march in the streets, proudly wearing this familiar, fluorescent garment-turned-rallying-sign.
Yellow Vests in Strasbourg on 12 January, in front of the Palais du Rhin
While it focused initially on challenging the domestic consumption tax on energy
products, the movement
has expanded to include many other fiscal, social, ecological, and political claims.
Leaderless, ever-changing, and operating outside traditional political
patterns, the Yellow Vests raise many ethical, political or social questions.
Does Stoicism require a particular relationship between the progressor (προκόπτον) and this movement? This post tries to provide some food for thought…
We can consider the relationship of the Stoic progressor to the movement of Yellow Vests in at least three ways: 1) Stoicism’s relationship to the claims of Yellow Vests, 2) its relationship to the actions of the movement, and 3) the possibility or even necessity of our personal involvement in the movement, considering points 1 and 2.
This post will look at each of these aspects in turn—claims, actions, and personal involvement—and then follow it up with some further reflections on how Stoic theory interacts with political engagement.
I am not a citizen of the UK or the EU but of the Cosmos!
—Socrates (a slight misquotation )
In 2016 the United Kingdom was offered a choice between leaving or remaining in the “Ever Closer Union” of the EU. At the time, many saw it as a debate between petty nationalism and cosmopolitanism. I chose to vote Leave. This post is about how I square that with my Cosmopolitanism and my favourite ancient philosophers — the Stoics.
Like many Leavers, I have an itinerary of complaints against the EU: its structural democratic deficit, its anti-democratic actions and attitudes of its leaders, and its wasteful policies on fishing, agriculture and trade that destroy the environment, hurt poorer nations and still manages to inflate the cost of food and essential goods like clothing and sanitary products for poor families in Europe. Ardent Remainers think these complaints are myths, and can list all the wonderful benefits that only the EU could possibly bring for Britain.
But most of us agree that deep down people voted on this issue on the basis of feelings more than they voted on the basis of facts. I didn’t believe most of the claims made by the Leave campaign and Remain friends I know didn’t believe most of the claims made by the Remain campaign. For Remainers, the EU inspires the feeling of being a small part of something big. It represents an ideal of political unity– and diverse peoples working together on something bigger than ourselves. For Leavers, the EU inspires the same feeling — the feeling of being a small part of something big — too big. It gives us the feeling of shrinking.
How should Stoic philosophers feel about ever closer union? It’s this point that I want to examine because I think it is applicable almost wherever you are: Alberta, California, Catalonia, Kurdistan, Scotland or Hong Kong. Should stoics care, in general, whether humanity is more or less politically united?
At first, it may seem obvious that Stoics should want the world to be more politically unified. Zeno’s political theory expressed in his lost work “The Republic” was based on the idea that
“household arrangements should not be based on cities or parishes, each one marked out by its own legal system, but we should regard all men as our fellow-citizens and local residents, and there should be one way of life and order, like that of a herd grazing together and nurtured by a common law”
—Zeno, Republic
Stoics believe that we are citizens of the cosmos, not the particular place of our birth. Why ought there be one human law here and another human law there when by nature there is one law for the whole cosmos?
On the contrary, I argue Stoics should be absolutely indifferent to the ‘size’ or ‘population’ of the community governed by a given set of human laws. It is to the character of the cosmos that we should seek our states to be aligned, not its extent. You should, therefore, hope that your political community is structured in a way which works with, and not against nature – particularly human rational social nature. If that means choosing to to break free of a larger political union so be it. In fact, I think that aligning human government to nature does often mean that we should support separation, independence and self-determination over large scale political unions, power-sharing and sovereignty pooling.
The Cosmopolis is Here in your Midst
Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
—Luke 17:20-21
The primary reason why we should not seek to establish a single human law for the whole cosmos is simply that we are too late. According to Stoic cosmopolitanism, the law is universal across both space AND time. Cicero puts it this way:
“There will not be a different law at Rome and at Athens, or a different law now and in the future, but one law, everlasting and immutable, will hold good for all peoples and at all times.”
—Cicero, Republic 3.33
For Stoics, the cosmos is already a well-managed city and its law is reason or Logos. Therefore Stoic Cosmopolitanism doesn’t prescribe the creation of a Utopian future state- but rather it is a description of the fundamental reality which is true now. Right now though there seem to be many laws each exercising authority in different nations — this is not fundamentally true. Really humans are judged only by reason – and human laws exercise authority only insofar as they are instructive to human reason.
During the EU referendum we often heard people declare that they wanted to vote Remain because they “felt European”. After all, they enjoyed European cities, wine, coffee, fashion and food and most importantly friends — who would want to vote against that! I don’t particularly think this was a worse line of reasoning than their counterparts who “felt British.” However it was a strange argument to me. As an English Canadian, I had always thought of myself as being European (after all, I’m not Algonquin) without having any kind of real awareness of or affinity to the EU as a political body. Now that I’ve moved to Europe, I feel North American, but the last thing I want is for my country of birth to become the 51st state of a United States of North America. Similarly, as a Cosmopolitan, I don’t need a global political union to enforce the power of reason or Logos over the whole human race.
Just a larger Anthropolis
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The converse is also true– which is why Zeno argues that all vicious men are ‘enemies and alienated from each other.’ Simply pledging allegiance to the same human country doesn’t actually unite us – it only appears to. If underneath we still are seeking to plunder each other, then our laws are simply a facade behind which we hide our inner anarchy. Thus Zeno gives us reason to think that global federalism isn’t just undesirable — it’s impossible. When vicious people unite, they do not establish a state of law and governance but disorder and war. As Augustine, a Christian strongly influenced by Stoicism argues
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince; it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.
—Augustine of Hippo, City of God 4.4
Simply extending a bad state over a larger population doesn’t bring people together. By contrast, reforming the state to make it more just does bring its people together. Aristotle, who shares much of the stoic worldview writes in Politics 7.4.
Most persons think that a state in order to be happy ought to be large; but even if they are right, they have no idea what is a large and what a small state. For they judge the size of the city by the number of the inhabitants; whereas they ought to regard, not their number, but their power.
—Aristotle, Politics 7.4
Aristotle goes on to state that a city of mostly slaves or non-citizens would not be as powerful as a city where everyone was a citizen and free. A citizen for Aristotle is someone who governs and is governed. A great state doesn’t possess a great number of people deprived of political agency or personal rights and liberty “for a great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” In the corporate world we make a distinction today between management and leadership. For the Greeks leadership is the art of politics and management is the art of households. In the same manner, many of the Asiatic empires, Aristotle didn’t even consider to be polei at all: they were ‘large households’ with no citizens but many slaves. If the bonds of unity are coerced by law and not inspired by leadership the unity is unnatural.
Returning to my decision to vote Leave, although I find it compelling that the British should work with other nations on important issues like trade fisheries and the environment, it is more important to me that I’m governed by a just law than that it is the same law that governs other people in Europe. Reluctant Remainers accept that the EU has an unjust constitution and creates great injustice in the world. However they ask, “why should we lose our influence over the EU by leaving it? While we are in the EU we have a vote: once we leave we don’t.”
It is true that the EU constitution gives member states political power to influence EU decisions. It isn’t what Leavers would like it to be, but it is something and we lose that something by leaving. However, the power we lose is political in nature—and not, I believe, the power of reason. In other words, as members the UK can forcibly stop the EU from doing certain damaging things. However, this kind of influence is not to me as valuable as the rational influence we will retain however the map is drawn. Consider the influence that trials (both failed) in Finland and Canada are having on the problem of unemployment and poverty. Consider the influence the UK’s own universal credit system is having (the Finish are going to trial that system next). Consider that the Netherlands has influenced many parts of the world by giving us reason to think that substance legalisation is a viable policy. Once we Leave the EU, we could likewise set an example to the EU of trade, agriculture and fisheries policies. If we choose good policies that are beneficial to us and our world, then we will give the EU reason to join us. The power of reason is not in the gift of the EU constitution, but to my mind, it is the powers gifted by any human constitution.
You might accept that global application does not make the law just, and that a small just rule is preferable to a cosmic unjust rule and still yet wonder: “Isn’t it still better that just human laws apply globally?” It’s clearly true that it’s better that just laws apply everywhere; but from that, it doesn’t follow that the same just laws apply everywhere.
Reason itself is situation sensitive. It is primarily the cause of individual human activities, but it can through dialogue be the cause of collective human activities. Historically these dialogues have started small and worked their way up. What we have are two contrasting visions of global justice. The centralized cosmopolitan thinks that because there is one natural law for human action, there should be one just government over the whole world. The decentralized cosmopolitan thinks that nature lends itself to many thousands of small just nations across the whole world each with their own local application of common law. The question therefore is: “Isn’t the one just and global rule more just than the many just rules which apply locally?” I think not. In fact, I think that social justice demands that politics is local.
An Augustinian Genealogical Argument for Decentralised Cosmopolitanism
Let [Pagan Romans] ask, then, whether it is quite fitting for good men to rejoice in extended empire. For the iniquity of those with whom just wars are carried on favours the growth of a kingdom, which would certainly have been small if the peace and justice of neighbours had not by any wrong provoked the carrying on of war against them; and human affairs being thus more happy, all kingdoms would have been small, rejoicing in neighbourly concord; and thus there would have been very many kingdoms of nations in the world, as there are very many houses of citizens in a city. Therefore, to carry on war and extend a kingdom over wholly subdued nations seems to bad men to be felicity, to good men necessity. But because it would be worse that the injurious should rule over those who are more righteous, therefore even that is not unsuitably called felicity. But beyond doubt it is greater felicity to have a good neighbour at peace, than to conquer a bad one by making war.
—Augustine of Hippo, City of God 4.15
Ever closer union is a fairly modern the trend. Albeit, in the last 100 years, there have been about 62 new countries formed – these can mostly be attributed to the Soviet and British empires splitting into their colonial units. However the era of European colonialism was itself an era of centralisation as modern Canada has 634 first nations not counting the first nations that were completely lost. European countries are also concoctions of smaller independent states. Germany, for instance, is an amalgamation of a few hundred states. For most of human history decentralisation has been the norm.
We may never know, however it seems reasonable to think as Augustine does, that it was due to war that we banded together into large states. We banded together to wage war, to defend ourselves from conquest or after being conquered we were grouped together by our conquerors into colonies which are merely mechanisms for a small group of conquerors to manage large subjected populations. Given that war, and subjection exist because people fail to reason—it follows that it is our failure in the art of politics not our success which has led to the political unification we see today.
We can make the a similar argument without the risk of a potential genealogical fallacy. Today economists have identified two main advantages to living in a large state: large states have bigger armies and larger internal markets. Both of these facts mean that large states can be more resilient against war, either open war or trade wars. If we are to be Utopian and work towards a cosmopolitan ideal, surely we should aspire to a world in which these two factors don’t matter?
An Aristotelian Argument for Small Countries
Aristotle gives several arguments to the effect that a just city will necessarily be limited in size. From an Aristotelian perspective the state exists as an extension of natural phenomena—human rational cooperation. Politics is an art which perfects nature. By nature, humans reason together and cooperate, but by the art of politics we exercise our social rational powers cooperatively to our highest ability. However, if the state becomes too big, it actually gets in the way of the very social rationality which is its basis and true nature:
“For law is order, and good law is good order; but a very great multitude cannot be orderly: to introduce order into the unlimited is the work of a divine power- of such a power as holds together the universe. Beauty [Glory] is realised in number and magnitude, and the state which combines magnitude with good order must necessarily be the most beautiful [glorious]. To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled. For example, a ship which is only a span long will not be a ship at all, nor a ship a quarter of a mile long; yet there may be a ship of a certain size, either too large or too small, which will still be a ship, but bad for sailing. In like manner a state when composed of too few is not, as a state ought to be, self-sufficing; when of too many, though self-sufficing in all mere necessaries, as a nation may be, it is not a state, being almost incapable of constitutional government. For who can be the general of such a vast multitude, or who the herald, unless he have the voice of a Stentor?”
—Aristotle, Politics 7
Aristotle ends his argument with two rhetorical questions which seem quite naive today. I suppose Aristotle never would have thought we’d replace the local town crier with a multi-billion pound news media industry. But on second thought, how is that going for us? Is the news industry industry fostering rational deliberation on a societal level? Or is it not true today as Aristotle says:
“Experience shows that a very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed; since all cities which have a reputation for good government have a limit of population.”
Aristotle points to two ways in which an over-sized state breaks down: the governors lose touch with the people they govern, and the people being governed lose touch with each other: “For both governors and governed have duties to perform; the special functions of a governor to command and to judge. But if the citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other’s characters”
The breakdown is a two-way breakdown of representation—if the state is too large the governors cannot possibly represent a population they cannot possibly have taken the time to understand. Conversely an individual in a large state is so crowded out by her fellow citizens she cannot possibly make her voice heard—even by electing a representative that will defend her interests. I can definitely see both sides of the breakdown occurring today.
A Republic too large is no Republic at all.
As I write, this the UK parliament is voting down the two year process of striking a withdrawal agreement with the EU. The Prime Minister has throughout the whole negotiation process tried her hardest to represent all of the 72 million people who make up the country that she governed: Leavers and Remainers alike. Arguably that’s just where she went wrong. The “nay” lobby is full of people from both sides of the house. Remainers think that she has recklessly charted a course towards a ‘hard brexit’. Leavers think that she has treacherously betrayed the referendum result with a ‘soft brexit’. There simply was never going to be a deal that 72 million people were going to like.
If Westminster had granted sovereignty to the Scottish in 2014, the 2016 referendum result would have been more decisive and there might have been an easier chance at attaining majority support for a specific outcome in parliament. But it seems that the UK is just too large and too diverse to have a consensus on this issue. This is not a specific issue to the UK. France is facing mass riots, Belgium and Germany respectively failed to form governments for months. Could it be that western democracies are simply too large and too diverse to actually function democratically anymore? It’s arguable that even the United States is too big. The great republic has not had a government for many weeks. Coping with change requires decisive action. Decisiveness requires a clear mandate. So while these populous democracies flounder politically, they flounder economically too. It has not escaped the notice of contemporary economists that small democracies have significant advantages over large democracies and that the advantages large countries have are becoming less relevant in a world where trade barriers are low. They seem to be better governed and more entrepreneurial than comparable larger countries. Could Aristotle have been on to something?
There is an alternative to being an overly populous democracy of course: that is being a populous non-democracy. This is I think is the route taken by the EU, Russia, China and India. The advantage is that government can get things done. One of the key issues the 72 million people of the UK cannot agree upon is whether complex policies such as trade among numerous other things can sensibly said to have the rational consent of the 512 million people of the EU. To be sure, the Europeans fear a revision to a time when Europe was at war – and they like the idea of a Europe of peace and prosperity. Who wouldn’t? But when it comes to the details of who should make what decision and whose money should go where — the unanimity begins to unravel. Nevertheless the EU presses onwards towards it’s own goals.
This is why most Europeans consistently feel that Europe is headed in the wrong direction. While only the Czech republic would up and go today, a sizeable minority in other countries (40% in Finland and Italy and 46% in Greece want to leave (here and here). Do to its size and democratic headwinds, it’s a fundamental that EU doesn’t really even try to rule by consent of the governed. While the European parliament can apply brakes and tweak the course of action, the overall direction and agenda of the EU is set by the un-elected commission. When democratic opposition comes, the commission plows on. For example, the Greeks voted against their EU brokered bail out– they were forced to take it anyway. The Italians formed a government with a eurosceptic finance minister—and he was gone: replaced by an EU love-in. As president Junker puts it (in this case in relation to a French referendum) ““If it’s a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and if it’s a No we will say ‘we continue’”. Even if there is an appearance of democracy in this hoard of 512 million people: is it representative democracy? When he says that a republic which is grows in excess of it’s nature ceases to be a republic at all, could Aristotle be on to something?
A Democracy in which the citizen cannot be heard is not a Democracy
To be heard in today’s constant news cycle, you certainly must have the voice of Stentor. No wonder we judge others without listening to their views. The task of engaging with millions people rationally is just beyond the scope of human powers. It’s literally impossible for the human brain to comprehend the rational of the 17.5 million people who voted for Brexit. So the news cycle caters to our monkey brain and feeds us a generalisation: Brexiteers are left behind, uneducated, racist, nationalist and gullible souls who “didn’t know what they were voting for” and whose main concern in the referendum was “how can I make life hard for immigrants” or “how can I bring back the British empire?” Similarly, I needn’t dialogue with the 14 million people who voted against me, the news media will portray them all to me as macchiato drinking university educated elites whose main concern will be “Who will serve me avocado toast?” or “Will I have to pay roaming charges in Ibiza?” No wonder the country is polarised. There are not enough categories for the human brain to rationally engage with all the real people that we are forced to cooperate with and so we must generalise them before we’ve even heard their voices.
Individuals therefore moulded into manageable categories: republican, democrat, Liberal, conservative—which are basically meaningless affronts to the diversity of human interests and thought. If the citizens cease to have a voice, and what we hear in parliament are a cacophony of wear chants from competing tribes is democracy over. Could Aristotle be on to something?
Conclusion
Reason is found in humanity in the form of rational individuals, and rational cooperation is mediated in humans by dialogue. Perhaps justice demands that we speak to each other—and given the finitude of human nature, that demand can only be met in groups of a limited size. If we wish to govern and be governed in a manner that works with our limited nature and not against it, we will be satisfied with small just nations where people have a voice – rather than large ones where people cannot be heard.
In a conversation with a colleague he tells me “a real brexit won’t happen”. He tells me that this issue is like a three way tug of war. One of three strings must break: the constitutional integrity of the European Union or that of United Kingdom or the will of the people expressed in the referendum. “What strand do you think will break first?” he asks rhetorically. I for one would be willing to sacrifice either union, both or every union under the sun to honour the sovereignty of people to determine… and then accept their own fate.
Editor’s note: this post was originally published on the author’s blog on 09 February, 2019.
Stoics believe in justice. Stoics are for justice. In fact, Stoics do not think there are goods other than virtue or ‘general justice’. But that doesn’t mean that Stoics can necessarily believe in ‘social justice’. I’d like to argue that they can, but it’s far from obvious when you consider that the typical social justice advocate and the ‘Stoic justice warrior’ begin thinking about justice from a different starting place. In this short article, I’d like to outline these starting places and show why Stoics must start our thinking about social justice from a different place than others do.
The Landscape
There are three basic ‘locations’ of justice in philosophy—three kinds of thing which can fundamentally be said to be just or unjust: people, rules, and situations. These correspond to three basic kinds of ethical theory generally: virtue theory, deontological ethics, and consequentialist ethics. Stoics are notably virtue theorists, however as we shall see, that entails that we cannot take social justice as a fundamental theoretical concept—we have to explain social justice in terms of personal justice. Let’s explore the alternatives first.
Consequentialist Social Justice
Consequentialists believe that situations themselves are just or unjust: a situation might be something like the gender pay gap. Consequentialists start their account of just or unjust people and rules in terms of their relationship to a just or unjust situation.
For example, if the gender pay gap is unjust, a consequentialist could say that people and social norms that contribute to the gender pay gap are also unjust.
Likewise, many people think that it is unjust that men and women are not equally represented in managerial positions. Note that this view is different from saying that it is unjust for women to be discriminated against by their employers. Unjust discrimination is an unjust action performed by an unjust individual. If however, we take the situation itself to be unjust we must maintain that the situation is unjust even when no discrimination has occurred. If that is the case, then we might think in fact positive discrimination or affirmative action would be necessary.
Deontological Social Justice
Alternatively, we could start with just or unjust social norms and laws—that is, unjust rules.
Statutory paternity leave is a rule. It equalises the legal opportunity for women and men to monetise spending some of their time with a newborn child. Arguably it’s a just rule regardless of the consequences. Suppose a country offers the option of paternity leave in lieu of maternity leave. Five to ten years down the line it appears that the policy has not had a substantial effect on the number of women in managerial positions. Is the policy a success? If the law was intended to change the distribution of management jobs across sexes, then the law was a failure. If the purpose of the law was to respect the fact that both sexes can make a meaningful contribution to postnatal care, then the law is a raving success.
These two starting points for social justice—consequences and rules—have motivated people to bring about meaningful and valuable social change. One huge advantage of both of these conceptions of justice is that they can very easily be applied to societies as a whole. A whole society lives in the circumstances and under the laws and norms that surround that society.
By contrast, Stoics focus on justice as a state of an individual. It is reasonable for critics to ask us therefore how we can apply justice as a concept to society as a whole. One might be tempted to treat Stoicism as an account of personal justice and then borrow another starting point for social justice. However consequentialist justice and deontologist justice have their own severe limitations. Understanding those limitations can help us understand why it is so important to have a virtue-theoretic account of social justice.
Justice out of Control: The Problem with Consequentialism
There are numerous ‘just outcomes’ that philosophers have thought society should aspire to. Three notable examples are equality, maximality and sufficiency. On an egalitarian view of justice, society is just if outcomes are equal for everyone. On a maximalist view of justice, society is just so long as the aggregated outcomes for everyone are constantly getting better without end. On a sufficientarian view of justice, a just society is one in which no one’s situation drops below a threshold of utility.
One problem for all these views is that many so-called injustices are completely outside of human control and certainly outside of the control of live human individuals. For instance, some humans live in areas affected by hurricanes and others don’t. Different people have differing levels of intelligence. So even if you distribute artefacts like money in an equal or otherwise ideal distribution across the population, human life will still have an element of chance and the arbitrary distribution of opportunities afforded by nature itself will feel profoundly irrational and unjust. It’s easy for people on either side of a particular turn of fate to resent each other if they think of justice as a situation. Epictetus warns us against harbouring such a sentiment in his handbook:
Remember then, that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men.
—Enchiridion, 1.2
There is an old story that illustrates Epictetus’s point well. Cain grows fruit. Abel raises animals. Both offer sacrifices to their God. As it turns out God likes meat—who knew?! It’s an arbitrary choice and it disadvantages Cain. It’s not Cain’s fault that God doesn’t like his sacrifice—nor is it Abel’s. For that matter, it’s not even God’s fault that Cain grows fruit. It’s just a situation that they are all in—and an opportunity for them all to work together. But in the story, Cain blames Abel for his woes and kills him.
Cain Kills Abel, by Giacomo Palma the Younger, 1603
We see a similar dynamic play out today where the haves and have-nots blame each other personally for macroeconomic situations which are largely inherited from previous generations and ultimately from the brutality of nature. Class guilt, class prejudice and resentment festers on all sides of a web of intersectional divides which only serve to alienate us from people with whom we share a common rational nature.
Of course, we all have control over everything that we choose to do and not do, and these choices can have a positive and negative effect on the lives of other people. However, if it is not our individual choices that we own and identify with, and we begin identifying ourselves with the historical accident of our birth—whether that be to a disadvantaged or advantaged race, sex, or class—we attach moral significance to what is meaningless and out of anyone’s control. We ought rather to make life more preferable to all of us, but by calling our social situation ‘unjust’ we implicitly ascribe blame to people for what is outside their control and thereby create enemies out of people who could be our friends. It’s counterproductive and there is a real danger that we sacrifice personal virtue ‘for the social good.’
No 12 Rules for Justice: The Problem with Starting with Deontology
The rules we choose to employ are far more in our control than the situations. Chrysippus opens his lost work ‘On Laws’ by stating that
law is king of all things human and divine. Law must preside over what is honourable and base, as ruler and as guide, and thus be the standard of right and wrong, prescribing to animals whose nature is political what they should do, and prohibiting them from what they should not do.
—On Laws, fragment preserved by Marcian (Long and Sedley 67R)
If we take that statement at face value, human legislators have the task of setting out a finite list of rules which details to each individual what he should or shouldn’t do. However, this is clearly impossible. The right thing to do will vary from circumstance to circumstance, which is why humans move from rule-following to reason directed action as they mature. This means that it is literally impossible to legislate the just action in every circumstance.
Real human laws don’t even try. For instance, in common law, there is typically a criminal defence for ‘reasonable force.’ It’s against the law to punch someone in the face and normally this is a just law. But what if the guy is stealing your 5-year-old daughter from her bed? One expects that if you were charged with assault in this situation, the law would defer to the judgement of rational individuals—often a jury—to determine if punching the kidnapper was a reasonable use of force. This is a tacit admission on the part of the law that it cannot handle exceptions as well as humans can. The law requires just human action both on the part of a judiciary, lawyers, and often a jury. Often judges will also rely upon case law in their own judgements—they want the law to be predictable—but they will also deviate from and overthrow precedents that are reasoned to be unjust.
For this reason, Cicero’s Laelius (Republic 3.33 ) says “true law is right reason, in agreement with nature, diffused over everyone, consistent, everlasting, whose nature is to advocate duty by prescription and to deter wrongdoing by prohibition. ” In other words, Cicero understood the Stoics to simply eliminate the concept of human-created law in favor of natural moral law. For this reason Plutarch also records that the main thesis of Zeno’s republic is that “our household arrangements should not be based on cities or parishes, each one marked out by its own legal system,” Zeno’s view is that virtue is enough to govern human relations entirely—if of course it is exercised. “Zeno wrote this, picturing as it were a ‘dream’” (Plutarch, On the fortune of Alexander). In his City of God, Augustine—a Christian philosopher strongly influenced by Stoicism—points out that it is no accident that Cain from the story above goes on to found the first city to protect himself from the threat of retribution. The Biblical story mirrors the fratricidal founding of Rome. For Augustine, these ancient stories remind us that human political institutions are the outcomes of injustice—perhaps a necessary but suboptimal cure to it. Seneca endorses a similar thought as follows:
In that age which is called golden, Posidonius maintains that rule was in the hands of the wise. They restrained aggression, protected the weaker from the stronger, advised and dissuaded, and indicated what was advantageous and what was not. Their prudence saw to it that their people lacked for nothing, their courage averted dangers, and their generosity enabled their subjects to progress and flourish… But with the subsequent infiltration of vices and the alteration of kingdoms into tyrannies, the need for laws arose, which were themselves, to begin with, introduced by the wise.
—Letters to Lucilius, 90.5–6.
Whether or not there ever was a ‘golden age,’ the point of Zeno’s ‘dream’ and of Posidonius’s ‘golden age’ is to show that if people are reasonable we wouldn’t need laws. However, even just laws require the judiciousness of reasonable people. This asymmetrical dependency shows that actually, moral justice is fundamental to legal/political justice.
Reasoning as a Foundation for Social Justice
None of what I have written proves that there are not laws and situations which are more preferable to the just. What is being shown is that justice is fundamentally virtue and only secondarily applies to laws and social circumstances. If we are going to develop a Stoic concept of social justice we must start with virtue.
I believe that it is very likely that we can indeed have an account of social justice based on virtue. It is outside the scope of this particular piece to spell out what that account might be however, I think we can say something significant about virtue as a foundation for human action.
Stoics believe that virtue is action in accordance with reason or Logos (λόγος). However I would argue that human reasoning is an essentially collective action. By collective action I mean an action that is normally performed by more than one person. It takes two to tango. It takes two to fight. And it takes (at least) two to reason. Reasoning is a language-driven activity and no human is capable of a private language. We inherit a vocabulary and linguistic forms of thought from other humans.
Tango aficionados dancing in Washington D.C. (Image copyright Ed Yourdon, 2010)
Of course humans talk to themselves and reason with themselves, but this isn’t the normal use of reason. Similarly people could tango by themselves but this isn’t the normal way to tango. When we act according to reason, we are essentially acting in ways that make our actions intelligible to others. If this is true, and if virtue is an action in accordance with reason, then it is most virtuous for us to reason with others and having gained some level of rational consensus, act reasonably and collectively with others.
While justice will be possible in isolation, it will normally take the form of collective action from a consensus of reason. This kind of just collective activity could be the foundation of a just society.
In this post I want to advance a simple argument: that people interested in following the principles of Stoicism have a duty to practice nonviolent resistance (though not necessarily to be pacifists). At first glance their might not seem to be much common ground between Stoicism and nonviolent resistance, and its clear that the ancient Stoics were not pacifists. After all, the Stoic emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius spent most of his time waging war. The Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, whose teaching inspired Epictetus, was a knight who fought in the Roman army. And Cato the Younger, the Roman Stoics’ greatest exemplar, led a civil war to attempt to prevent Julius Caesar from overthrowing the Roman Republic.
Yet it is important to remember that, while the Stoics emphasized certain universal moral principles, the specific application of those principles was always dependent on context. Epictetus emphasizes fulfilling the various roles that we have at different points in our life and in relation to those around us. Very few of the Stoic authors were ever willing to give anything like a specific set of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” (with the possible exception of Musonius Rufus, who was happy to tell his followers, for instance, that a good Stoic man would always grow a beard). Instead, we are called upon to use our rational faculties to apply the four cardinal virtues to our specific situation. We can adopt figures such as Cato or Marcus Aurelius as examples of those virtues, while still acknowledging that their specific actions may be more or less appropriate to our current situation.
The famous “Tank Man” temporarily stops the advance of a column of armored vehicles in Beijing on June 5, 1989.
In addition, even our virtuous exemplars were themselves flawed people, with limited moral insights. This isn’t some revolutionary statement for a Stoic to make. None of the Stoics claimed to be the ideal Stoic sage, who lives a life of perfect virtue. So gaining inspiration from Stoic philosophy and admiring people who have put it into practice doesn’t mean that we should hold up any one of the great Stoics of the past as flawless exemplars. The Stoics were people of their time and limited in the scope of their moral imagination by the common ways of thinking prevalent then. Many of them pushed against these prevalent ways of thinking, for instance by arguing (as Zeno and Musonius Rufus did) that women were equally capable of virtue with men,1 and arguing that one should treat even slaves with dignity and respect (though not, perhaps,free them from their bondage).
So, acknowledging that the historic Stoics might not have had much to say directly on nonviolent resistance and clearly found violence for political ends to be compatible with virtue, how might we look at their underlying insights into human nature and the character of virtue in order to apply Stoicism to the question of nonviolent resistance? I see it as informing two key choices: first, should we seek to achieve positive political change at all and second, what methods should we use to seek those changes?
The Stoic answer to the first question is abundantly clear. For the Stoics civic engagement and public service was a duty required by virtue, not an optional matter for us to pick up or not. This is still true today. As social animals, living in accordance with nature demands that we care not just for ourselves but for our broader community. And indeed, I would argue that for citizens of advanced democracies, the obligation for civic engagement is even greater than for the Stoics of the past. Our opportunities for political engagement are infinitely greater, and our scope of action infinitely wider, than in the limited areas of political engagement available to most people throughout history. Most historical figures could make the argument that they could not reasonably affect the politics and societies in which they lived. Democratic citizens, with the capacity to vote, demonstrate, strike, and engage in other methods of nonviolent resistance do not have this excuse.
So, if we are consistently following Stoic ethics, we must be actively engaged in seeking the welfare of our fellow human beings. What about the second question of methods? Here too the Stoics speak very clearly. We have an obligation to seek the welfare of others through methods that are in accord with virtue. Stoic thinkers saw a fatal flaw in thinking that immoral means were justified by moral ends. What is this flaw? The results of any action are outside of our control, subject to the whims of fortuna. What we can control is the way in which we pursue those actions. In setting our intention to be in accord with virtue we are invincible. So if we wish to live a virtuous life we must pursue actions for the benefit of others, and those actions must be dictated by their virtuous quality in the immediate moment, rather than by their perceived long-term benefits.
If we drop thinking that the ends justify the means, very quickly almost all our reasons for using violence to pursue political goals similarly drops away. Should we assassinate a dictator because getting him out of the way will allow a more just political leader to come to power? Well, we don’t know if the assassination will actually bring about the change we think it will. It’s up to fate. So we are left with just killing him either because we don’t like him personally or because he’s done terrible things that we think deserve punishment. Yet on both grounds we will have departed far from Stoic virtue. It’s not rational to kill someone just because we don’t like them. And evil actions spring out of ignorance – the dictator is harming themselves by acting in that way. Thus seeking to kill them for retributive reasons also falls short.
The good thing is that there is a more virtuous path available to the Stoic, and one in which our chances of dealing with the whims of fortuna are better than approaching problems through violence anyway. Nonviolent resistance is a more powerful force for political change than political violence ever has been. And critically, it is a force for political change that involves growth in Stoic virtue rather than departing from virtue because of ends-means justification. Let me explain what I mean, first what nonviolent resistance is, how it works in practice, and how it meshes well with growth in virtue.
What do I mean by nonviolent resistance? Nonviolent resistance is quite simply a refusal to cooperate. Like Camus said, a rebel is a person who says no. It is withdrawing your consent and cooperation from a political order that you believe to be unjust. It has some typical tactics that are familiar to us, like protest marches, strikes, and boycotts, but it isn’t synonymous with any of these. What it means is refusing to accept the channels of power created by the powerful and instead forge your own. One of the great practitioners of nonviolent resistance in the 20thcentury, Vaclav Havel, described it as refusing to accept a lie and instead choosing to “live in truth.”
My favorite Stoic exemplar here is the Roman senator Helvidius Priscus, as described in Epictetus’s Discourses (Book 1, Chapter 2). The emperor Vespasian gave Helvidius the opportunity to keep his mouth shut and go along with imperial policy, thus allowing him to save his own life. Helvidius refused to play the game, but instead insisted that as a Roman senator he had a duty to speak the truth no matter what the consequences might be. And when the Emperor threatened to kill Helvidius for standing up to him, Helvidius replied: “When did I tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part, and I will do mine. It is your part to kill, it is mine to die – but not in fear.”
The effectiveness of nonviolent resistance rests upon a simple premise: rulers rely upon the ruled to stay in power.2 They rely on us accepting their avenues for exercising political control as right and just for that control to be sustainable. When enough people refuse to give that acceptance, then the whole edifice collapses and change becomes inevitable. This is why nonviolent resistance movements against unjust political orders tend to succeed in ending those orders more than twice as often as violent movements, even when only a relatively small proportion of the population is willing to boldly stand up and participate.
Finally, the practice of nonviolent resistance involves disciplining yourself in ways that are integrally Stoic. An excellent example of this comes from the US Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960s, one of the most powerful campaigns of the civil rights movement was the lunch counter sit-ins. These started when black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina decided to attempt to forcibly desegregate the lunch counters in their city by simply sitting there and refusing to leave until they were given service. The movement spread like wildfire across the segregated south, and was helped along by foundational civil rights leaders like James Lawson, who had studied the Gandhian nonviolent resistance movement in India. James Lawson organized a training regimen for lunch-counter sit-in activists that would make Epictetus proud. Students who wanted to participate in a lunch counter sit-in had to be prepared to remain peaceful, calm, and polite no matter how bad the situation around them got. So before going out the students went through a kind of premeditatio malorum training exercise. The black students preparing for a sit-in would sit in a chair while their white fellow activists stood around them and played the role of racist agitators trying to disrupt the sit in. They would hurl insults at the black students, and even physically assault them. The black students had to remain completely calm and nonviolent. When they subsequently went out on their sit-in, they were prepared and remained peaceful. Like the Stoic sage, they refused to respond in kind to violent provocation, and their refusal made their example that much more powerful. The lunch counter sit-ins were a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle, and helped end legal segregation in the American South.
Hunter Gray and other activists received exactly the abuse they expected in this famous photo of the Greensboro sit ins.
It’s easy to recognize the Stoic virtues at work in the example of the lunch counter sit-in activists. And these stories are common throughout nonviolent resistance movements. Engaging in nonviolent resistance is perhaps one of the best examples we have of all the four cardinal Stoic virtues at once: practical wisdom in selecting a method of struggle that is more likely to succeed (though of course the ultimate outcome is outside of our control), justice in that we treat our fellow human beings with dignity and respect, courage in that we champion the right and refuse to go along with political orders that harm others, and temperance in that we hold our emotions and irrational responses in check like the sit-in activists. So, there is a strong case that most Stoics in most situations should be prepared to engage in nonviolent resistance, and in many cases have a duty to do so.
I don’t, however, think that Stoicism implies a kind of total pacifism that would eschew physical violence in any circumstance whatsoever. First, as I discussed earlier, most Stoics are quite light on absolute moral dictates. You must apply the virtues to your situation, and your role in that situation. And it’s certainly conceivable that there are situations where violence is the appropriate, virtuous response. Even people we think of as more or less absolute pacifists like Gandhi said that violence was acceptable in certain circumstances. The important thing for the Stoic to consider is the true justification for violence. Am I choosing to engage in violence for reasons that are really in accord with virtue? Or am I simply going along with cultural expectations and “ends justify the means” thinking?
One should also consider one’s own strength and capacity to engage in particularly strenuous forms of resistance. Part of the role ethics of Stoicism is knowing when something is beyond your personal capacity. Yet we can all strive for more, as we seek to approach the sage’s virtue. As Epictetus says, we can all strive to be “the purple, the small part which is bright, and makes all the rest appear graceful and beautiful.”
The midterm elections here in the United States are happening tomorrow, and passions are running incredibly high. After a solid decade and more of rapidly growing mistrust and distaste on both sides of our two-party system (as documented by Pew Research Center polls, among myriad other metrics), we’re looking down the barrel at “the most sweeping and divisive national referendum on any administration at least since the Great Depression,” as one political scientist told the Washington Post.
Change over time in the collaboration structure among Democratic and Republican congresspersons.
Normally I would dismiss such talk as dramatic hyperbole, but for many of us, “polarization” has become the watchword of the day. The very intensity and intractability of America’s partisan brawling is starting to become as concerning as the issues that we were brawling about in the first place! The fact of polarization seems to be just about the only thing that the country can agree on these days: according to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, a record-setting 9 out of 10 Americans believe that partisan divisions are a “serious problem” for the U.S. today. But true to form, the same survey naturally shows that each side points fingers at the other party as by far the primary cause of the divide.
If Stoicism is ever called for in our political lives, surely the intensely adversarial atmosphere that attends a divided country is one of those times. How might a rational, affectionate, and morally driven προκόπτον(prokopton) navigate the sensational morass of adversarial politics in an unusually polarized time?
This is a harder question than it might at first appear. I’ll approach the issue here in a few different ways, but overall I want to suggest that the Stoic concepts of ignorance, Temperance, Courage, and (especially) Socratic dialogue have a great deal to teach us about how to engage ethically and effectively in polarized conversations. And to close, I’ll share a bit about my recent experience in an inter-partisan dialogue workshop that brought a group of self-identified “reds” and “blues” together for structured exercises in building mutual understanding. Dialogue movements of this kind strike me as something that Stoics of all political persuasions ought to be able to support, despite the legitimate misgivings some people have about such methods on their surface.
Becoming something of a majority leader, Cato pressed his conservative optimates to pass a resolution condemning Pompey’s attempt to change election law for his own interest…
The Stoic leading the statehouse thwarted the conqueror at every turn, using his now-perfected filibuster to kill the populist legislation. With little room to maneuver, Pompey would try a new approach.
—Pat McGeehan, Stoicism and the Statehouse (2017), p. 56–7.
Connecting the framework of Stoic virtue ethics to something as detailed and multi-faceted as politics is no simple task. In this post, I want to propose that while Stoic political engagement is varied (and can be found on both the left and the right), overall it is unified by three broad principles: cosmopolitanism, non-retribution, and an ethic of service.
The conversation on Stoic action is fresh and new, but already well underway. This post skims the surface of some of the content that today’s Stoic writers, bloggers, and scholars have produced as they try to translate the ancient philosophy into modern life.
For a more complete bibliography of op-eds and papers on the Discipline of Action, have a look at our extensive Reading List.
