Stoicism for Polarized Politics

This story was originally written November 18, 2018.

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.

To this day, Lincoln and John Brown have their respective critics and admirers: gruesome as his tactics were, it does appear on the surface that it was Brown’s hyper-confrontational approach — not Lincoln’s effort at placation and accommodation — that ultimately succeeded in freeing the enslaved peoples of the United States. Whichever approach you may sympathize with more, the fact is that the choice between confrontation and accommodation is seldom a foregone conclusion, and serious moral concerns motivate both approaches.

Thankfully, polarized as America may be this election season, violence is not seriously on the table. But if anything, that only makes it all the harder to decide how to engage virtuously.

Pat answers not forthcoming, then, let’s look at some of the general Stoic principles that might be relevant for how we handle a polarized conversation.

At the very worst, then, the Stoics counsel us to view our relationship to misguided people as akin to a relationship between a doctor and a patient. We should always wish them well and, fate permitting, support their recovery from error. No passage from the classical Stoic texts expresses this charitable and humanizing attitude so well as the much-beloved opening of Meditations 2, worth quoting here in full (similar sentiments can be found in book 2 of Seneca’s On Anger):

The general principles of cosmopolitanism, philostorgia, amathia, and showing “kindness to one who is still in the dark” are about as close as we can find to non-negotiable absolutes in Stoic ethics. Taken together, they offer a powerful antidote to our all-too-natural tribal tendencies as human beings. As we will see, these idea’s don’t necessary confine us to a strictly “accommodationist” approach to conflict. But they do put a major peg in the ground that, at the very least, points sharply away from certain extreme forms of confrontation.

Conflict can be thrilling, alluring — even downright pleasurable. Who hasn’t felt an intense desire to give an opponent a “piece of their mind” now and again? Or to indulge in a little self-righteous mockery of a point of view we disagree with? Who hasn’t rushed an argument in the heat of the moment, and found themselves defending irrational or oversimplified claims? And who doesn’t sometimes wish that they could just bulldoze their way through an ideological impasse with a burst of belligerent energy? These temptations can appear all the more justified when they are directed at highly important and noble goals, like justice.

These feelings are a fundamental and ever-present part of our human nature. Like most “proto-passions” (προπάθεια, propatheia), they are there for a good reason, and we shouldn’t ignore them entirely. Sometimes the actions these feelings point toward are well-justified. There comes a time to put our foot down, proverbially speaking, and the impulses that we feel toward action help keep us alert and focused on fighting for what’s right! But other times, of course, these impressions lead us wildly astray if left unchecked.

Stoicism’s famous Discipline of Desire calls us to moderate these impressions by cultivating a conviction that virtue is infinitely more important than these external desires. But independently, the Discipline of Action requires us to prudently distinguish between the actions that they suggest: is this really the time to scoff, drop a barbed insult, or to make a sweeping and grandiose claim about the other side? Or am I being mislead into unethical behavior by an attractive impression?

The Internet is one giant laboratory that shows just how bad human beings are at this kind of discipline. It should go without saying that most of the petty trolling and snark that we associate with social media debates is fundamentally “un-Stoic.” “For what’s more feeble,” says Seneca, “than anger huffing and puffing to no purpose” (On Anger, 2.11.1)? None of us being Sages, however, even forums dedicated to Stoicism draw their own share of drama and disfunction!

The Stoics don’t offer us any absolute, perfect answers for distinguishing between sound reasoning and unsound rationalization when it comes to the desires and impressions we feel during interpersonal conflict. They ask us to practice Temperance and Prudence, and to make an attentive effort to distinguish between what is good and bad: “Don’t allow yourself to be dazed by the rapidity of the impact,” Epictetus famously advises, “but say, ‘Wait a while for me, my impression, let me see what you are, and what you’re an impression of; let me test you out’” (Discourses, 2.18.24; see also Enchiridion 1). The rest, we hope, will follow from the process of skill development that this mindful Discipline of Judgement allows (the third of Epictetus’s three-discipline scheme of desire, action, and judgement).

What they do offer us are two solid admonitions. First, full-blown anger is a kind of desire for revenge, and thus something that we should avoid:

Second, a lot of our conflicts with other people do ultimately arise from our attachments to external things. Because these things ultimately have very little value in comparison to virtue (they are like a “candle to the sun,” in a common Stoic metaphor), sometimes it does make sense to resolve conflict by practicing straight-up accommodation. Epictetus illustrates this in the context of family conflict, admonishing his students to

Of course, human rights are a whale of a lot more important than a lettuce or a chair, so this approach has limits! It seems that the approach Epictetus recommends for vegetable and furniture disputes may be of very sparse usefulness in a political context. This brings us right to our third key principle:

Whether or not you agree with Jones’ assessment of the moral issues that are currently at play, it is certainly true that a virtuous approach to conflict sometimes requires us to exercise a big dose of Courage, and to overcome our natural aversion to tension and disharmony. We ought to be willing to “speak truth to power,” as the saying goes, or (in terms more popular on the right) we should be unafraid of being “politically incorrect” when the situation demands it.

Point being, courageous confrontation is an important part of our moral and political toolbox, and (when handled virtuously) it is perfectly compatible with Stoic values and practice. Granted, Cato and others like him are endlessly controversial figures, and some argue that his stereotypical Stoic stubbornness accelerated political polarization in the Republic and hastened its fall. But the case is hardly black and white. Commentators like Teyari Jones certainly fall into hyperbole when they suggest that there is nothing virtuous at all about “finding common ground,” but she is correct that principled Courage is a vital political virtue.

Praising the value of temperate and courageous dialogue, respectively, is all well and good. But what matters is how we apply these virtues on the nitty-gritty level of a real conversation.

The Stoics offer us a nice rule of thumb here, which I have increasingly come to view as brilliantly useful: whenever possible, craft your argument so that it meets your opponents where they are. Or stated differently, we should approach arguments as if were were talking “with friends.”

Simple as it sounds, this idea was a big deal in the ancient world. It was specifically associated with the Socratic method, or ἔλεγχος (elenchus). The difference between elenchus and its more confrontational alternatives is neatly expressed by Socrates in Meno (emphasis mine):

Most provocatively, Epictetus emphasizes that this methodology is focused squarely on winning the heart and mind of your opponent, and not on putting on a good show to persuade third-party observers (2.12.5):

Socratic questioning is a fundamental part of today’s Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy toolbox, and at one time it was an essential component of philosophical training and practice in the Western world. Maybe it’s time for modern Stoics to dust off elenchus as a spiritual exercise, and to bring its non-coercive, person-centered approach to conflict back to the fore.

This accommodating interpretation of Socrates’ example was clearly held in high esteem by the Stoics. But it clearly shouldn’t be treated as an absolute standard, applicable to any and every situation. The Stoics’ narrow interpretation of Socrates as a cordial, accommodating interlocutor seems to ignore his famous capacity for Socratic irony, and Epictetus himself was no stranger to witty sarcasm that borders on derision! Seneca’s aforementioned claim that “sometimes we must strike with fear those with whom reason gets nowhere,” moreover, certainly implies that we should sometimes suspend the principle of meeting people where they are.

Of course, the Stoics could be wrong about all of this, and their example isn’t gospel truth — but overall I think they do a good job of expressing the major aspects of behavior that we should try to be aware of during a conflict. The remaining question is how we ought to tie all the pieces of this moral alphabet soup together when facing specific challenges — and that’s where modern scholarship can step in and try to develop the philosophy further!

This may be as good a synthesis of “accommodation” and “confrontation” as we can hope to find, and I think it offers us a good starting point for understanding how the virtues of Temperance and Courage might interact to produce an ethical understanding of the ideal “Socratic” dialogue.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a Better Angels workshop at George Mason University which brought together seven “red“-leaning students and seven “blue“-leaning students for a series of structured dialogue exercises.

What I admire most about these events is how incredibly efficient they are. I have had many one-on-one conversations across world view divides before (religious and political) — and they easily get unwieldy! World views are huge things, and it is easy to get mired in an exponential number of details, and to get stuck on especially controversial quagmires. Dialogue events led by trained organizers help avoid these pitfalls.

In this case, we were asked to perform a couple of exercises. In one, for example, they divided us into our “red” and “blue” groups for a stereotypes exercise: we were asked to brainstorm the top four stereotypes we feel our own political group is stigmatized with. Here is what our respective cohorts came up with:

Then we worked together within our own cohort to explain what is wrong with each stereotype, and — here is where it gets interesting — to identify the grain of truth that lies behind each stereotype. After hashing out this “two-step movement” amongst ourselves (which isn’t always easy — Lord knows people of the same party often disagree!), the reds and blues were brought back together in the same room, and we presented our conclusions to each other.

We were able to listen to Republican-leaning students contest the idea that their party is made up of “all rich white men,” for example — while at the same time listening to a politically active young woman open up about how she does, in fact sometimes feel out of place within her own party. On the flipside, the red group had the opportunity to listen to us blues explain how abusive and insulting we find the word “snowflake” — even while we admitted that passions do certainly tend to run high among progressive movements, and that we have our own misgivings about how to keep activism in check.

Now, the natural worry one might have with these sort of initiatives is that they result in a shallow sort of accommodationism. Dialogue’s humanizing effect, it seems, can lead us right into a feel-good “Kumbaya moment” that puts us at risk of making inappropriate compromises and losing our Courage to take a forceful stand on important issues. As Jones and McGeehan advise us above, there is nothing inherently virtuous about compromise, and too much focus on harmony creates a slippery slope to dangerous false equivalences.

My experience completely neutralized this objection for me. Participants in dialogue exercises don’t leave their pressing concerns at the door, and at no point does indulging the “better angels of our nature” through humanization and empathy mandate that we pretend both sides’ beliefs are equally correct and equally good. As our moderator pointed out, participating in Better Angels does not “turn everybody purple.”

Dialogue is just one tool for handling “momentous disagreements” (as Aikin and Talisse call them), and it is not the absolute end-all be-all. We certainly need other forms of debate and criticism, and, as we’ve seen, even ridicule has its place sometimes. But dialogue is one powerful and positive tool that seems to have a very slim chance of being misused for evil — and it is for that reason that I think dialogue, like the elenchus of Socrates, commends itself as a sound core practice around which to to build a Stoic approach to polarization. It may not solve all our problems at once, and it may be a long and frustrating process at times, but that shouldn’t bother us if we are in it for the long game, and for the good of humankind:

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