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| Zenon, founder of Stoicism. Image from the medieval Nuremberg Chronicle. Photo: Wikipedia. |
Stoicism was Christianity before Christianity. It came into being surreptitiously. Its founder was Zenon from Cyprus. Taking advantage of Greek freedom of thought, Zenon started preaching Stoicism in the shaded colonnade of the Athenian agora in early third century BCE.
Plundering Greek culture
Stoicism decorated itself with Greek philosophical ideas like that of logos (reason). Fire was especially close to divine reason, a tradition the Stoics also adopted from philosopher Herakleitos, “a god-like man, the inspired glory of ancient Ephesos”(Greek Anthology 2.355). Herakleitos, c. 540 – c. 480 BCE, saw the stars as bowls of fire and fire as logos, the wisdom one gains in understanding the cosmos. Man was inextricably tied to nature.
However, Stoics like Zenon broke with the Greek tradition of the polis (city State) and the philosophical ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Stoicism degenerated to the popular talk of the shopping mall: an incoherent, flexible formula of fears, ideas, superstitions, abstractions, theologies and wishes satisfying almost everybody, especially those in power. It mixed up religious practices from outside the Greek world with the demands and superstitions of tyrants. Over all, Stoicism was a religion for the masses.
Seneca, Roman philosopher and political advisor to the Roman emperor Nero in mid-first century, hinted that Stoicism made people like dogs tied to a moving cart. The dogs had the option of walking behind the cart or being dragged by the cart (Epistles107.11). Another Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, a Greek from Asia who was born into slavery, c. 55 - c. 135, was equally harsh. He said life was tough: some people have had to hold the chamber pot for others (The Discourses1.2.8-10).
Stoic philosophers also plundered the ancient Greek cosmological tradition. They peppered their speeches and writings with Greek powerful concepts like logos or pneuma(breath, mixture of cold and hot, air and fire). But these ideas became obscure, though pretty and meaningless Stoic lipstick for the few. In contrast to the eternity of the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmos, the Stoic cosmos was going out periodically in a big fiery bang, only to reconstitute itself and start all over again.
In support of tyranny
The real purpose of Stoicism, however, was political. It preached the accommodation of the people to the emerging ruling class of undemocratic states. Stoicism, says Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, “imagined a universe governed for the good by a single divine force.” This proved “congenial to a Roman imperial mentality from ancient times" (Battling the Gods, 235). Naturally, Stoicism was a great booster of the Roman Empire.
Forcing the Greeks to become a grazing herd of cattle
Zenon denounced Greek traditional political values. He had no use for Plato’s Republic.He wrote his own Republic in which he envisioned a global empire running the world.
Plutarch, a Greek philosopher and priest of Apollo, c. 46 – c. 120, put it diplomatically this way: Zenon’s Republic, he said, would favor the undoing of Greek institutions. It’s main point being that Greek household arrangements should not be based on poleis or smaller communities, each one living by its own laws. Zenon wants us to consider all men from all over the world as our fellow citizens and residents following an identical way of life. In other words, Zenon wants the Greeks to become "a grazing herd of cattle" (On the Fortune of Alexander 329a-b).
Zenon also attacked the Greek family and role of women in Greek society, making all women prostitutes -- property shared among men. In addition, he did not want to see the construction of any more temples, gymnasia and law courts in the Greek poleis (city states) (Diogenes Laertios, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.32-33).
Modern Stoicism
Does this ancient vision of a mega state remind you of the incessant strategy of corporate America to homogenize and globalize everything? The downplaying of Greek values that formed Western civilization?
Political scientists rarely equate modern political ideology to Stoicism. Yet Stoicism covers the twenty-first century landscape: its obsession with corporate and state control of everything. However, this mania for global empires under a multitude of other names, comes at heavy price:
The destruction of the diversity, ecological integrity, and small size of the family farm in favor of imperial agribusiness; and the sowing of animosity and class antagonisms among the people of America and those in the rest of the world.
The gravest threat is the decline of democracy and the rise of imperial states armed with nuclear weapons threatening humans and the Earth.
America and Russia
America and Russia are the top dogs in this race to extinction. The summit between American president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, 16 July 2018, illustrates the wrongheadedness of international relations in the age of Stoicism in the twenty-first century.
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| President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Donald Trump of the United States. Photo: Getty Images. |
Instead of negotiating the reductions and elimination of the genocidal nuclear weapons, Trump and Putin had a personal meeting, in which they probably ironed out the hot controversy of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 US elections. Trump agreed with Putin that Russia did not interfere in the American election. This was a slap in the face to both Democrats and Republicans and to all American media steeped in an anti-Russian frenzy. The American establishment expected Trump to denounce Putin and Russia.
Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation Magazine, is convinced Americans must understand that, along a multitude of other factors, the election conflict has pushed America and Russia far apart. And with nuclear weapons from both countries ready to fly, the nuclear predicament between them is in a more perilous condition that that of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Indeed, on January 25, 2018, the president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Rachel Bronson, warned America and the world that the Doomsday Clock was “two minutes to midnight”: nearly identical to the position of the Clock in 1953, the height of the Cold War.
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| Doomsday Clock showing two minutes to midnight: 25 January 2018. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Photo: Wikipedia. |
No wonder Katrina van den Heuvel urged Americans to “step back.”
On the face of potential nuclear annihilation, Americans should have focused on that danger, urging Trump to, at least, imitate Ronald Reagan who, in the 1980s, got pretty close to agreeing with Mikhail Gorbachev (secretary / president of the Soviet Union / Russia) to eliminate nuclear bombs.
Wake up, America!
We all need to step back from our own biases and misunderstandings of international affairs. You cannot forget the Cold War.
We must wake up to the enveloping political and environmental threat of 2018. It has myriad hues and colors. Thousands of nuclear bombs are ready. Farm practices contaminate mothers’ milk with pesticide poisons. These chemicals, along countless public health and environmental insults, are also responsible for killing billions of honeybees – in America and all over the world.
The proponents and lobbyists of this modern Stoicism in America care less for Greek virtues, much less for honeybees or for mothers feeding their infants poisoned milk.
For the sake of corporate profits, they have been exporting American jobs and importing cheap goods. They display the flag and pour huge amounts of money into the Pentagon, supposedly to protect us from invisible enemies, but, in practice, to boost the profits of the “defense” industry: keep churning more bullets, pistols, machine guns, bombs, tanks, aircrafts, and other munitions, including nuclear weapons..
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