Stoicism is no Holiday
there are better ways to be than Stoic
On Wednesday night I went to see Ryan Holiday at the Sydney Town Hall. Holiday has done an amazing thing: he has made ancient Greek philosophy popular again. 2500 years old and Stoicism is making a massive comeback.
One of the reasons his achievement is so amazing is because of what Stoicism actually is. It promotes a rather dour and uninspiring attitude to life. It promotes an approach to human emotion that is at best ignorant and at worst repressive. And it is extremely naive about the world from a scientific perspective.
Of course, this is what you would expect from an ancient philosophy. This is a pre-scientific world. It is a small world, run by a male aristocracy. It is a world of emergent nation-states in Western Europe, a world of warfare at the very beginning of urbanisation and settled agricultural production. Stoicism is, from this perspective, manifestly unsuited to addressing the problems of contemporary…
