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Stoicism in Times of Unrest

We live in a turbulent time. As with many volatile periods in history, it seems like every day the news brings reports of struggle and upheaval. Many people even experience it first-hand. This anxiety has given birth to comparisons like the civil unrest in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Others have likened it to the 1930s and 1940s with tariffs and Japanese internment camps. Still others see parallels to the 1890s, given the rise in unionizing, labor struggles, and wealth inequality. These comparisons give a helpful perspective. Times were hard then, too, but we got through them, often leaving society better. Another window of history we can look to for unrest is the Hellenistic period in ancient Greece. After Alexander the Great’s death (323 BCE), the once mighty Macedonian Empire began to rapidly tear itself apart. This gave rise to several survival philosophies. These schools of thought aimed to provide inner peace and happiness during tough times.

The most popular of these was Stoicism. The Stoic philosophers said that unhappiness is caused by our passions – things outside of our control stir up an emotional response. The cure, they said, is to temper these harmful emotions through reasoning. Learning to accept the things we cannot change leads to a happy life. This conclusion has led to a common misconception that Stoicism means being cold and emotionless. After all, the experience of emotion is a fundamental part of our humanity. Should we really seek to rid ourselves of it? Additionally, doesn’t the focus on calmness and control encourage us to accept injustice and suffering rather than trying to resist it? Is this really what Stoicism teaches?

There are some helpful lessons to be learned here from Martin Luther King, Jr., who shows us what applied Stoicism can look like during challenging times. On April 16, 1963, he wrote an open letter after being jailed for protesting racial segregation. This Letter from Birmingham Jail includes powerful moral statements on the injuries inflicted when justice is delayed, as well as the dangers of prioritizing decorum over justice. If we are earnest about doing what’s right, responding to injustice could mean non-violent direct action such as protests, strikes, boycotts, or civil disobedience. King provides four steps to determine if action is needed, and if so, how to prepare. The first step requires gathering facts to determine if injustice has truly occurred. The second step is negotiation. If an injustice is identified, in an ideal world, we would bring it to the attention of those with power to stop it. However, if injustice occurs because those in power are either complicit or complacent, negotiations fail. What then? This brings us back to what the Stoics mean when we talk about accepting our suffering. Acceptance doesn’t mean to consent, but to come to terms with the reality of the situation so we can focus on what we can change. Stoicism is about “keeping your head in the game.”

Since we cannot control the past nor can we know the future, Stoicism helps us tune out noise so we can focus on what is in front of us. Stoic acceptance means not letting passions weigh you down so much that you lose focus on what you can do today. Likewise, Martin Luther King, Jr. shows that when negotiations fail, we must accept the reality of what happened without resigning ourselves to those failures.

The final step that King prescribes is direct action, a pressure campaign designed to bring people with power back to the bargaining table. This follows from his third step: self-purification for that campaign. He  describes self-purification as preparing oneself to react peacefully in the face of violence. This takes incredible mental training and self-discipline! It also helps to clarify what the Stoics might mean by ridding oneself of passions. In the face of violence, it is only natural to have strong emotions. If someone harms you, a person you love, or a community member, reactions like anger and fear are to be expected, especially if the harm is unjust. The problem is not the sudden onset of these feelings (in other words, a passion in itself), but what we do with them. King’s step of self-purification readies us to focus on what’s most important (justice) and not to let even the most powerful passions break our focus. While it is easy to “lean into” emotions that make us feel defeated or that distract us from what’s important, we should pause and ask ourselves, “What is in my control? I may be angry or feel crushed, but what can I do today to make a difference?”

In turbulent times, even when we think about what is in our control, it may still seem like too much. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus reminds us that our lives are like actors in a play. We do not decide the life we are given, but it is up to us to live it as well as we can. If we do, we might find we are capable of more strength and resilience than we were expecting: “…each thing that happens to you, remember to turn to yourself and ask what capacity you have for dealing with it… If hardship comes to you, you will find endurance. If it is abuse, you will find patience.”

Perhaps it feels like things are out of control, and you want to act, but feel overwhelmed. Maybe you have been doing what you can to help others, but there’s so much to do that it feels hopeless. It may be that you are struggling with daily mental health with the onslaught of negative information in this time of uncertainty. These are times when passions can prove especially difficult to master. These passions get in our way and can be paralyzing. They keep us from doing good in the world or providing the self-care that we need. The Stoics help us focus on what’s important and tune out what is not. What’s important is what is in front of us today. As Martin Luther King, Jr. shows, this does not mean giving in or giving up. Quite the contrary! If we focus on what’s in front of us right now, we position ourselves to take on whatever comes next.

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The Freedom Convoy and the Ethics of Civil Disobedience

photograph of Freedom Convoy truck blockade

Stealing money seems wrong. Speeding in a car seems wrong. Even lying on your tax return seems wrong. But is it always wrong to break the law?

Activists for women’s suffrage illegally disrupted Parliament, broke windows, and slashed tires. Gandhi led tens of thousands to the Arabian Sea to illegally gather salt in protest of the heavy tax levied on salt by British law. Rosa Parks illegally sat in the section of the bus reserved for whites under segregation. Edward Snowden illegally handed thousands of classified documents to journalists, revealing the massive surveillance program the United States government was operating. In recent days, almost 2,000 Russians have been arrested for illegally assembling to protest the war in Ukraine.

These are all examples of civil disobedience — breaking the law to protest perceived injustice. And I suspect the chances are high that you think at least some of them were justified, moral acts.

Now that it is coming to a close, it’s a good time to ask: was the “Freedom Convoy” that grabbed headlines for so many weeks another example of civil disobedience? Or was it something else?

The philosopher John Rawls thought that civil disobedience was a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act that was contrary to the law, aimed at bringing about a change in law, or fixing an existing injustice. There’s a lot in that characterization.

What did he mean that it is “public”? Civil disobedience is, fundamentally, an act of communication, “an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction.” The Freedom Convoy protesters were certainly seeking to communicate to the public and those in power that there is an injustice that needs to be rectified. The movement was ideologically diverse and perhaps unsavory in parts, but its core message was protesting vaccine mandates and vaccine passports for truckers crossing the U.S. border. The perspective of the protesters was that these laws were unjust — that the government had overreached and infringed on Canadians’ rightful liberties. They were trying to bring the attention of the public and pressure politicians to change the law. I’m not going to try to figure out if the protesters were right or wrong about these laws being unjust. Whatever the case, it seems clear that their protest was a public act. It also seems clear that it was aimed at bringing attention to a perceived breach of justice, and bringing about a change in the law to rectify the perceived injustice.

Rawls also claimed that civil disobedience is non-violent. This distinguishes it from more extreme forms of political action such as militant action and terrorism. The reason civil disobedience ought to be non-violent, Rawls thought, is connected to its function as an act of public communication. If violence occurs, it is likely to distract from the intended message and discredit the movement.

These ideas are echoes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s moving “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which the civil rights leader responds to the condemnation of his non-violent but illegal marches against racism and segregation. It is clear that King, like Rawls, sees non-violence as vital to civil disobedience’s power to rectify injustice. The civil rights protestors had workshops on non-violence, and asked themselves, before marching “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” Only those who answered affirmatively were permitted to march.

Finally, Rawls thought civil disobedience was contrary to the law, but still “in fidelity” to the law, still conscientious. This might sound paradoxical, and it’s a tension MLK Jr. confronted. He wrote,

Isn’t negotiation a better path? [Civil disobedience] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.

Those who commit civil disobedience intentionally break the law, but they do so purely to draw attention to the cause of pursuing justice. They peacefully accept being arrested and enduring whatever legal punishments they receive. This demonstration of respect for the legal system is also crucial to the communicative function of civil disobedience. The protestors, in order to change it, must show that they accept the existence of the legal and political system. They want to improve it, not to overthrow it. For this reason, Howard Zinn suggests that “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; It is absolutely essential to it.”

Once again, the Freedom Convoy seems to have largely demonstrated fidelity to the law, even while acting contrary to the law. While illegally blocking the bridge linking the U.S. and Canada, at least 100 Freedom Convoy protestors were peacefully arrested without resistance.

All in all, the Freedom Convoy does qualify as civil disobedience, at least according to Rawls’ characterization. But not all civil disobedience is morally acceptable. So the next question to ask is this: was the civil disobedience of the Freedom Convoy moral?

Once again, we can get some help with this question from Rawls. He provides three criteria that need to be met for civil disobedience to be moral.

The first is that it is sincere. Those who are breaking the law must truly believe that the policies or laws they are seeking to change are unjust. They cannot be using the cause as an excuse to break the law, or the cause as a cudgel to beat their political opponents. It’s much harder to say whether this standard was met by the Freedom Convoy as a whole. Many protestors appear to have been sincere, while others arguably used the movement as a partisan opportunity to push conspiracy theories or put political pressure on the politicians they already opposed.

The next standard that Rawls claims needs to be met for civil disobedience to be moral is that the challenge must be well-founded. The injustice that is being protested must be a genuine, serious breach of justice, of security, social welfare, rights, democracy, and so on. It must be a cause worth breaking the law for. Were the vaccine mandates and passports a breach of basic rights or a sensible health measure? This is a hard question, and a lot of ink has already been spilled (or keyboards hammered) answering it. I am sure you have your own views.

Rawls’ final criterion that must be met for civil disobedience to be moral is that it must have good enough consequences. It cannot, for example, be justified to commit murder in an attempt to condemn or change overly harsh legal penalties for murder. There must be a good balance between the benefit of rectifying injustice and any harm generated by the law being broken in protest. The disruption to ordinary citizens’ lives in Ottawa was fairly profound, and this can only be justified if the protest achieves something even more valuable than that which is destroyed.

This last criterion means that, in many cases, legal forms of protest should be favored over civil disobedience, as the former tends to generate smaller costs for both the protestors and society at large. Even so, civil disobedience can still be justified as a last resort. MLK Jr. found it important that his own civil disobedience was the last resort. “It is unfortunate that [illegal] demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham,” he wrote, “but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure led the Negro community with no alternative.”

Was the Freedom Convoy’s law-breaking a last resort? It’s a difficult question. There had been rising dissent against the coronavirus restrictions since the first lockdown of 2020 but few reductions in restrictions, which might suggest to some that the legal avenues for change had been exhausted and failed. But to others, this only shows that these legal avenues had never been fully explored and that the Freedom Convoy caused needless disruption and suffering and was never the last resort.

If you are left feeling frustrated that philosophy refuses to deliver any clear answers, I acknowledge the point. But philosophy can at least give us the tools to think about things more clearly; Rawls’s framework for evaluating civil disobedience may not be able to tell us if the Freedom Convoy was right or moral, but it does at least help us to focus on the right questions in trying to find an answer.

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Color Blindness and Cartoon Network’s PSA

photograph of small child peeking through his hands covering his face

Cartoon Network’s latest anti-racist PSA is undeniably clever. “See Color” takes place on the set of a PSA, where Amethyst, a Crystal Gem from the show Steven Universe (don’t ask me what this means), leads a couple of tots in a song about color blindness.

“Color blindness is our game, because everyone’s the same! Everybody join our circle, doesn’t matter if you’re white or black or purple!”

Amethyst isn’t buying it. “Ugh, who wrote this?” she says. “I think it kinda matters that I’m purple.” The children register their agreement.

“Well, I’m not an alien,” says the Black child, “but it definitely matters to me that I’m Black.”

“Yeah, it makes a difference that I’m white,” the white child chimes in. “The two of us get treated very differently.”

The Black child explains further: “My experience with anti-Black racism is really specific…But you won’t see any of that if you ‘don’t see color.’”

The idea that color blindness is deficient as a means of extirpating racism — because it blinds people to existing discrimination and invalidates legitimate race-based affirmative action — is not new. Indeed, the rejection of the philosophy and practice of color blindness has by now become the new orthodoxy in academic and left-leaning circles. That this rejection has trickled down to kids’ shows is surely a powerful measure of its success.

Conservative critics complain that the new anti-color blindness position is antithetical to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a society in which people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. This is a mistake. To see this, it is useful to understand the distinction in political philosophy between ideal theory and non-ideal theory. 

The distinction was first introduced by John Rawls in his classic A Theory of Justice. According to Rawls, ideal theory is an account of what society should aim for given certain facts about human nature and possible social institutions. Non-ideal theory, by contrast, addresses the question of how the ideal might be achieved in practical, permissible steps, from the actual, partially just society we occupy.

Those who reject color-blindness can see the color-blindness envisioned by King as a property of an ideal society, a society in which racism does not exist. In that society, the color of a person’s skin really does not matter to how they are in fact treated; hence, it is something we can and ought to ignore in our treatment of them. Unfortunately, we don’t live in this society, and in addition, we ought not pretend that we do. Instead, we ought to recognize other people’s races so that we may treat them equitably, taking into account the inequitable treatment to which they have and continue to be subjected.

But just as the norms which we must follow in a non-ideal society are perhaps different from those we ought to follow in an ideal society, so the norms we ought to teach our children should perhaps be different from the ones adults ought to follow. And there is a danger in teaching children to “see color” while also asking them, as we still do, to embrace King’s vision: it may very easily lead to confusion, or worse, a rejection of a color blindness as an ideal. After all, how many children are equipped to understand the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory? Imagine white children criticizing King as a racial reactionary because of the latter’s insistence that in his ideal society, judgments of people’s merits would not take their race into account.

On the other hand, perhaps risking this outcome is better than the alternative: another generation of white children who believe that because race shouldn’t matter in some ideal society, it therefore ought not matter to us. Can we really afford to risk another generation of white people who believe that the claim that Black lives matter is somehow antithetical to the claim that all lives matter? Perhaps not.

There are good reasons to reject color blindness as a philosophy and practice for the real world: it leads us to ignore actual discrimination and vitiates the justification for race-based affirmative action. But there are limits to what children can be asked to understand, and ensuring that they are neither led astray nor confused requires careful thought.