Politics, Tribes and the Common City
One Stoic ran the Roman Empire and disliked it. Another tutored Nero. Neither of them thought your side was the point.
7 min read
Political argument now runs mostly on identity. The question underneath a given position is rarely what would work; it is who holds it, and therefore who you become by agreeing. That is exhausting in a specific way, because it means every disagreement is a small referendum on belonging, and it makes the other side into a category of person rather than a set of claims.
The Stoics are unusually worth reading on this, and not because they stood outside it. One of them ran the Roman Empire. Another wrote a policy treatise for a teenage emperor who later had him killed.
The morning briefing
Marcus Aurelius begins the second book of the Meditations with an exercise, and it is the least sentimental thing in the book:
"Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet to-day inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men."
Two things are happening. He is removing surprise, so that bad behaviour arrives as forecast rather than as outrage. And then, immediately, he blocks the move that would make the forecast comfortable: these people act badly out of ignorance about what is actually good, and their nature is the same as his. Not a different species. Not a different kind of mind.
"we have come into the world to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth"
The image is deliberately unflattering to everyone involved. Not a brotherhood of the like-minded - a set of parts, some of which are teeth. Cooperation is structural, not affectionate. You are not required to approve of the lower jaw.
The two cities
The doctrine underneath this is the Stoic one about belonging, and Marcus puts it in nine words:
"As Antoninus, my city and my fatherland is Rome; as a man, the Universe."
This is not the claim that local loyalties are illusions. Rome is real; he spent his life on it. It is a claim about rank. Whatever group you were born into or chose sits inside a larger one whose only membership requirement is being a person, and where the two conflict the larger wins. Seneca makes the same argument in On Leisure when he says there are two republics, the accident of birth and the one bounded only by the reach of the sun.
Applied to a modern political tribe, that is a demotion. Your side is a subset, and a fairly arbitrary one.
Two checks on political fury
Book 11 contains a list of nine reminders for use when other people are insufferable. Two of them transfer directly to arguing about politics. The first is a symmetry requirement:
"that you yourself also often do wrong and are another such as they are"
The second is about the confidence of the verdict, and it is the one that gets skipped:
"you are not even sure that they actually do wrong; for many actions are done to serve a given purpose"
Most political anger runs on a confident reconstruction of somebody's motive from their conclusion. Marcus, who had actual intelligence reports and still got people wrong, thought the reconstruction was usually unjustified.
The part that stops this being quietism
Here is where Stoicism refuses the reading it is most often given. Having spent nine prescriptions on not being angry, Marcus adds a tenth, and it cuts hard in the other direction:
"it is madness to require bad men not to do wrong, for it is aiming at the impossible. Still, to permit them to be such to others and to require them not to do wrong to yourself is to be unfeeling and tyrannical."
Read that second sentence twice. Withdrawing into your own tranquillity while other people are harmed is not neutrality in his account. It is itself a vice, and he uses the strongest available word for it. Stoic detachment is licensed with respect to your own injuries. It is not licensed with respect to other people's.
The tone he recommends comes with a similar catch:
"gentleness is invincible, if it be genuine and not sneering or hypocritical"
Which rules out the most popular contemporary imitation of it: the calm, faintly amused superiority of the person who has risen above the discourse and would like you to notice.
Seneca, writing to power
The other Stoic text on politics is On Clemency, and it is a strange object: a Roman philosopher explaining to the young emperor Nero why mercy is in his interest, framed as a mirror the emperor can look into. Its argument is that power is only admirable when it is useful to the people under it:
"great power is glorious and admirable only when it is beneficent; since to be powerful only for mischief is the power of a pestilence"
And that the scale of the office changes the moral weight of a temperament:
"Cruelty in a private man can do but very little harm; but the ferocity of princes is war."
It is also the most compromised text in the corpus. Seneca was writing flattery to a man who would go on to have his own mother killed and who eventually ordered Seneca's suicide. Whether this is philosophy restraining power or philosophy supplying power with a vocabulary is a genuinely open question, and the essay reads differently depending on which you decide. Both readings are instructive about what happens to principles at close range to office.
What survives
Stoicism does not refute the tribal instinct; it outranks it. The people on the other side are running the same faulty equipment you are, from a different starting position, and they belong to the larger city whether either of you likes it or not. You are probably wrong about their motives. You are certainly guilty of some version of what you are objecting to.
And the corrective is not to float above the whole business. Marcus, who had more reason than anyone to want out, wrote down that opting out while others are harmed is tyranny with better manners. The instruction is to stay in it, without the part where the other side stops being people.