E.G.

Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out.

Here's

The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outside of your control, but your inner life is completely within your control.

Everyone, I assume, can see why this form of stoicism is no good. Here's

The second-worst form of stoicism: Your inner life is more controllable than the world around you.

This form of stoicism is not quite as bad, but it's still not true, or at least not true for most of us.

What's true is that we have some control over our insides. For example, if you have an unwanted desire, you may well be able to rid yourself of it. Sometimes, careful reflection on the reasons why it would be better for you if you didn't want X will be sufficient to make your desire for X go away. And if that doesn't work, there are various further mind-tricks that you can try. But many of our desires cannot be changed. Many (perhaps all) of us are in pain, and we want the pain to stop, and that probably won't change anytime soon.

It is easier to write a book than to make yourself enjoy the difficult parts of the writing process. Much of what's going on inside of us is wild and uncontrollable. Much of the external world is tamed and controllable. That's true now more than ever. We're able to rearrange our world in ways that Marcus Aurelius couldn't dream of. We can build hugely good things, and hugely bad things.

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Much of what I dislike about stoicism is packaged neatly in Kate Norlock's pessimism. She says that

when it comes to evils caused by human beings, the situation is hopeless.

And she suggests that, instead of "[r]epeating and upholding narratives of moral progress," we should instead have a stoic "praxis-centered ethic" that will

helpfully adjust our expectations from changing an uncontrollable future to developing better skills for living in a world that exceeds our control.

Instead of saying the things that Norlock says, it is much better, I think, to say what Mariana Alessandri says in her explanation of why she isn't a stoic:

The world I live in is sexist, ageist, racist, homophobic, and generally unfriendly. It’s hardly unchangeable, though, and I want to do more than endure it.

I think we have all sorts of reasons that are peculiar to our time and place to hope and believe that we can make the world much better than it presently is. Norlock's pessimism might be reasonable in some situations, but it is badly out of place in our moment.

Also, even in dire circumstances, stoicism seems likely to be misleading. Alessandri is too generous to stoicism when she says that

[s]toicism is an amazing tool and a near-perfect philosophy … for prison. If you find yourself, like Stockdale [who spent seven years as a prisoner of war and claims to have relied upon stoic ideas to get him through those years], trapped in a situation that is definitively out of your physical control, then Stoicism might be the best option.

The prisoner might reasonably judge that she has no way to control her external environment. That half of stoicism—the pessimistic half—would be correct for the prisoner. But I doubt that prisoners typically are able to exert a great deal of control over their insides. In fact, a prisoner seems likely to have far less control over her insides than most of us do, precisely because the prisoner has so little control over her environment, and so little external freedom. One of the main ways to elevate your mood is to go for a walk, but a person in a prison might not be able to do that.

I think many of us should embrace a can-do spirit with regard to the external world. We should get together and get to work on making things better. We should reject stoic pessimism about that sort of project. I think we also should reject stoic enthusiasm about the project of gaining control over your inner life. Yes, you can change some of what's going on inside of you, and some of that sort of thing is well worth doing. But any project like that should be very modest in its aims and should be undertaken against a background recognition that most of your interior is beyond your control.

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Although I think that our control over our insides is limited, I also think that our understanding of our insides is limited. Many people are deeply confused about what they want and don't want, and what they like and dislike. Gaining a better understanding of your inner life might have some of the same benefits that exerting control over your inner life might have.

For example, I am aware that many people claim that they dislike immigrants, and claim that they want there to be fewer immigrants in the USA, and so they vote for politicians who promise to harm and remove immigrants. But I think most of those people are mistaken about what they truly want and feel. I do not think they do dislike immigrants, and I do not think they have a genuine desire to have immigrants removed. And I think that these people could see this if they were to carefully look inward.

In general, a false belief that you desire X can be as harmful as a real desire for X. For example, if you falsely believe that you have a very strong desire to buy a certain expensive car, this might cause you to make a financially irresponsible choice, just as surely as if you really did have such a desire.

So, coming to realize that you don't actually want the car could be great for you, in much the same way that, if you did actually want the car, eradicating the actually-existing desire for the car could be great for you.

As I have suggested, I think a stoic project of desire eradication should be modest in its aspirations. There's only so much desire eradication that is psychologically possible for us. But I think a stoicism-adjacent project of desire clarification could be very beneficial, because I think that many people are deeply and pervasively confused about what they really want, and what they really like and dislike.

I suppose that a variant of stoicism that focuses on desire clarification, rather than desire eradication, might be called second-order stoicism. I think second-order stoicism is probably a good idea.