The Stoic Revolution….

I keep my FB account for a few reasons. I do occasionally get news of distant friends. Sometimes I can also share something from the Fleming Foundation, in the hope--usually vain--that it will attract a new subscriber--who feels our work is worth the quarter or fifty cents a day we charge.

But there is another reason, less pure. No, I do not refer to the ads and spam light-porn videos with which I am bombarded. I mean the barrage of memes.  Judging from what I can see, grown men and women, mostly college-educated and with decent incomes, are keeping themselves coarse on stupid on a diet of lousy pop music and stultifying Hollywood movies.

Best of all are the memes of quotations from philosophers and poets. Of course at least half of them are bogus, because none of these people actually reads a book, a poem, or essay. They just recycle for the 100th time what some other poor chump mistakenly thought was a quotation (they always say "quote," which is a verb!) from Plato or Voltaire. Of course, there is never any reference to a work, much less page number or chapter and verse. t's something like the sleep teaching tapes in Brave New World. I'm glad I'm a Beta. Gammas are stupid and the Alphas have to work too hard. I'm glad I am a Beta,

The worst are the Stoic quoters. There are websites, apparently, promoting popular versions of Stoicism and run by people who obviously have very little idea of that philosophical movement. One can only assume that these poor lost souls are looking for someone to hand them a way of life, ready made and off the rack like a cheap suit. It looks good under the artificial lights of the store, but when they take it home and the Made in China label, they do not connect it with the bulky seams and shoddy material.

In the words of a great American writer, My people! My people!

Stoicism was a philosophical movement that began in the Fourth Century BC--as Cicero noted, cobbled out of stolen bits of Aristotle and fitted out with highfalutin technology terminology to baffle the rubes--and was still going strong in the Second Century AD.  The founder, Zeno, appears to have been a well-to-do Hellenized Phoenician.  As an outsider, he naturally taught the brotherhood of man, contempt for tradition, and a sort of narcissistic devotion to his own happiness.   How this cult evolved into a dignified Roman appeal to self-discipline and duty is a long but interesting story.

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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

8 Responses

  1. Allen Wilson says:

    Sadly, what you have written is true. I now only use FB to communicate with some friends and for amusement. The memes and the “science” videos are so silly. I won’t even bring any up for fear of boring people here. Then there are the paleo-history “historians”. The less I say about them the better, but honorable mention goes to one who visits ancient sites in Egypt and is shunned by the local site caretakers because they know who she is and how nutty she is. Sometimes there are funny videos, such as the recent “Appalachian Star Wars” video which I just had to share to all my friends for no good reason.

    My recent rediscovery of Afroman, however, must be credited to FB and to a certain German Schlager Sangerin by the name of Sonia Liebing, who posts video shorts all the time. These can be amusing. One of them was of her big fat grey cat named named Nemo, who was lying on his back drifting off to sleep. He would part his eyelids and look at the phone she was filming him with, his eyes would flutter, and close. The music she used in the video went: “Cause I got high, because I got high, because I got high”. So I looked the words up, and you know the rest of the story.

    We can blame Nemo. He won’t care.

  2. Allen Wilson says:

    By the way, I used to share Fleming Foundation FB posts all the time, and made them available for public view as well, but my friends list is not fertile ground for new recruits. Likewise, I shared Abbeville Institute FB posts, but they all got removed eventually. Facebook hates the Abbeville Institute.

  3. Allen Wilson says:

    It looks like I strayed from the main point here, and I do apologize. It is rather strange how something that began with the likes of Zeno went on to Cicero and ended up with Boethius. It goes to show that sometimes gold can be made from lead, or am I being too hard on Zeno?

  4. Vince Cornell says:

    I have a FB account originally only to check on local business (who don’t have websites anymore because Facebook is “free”) and for the last three years to check on one prominent Catholic theologian who posts the latest news on Pope Francis’s war against the Church and the Latin Mass (which are pretty much one and the same). I don’t even “follow” these pages, I just manually type them in and look at what they have to say (Facebook wouldn’t let me see the pages unless I had an account).

    It was only fairly recently I clicked on the “home” tab. I guess it’s supposed to show posts from people I “follow” but since I don’t really follow anyone, it’s just an almost solid stream of lewd cartoons, AI generated nonsense pictures of a non-existent “place” in Greece saying “don’t you wish you were here?”, auto-playing clips from movies that look like Italians quasi-porn, and pictures of women dressed inappropriately and/or in lascivious poses. At first I tried to block the accounts posting these things, but there appear to be an infinite number of these accounts. Then I tried to report posts that were blatantly of adult content, but the “content checker” reported back to me a few days later that they couldn’t identify anything of a sexual nature in the post I flagged.

    Now I just don’t go to the “home” tab anymore.

    We live in the most bizarre of times.

  5. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    Too hard on Zeno? Yes and No. On the No side, he and his immediate successors put together an integrated package that included a theory of Nature, logic, and ethics. As time went on, they even pronounced on literary questions. Yes, because he and his successors self-consciously established a movement in opposition, first to the purer philosophic inquiries of Plato and Aristotle and their students, second, because they were partisan and polemical and did not usually acknowledge the extent of their borrowings. Finally, their turning away from the ordinary world and embracing universal duty was a repudiation of Greek traditions and, at least to me, it seems selfish. Dr. Johnson–and I think quite correctly–accused them of being indifferent to the suffering of others. The same critique could be made of the other personal salvation cult that emerged at the same time–the school of Epicurus.

  6. Sam Dickson says:

    Dr. Fleming: I am guilty of reading and giving some credence to the websites you mention.

    I am curious:

    What is the Fleming assessment of Epictetus? He was Dr. Oliver’s favorite philosopher and I confess that I have read the Golden Discourses many times.

  7. Roger McGrath says:

    Perhaps, a bit off topic but I’d certainly like to hear your opinion, Tom, of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Thanks!

  8. Frank DeRienzo says:

    I experienced a similar influx of memes aiming at and missing a Stoic theme. The silly tsunami was mostly generated by one social-media ‘friend’ whose ability to feed me such spam is now paused for 30 days. The meme themes seem to come in waves. I previously paused or blocked posts to halt an influx of memes featuring both Ayn Rand and the antinomian, sin-boldly, niche of pop-Lutheranism. Not surprisingly, Ayn’s and the Lutheran bad-boy’s media were often posted by the same normies shamelessly flaunting worldview deficit disorders.