Stoic Wellbeing - Cancel Culture, or Conversation Culture? A Stoic Perspective on What Benefits Society

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

As a listener of this podcast, you’ve already heard me talk about how the ancient philosophy of Stoicism offers guidance on how we can live the good life in the modern world. How to be less stressed. How to be a better listener. How to be more productive. But Stoicism is about more than improving ourselves on an individual level, it’s about improving our communities and being an active member of society. “No one is an island,” says today’s guest. That’s actually the title of chapter five of the book he co-authored: Being Better: Stoicism for a World Worth Living In. I am speaking to Kai Whiting, an English researcher and lecturer in sustainability and Stoicism currently living in Lisbon, Portugal (Update! Kai's moved to England).Kai and I spoke for several hours — he’s a new bff whom I definitely plan on visiting in real life. I loved our conversation and am splitting it up in a few parts. This week we’re focussed on why Kai decided to focus  his book on Stoicism for the common good, and we get into a fascinating discussion on how contemporary cancel culture is a version of exile from ancient times, and how Stoicism offers an antidote to this.Enjoy.Hello! I'm your host, Sarah Mikutel. But the real question is, who are you? Where are you now and where do you want to be? Can I help you get there?Visit sarahmikutel.com to learn how we can work together to help you achieve more peace, happiness, and positive transformation in your life.Book your Enneagram typing session by going to sarahmikutel.com/typingsessionIt’s not super easy for U.S. citizens to get visas to live and work abroad (and the U.S. gov doesn’t make it easy for people to come in either). But millions of Americans have figured out how to create a life overseas, and so can you.Here’s my cheat sheet of the nine easiest countries to move to from the U.S.https://www.sarahmikutel.com/countryguideDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

A lot of us say that we want more meaning in our lives to be part of something greater than ourselves, to feel more connected to other people in the universe. This begins with becoming more connected with who we are and more self-aware of what's unconsciously motivating us. Welcome to Stoic Wellbeing. I'm your host to Sarah Megatel, an American in England who uses stoicism and other techniques to help my coaching clients become more present, productive, and open-hearted. I am here to help you to visit Stoicwellbeing.com to learn more. As a listener of this podcast, you've already heard me talk about how the ancient philosophy of stoicism offers guidance on how we can live the good life in the modern world, how to be less stressed, how to be a better listener, how to be more productive. But stoicism is about a lot more than just improving ourselves on an individual level. It's about improving our communities and becoming an active member of society. No one is an island, says today's guest. That's actually the title of chapter. five of the book he co-authored, Being Better, Stoicism for a World Worth Living in. I am speaking to

Kai Whiting, an English researcher and lecturer in sustainability and stoicism who is currently living in Lisbon, Portugal. Kai and I spent several hours talking together. He is a new BFF, and I definitely plan on visiting him in real life. I loved our conversation so much that I am splitting it up into a few different parts. And this week we are focused on why Kai decided to focus his book on Stoicism for the Common Good. And we get into a fascinating discussion on how contemporary cancel culture is a version of exile from ancient times and how Stoicism offers an antidote to cancel culture, as you may have heard already on this podcast. The Stoics really looked up to Socrates, who questioned everything. He was always questioning things. He didn't assume he

knew everything and he didn't shut down people who he disagreed with. He listened to them. So we are going to get into what today's society is like when it comes to listening, cancelling people. I found a very interesting and helpful and I think you're going to like it as well. Let's jump in. Welcome, Kai. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited to be here today, Sarah. Thank you for inviting me. I know you're interested. You're interested. and like what you've been working on over the years has been stoicism and the common good. And you chose to make that the focus of your book. So can you talk to me a little bit more about why this is and then also like what,

what role does community play in a stoics life? I found that the contemporary Stoicism offering was very much fundamentally glued or even well-ded in some cases to the idea of what was in our control and what's not. And then you focus on virtue. And that tells me more about the modern sort of thinking than it does anything that the Strait had to offer. So the reason why it focuses on the common good is because it says one is called to be virtuous, but one is called to be virtuous not just for one's own sake, but for the sake of others.

Because what's good for, basically what we said in chapter 7 is what's good for Sparta is good for the Spartan. So what's good for your community is good for you. And in the contemporary sense, we're very individualistic, which is fine as long as we use that individualism with one eye firmly, or one foot firmly in the cosmopolis is in the global community. The minute we think that individualism is being separate and highlighting that, you know, Kai as a person is more important than anything else, that's when I think it gets lost, especially if you're focusing on, well, it's not, climate change is not really in my control,

so I'm not going to do anything about it, because at the end of the day, like, I can't stop the fuel companies extracting oil, right? So I just, you know, I just won't do anything. And this is so anti-stoic. It's like, well, that's not really what they said. They said, like, okay, what can you do? How do I get to work? Oh, I use a, you know, I use a car.

Could I get a bus? Is that reasonable? Could I car share? Is there not a way to reduce this demand for that fuel? So it was kind of like trying to push back against this contemporary notion that we are individuals and we need to decide which is what is in our control as individuals. So the strokes were like, no. like you really, we don't want hypotheticals.

We don't want like the trolley problem. Like should I, who should I? Should I push a fat man in the way to save other people? No, they were like, I want a realistic problem that you can see on the street what's happening. And how do you focus on the common good thing? How do you focus on the well-being of that individual? How do you use your reasoning to do that? And so I felt like if socialism can give us an answer to how do we deal with like economic inequality?

How do we deal with climate breakdown? How do we deal with tribalism, which is rampant right now in the U.S. And the UK is slightly, slightly better, but going the wrong way. If socialism for me can't answer that question, then there's not much use because I think those are the challenges we're facing right now. I don't know if you'd agree with me, so. No, I do agree with you. And I would say, yeah, the decisions we make on an individual level, we should also be

considering the common good. I mean, you talk about your book as kind of being a reaction to other books that are out there. But I would also say that I think your book is a good introduction to stoicism for people who are interested in, you know, helping the world at Utah. I mean, your work is in sustainability. There's a lot of people who could be introduced to stoicism because they want to do good works and have a more meaningful life. And so, yeah, I think this could be a good book for anyone, really. Well, thank you. It's very kind of you to say so. We tried to tell the story of storism through the stereotypes themselves. Of course, like, we had to use, like, some kind of

awful license, right, creative license, because we don't have a lot, once you go beyond a few fragments. But we tried to create that life, like, what does their world look like? Because we often say things like, oh, you know, these challenges, they never face these challenges that we have today. Well, tribalism was a problem. And maybe climate breakdown wasn't, but certainly things like slavery, you know, a great big institutionalized slavery, which is not the same as slavery in the US, but nonetheless was slavery. So it's not that they had easier problems to solve. It's just we forget that because we're not there. We try to say, okay, what are they facing? And we try to draw parallels between the actions and the contemporary

sense, which is something I did not in the book, but for example, I just wrote an article, talking about council culture, and we said council culture is a form of exile. So stories is a be useful because it basically helps people who have been exiled or people who want to decide whether they should exile somebody. So we said, well, council culture is a form of exile. So therefore, like contemporary strikes could lean on actionism to help them in that, to make a decision, should they cancel someone, should they not? What do they do when they've been cancelled? Tell me more about this, because this is such a hot topic. Well, people actually said to me when I wrote this piece, is this the most important thing

you could have done, Clyde, isn't the war, literally, this is almost the base, isn't the war in Yemen more important? And I paused for a moment. And I said, I don't speak Arabic. Yes. I don't speak Arabic. I'm not in Yemen. If I put something on social media, I am betraying those people, because it would be a very superficial understanding of what is actually going on. So yes, if I was in Yemen or in, you know, or I had power over Mohammed bin Salman, I could speak Arabic, I understood the nature of a problem, yes, I should probably write an article on Yemen. But the truth is that I'm woefully ignorant about the war in Yemen. Like, I'm not saying that I obviously recognise that what's going on is a war. I think, I personally think it's a war crime. But that doesn't

mean that because I think it's a war crime, that I should write about it, because that doesn't make me an expert. That just makes me have an opinion. Whereas with council, culture, I'm an academic, right? I have colleagues and I've seen it with my own eyes on both sides. So a lot of people on the right will say that people on the left are snowflakes and the people on the left will say to the right that council culture doesn't exist. But I've literally seen it from both sides. Regardless of position, there's people who want to cancel one, people who are cancelled. And that's always been historically the case. The question that story would ask is, is it just? Of course, there are some cancellation that are just.

and there are some cancellation that are not just. But that wasn't really the point of our article, because we called it, so as Jonathan Church and I, we called it, is terrorism an antidote to cancer culture? Because we felt that if you cancel somebody, you actually, within, you know,

there's some terms that you need to cancel, but in most cases, I would argue, it actually robs you of the opportunity to exercise virtue, to exercise justice, self-control, and wisdom and courage, right? And that doesn't mean we give a license to anybody who wants to talk.

But it does mean that we don't sit there and say, for example, I feel triggered, therefore we should counter it. If you feel triggered, you should perhaps move out the room. But that doesn't mean that everybody should be unable to hear what a speaker has to say. Because it's only inocratic dialectic, or only the dialogue that you and I say are finding the answer to a very complicated question, right? It's not that any question can be answered just by one side. It's through the tussle. It's through the, I call the virtuous dance, to know what is, not only what is true. what is reasonable, right? Because truth, obviously, it matters. But also, how do I respond to that

given truth? So we argued quite strongly that to just use council culture as a mechanism to silence people isn't just bad because it's silence people, but it's bad for you, because you're basically saying, oh, it's too hard, it's too painful for me to listen to it. So we argued that that was an actual very epicurean way of looking in it. So they said that the worst thing that can happen to you is losing your tranquility. So either. suffering, for example, a lot of pain. So if you think that suffering pain is very bad, then council culture makes a lot sense, as does safe spaces. On the other hand, if you say, well, pain can be used for virtue, and that's what matters, then there's not much sense

in counselling people, right? Unless, for example, you might say, well, we don't tolerate the inciting of violence, and you have, you know, you explain why there is, and if you incite violence, we'll remove you. So it was really funny because people then threw a load of vitriol on me for being, you know, daring to say something. It was like, but you haven't read it. It was obvious that they hadn't read it because that wasn't the point we were making. We weren't saying that council culture was good or bad. We just said that it robbed you off an opportunity. And if you wanted to claim to be stoic, then you should be very careful about how you sculpt your own character. Do you feel like it was your stoic duty to speak up on this topic? It's a very good question. Yes. Because

I'm an academic because I saw it and I couldn't I couldn't just shut my eyes to it. And I didn't want to blame the left or the right because actually stuics are not called to be left or right. We're called to be reasonable and to listen to reasonable arguments on both sides. So I thought that was a good exercise of like, okay, do I really like, do I really believe in stuism? Like, do I really believe that this is reasonable? To what extent do I believe it's reasonable? Which is why we said if you think pain is really, really the worst thing that can happen to you, then yes, yes, we should have cancer culture. If on the other hand, you, you you have a virtual ethics framework, then it doesn't make any sense. It's actually illogical.

And people didn't like that argument very much because they wanted it to be, they, I basically didn't want to pick either side. I didn't want to say that cancer culture was good or that cancer culture was bad because actually in the Stoic sense, it makes, it does not make the moral difference. It depends on why you cancel. It depends on how you cancel. It depends on who you cancel or who is counselling because people say, oh, I'm cancelling somebody very powerful. But there was a really good example at my old university, so I knew a lot about this case, speaking to my colleagues, of a student who aged 29 was asked a question in a classroom about what she thought a woman was. She answered, was put on mute and is now threatened the cancellation for her degree. Now, if you're a teacher and you invite a student to respond, you should be mature enough to either correct that response or at least say, well, there's a bit of a new and fair.

Let me have a caveat here. right you said this but this caveat could be this and not silence someone that's to me very bad pedagogy because you're not actually it's not education at that point it becomes political and that individual even if if i agree or disagree with her i don't think we should be able to cancel her degree after she worked four years to get it and that's the problem it's not only about counselling famous or powerful people i i would say in that case is actually the powerful individual in that particular situation is the university as in the legal individual Lee Winsky.

And the student is actually powerless. So it found it really odd that people on the left were saying that she should be cancelled. And I was like, that's not traditionally the left's position, is it? Could you talk a little bit briefly about like stoics going into exile, being forced into exile? Yeah. So actually, people miss the point of exile sometimes. They think that exile means you get to go to a place you didn't want to go to. that's not really why exile is bad.

The reason why exile is bad, Sarah, when you think about it, you'll recognize, is that outside the city gates, it was a no-person's land or a no-man's land, but let's call it a no-person land. It was a place where you'd get robbed. It was a place where you'd go missing. It was a place where you were killed.

It was a place where you had no protection because you would be on the city gates. It was a place where you had no one you could depend on. There was no running water. There was no food easy. available and you were excess, you know, it was excessively likely, extremely likely, sorry, that you would have been robbed and killed. No one would have fought anything of it. So people think that X-R is about going to a place that you don't want to go to. So it's actually saying,

we don't care about you. We don't care if you live or die. Right? And that's the real, because you think about it. If we might say, oh, it's, you know, for example, or that crete is like, I know, four hours by car from this location. It's like, actually they were walking. If they were lucky, they'd have a horse or a donkey. How long do you think that took? Did they have a guarantee of fresh water? No. When they stopped, were they likely to be robbed?

Yes. Did the people that were robbing them? Did they know who they were? They didn't have like, I don't know, Instagram or something. So they didn't even miss, they knew they were rich, but they didn't know they were. So that's what it is. It's like, you are no longer anybody. You're no longer important.

If you die, that's fine. So I think that's the thing that we miss with back to which is why I think council culture is a bit like that publicly. It's like, we don't mind if you lose your job. We don't mind if you lose your following. We don't mind if you get you Twitter. We don't mind if you lose your name in the circles that matter to you, right? It's the same thing. So a lot of the Stokes were exiled.

Like, I'm certainly if Rufus gets exiled twice for, like, disobeying, like, what the, what the emperor wants, basically. And it's just such a powerful thing when you think about that he's literally told you're a nobody. We don't care about you anymore. And he's like, well, my principles matter. They matter sufficiently. And I think that's something really, really powerful because it's not just that you have to go to a place you don't want to go to. It's like you are very likely to die. And that's an entirely different way of looking at X-O and looking about what that means, right?

Because it's not only just losing your comfortable house in one place and going to another. It's literally losing your identity. Because people forget, we wrote about this for the American Philosophy Association, that people often say that Storzan's a white, rich man thing. like, well, Zeno-Ocytium wasn't white, and Clianthes of Assos isn't from Athens or either, so those two are not from Athens, and it says so in their name, your location was incredibly important, more so than say your family name, because we go Zeno of this place, Clianthes of this place, Chrysippsipps of this place, and people forget that. That's how it's

really important, and even that's why Epititus says, do not, you know, somebody asks you where you're from, do not say I'm an Athenian, because what does it matter if you're an Athenian or you're from Corinth. Because that was people's main identity back then. It was really their home city state. It wasn't necessarily their skin color. It wasn't necessarily their religion. It really was where they were from.

So that's another thing that it was doing. It was unsettling a person's identity. I interviewed Donald Robertson a while back, and we were talking about how, like, heated things have gotten in the US and how a stoic practice to sort of bring that down and to avoid canceling everyone you know is to, get curious and start asking questions like, but genuinely curious questions with other people. And I really took that to heart and also, you know, the concept that in other people's minds,

they're doing the right thing or like they're right in their own mind and have made that an actual practice in my life. And I have to say, it has worked every time, which is amazing. And even if you're not like convincing people over to your side, you can end with saying, like, listen, I know your heart's in the right place and I hope that you know that my heart's in the right place. And then, and we can leave it at that. It's a very, I mean, the band of evil is what you were talking about, but nobody does evil because they think they're evil. Absolutely. I mean, I remember somebody very angry with me on Facebook about something I said about stories. And they were flat earther, actually. And I was thinking, well, a flat earth isn't a hard person to persuade.

The reason they're a flat earth is because they haven't thought about it very deeply. They've stuck to their guns rather than go, okay, what does the science say? So I just thought, okay, do I need to attack this person because of a flat earth? So I started to say to him, we're on the same side. If you believe that the best thing that you can do is, you know, be influenced by strosism so that you can live a life worth living, I think I said to him the good life. Then we're on the same side. And he's whole, he couldn't attack me.

Because he was so expecting because that's what happens, unfortunately, with two flat earthers, as far as I've spoken to them, they're so used to getting attacked. They're going to defense mode, like, automatically. And he had no defense because I was like, we're on the same side. He was like, oh. And he listened then, because I wasn't attacking him. I had no interest in attacking you. He said, why I believe this, I don't have an issue with that belief.

It doesn't bother me that somebody's a flat earth. It makes no difference to me because I'm not an astronaut. I'm not, I'm not a pilot. It doesn't make any difference to my life, right? He's not my student. I'm not teaching him geography. And so the point, I was making was about living a good life and he got upset because of being something to do

with being a flat earther and what was truth. And I was like, you can have that truth. It doesn't matter to me. That's not my battle. That's, again, I guess you and I are saying like, pick here, you know, we all got to die on a hill somewhere, which hill do you want to die on? And I wasn't willing to die on the world where's round hill in an argument. Just going back to like cantle culture and like finger pointing and everyone feeling like they need to get their, like their way is the only way. And, you know, people don't ever respond well when you're pointing a finger in their face. So I didn't get a chance to read your article yet, but can Stoicism save us from cancel culture? I think it can save people individually when they think about it.

Like, if they think, like, what is the worst thing that can happen to me? And the answer is, I can lose an opportunity to grow. I can lose an opportunity to, you know, build my character. then council culture loses its power because it's no longer about avoiding pain and being in a tranquil situation. So I actually talk about in another article that's going to come out in the next few weeks, like people who are keyballed warriors being epicureans again in the epicurean garden or being in their tranquil garden, that when things get too heated, they then scurry back and sit on a chair. And there's nothing wrong of that. But it's just you need to be coherent then and say the most important thing to me is tranquility.

I do not want to be perturbed by other people's ideas or problems. Because that's the other thing with council culture is like, you're actually just counselling it rather than solving the problem. You mentioned like the Epicureans. And could you just briefly talk about the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans, similarities and the biggest difference? So the biggest similarities is that they're both looking to live the life worth living. The life, what they would say is the good life, right?

To the Epicureans, the most optimal psychological functioning human being is a person who is not suffering any form of or any form of unnecessary pain. So there are unnecessary pain, but unnecessary pain. And he's in quite a calm, tranquil state. So they actually used to sit in a garden, which I talk about the Epicurean garden, because they felt they were not perturbed by people. So other people's problems weren't an Epicurean's problem, right? they literally like, okay, I can be virtuous, but I am virtuous in order to remove unnecessary pain and to access tranquility. Whereas a Stoic said, no, no, no, no, no, you're missing the point. The point is that you can use pain or pleasure, so when things are easy and when things are hard,

to shape your character. You shouldn't shape your character in order to get pleasure because that's actually, you're going, at one point you're going to say, do I do what's right, or do I do what's pleasurable slash easy for me? So the Stoics actually said, like, other people's problems are your problems if it says something about your character. So when you ask me that question, like, did I feel that I had to say something against council cultures, the prevalence of culture? The answer is, yes, I felt that if I didn't, I would actually, it would say something about my character because I would feel like I didn't have the courage to stand up and say, I'm not on your side. I'm not on your side. So I had both sides pretty angry, right?

It was so anti-stoic Facebook that weekend. I was even on holiday that weekend. That was not a good time. But I was like, do I do what's right or do I do what's easy? Well, I appreciated that conversation. And I appreciate that your book focuses so much. Like we've mentioned this a bit, but your book focuses on stoic actions, which I really like. You brought in like ancient stories, but also modern stories of how people are acting in a virtuous way.

I was wondering if there was any one in particular you wanted to bring up. I really liked the Chobani example. But anything you want to talk about? So the CEO of Chavani Yoga, which is an American, is an American Greek yogurt company run by a Turkish, Kurdish man, who came to the U.S. in the 90s to learn English and then started up a yogurt company because he just felt that that was the right, again, that was the right thing to do.

The interesting thing about Shabani, Yoga is not that it's particularly yoga, although it is Greek and he is Turkish-Kurdish, right? So that's quite an interesting thing there. The idea that he wanted, Shibani is a company that is very open to people who are refugees or economic migrants. And the idea is that once people can work and they have stability in their job, they then put down roots. And when they put down roots, they build community. So he made, you know, they, it's, the whole company's vision is to have the ethos of, it doesn't matter if you're a refugee or you're a native,

native indigenous person, or if you're a white European derived American, if you work for Shibani, you're a Shibani employee, and that's what matters, right? So it's a very sort of, how can we create a product, which not only is a good product,

but talked about our values. So he, you know, they made sure that their workers had some shares, And that they have, which is incredible, that the US doesn't have paid maternity and paternity leave. And they said, you know, how is it possible that we can say that we care about our employees? And yet they have children and we don't even make sure that they're okay during that period. So the whole idea is to like, it says, okay, we need to make money.

We need to exist. And that is the goal of a company is to literally make money. But how can we do that in a way which champions values that go beyond the mere making of money? Because I'm not going to say that a company shouldn't make money, right? that wasn't the point. The point is like, can we, maybe we make a little bit less, but we do so because we value, or make a less profit rather than less per se, because we value the workers. And I thought this was so important because we do get into the blame game.

Even, you know, the UK, I would say the UK is not particularly racist, but incredibly xenophobic. But it was an idea of like, how can we integrate and share a common goal and see beyond our differences? What can we, what can we do there? And I said, it was quite funny because it was a yoghob. that we wouldn't actually necessarily eat ourselves. But I still thought that the principle was true that he had overlooked the tick box of this person's a problem

and said, how can I make this person a functional productive human being? So when they said things like, oh, you shouldn't get immigrants because they don't speak English, like we'll get translators. And that's a very strict answer. Like, okay, so the problem is that they don't speak English. Okay, can we get a translator? Yes, so the problem goes away.

And that's a solution-based approach rather than a problem-based tick-box approach going, well, they don't speak English, so we can't employ them. Okay, maybe we shouldn't employ them because they really, really need the English to be, you know, great and they're speaking or maybe get a translator. Can we get a translator? Yes. They don't have cars.

We can't employ these people because they're so poor they can't have a car, which is a massive problem in the US. Can we get a bus? Can we pay for a bus for them to go? So he started to ask, again, better questions, and the whole point of being bare is to say, and we do say this, we don't have the answer for you, because that's not self-help. That's the irony of self-help, right? It doesn't help you because

it's basically you're still being bottle-fed. How can we help you create questions in your mind so that you can get the answers? Because I'm not the best-place person to answer your problem. You are. Yes. Well, and they were throwing up all these obstacles. And so, you know, obstacles, the obstacle is the way, Ryan Holiday book, but of course, like the core Stoic principle. But yeah, I love that story because it's such a, a good example of being a true citizen of the world where you are not just like trying to protect your own individual tribe, but bringing everyone into the collective and helping them grow, even if it's not the easiest thing to do. That's all for now. Check out the show notes for the

link to Kai's article on Stoicism and Cancel Culture and subscribe or follow this podcast to hear the next episode where Kai and I talk about what it means to be a global citizen. Until next time, have a beautiful week wherever you are. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.