Rock Island

Concepts are not durable objects; they are highly subject to change as they are transmitted from person to person, as many people in the social sciences are fond of pointing out. This is part of the reason why the understanding of what it means to be "Stoic" has shifted so much in past couple of millennia. Because most people derive their understanding of philosophical concepts from sources other than philosophy classes, textbooks and primary sources, the pop culture version of stoicism bears only a superficial outward resemblance to the original.

Normally, this isn't much of a concern, after all, modern religious practice has pretty much nothing in common with how things were done when Rome was still the dominant power in Europe, and no-one seems to care that the term "Cynic" appears to have absolutely no relation to the school of Greek philosophy that it derives from. But Stoicism has become caught up in the periphery of the Culture Wars, and this has licensed pedantry about how it's "supposed" to be done.

When I was young, I understood "stoicism" to mean something along the lines of suppressing outward displays of emotion. Having emotions was all well and good, but displaying them in public, especially negative ones, indicated a lack of internal control. And I found this a useful way of understanding things. As a high school student in the 1980s, I found that classmates of mine would call me "nigger" to my face not out of any genuine racial animus, because they sought to get a rise out of me. One which demonstrated that they had a certain level of control. Learning to not respond to the provocations (something which I failed to completely master while still in high school), I found that people were less likely to deploy them.

But it was not a universal position. There were (and are, really) any number of people who felt that anger was the correct response to such disrespect. In this, we disagreed on how efficacious it was as a tool of changing others behavior.

A lot of the modern discourse about "real" Stoicism versus the pop-culture variety centers around the idea that mastering one's responses to emotions means suppressing the emotions (or the perceptions of them) themselves. And I can understand that. The difference between accepting something that cannot be changed and being resigned to something that should be changed is not self-evident to an observer. Accordingly, neither is the understanding that one cannot control others versus maintaining a pretense that no harm was done. As "Toxic Masculinity" has become something that must be stamped out, the difficulty in recognizing its constituent parts becomes clearer.

In any event, I find the discussion interesting, as it provides a glimpse into the broader conflict over the "correct" ways of being an acting. Given how rapidly the world changes, I doubt that there will be anything resembling a resolution before everything moves om. But even the partial insight is a useful too.