Explaining Obama's "cool"

David Frum traces Obamas "cool" to Stoicism in an interesting article.

“Cool on the outside” is something Americans rarely see in a politician; less charitable observers look at the same presidential quality and see “aloofness,” “standoffishness,” “arrogance,” and even the great American sin of not being “a people person.” In these times, a philosophy, built on emotional control, seems strange in the age of over-sharing. Yet it may be the right philosophy for this day and age and it seems to be, according to many observers, the epitome of Obama.

 Invented in Athens just a few decades after Alexander the Great’s conquests and premature death upended the Greek world, Stoicism took off because it offered security and peace in a time of warfare and crisis. The Stoic creed didn’t promise material security or a peace in the afterlife; but it did promise an unshakable happiness in this life. For Stoicism tells us that no happiness can be secure if it’s rooted in changeable, destructible things. Our bank accounts can grow or shrink, our careers can prosper or falter, even our loved ones can be taken from us. There is only one place the world can’t touch: our inner selves, our choice at every moment to be brave, to be reasonable, to be good. The world might take everything from us but Stoicism tells us that we all have a fortress on the inside. 

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and crippled at a young age, wrote: “Where is the good? In the will…If anyone is unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.” While it’s natural to cry out at pain, the Stoic works to stay indifferent to everything that happens on the outside, to stay equally happy in times of triumph and disaster. 

It’s a demanding way of life, but the reward it offers is freedom from passion–freedom from the emotions that so often seem to control us, when we should control them. A real Stoic isn’t unfeeling. But he or she does have a mastery of emotions, because Stoicism recognizes that fear or greed or grief only enter our minds when we willingly let them in. A teaching like that is designed for a world on edge, whether it’s the chaotic world of ancient Greece, or a modern financial crisis. But then, Epictetus would say that–as long as we try to place our happiness in perishable things–our worlds are always on edge.

The world that originally gave birth to Stoicism was a parochial, often xenophobic place: most people held fast to age-old divisions of nationality, religion, and status. It was perhaps the first Western philosophy to preach universal brotherhood. Epictetus said that each of us is a citizen of our own land, but “also a member of the great city of gods and men.” The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, history’s best-known Stoic, reminded himself daily to love the world as much as he loved his native city. If the key to happiness is really in our own wills, then even the biggest social divides start to look trivial. The Roman Stoic Seneca lived in a society built on slavery, but he also urged his fellow Romans to “remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.”

This embrace of cosmopolitanism (a word invented by Stoics, which literally means world-city) made Stoicism the ideal philosophy for the Roman Empire, which brought an unprecedented range of races and religions into contact. Stoicism made sense for a globalized world–and it still does. Imagine a religion that stressed human brotherhood under a benevolent creator God; that told us to moderate and master our basic urges rather than giving into them; that nevertheless insisted that all humans, because we’re human, are bound to fail at this mission; and that spent a lot of time talking about “conscience” and the multiple aspects, or “persons,” of a unitary God. All of that might sound familiar. But the philosophy that invented all of those ideas was not Christianity, but Stoicism.

Stoicism dominated Roman culture for centuries—and Christianity went mainstream in the same culture. What’s more, many of the leaders of the early Christian church were former Stoics. Of course Christianity borrowed much of its thought and terminology from Stoicism–because thinking about religion in the early 1st millennium meant thinking like a Stoic. Stoicism is still there at the foundation of the Christian religion, in some of its most basic terms and concepts.

In her book The Stoic Warrior, Nancy Sherman, who taught philosophy at the Naval Academy, argued that Stoicism is a driving force behind the military mindset–especially in its emphasis on endurance, self-control, and inner strength. As Sherman writes, whenever her philosophy class at Annapolis turned to the Stoic thinkers, “many officers and students alike felt they had come home.”

Stoicism teaches us that, before we try to control events, we have to control ourselves first. Our attempts to exert influence on the world are subject to chance, disappointment, and failure–but control of the self is the only kind that can succeed 100% of the time. From emperor Marcus Aurelius on, leaders have found that a Stoic attitude earns them respect in the face of failure, and guards against arrogance in the face of success.

Stoicism has an appeal for anyone who faces uncertainty–that is, for all of us. But leaders are especially subject to risk and flux, so it’s not surprising that many of them find a Stoic attitude crucial to their mental health. We mentioned Barack Obama’s Stoic demeanor above–and there’s some more evidence for it in his recent interview with Michael Lewis. “I’m trying to pare down decisions,” he told Lewis. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make…You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” Whatever your opinion of Obama’s politics, that’s classic Stoicism–trying to draw lines between the essential and the inessential at every level of life.

 The Stoics taught that we fail far more often than we succeed, that to be human is to be fearful, selfish, and angry far more often than we’d like. But they also taught a realistic way to be more.

The more we practice Stoic qualities in good times, the more likely that we’ll find them in ourselves when they’re most needed.