In this way, Seneca was correct: crowds can be dangerous.
THE SEARCH FOR GOOD COMPANY
We should choose a healthy environment not only for our body but for our character too.
—Seneca, Letters 51.4
If crowds tend toward infectious, unhealthy behavior, what’s the alternative? After describing the violent, jeering behavior he saw in the amphitheater, Seneca advised Lucilius, “Spend time with those who will make you better, and welcome those you can improve. The process is mutual; and people learn while teaching.”15
If people with unhealthy characters surround us, the first and most crucial step is to escape from their presence. “A large part of sanity,” Seneca explains, “consists of letting go of those who encourage insanity and getting far away from a companionship that is mutually harmful.”16 The second step is to surround ourselves with people who have good characters, even if it’s a tiny group or a single person. That’s because virtuous people can influence us just as strongly as vicious people, but in reverse: “Just as poor health improves in a good location and a healthy climate, it is equally beneficial for a mind, lacking in strength, to associate with a better crowd.”17 In the same way bad qualities can be virally transmitted, good qualities can be contagious too. Seneca would have agreed, at least in principle, with the famous saying of business writer Jim Rohn, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with”—so we should choose those people with care.
This again highlights why friendships and meaningful relationships are crucial in Seneca’s philosophy. Spending time with people who possess good characters will help us make progress. “Good people are mutually helpful because they exercise each other’s virtues.” Even a Stoic sage “needs his virtues activated: for just as he exercises himself, so too is he exercised by another wise person.” In the same way that wrestlers and musicians practice and train, wise people need others to practice with and learn from.18 If we want to be wise and have good characters, we need to have those qualities “activated” in us by another person. And in order to activate another person’s good character, we must activate our own.
ONE HUMANITY: BELONGING TOGETHER VS. TOXIC TRIBALISM
Remove fellowship and you will tear apart the unity of the human race on which our life depends.
—Seneca, On Benefits 4.18.4
With their belief that humanity is one due to the spark of reason or logos we all share in common, the Stoics made a monumental contribution to the development of human rights. Stoic ideas contributed to ending slavery and ensuring the equality of women in the Western world and on a global basis.
While Aristotle had many fine philosophical ideas and helped to lay the foundations for scientific research, some of his ideas were flawed and damaging. Specifically, Aristotle believed that only men fully possessed reason. In comparison to men, women possessed a lesser degree of reason, while “natural slaves” and “barbarians” (or non-Greeks) lacked reason altogether.19
The Stoics, by contrast, believed that all people possess reason in exactly the same way. In other words, everyone who is a human being—including men, women, slaves, and people from every country—all possess reason, and the human soul is “always and everywhere the same.”20 The early Christians adopted this idea from the Stoics. As the Christian writer Lactantius wrote, “Wisdom is given to humankind, it is given to all without discrimination . . . The Stoics understood this to such an extent that they said that even slaves and women ought to do philosophy [emphasis added].”21 To put it differently, in the same way that all human beings are born with muscles, all humans are born with reason, too. How we will then develop these gifts is up to us.
While not a Stoic philosopher, the Roman statesman and writer Cicero (106–43 BC) studied Stoicism carefully and was very deeply sympathetic to many Stoic ideas. As a political philosopher, Cicero adopted and developed the Stoic idea of natural law, which would have a long and significant history.22 Natural law is based on the Stoic idea that the laws of nature are rational and that our human rationality, also, originates from nature. Based on these premises, Cicero thought our human laws should be self-evident to reason: ultimately, they should be based on the kind of rationality we see reflected in nature, in the cosmos, and in our own moral sense. As a political philosopher, he defined law as “right reason in harmony with nature.” If we could see things clearly, Cicero thought, we would want the laws to be identical in Rome, Athens, and every other city because they should be founded on universal reason.23
In other words, natural law is universaclass="underline" it is not invented by humans. Rather, it is discovered. It ultimately comes from Nature, Reason, or “God”—three terms that were synonymous for the Stoics. According to natural law, all people have inherent rights, or natural rights, which are intrinsic to human nature.
Fig 6: The long development of human rights, from the Stoics to the United Nations.
While our modern idea of “universal human rights” did not exist in the ancient world, the seeds of these ideas did exist in the Stoic idea of natural law, championed by Cicero.24 The Stoics had already set forth the concept of human equality. Then, over the centuries, natural law gave birth to the idea of natural rights, which in turn gave rise to the modern notion of human rights (see figure 6).25 In essence, natural rights are human rights.
The Stoic ideas of natural law, as expressed by Cicero, informed Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke (1632–1704) and deeply inspired the Founders of the United States.26 For example, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, was, like other Founders, thoroughly familiar with the ideas of Seneca, the Stoics, and Cicero.27 Jefferson’s own concept of natural law was Stoic.28 And when Jefferson wrote the words, “All men are created equal,” it mirrored the Stoic idea of human equality.29
Cicero had explained that a primary function of government was to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. Centuries later, John Locke identified “life, liberty, and property” as among the most fundamental natural rights of people. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration, he transformed the natural rights described by Locke into “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” As Jefferson put it,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
For Jefferson, the rights he listed were “self-evident” to reason, and aspects of “Nature’s Law.” These rights are both natural rights and human rights. And as historian Joseph J. Ellis has noted, Jefferson’s lines in the Declaration are “the most quoted statement of human rights in recorded history.”30
This, then, is the historical trajectory linking Stoic ideas with the development of modern human rights: from the Stoics and Cicero on natural law; through John Locke and the other Enlightenment philosophers; to Thomas Jefferson who drew on them all in his proclamations on human rights.
Jefferson was obviously an important but transitional figure in ending slavery. On the one hand, many believe that he did not fully live up to his high ideals (he was, after all, a slaveholder, and thus at odds with his own moral principles). On the other hand, his commitment to end slavery was profound: he consistently advocated for the elimination of slavery, proposed practical schemes for emancipation, and even enacted a law, while serving as president of the United States, that banned the international slave trade. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” While slavery did not end in Jefferson’s lifetime, the lengthy historical arc of eliminating slavery originated from, and was inspired by, Stoic ideas of natural law and human equality. Jefferson made those ideas central in the public mind and vigorously advanced the cause of abolition.