Into the heart of darkness or: Alt-stoicism? Actually, no…

This paper proffers a few new considerations in response to Donna Zuckerberg's Not All Dead White Men, in particular its challenge to non-Alt-Right friends of Modern Stoicism to defend Stoic thought against its seeming appropriation by elements of today's Alt-Right. Classicists and lovers of the classics should, I agree with Zuckerberg: "focus on the parts of antiquity that aren’t elite white men. Read and cite the work of scholars who write about race, gender, and class in the ancient world. Be open about the marginalization and bias that exists within our discipline." There is also a work to be done to push back directly against what she acknowledges in the same piece as the “shallow, poorly contextualized, and unnuanced” reading of the ancient sources themselves that the Alt-Righters are proselytizing. To do a little more of that work here, and as such to contest Zuckerberg’s stronger claim that an “Alt-Stoicism” is more than an exercise in polemical cherry-picking, I will begin in the heart of darkness, looking at why the Nazi classicists all abhorred Stoicism. This analysis will allow us next to pinpoint what the attempt to forge an “Alt-Stoicism” today must deny or ignore: namely, Stoicism’s cosmopolitanism, as well as its egalitarian assessment of the capacities of women. Our concluding remarks will then reflect on the complex question of the relationship between Stoicism and politics, querying whether Stoicism prescribes any single political stance today, but insisting that it nevertheless strongly proscribes all forms of nativism or white supremacism.