The Daily Stoic - Adam Hochschild on Our Obligation to the Common Good pt. 1

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

In the first of a two-part interview, Ryan speaks with one of the great non-fiction writers and historians of our time, Adam Hochschild, about how history can inform the push for change in the present, the civil rights trailblazers he examined in his book Bury the Chains (one of Ryan’s favorites), the links between the Stoic virtues and the United States’ anti-slavery movement, and more. Part two will be published on Saturday.Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian, and lecturer. He has written 11 books, including the highly regarded and influential King Leopold’s Ghost. He has written for the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Duff Cooper Prize and the Mark Lynton History Award for King Leopold’s Ghost, and the California Book Awards Gold Medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for Bury the Chains. Adam graduated from Harvard in 1963, and he holds honorary degrees from Curry College and the University of St. Andrews.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have. Here on the weekend when you have a

little bit more space when things have slowed down be sure to take some time to think to go for a walk to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stewart Podcast. I was thinking about this the other day. So my wife and I went to college together and I remember she came home one day and she was reading this book, King Leopold's Ghost, which is all about the terrible colonial crimes of King Leopold, of Belgium in the Congo, in the Belgian Congo. And that was the first time I'd heard of Adam Haaschild, and then you flash forward 15, 16 years later. I don't know how I got recommended this book, but I got recommended his book, Barry the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free and Empire Slaves. Basically, it's about abolition,

that the idea that slavery shouldn't just exist because it has always existed. You know, it was a radical and a new idea, right? You go back to Seneca's time, he doesn't question slavery. You go to Epic Titus' time. He is a slave, he doesn't really question it. Marcus Aurelius doesn't question it. Cato owns slaves. In fact, Cato's great grandfather,

who writes the sort of first surviving work in the Latin language, casually talks about a slave. It was just a fact of life, it's a fact of life all the way through the founding fathers up until this moment that I talk about in today's interview where someone questioned that core assumption and more than just questioning it, they changed how we thought about it. They made something better because of it. So anyways, it was a fascinating, brilliant, lovely book that I have been thinking about ever since I wrote it. And I've been thinking about it a lot because I'm using it in part two of what will be the Justice

book. So I'm doing this Cardinal Virtue series. First of all, it is Courage, Next is Discipline, Third Justice. And I'm fascinated by people like that who make the world a better place. So I read this book. I was using it. I don't know why I didn't think to have Adam on the podcast, but then Amazon suggested another book, which we are going to talk about in the next episode. But I read that and that's what had me reach out to Adam. So look, I don't want to step on this.

What I will just say is, Adam is one of the great nonfiction writers of our time. He's a fascinating journalist. He graduated from Harvard in 1963 with a BA in history and literature. He spent a summer, a freedom summer, which we talk about in today's episode in 1964 as a civil rights worker in Mississippi, and he was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and then ended up founding of the famous magazine, Mother Jones. Just a fascinating writer and thinker, an all around wonderful and kind individual

who I had a great conversation with. And I'm excited to bring you this episode with Adam Haaschild, whose book Barry the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in a Fight to Free and Empire Slave. I cannot recommend enough. You'll obviously get some of it from me in the new book, but it's totally changed how I think about how to bring about change. I think it's a vivid reminder of what the Stokes would say. Our obligation is, as people do the common good, the famous slavery logo that he talks about in the book, the question, am I not a man and a brother? To me, it goes to the essence of what Marcus really is trying to get to, what heirachlesis

is trying to get to, that the victims of injustice have a nature not unlike our own and we own obligation to help them to be of service to them to make their lives better. So I'm really excited to bring you this conversation. It's a two-parter. I asked for two hours of Adam's time. So in this first episode, we're talking about Barry the Chains and then stay tuned for the next episode where we dig deeper into two other wonderful books he wrote, which I am very excited to print to you. Okay, fire away. I'm at your service. All right, so take me back to London in the 1780s. 12 men meet in a print shop. What happens? Okay. This was a moment that May 22, of course, has been remembered and celebrated forever, but we've forgotten about this remarkable meeting that took place, May 22, 1787. Here's what it was. The British Empire at this time was the world's greatest slave trading and slave owning country. Half the ships,

half the captive Africans who were transported in chains across the Atlantic, traveled on British ships. And a huge number of them went to work once they crossed the Atlantic throughout the 18th century and British colonies. Those in the American South, that in 1787 it just become independent, and much more lucratively as far as the British Empire was concerned on the Caribbean islands, which produced the oil of the 18th century, namely sugar. So Britain was the world's greatest slave trading power. The meeting that happened on that day in a quaker printing shop in downtown London was a group of 12 people who came together determined to bring slavery and

the slave trade in the British Empire to an end. And it was as unusual as if a meeting determined to end the reign of the oil and gas industry happened today in Saudi Arabia or in Putin's Russia. It was the last place you would expect this to happen. Because this was a world that took slavery for granted. If you had stood up on a street corner in London in 1787, or in most places in the new United States, people would have said, well, slavery is kind of a fact of human life.

It may be unfortunate that the Romans had slaves, the Greeks had slaves that existed for thousands of years. And in Britain, they also would have said, you know, without the slave labor economy, how are we going to get sugar for RT? Plus, if you end this system, you're going to put 30,000 British sailors on those slave ships out of work.

You're going to put plantation owners into bankruptcy. It's an idealistic dream. Forget about it. Yet, five years after this meeting in the London printing shop, 300,000 Britons were participating in a sugar boycott, refusing to buy slave grown sugar for their tea in their coffee. 400,000 people in England had signed petitions to Parliament, demanding an end to the slave trade, and that was more people than were then eligible to vote in Great Britain, because the franchise was highly restricted. So I'm fascinated by this movement, which in the space of five years invented every

technique of political organizing we use today. For example, the idea of something we don't want to give any thought to, of people from different religious denominations, uniting to work together for a secular end. I mean, every American political group does that, but this was extremely unusual in Britain of the 18th century. The idea of a national civic action group with its headquarters in the nation's capital and chapters scattered in cities around the country also hadn't really been done before. They invented the political poster and we've all seen it.

It's that image of the top down diagram of a slave ship that shows slaves bodies packed together almost like sardines and hundreds of bodies packed into one ship. That poster came from the anti-slavery activist studying a specific ship called the Brooks Home Port of Liverpool, and it's actually rather conservatively drawn because it shows fewer bodies of slaves than we know from shipping records were actually carried in that ship. So they invented the political poster. They invented the idea of a logo for a political movement.

Their logo showed a kneeling slave in chains surrounded by the legend. Am I not a man and a brother? And later when women's anti-slavery societies were formed and the women's societies incidentally were always much more radical than those of the men's. That was replaced by the image of a woman's slave kneeling in chains and the legend, am I not a woman and a sister. These folks virtually invented the consumer boycott, the refusal to slave grown sugar. So a fascinating movement that was the wellspring of many, many movements since then. I love the story and I love that it sets up in the intro of your book, just an absolutely

extraordinary sentence, which I have thought about many times and say, Reddit, you said, the campaign in England was something never seen before. It was the first time a large number of people became outraged and stayed outraged for many years over someone else's rights. That's right, that's right. There had been nothing like this. People had fought for their own freedom, of course. Again and again, slave revolts throughout history, revolts of people wanting independence for their national or ethnic group. But the idea of going to bat for somebody else's rights,

particularly somebody of another color and another part of the world. This was something new. Yet I think if we don't have the ability to do that, there is no hope for us on this planet because we can't just be agitating for our own self-interest. Well, yeah, you mentioned the similar meeting occurring roughly at the same time across the Atlantic.

And what is interesting about that, if you contrast Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Adams and these other people who you could argue are outraged and are coming together and staying organized in all these things, the difference between those two groups is those 12 men in the shop in London, they have almost no stake in the fight, right? None of them are freed slaves. None of them have been wronged by slavery really in any way. That, that, what's so fascinating is just how little they had in the way of personal grievance against this system. And yet they, they set out to, to attack one of the most critical institutions in the entire British Empire.

Yeah. But I think we have to act this way because you can say, you know, if we're going to solve the most extreme problems facing us on this planet right now, for instance, the problem of global warming, you know, we can for instance, the problem of global warming. We can't wait until the community where we live gets too hot to live in. We have to recognize that that's already happening in other parts of the world. Maybe it will happen to our children and grandchildren, but the fact that it's not happening to us is not an excuse not to act. happening to us is not an excuse not to act.

But it's interesting just how revolutionary that idea is, right? You talk about Thomas Clarkson. He's asked to write this sort of schoolboy essay about that question. You know, is it right or wrong for a human being to own another human being? And you know, he competes to write this essay, but as you sort of present it, he's interested in getting a good grade, more than he really is interested in probing the philosophical nature of that question. And it's not until after he wins,

that he sort of stops and thinks, hey, yeah, actually, is it right or wrong to own a human being? And I was just struck by, yeah, how, how little people had pondered such an existential and moral question. It's true. People took it for granted because slavery was not only something that underlay the whole Atlantic economy at that time, you know, with these slave plantations in the Americas, you know, not just in the Southern United States, but in the

Caribbean and Brazil and other parts of Latin America. You know, it was the foundation in a way of how the old world exploited the new with the labor of people from Africa. And it had always been there. And people took it for granted. People took it so much for granted that a major slave plantation on the island of Barbados, the Codrington plantation,

was owned by the Church of England. And they actually kept very good records, and we know exactly how many slaves were there, how they were punished, how they were burnt to death, and so forth. And you know, to think about all these clergymen sitting around and having their board meeting in London and not morally questioning those, today it seems outrageous to her,

but it is something that people took for granted. And then the remarkable Thomas Clarkson came along and kind of lit a fuse to this movement. We should talk about him a bit. We should. Although I think it's interesting just how long this moral blind spot has existed in human beings. I've talked about this in regards to the Stoics. There's this interesting contrast, right? The two perhaps most prominent Stoics in history are Marcus Aurelius, who's the emperor, and then Epictetus, who's a Roman slave.

And okay, we get why Marcus Aurelius doesn't question slavery, right? It underpins the whole empire in Rome just as it does for Britain. But what's so interesting about Epictetus, who at this time, Roman slavery dictated that you could not be freed until you'd spent 30 years in servitude.

So he spends his 30 years, he becomes this philosopher, he writes, he gives these lectures. But nowhere even does Epictetus seem to question slavery, right? So there is this strange historical blind spot. There were exceptions here or there, but it just does seem like almost all of humanity, including in some cases, the slaves themselves seems to just accept this horrible status quo without thinking, not even whether it was right or wrong, but whether anything could be done about it even if it was wrong.

Yeah. Well, human beings everywhere have trouble questioning a system that they've grown up with because we tend to take for granted something that our parents and grandparents took for granted. And I think Americans right now are wrestling with, you know, our unlimited use of fossil fuels. Sure. And we feel there's something that is subversive and terrible or threatening if this is going

to be taken away from us. That too, I think, is as imprisoning in its way as the concept of slavery was. Yeah, there's the the Uptonston Clare line about it's very hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. And I wonder how much of it is, it's very hard to get human beings to question something that they're comfort and identity and day-to-day survival seems to depend on. Yeah, but yet sometimes when you have human beings who are at one remove from the thing itself. They're more open to questioning it.

Like one reason why this remarkable movement, story I told in Bearbury the Chains, got started in Britain, I think, was that there was no slavery in England itself. Right. It had actually been ruled illegal some years previously. There were very, very few black people in England, a few thousand who had been brought there from the Caribbean by people who had owned them and slaves in the Caribbean, brought them home to England. In some

cases, let them free and some cases didn't. In other cases, the owner died, and it was ambiguous, but in any case, there were only a handful of them, so that most British people didn't, on a daily basis, feel, you know, my life depends on the system of slavery. And I think that made them more open, once the movement got underway and once with the extraordinary techniques they had, the activists in that movement dramatized just what the daily horror of slaves life was, I think that's what made people willing to protest against it, to sign statements, to boycott sugar, and to bring the decades of pressure that finally forced the British parliament to end slavery in the British Empire, a full quarter century before

that happened in the United States. And don't you think the somewhat outsider-ness of the Quakers also contributed to their ability to see that the paradigm slightly differently. You know, these weren't, it wasn't a cabal of the most powerful men in London, or even the most dominant religion or viewpoint in London getting together. This was not exactly a Ragtag group of individuals, but they were not, they were a little bit outside the system. Yeah, the Quakers were the only religious denomination in Britain who took a principle

stand against slavery. And for Quaker, Slate of Owners in the Americas, which meant mainly the United States. If you wanted to remain a member of that denomination after mid-18th century, you had to free your slaves. And in some cases, they even paid compensation to the slaves that they freed. So they were the only religious denomination that took this firm stand in Britain. And I think they came to it in part

because they themselves had had the experience of being discriminated against, put in prison in earlier times. And even then in the late 18th century, unless you were a member of the Church of England, you couldn't run for parliament, you couldn't be a military officer, you couldn't get a law degree and do various other things. So they knew something about what

discrimination meant, and they had this strong anti-slavery tradition in their own denomination, but they had been quite ineffective for many years because people thought of them as an outroop. There were only about 20,000 in Britain. They wore these funny tall hats, which they refused to take off even when meeting royalty, because the Quaker believed that Quaker man believed he should take off his hat only when preaching or praying. And they also, you know, spoke differently. They used the words, the in thou instead of you. They didn't use the names of the days of the week and

the months of the year because these derived from Roman gods. So their agitation had been quite ineffective. People thought of them as oddballs, but Thomas Clarkson, the spark plug of this movement, realized that if you could bring Quakers together with Anglicans and have an Anglican who signed the letters and who approached Parleman and who testified, but have the Quaker network backing you up, but have the Quaker network backing you up, then you could really have a powerful movement. So this was a wonderful example of coalition politics, without which I think we don't get anything done politically. Where that first meeting of the Anti-Slavery Committee in 1787,

it was nine Quakers and three Anglicans, and they agreed to elect an Anglican share of the group so that when the letters went out, they would have the familiar names of the days of the week and the months of the year on them. And another thing that Quakers wouldn't do, for instance, was address somebody by their title. You wouldn't say, you know, dear Lord, so-and-so because there was only one Lord and only he deserved the title. So how the letters were addressed were important. And the Quakers recognized this, and they were the shop troops of this movement, but they knew that they had to cooperate with Anglicans and later with Baptists and Methodists, if they were really going to get something done.

Well, let's talk about Clarkson really fast because you quote Emerson in the book, you say, the whole movement is the shadow of the man. This one man really does put in motion these events that change the world. He was a truly extraordinary man. He was a preacher's son, Church of England, and in 1785 he was just finishing his divinity degree at Cambridge University. And the most prestigious thing you could do at British University in those days, sort of equivalent to winning a Rhodes scholarship today, or winning the Heisman Trophy at College Football, was to win the annual Cambridge or Oxford Latin essay contest.

And the subject for the Latin essay contest that year was, Cambridge had an unusually enlightened vice chancellor of the Hegel University who decided to do his part by setting as the subject for this essay, is it right to make slaves of people against their will? So Clarkson added the contest, wanting just to have the prestige of having won this great Latin prize. He worked very hard to design. He and his brother, who helped him, discovered that a family friend had been in the shipping

business and transported slaves on his ships. They were horrified. They got into the records of the shipping company. Clarkson began reading accounts of what life was like on the sugar plantations in the British West Indies. And he writes very movingly in his memoirs, which what he was finding that he left a candle burning all night long in his room with Cambridge. So in case a thought came to him in the middle of the night he, that would be useful for this essay, he could get up and write it down. So he wrote the Latin essay, he read it aloud in Latin to an assembled crowd, he won the prize, and then he got on a

horse that he owned to set off for London to make his way in the world as a Church of England minister, and halfway to London, at a place where this horse path crossed the river, river, river, and I've actually been to that spot to see it. He writes in his memoirs about how the thought came to him that somebody ought to do something about this problem. God off the horse sat down by the side of the road, got back on the horse and devoted the next, the remaining 61 years of his life to working first to end slavery in the British Empire and then in the rest of the world. And unfortunately, this horoscope, the Catholic horse path is now a four lane highway today, but there is still a stone placed at the spot where it's believed Clarkson got off the got off his horse. So then he spent the next couple of years rounding up everybody he could find who had information about exactly how this system worked. That meant people who'd worked on slave ships,

people who'd worked on slave plantations. It meant freed slaves who were living in London, and got to know a remarkable man by the name of a little Lodak, Wiano, who was a former British slave, who had earned his freedom. In other words, earned enough money to buy himself from his own. And then two years later, two years after his graduation from Cambridge and winning a Latin prize, Clarkson brought together this very carefully constituted committee, mixture of Quakers and Anglicans, to set out upon this great task.

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Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. It struck me as I tell this story and in the series I'm doing on the four virtues. Hercules is a moment at the crossroads, the choice between virtue and vice.

Clarkson has this moment where he can turn away from the evil that he has written about and explored and thought about and go about his normal, comfortable, pleasant life, or he can turn towards that evil and injustice and difficulty and at that time almost certainly an impossible task and he chooses the difficult road and you know again to mix some some images here. It's the road that makes all it's the choice that makes all the difference. That's right. That's right. You know it took a whole lot longer to achieve this goal than they expected. It was really not until 51 years later after that meeting that slavery finally came to a complete end, legally speaking, in the British Empire.

But there were many ups and downs along the way, but he stuck with it. As did, he was actually the only surviving person who had been at this meeting at the time that British slavery ended. But he had stuck with it the whole way, and then he worked on entertaining about American slavery after that. And the two greatest American abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison actually came to see Clarkson several years after British slavery

and had just a few weeks before Clarkson died. Because the Americans were taking very close notes on what the British were doing in this crusade. Well, you know, what I think is incredible when I read the book, I was struck by two thoughts, sort of two ideas that we also hold as true, not quite as clear as slavery, but two idea, toxic ideas, the first of which is this idea,

I think in the modern world, a reaction against the so-called great man of history theory that one individual can change the world. And Clarkson strikes me as a very clear reminder that not that long ago, a single person changed the arc of human history, and he said it took 51 years, which seems like a very long time, but in the scope of human history is nothing. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. I think individuals can have a huge difference

for good, as in this case, or for ill. I mean, I think if Hitler hadn't come along, it's sort of hard to imagine, yes, the Holocaust happening exactly as it had. So it can go both ways. The other thought that I had as I read your book, there's that quote, which now is, you know, on a million t-shirts and Instagram posts. And I think she's coming from a good place, but the poet and activist Audrey Lorde said, you know, the master's tools can never disassemble

the master's house, right, or dismantle the master's house. And nowhere does that quote not work as it does with the abolition of slavery, right? Like quite literally, the master's tools, the capitalist system, in this case, is used against, you used against the great evil of capitalism. And it wasn't a violent revolution from below that brings about the change, but relatively privileged people working within the system doing so peacefully, doing it even for the most part outside the ballot box, but managing to utterly dismantle one system and bring about, if not a radically superior system, incremental progress that, as you said, then inspires the American Civil, you know, the American abolition movement and then the Civil

Rights Movement. You could trace basically back to that meeting at a print shop in London, all the great movements of the last 200 years that it made the world better. You certainly can, why there is not a monument at that spot today. I have no idea. I've been there a couple of times. I've joined with people in England trying to get a monument put there, but so far no look.

Because not that long after that meeting, you know, 50 odd years after that meeting in a print shop in London, the Seneca Falls convention happens. And then from Seneca Falls comes the women's rights movement, which leads into the civil rights movement, which leads into the gay rights movement and the consumer rights movement. It's a series of torches lighting each other from that point forward. Yeah, I think the idea of rights is something contagious in a good way. Yeah. Once you feel you've got rights, then maybe this other person has rights, and then maybe yet another category of people, and another category of people, it expands. And I think it was a wonderfully contagious idea, and this was a great landmark.

It also strikes me the power of questions, right? So the question from the head of university who asked, you know, is it wrong for a person to own another person? It, you know, against their will. But going back to the logo that you talked about, the, am I not a man and a brother? The power of that question, you know, it doesn't fully resonate with us today because the answer is so obvious, right? Like we live in the world that that logo created. I created it as well, so yeah. But in that moment to portray a person that other people did not think was a person

and have them ask that question, you know, that question changed the world. Yeah, it did. It really did. And it also made people, once they were willing to see this unfamiliar, distant category of people slaves as human beings, they began to get interested in their stories. And that's where somebody like Alada Aquiano comes in, the man who, as I say, he's a slave who earned his freedom, bought himself from his owner,

who wrote a best-selling autobiography. And for five years, traveled around the British Isles, talking about his book, in a way it was the world's longest book tour. And for many many if not most of the people who came to hear him speak, he was the first black person they'd ever seen. Interestingly, he found the friendliest audiences of all in Ireland,

because the Irish tended to think of themselves as being enslaved by Britain, Irish tended to think of themselves as being enslaved by Britain and ruled against their will. And actually, you know, a century or more later, Indian patriots who went to Europe to be educated in the early 20th century always found that they got a much more friendly reception in Ireland than they did in England. Does in Clarkson help Frederick Douglass get his freedom? No, Clarkson never came to the United States. But they met when when when Douglass came to England, right? Yeah, Douglass and Garrison came to England in 1846, just before Clarkson died and went to call on him as sort of a father of this movement.

And William Lloyd Garrison had spent time in England earlier. He came for months at the time that the British parliament was debating the great bill, bill to free the slaves in 1833, because he wanted to see how his comrades in England were getting their legislature to make this move that he was so eager to make happen in the United States. And of course, here it really took the Civil War to do that job. Yeah, it is the magnitude of what he manages to accomplish without firing a shot is contrasted with what it takes in America. It both makes the sacrifice of the American North more compelling.

Also makes the impressiveness of what Clarkson pulls off, more impressive. Yeah, we should mention, though, in fairness, that one of the things that accelerated Parliament's final passage of the Emancipation Bill in Britain was that there had been a huge slave revolt on the British island of Jamaica in 1831-32. And people were coming back to England and testifying before Parliament saying, this kind of thing is going to happen again. So I think that speeded things up.

But still, it was mainly the movement in England that finally got the bill through. Yeah. And your point about once you see that you have rights or once you see that one group has rights, it becomes this process that is difficult to stop once it starts. I mean, you think, you know, am I not a man, not a brother? And then, you know, in the 1840s, women go, I don't think you guys understand. Yeah. Just how oppressed, like when you read that Seneca Falls declaration, oppressed, like when you read that Sennaka Falls declaration, it's shocking because you think, oh, okay, they were talking about sexism

or just not being able to vote. You don't realize that women were in effect civilly dead in both England and America that they couldn't own, they couldn't, in effect, do anything. They were slaves who didn't really have to labor in the fields, but in almost all other aspect were owned by men. That's true, that's true.

And you know, it's, it's funny how sometimes people can have great consciousness of injustice in one sphere, but it doesn't immediately carry over to the other. Yes. Because, for example, the many of the people in the British anti-slavery movement were extremely cautious when it came to the idea of the rights of labor,

more the rights of everybody living in Britain to vote. Not Clarkson, who was sort of a radical on all issues, but most of the people he was working with were quite cautious about these other things. They were men of the establishment. The idea of women voting was too radical to be on the agenda, even at that point, but had it been, I'm sure there would have been opposed to it. But Clarkson's great, again, this is sort of why you have to have collision politics to make things work. Clarkson's great ally for half a century, and this movement was William Wilberforce, who basically led the anti-slavery forces in Parliament while Clarkson put on the pressure from the outside.

And Wilbur Force was reactionary on every issue except slavery. He didn't want the franchise expanded beyond the five percent or so of British people all men who could vote. He would have thought labor unions were a great evil. He was horrified by the French Revolution right on down the line, but he and Clarkson worked together for 50 years on this great issue of slavery and Actually, if Wilbur Force had not been such a reactionary his fellow

reactionary landowners in Parliament, probably wouldn't have listened to him about slavery. Well, I think when you think about allies and collisions, you forget like, you could be a mile apart from one person, but you could be a hundred miles apart from another person. And to be able to close that mile gap to come together to solve one issue, that's really the name of the game.

I was thinking about this with the Justice book. One of the, I was writing about Harvey Milk and what I found so fascinating about Harvey Milk was that at the very beginning, as basically a small town, you know, basically the politician who had a constituency of one street in San Francisco manages to sense that the teamsters have political power

and that by, that they're under, this is, they have the boycott of Cours Beer. There's this labor boycott of Kour's. And Harvey Milk gets gay bars on board with the teamsters boycott. And this is the beginning of his political power. And there's all these quotes from the teamsters when Harvey Milk's is supposed to run for office. And that, you know, what are we supposed to do with this, you know, insert slur after slur, like the idea that they would back this guy for office. But his friends in the union were able to go, look at what he has done

for us, right? The pro quo horse trading of politics, I think sometimes activists and change makers want to be above. Yeah, and often it's a little more than a quid pro quo. When you trade that quid for the quo and become acquainted with what that quo really means for the other person. It allows you to put yourself in their place. And yeah, it's a wonderful thing when that happens. Yeah, I think his point was that, you know, even if the movement itself wasn't successful, the fact that they had come together

was itself a kind of an accomplishment, right? That they were collaborating, talking as equals was itself a stroke for progress, even if just those human beings, not hating each other for a small amount of time or being in the same room with each other for a small amount of time, that in and of itself is a form of progress.

Very definitely, very definitely. It's an absolutely beautiful book, and I do think it's a story that more people need to know because there's a certain, I don't know, there's a certain hope in that story, right? That an irredeemably evil institution can be made to go away by the work of a coalition of ordinary people. If we don't take heart in that story, how on earth are we going to solve

the equally pressing issues of our time? There's one more thing I should say about Barry the Chance, which is this, when I first wrote the book, you learn who's reading a book in part because what groups invite you to come and speak about. And for the first few years after the book appeared, the invitations came from, you know,

college classes on slavery or African history or black studies or something like that. The last half dozen invitations I've gotten to talk about, Barry the Chains, have all come from groups working against global warming. Because they see something analogous that happened, you know, started more than 200 years ago, where a group of people changed how the world thought about something that took from granted. There was even a review of the book that appeared in an academic journal for climate scientists. And the guy began his review by saying, you may wonder why I'm reviewing in this journal

a book about the 18th century anti-slavery movement. But I was delighted to see that people felt that sense of connection. Yeah, I mean, in both cases, you are asking people to act against their short-term interests for their long-term moral interests. Martin Luther King talks about fighting for the soul of America, but is at the same time asking challenging America's soul, right? And I think when you think about fossil fuels and climate change and all, you're asking people to spend more money, do things that are harder, go without, you're asking people to sacrifice things, but you're not doing it. It's also in their interest to do things, and that's the paradoxical nature of it.

Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk about the book that I read after Barry the Chains, Amazon just suggested it and I said halfway home a memoir of a father and son, what does that possibly have to do with, you know, your other writing and it also struck me, you know, your life is very interesting. But when I read the description of the book, I didn't think, oh, this is going to be a riveting memoir, like it's not like you're talking about your struggle against immense adversity

or the center of world events. It really is kind of the ordinary story of a somewhat ordinary family, although your family was very privileged and interesting in a bunch of ways. But there was a beauty to how individual the story was, and yet also I felt sort of how general and timeless the story was. Well, thank you, Ryan.

That's very nice to hear. It struck me as something you'd been wrestling with a very long time. That's for sure. I didn't write the book until I didn't publish the book until I was 43, but I've been thinking about it for a long time because understanding and coming to terms with my relationship with my father was really kind of the major emotional task of the first 40 years or so of my life. And sometimes there's a time in your life when it's not right to write something and sometimes there's a time when it is right to write something. And I feel I waited for the right moment the right half the way home.

And I wonder, did you suffer with a struggle with a kind of, I don't know, a guilt or a self-consciousness in the sense that you weren't abused, you weren't deprived. It wasn't this, you know, a gregious It wasn't this egregious, harrowing tale, and yet it was painful and difficult and a thing that took you years to work your way through and make sense of. Well, I think all too often we think of memoirs as being by definition somebody asking for pity for something. But I've read an awful lot of memoirs. It's certainly true of some of them, but I think it's not necessarily so.

There are other kinds of memoirs as well. And for me, I think of this not as a complete memoir of my life, but as a memoir of my relationship with my father, who was a quite powerful, influential businessman, the CEO of a multinational mining company, and who had certain expectations of me, not that I would necessarily follow him into exactly that work, but into something in his sphere of life, you know, the movers and shakers of this world. And I had different inclinations, and I also felt I was always wrestling with a fear of his disapproval. It took me many years to get out from under that,

but I tried to tell the story of how I did that in that book. And I've, it was moving there as a result of the book, I've gotten many, many letters from many sons who have also struggled with difficult fathers. And it's especially pleasing when they're from people in very different parts of the country, different places in the class structure, different spheres of life. It makes you feel there is something universal about this struggle between parents and children. I interviewed these two writers earlier today who have been writing about Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers. And it struck me that what you didn't have is what Fred Rogers tried to so gracefully give to so many young people,

which was this idea that I like you for who you are. Or you are, I'm proud of you for who you are, I love you for who you are. The idea, you weren't just seeking to not get your father's disapproval, but it also feels like you felt like you had to earn his approval, that that wasn't something you got simply for being his son. Yeah. I think all too many of us have parents who love us for who they hope we're going to be. Yes. And then when you divert from that path a little bit, it can be a source of strain. And how painful that must be for them also, right? Like, to take one of the most beautiful things there are in the world, right?

The relationship between a parent and a child. And to make it inherently hostile, or to make it based on something conditional, something that has to go a certain way for the two of you to feel good about it, is one of the most grievous and self-inflicted wounds there can be in this life. That's true. That's true. And I think we also, all too often forget that the difficult or disapproving parent we may be dealing with, probably had a similar situation in their own life. And one of the things I tried to do in half the way home was to show that the older I got, the more aware I became of what a difficult relationship

my father had had with his father. And I ended up being quite grateful that I hadn't had his father for my father. And then by the end of his life, and my dad lived quite a long time, for he was 88, We really did finally make our peace. And without ever talking things out explicitly, but he saw that I'd done something reasonably worthwhile with my life, even though it wasn't at all the path that he had charted out for me. And he felt happy about that. And he related wonderfully to his grandchildren because sometimes when you skip a generation,

you can skip a lot of these problems. Well, yeah, just as slavery is this kind of intergenerational trauma, so often it is this unbroken chain of one person not being enough for another person who in turn is not enough for another person. I want to go back to your story, but first, how did you think about breaking that cycle in your own life? Well, having wrestled for long years to get out from under what I felt was a sort of cloud of disapproval from my father that was mixed with genuine love. But at the same time, it was really clear that I had gone

to quite different path in life than the one he would have preferred for me. I was determined not to do that with my own children, and I hope I succeeded in not doing that. You'd have to interview them to be sure of that. But one of them lives three blocks away from me. And in fact, we live in the house we do because our son and his wife asked if we would move close to them so we could help take care of their kids. So, you know, hopefully you learn a bit going from one generation to the next and don't reproduce some of the more painful things, but that's for other people to judge whether I've succeeded there. I was so haunted by the scene you portray in the book over and over again of being summoned into your father's office to answer for a slight or a philpa or a work of your personality, that sort of energy of the person that you want most in life to approve of and respect

and love and, you know, be a fan of you, to have the power of that turned against you is just such a harrowing thing. Yeah, I mean, as I look at him now, I see here, here was a guy who didn't marry until he was 49, didn't have his first and only child, me until he was 50. He'd had very little experience dealing with children. He'd spent the early part of his life, his young working life, a lot of it out of the country. And he wasn't really at ease with the idea of having a child because children are sort of uncontrollable, unpredictable. You can't treat them as a junior business associate,

that junior business associate, you can say, meet me in my study at two o'clock this afternoon, and I have something I want to talk to you about. But when you say that to a child, especially a sort of anxious, fearful child, as I was, you're worrying about it until two o'clock in the afternoon comes, because you know it's some kind of disapproval for some alleged sin that is going to be put on the table at that point.

So I forgive him for all that now. He just had no experience dealing with all that. And I think also grew up in a very formal world, where he was terrified of his own father, and where there was not the kind of informal rolling around on the floor with your kids kind of play that I think reduces those barriers and hopefully eliminates them. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa, Pocule, the

painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space, but we have made a special digital version of the Stoa we're calling it daily Stoic life. It's an awesome community you can talk about like today's episode. You can talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using stoicism to be better in their actual real lives.

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