Ralph Ellison was walking through a building on the grounds of Harvard after dinner one evening when, by chance, he happened to look up. There, in Memorial Hall, which sits on Cambridge Street, just across from Harvard Yard, he saw a long list of names carved into marble.
"I knew its significance almost without knowing," the author later recounted, "and the shock of recognition filled me with a kind of anguish. Something within me cried out 'No!' against that painful knowledge, for I knew that I stood within the presence of Harvard men who had given their young lives to set me free."
Ellison had not had an easy life. He had experienced race riots and lynchings and all the terrible injustices that came from the era of Jim Crow. Besides, like many of us, he was busy with his own life, his own problems, his own ambitions. But there, looking at the names of the Union dead from Harvard, he was struck by a sense of "indebtedness" that would never again leave him.
This indebtedness is something we all carry—whoever we are, wherever we come from. We are indebted to the good that was done for us. Someone took care of us when we were small. Someone invented the device you are reading this on. Someone sacrificed for our future generation to have what it has. The Stoics learned the hard way many lessons that we are able to gain so easily by reading a book. We have to pay that forward.
There is also a debt that we have to pay back. Our ancestors are not all Union men. We live on stolen land. Our museums are filled with looted goods. Our progress came at great expense to the environment and to other species. Who made that device you're holding? Who made that T-shirt you're wearing? Who worked the land that fed Seneca when he wrote his letters? (hint: it was slaves).
One of the subjects of Right Thing, Right Now (which you can preorder right now) is the Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Albert Schweitzer, a philosopher and doctor who dedicated his life to setting up and working in medical facilities in Africa. When asked why he did this, he explained that in light of the horrors of colonialism from the then only recent-past, he didn't have a choice. "We are burdened with a great debt," he said. "We are not free to confer or not confer these benefits on these people as we please. It is our duty. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement. That is the foundation from which all deliberations about 'works of mercy' must begin."
Our ancestors were wonderful and they were terrible. We, their descendants all over the world, are indebted to them for both. We have to pay forward the good they did. We have to make right the wrongs they did. We don't control what they did—to borrow from the dichotomy of control at the center of Stoicism—but we control what we do now, here in our own times. Doing better is up to us. This is what the virtue of justice demands. It's what decency and duty demands of us.
Right Thing, Right Now officially comes out June 11, but it's already been getting rave reviews. Arnold Schwarzenegger said it's "a message we all need to hear." And Dr. Edith Eva Eger called the book "a gift to humanity, showing us that each of us can live with a clear sense of justice, both within ourselves and within this planet."
If you want to take their word for it, Right Thing, Right Now is now available for preorder! We've put together some exciting bonuses, including a signed page from the original manuscript of the book and a video message from Ryan Holiday explaining how working on this book changed him as a writer and person. We also worked with the publisher on a limited run of numbered first-edition copies signed by Ryan (less than third of these are left!). Learn more about those and how you can preorder the book by heading to the Daily Stoic Store TODAY!
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