See How The Other Half Lives

0:04Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

0:43Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So when I was writing The Obstacle's Away, towards the end, I wanted to talk about people who had been influenced by stoic philosophy. And when you're writing a book, you never know when you're looking for one thing, what you might end up discovering and how you might chance upon something that can sort of the course of your own intellectual journey, your ethical journey. So anyways, I was looking for people who had written about Stoicism's influence on them. And I was searching through Google Books, doing some keyword search.

1:22And I found this old book that had been written in the, I don't know, early 1900s by this woman, Beatrice Webb, who was a social activist and sort of political finger that I'd never heard of. And she's raving about the influence that Marcus Aurelius and his meditations had had on her life. And I never heard of this person. So I did what most people do, which is I looked her up on Wikipedia and I mentioned her briefly there in the afterword of Obstacles Away. And so then this would have been in 2012, 2013. Flash forward 2023 and 24, when I'm writing Right Thing Right Now. And I decide to read more about Beatrice Webb.

2:07And I get her fascinating memoir. And I read this story that becomes a chapter in the book about how, as a young woman, she goes and lives with essentially a working-class family in Britain, someone very outside her social-political class circle, to see how the other half lives. literally, and how this shapes and informs her journey. And that originates out of a little bit of curiosity, a little bit of chance. It forms one of my favorite chapters in the book, which I'm going to bring to you. And then it also ties into something I talk a lot about in the wisdom book, because I call back to this chapter.

2:48That's the fourth book in the Virtue series, which you can pre-order now, dailystoic.com slash wisdom. The curiosity of Beatrice Webb. to go, I do want to know how other people live. I want to know what it's like. Theodore Roosevelt does the same thing. I mentioned that in this chapter as well. He goes and sees what the cigar bakers in the tenements in New York City, what their life was actually like. As a politician, he didn't just want to vote on things. He wanted to know what he was voting on. So the idea is we have to get out of our bubble. We have to meet people who are not like us. We have to have the ethical drive to do this, and then also the intellectual curiosity to do this.

3:29That's what I think the meta lesson of today's episode is about, and how something like justice, how two virtues, justice and wisdom, come together. You have to be curious, and then you have to follow that curiosity where it leads you. Then you have to be willing to change your beliefs, your understanding of the world. You have to be willing to get involved and do something about what you discover, what you learn from talking to people who are born in different circumstances, who live somewhere different than you, who are dealing with things very different than you. So that's what I'm bringing you in today's episode, this chapter, which is from part two of Right Thing Right Now.

4:07This is the audiobook read by me. And then I'm going in the studio in a week or two to record the audiobook for Wisdom Takes Work. That's the fourth and final book in the series. We've got a bunch of awesome bonuses, including signed note cards and pages from the manuscript. If you order copies, you can have dinner with me, a bunch of other awesome stuff. And we have this set of all four books. If you haven't read Right Thing Right Now, you can get Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, and Right Thing Right Now and Wisdom Takes Work, all in this limited first edition set of all four books.

4:39DailyStoic.com slash pre-order. I'll link to that in today's show notes. I hope you enjoy today's episode.

4:52Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin, and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

5:37We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

6:19Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

6:30See how the other half lives. Beatrice Webb grew up in a well-to-do British family. Unlike many women in her time, she was allowed an education at the best schools. Not that she needed to think about getting a job or supporting herself. Soon enough, she was courted by rich and handsome men and quite nearly married a future prime minister. It was only under the guise of a sociological project stemming from the Charity Organization Society that Beatrice, after two and a half decades on this planet, got what she would call her first chance of personal intimacy on terms of social equality with a wage-earning family.

7:10Pretending to be a simple farmer's daughter named Miss Jones, she went to live with distant relatives to experience and study their world. It was just a few miles from her home, but it may as well have been another planet. It wasn't simply that Webb was young and sheltered. In fact, society at that time was designed to shelter, keeping the upper classes safely ensconced from the grinding poverty of the vast majority of the population and the injustices that caused it. And the lower classes kept apart so that they could not become equals with their betters. There were then in Britain, and indeed in every developed country, Benjamin Disraeli would explain, two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets, who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.

8:11The rich and the poor. Webb's experiment shattered all these artificial barriers, changing not only her perspective, but the future of social organization. There, in the factories and shipyards and slums, she saw how the other half lived. She had previously been a believer in laissez-faire economics, a belief that did not survive contact with the humanity whom it cast aside. The model of charity at that time, which assumed that the poor were immoral and needed to be reformed, was revealed as woefully insufficient and cruel. What would emerge from this eye-opening experience was Beatrice's lifelong work as a social activist.

8:53Among her long list of accomplishments, Beatrice first coined the concept of collective bargaining, founded the London School of Economics, relaunched the Labour Party, and helped form the Fabian Society, which today we would call a progressive think tank. She fought for a social safety net in Britain, fought against poverty and exploitation wherever she found it. Most social change is a result of a similar kind of rude awakening. Someone sees something and decides to do something. In 1882, a 24-year-old state senator named Theodore Roosevelt found himself as the potentially decisive vote in a bill pushed for by the Cigar Makers Union that aimed to improve working conditions for thousands of poor workers who labored in the city's tenements.

9:42Roosevelt was initially opposed to it, like Beatrice Webb believing it was contrary to the principles of political economy of the laissez-faire kind. But Roosevelt was far from laissez-faire in how he formed his opinions, so he actually went and visited these slums for himself, hardly believing the accounts he had received from Samuel Gompers, the labor organizer behind the bill. This slum was how many blocks from where he grew up, yet he'd never been there, but what he saw changed him forever. Forty years later, Roosevelt would still speak of it with horror. Considering the explanations that Roosevelt would later make about how he was not a sentimentalist, we can safely assume he broke down in tears as he watched emaciated children sleeping six or seven to a bed, as he watched families struggle to breathe among all the chemicals, as the stench and filth overwhelmed his senses.

10:36What are you going to do about it is the main question of the day, the activist Jacob Rees would write in his famous book, How the Other Half Lives. After he learned, the answer for Roosevelt was simple. I've come to help, he told Rees, who would become a lifelong friend. Indeed, for the rest of his life, Roosevelt would fight on behalf of the exploited and against entrenched and powerful interests. The same thing happened to Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson's childhood was the opposite of Roosevelt's. His parents were born in a log cabin. He knew poverty and struggle and deprivation firsthand. But he was, as a white man in the American caste system, still higher than any of the other lower classes.

11:16Two experiences showed him something he could not unsee. First, it was teaching at a school for the children of Mexican-American farmers in the town of Catula, Texas, where the people were treated, as Johnson put it, just worse than you'd treat a dog. He never forgot the scene watching Mexican children going through a garbage pile, shaking the coffee grounds from the grapefruit rinds and sucking the rinds for the juice that was left. Second, after decades of indifference to the pains of segregation, it was the experience of his Black housekeeper and cook, Zephyr Wright, that finally broke him of his obliviousness to a racist world.

11:57When Johnson asked Zephyr to drive the family dog from Washington back to the Johnson Ranch in Texas, she begged him not to send her. It's hard enough for a black person to drive across the South without a dog, Zephyr explained. When we drive to Texas and I have to go to the restroom like Bert or the girls, I'm not allowed to go to the bathroom. I have to find a bush and squat. And when it comes time to eat, we can't go into restaurants. We have to eat out of a brown bag. And at night, my husband sleeps in the car with the steering wheel around his neck, and I sleep in the back. Johnson left the conversation in tears and powerfully relayed these experiences to other lawmakers who helped him champion the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

12:40The problem is that it's so easy to stay in our bubbles, to not see what we don't want to see. We don't do the math on what it would like to live on such a wage, on where all these raw materials are coming from or where our money is going. We ignore the smell or we let other people cover it up for us. There's a joke that the royal family thinks the world smells like fresh paint. But even those of us who are struggling, who have our own problems, can be guilty of the same sin. When you're suffering in your own life, it's hard to muster the empathy for someone else, especially if you or your choices have played any part in it.

13:17As a kind of converse to that idea that we shouldn't go around with people who make us blush, we should actively seek out learning things that make us blush. We need to learn about the unpleasant facts of history. We need to learn about the inequities of society. We need to become vacuums for the lived experiences of other people, what makes it hard to be them, where they struggle, where they have been mistreated, where their daily lives are different than ours. The truth is that injustices are everywhere. Transparency is, as we know, not a widely practiced virtue. Unpleasantness is swept from view.

13:53Disparity and their consequences are covered up. The sufferings and desperate needs of millions are kept from us, and we keep ourselves from them. Steve Jobs apparently never visited any of Apple factories in China. He was a designer, not a manufacturer, more interested in his gadgets than the conditions in which they were made. But this is not an excuse. As Reese said, it is an indictment. Did you not know or did you just not care to know? We cannot fix what we won't face. We cannot stop what we refuse to acknowledge. But what of the people who find out and still don't care? We should pity these folks too.

14:34Something is broken in them. We must wake up. We must seek out the experiences that will change us. We must seek out an understanding of how the world works and lives. We can't wait for someone to show us. We cannot assume we know. We cannot accept appearances. The epiphanies of Webb and Roosevelt and Johnson were not free or fun. They were massively disruptive in the sense that the experiences shook their worldview, but also in that it redirected the course of their lives. It was not possible for decent people to continue as they always had. The knowledge demanded action. So go forth and fight.

15:18Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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