Perhaps no other word in the English language has shifted in meaning like “justice.” It has become one of the central cultural disagreements dividing families, churches, and communities. Just saying the word conjures into the mind everything from police brutality to LGBT+ issues to abortion to labor laws.
In Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds, Ryan Holiday, best-selling author and media strategist, approaches justice as a form of common sense. He’s not entirely off base. Everyone in the modern world (religious or not) affirms the goodness of justice. However, as Alasdair MacIntyre shows in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, agreement on what justice entails and how to achieve it may be unobtainable.
As Holiday’s argument progresses from an emphasis on personal integrity to communal equity to personal spirituality rooted in the oneness of human beings, the diversity of conceptions of justice among worldviews emerges. It quickly becomes clear that Holiday’s Stoicism, though increasingly popular among young men, presents a false morality that’s unable to support the justice he hopes to encourage.
Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds.
Ryan Holiday
Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds.
Ryan Holiday
In Right Thing, Right Now, Holiday draws on fascinating stories of historical figures such as Marcus Aurelius, Florence Nightingale, Jimmy Carter, Gandhi, and Frederick Douglass, whose examples of kindness, honesty, integrity, and loyalty we can emulate as pillars of upright living. Through the lives of these role models, readers learn the transformational power of living by a moral code and, through the cautionary tales of unjust leaders, the consequences of an ill-formed conscience.
False Objectivity
The assumption that everyone knows what justice looks like is baked into Holiday’s worldview. He writes, “You know justice when you see it—or, on a more visceral level, you feel it, especially its absence and its opposite” (xxii). Justice is so obvious that to debate it is to delay it.
Though justice is supposed to be internally obvious, we must align ourselves to an external authority: “This is what we are after, affixing justice as north on our compass, the North Star to our lives, letting it guide and direct us, through good times and bad” (xxiv).
This “North Star” is outside the individual, but it isn’t objective. It’s chosen by each individual from various options. Holiday gives examples: “Loyalty. A love of the game. A desire to keep your hands clean. The confidence to compete fairly with the best. Integrity” (101). Those examples show that Holiday’s concept of justice has two main sources—human reason and human example.
Holiday is correct that humanity has an innate sense of order in the universe (cf. Eccl. 3:11; Rom. 1:18–21), yet his Stoic justice trends toward a pragmatism that Christians should resist. His “justice” is whatever seems to result in a positive social outcome. In contrast, true justice isn’t found purely by human intuition or trusting in a chosen “North Star.” It proceeds from God’s character and is described in God’s Word (Deut. 32:4).
True justice isn’t found purely by human intuition or trusting in a chosen ‘North Star.’ It proceeds from God’s character and is described in God’s Word.
Contemporary versions of Stoicism are attractive because they encourage socially beneficial characteristics like integrity, generosity, and a willingness to forgive. Yet these are often built on utilitarian foundations such as desiring to be happy with ourselves, hoping for reciprocity, not breaking promises to ourselves, avoiding being attacked by our enemies, getting closer to heaven, eliciting help or avoiding harm, and being “great.” Holiday’s version of Stoicism fits well within our culture of expressive individualism, but it has no room for the chief end of humanity, which is to “glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
False Unity
Holiday draws from ancient Stoics, particularly Marcus Aurelius, throughout the book, which is the third in a series on cardinal virtues. Yet there’s more classical liberalism or modern secularism in his understanding of justice than anything ancient philosophers would’ve recognized. These differences don’t matter much to Holiday, because he’s optimistic that everyone can get along, that we do share basic presuppositions, and that we can arrive at common conclusions through dialogue and human reason.
Differences of opinion are, therefore, superficial. As Holiday opines, “All the philosophical and religious traditions—from Confucius to Christianity, Plato to Hobbes and Kant—revolve around some version of the golden rule” (xxii). Yet we can see how this perspective flattens religions and philosophies.
This perception of commonality leads to a dizzying variety of exemplars of justice in the book, including Harry Truman, Malcolm X, Florence Nightingale, Harvey Milk, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus Christ, and many more.
It’s hard to imagine Gandhi, a pacifist, feeling proud that his name is in a list of particularly just human beings with Truman, who authorized the use of the atomic bomb. The stories Holiday shares are always engaging and often compelling, but they mute the substantial differences these figures have concerning justice.
It also isn’t clear that Holiday’s interpretation of figures is consistent with their actual views. For example, he argues that Malcolm X “walked away from hatred and toward the light, toward love. He outgrew separatism and embraced the concepts of human rights and human unity” (315). I wonder whether Malcolm X would’ve affirmed this secular and pluralistic vision of the good life, even after he left the Nation of Islam.
False Future
One natural consequence of flattening these diverse worldviews is that it creates the illusion of a shared vision of progress. Holiday celebrates a diverse list of political efforts and workers as signs of increasing justice: “Animal rights. Environmental rights. Voting rights. Gay rights. Consumer rights. Reproductive rights. Antipoverty activists. Anticolonial activists. Peace activists. Prison reformers. Fighters of human trafficking. Free speech advocates” (128). According to Holiday, these are examples of “seeking a more perfect union, [and of] realizing the true promise of the social contract” (128).
The stories Holiday shares are always engaging and often compelling, but they mute the substantial differences these figures have concerning justice.
This shared vision of justice might have been believable and inspiring before the fracturing of the monoculture over the past couple of decades. But civil society’s fabric has been torn apart by the dramatic cultural shifts in my lifetime. A subjective vision of justice, even with majority consensus, isn’t enough to bring us back together. Holiday’s efforts present a false optimism about the future.
Through common grace, Holiday is often correct in its conclusions about justice. He provides a point of contact for Christians to graciously debate the nature of justice. This common ground helps explain why some Christians find Stoicism attractive. Furthermore, Holiday’s writing is always interesting and sometimes compelling in its assertions. Yet a Stoic worldview lacks the bedrock on which notions of justice must stand. In the end, Right Thing, Right Now is a reminder that Stoicism as a moral system falls far short of the Christian ideal.