Democracy in America, Volume 2

Welcome back to the New Thinkery. My name is David Barr. With me as always, this is my good friend Alex. How are you?

How are you, Alex? Good, all right. How are you doing, buddy? I'm well.

How are you doing, my good friend Greg McRaehr? I'm tired of my tummy as I've said. I'm sorry to hear that. We're doing spicy chicken sandwich.

And I'm from Chick-fil-A, and I should have known. Oh, for sure. I should have known. The pleasures of the body and soul don't mix Greg.

I love Chick-fil-A, but you've got to get right with God before you go eat a Chick-fil-A. And I didn't do that. Also, I can imagine they have good believing Christians, they trust in divine products to correct for any suspicious meat. I presume that my upset stomach is the product of my own sin.

Well, yeah, I was going to say, Alex, because assuming that they are covered with divine protection and what emanates from Chick-fil-A is proper and good, the person with the sickness is really Greg, right? It's what happens when the sick soul is introduced to something holy. That sounds right to me. But listeners at home should know that they should go to their local Chick-fil-A and order a spicy chicken sandwich.

It's delicious. It's one of the largest American-passed food restaurants in the United States with a seagrisen, my home state, the peach state, Georgia. Eat more chicken. Before we go any further, we need to make clear to the audience what translation we're using today.

Oh, Chick-fil-A? Something Greg always says like an hour and 20 minutes into our hour and 25-minute episode. Today we're reading volume. What translation?

So we're using the Harvey Mee-Nee-Seal translation. Correct? Alex? No, that's not correct.

Democracy in America. Also translated by his deceased wife, Double-E-Thru-A. There you go. That's right.

Give a lady her proppers. Yes, absolutely. Massive tone. It's a big book.

Oh, the book, yes. No, I agree. What else would I refer to as the tone? I don't know.

It's a big book. It is a book, gosh. University of Chicago Press. Yeah, and if you want to, I guess we had Greg's colleague and executive director of the Ashbrook Center, Jeff Sickinger on tokville.

So I'd refer listeners back to that episode for more general introduction to tokville's thought and some would be the providence of democracy in America. There are two volumes, and today we are dealing with volume two with the first dozen or so chapters in volume two. Yeah, and we covered parts of volume two with Jeff last time. Yeah, the end of volume two, correct.

So I think, Greg, you said this was part of your plan. I think to outshine Jeff and take his job from him. It's just a matter of time, really. I mean, I've been lying in wait.

Yeah, that's right. One day I will be executive director. We're doing part one of tokville's democracy in America. Part one of volume two, which is on the influence of democracy on the intellectual movement in the United States.

So if you will, this is sort of tokville on the American mind. What is it that gets the American mind going? So this is volume two. The previous volume, if I were to speak loosely, is mostly about American government and politics.

And volume two seems to be more about like social things, more ways that kind of stop an intellectual habits. And here's a little piece of advice. Yeah, right. No, no, no, let's hear it.

The beginning of the book sometimes can act as a stumbling box. So Alex correctly points out it's a humdener of a tone. So it's rather lengthy. And when he starts talking about or going into the structural government, our federal constitution, but then in our township system, notice that I love that word.

No, no, no, of course, it's interesting, but it's not, I think, as immediately engaging as volume two, where he starts to talk about our peculiar cast of mind. And I think in the language there, the chapters there, the readers immediately will see themselves or I think there's some exceptions though. And the first volume, I mean, the theory of the tyranny of the majority part, that's in volume one. Oh, really that gets you out of bed?

It does. It's where he shows his disagreements with Jefferson and Madison. Also, I would say, is it kind of the races, the three races in North America is really fascinating. I don't go into that.

Or recorded Greg. And this is on the record, actually, right? And also, some of his thoughts on the United States is rolling foreign policy or international affairs in the coming century. It's quite impressive that he sort of says he serves as Russia in the United States will be the two biggest powers in the coming century, which I mean, how can anybody have seen that?

But you're right, I mean, I totally agree that Boeing is much more my taste and much more interesting. And Mansfield has said that it's both the best book on America and the best book on democracy. And for my money, it's the one that sort of holds up a mirror to me, to us as Americans, and it's something that can be very insulting. I mean, the first line of the first chapter of part one of Boeing two, I'll read here in just a moment, it's sort of just a match in the face.

And it's pretty impressive. You sort of think maybe it's, I don't know, I'm sort of torn, right? Do you have to be an American understand America? Or is it the case that this Frenchman who came over us sensibly to study the penal system in the United States, but somehow gleaned what he just looked at the penal system and figured out what we're really about?

It was time for him to handle. It's just kind of impressive that he could just look at that and figure out who we are. And so, you know, I don't know, I mean, this is our really talks about like the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we think, the books we read, how we go to church, or why we don't read books, why we don't read books, the relationship between men and women, the relationship and the family, all of this, I mean, just it really hits home. I think it's really insightful.

Alex was going to make jokes. You, I was going to say, speaking of leaning the penal system, but I didn't have anything to follow that up. Right, right. That stands on its own.

I tee you up for you. Yep. You guys both said something that I think was interesting, but I didn't really identify with you guys said, when you read this book, you sort of, it's like looking in the mirror or seeing something. I mean, I got that sense from the passages on aristocratic habits, you know, right?

Right. Being, you know, right? It's a region. I gotta say, I saw a region.

You guys in it too. You know, some of that. Slaying on us. It's a little culinary and sort of, but quite here kind of every man.

American. Thank you. You have a lot of things I think are all the stuff about sort of, you know, sort of audibly just sex and also a man bovine relations. I have a strong democratic streak for sure.

I don't care for fancy-pants people and I don't care for people who put on airs and yeah, I mean, it's just like a true Emory grad, right? Right. Look, in all sincerity, I clearly went to a very elite university. I did not, I did not fit in very well there.

Just you guys, you know, there are a lot of fancy people there. Nothing gets it. Great university. A lot of money.

Hope they'll help me. Got a lot of success. Good luck to them. Because they're doing great things.

I do have a PhD. I mean, it's all to the earth stuff. Greg's like, hey, David, I got the full every man library, you know, this library man box. So that's why I know him in every man.

You guys don't see Greg right now. He's got a mask on. He's shirtless with a cape and obviously about to go to his eyes wide shut party, which is every Tuesday night in Ashland. Which is why I'm so upset that we start recording later.

You've come into my party time. It's not me. Look, it all sincerity. Like I was actually quite sincere.

I realize that there are a lot of ways that I'm not democratic. But I do think that, yeah, I mean, I'm over rocky, right? Like I hate teams that do well in sports. Like I don't like empires.

Like there's, there's, there's sort of, I mean, this is precisely what I'm talking about. You read this book and you realize like as much as you think maybe you've sort of divorced yourself from your regime and if sort of become independent, you know, you're still very much like someone cuts in front of me in line, right? I guess that that's a very American thing. Other countries people don't do this.

So really? Yeah, queuing up. People make fun of Americans for queuing up, actually. They call it queuing up, which is not only some of the Germans, but you know, Greg, it is interesting that even the so-called risk suppress in the United States, I don't even think Boston, and Bromens really exist anymore.

Even they have an undeniable democratic street, right? Just doesn't mean the same operation doesn't take place. But anyway, you guys, like how friendly I am, how like open and smiling with strangers and these kinds of things. It's very democratic, right?

Like this is not a risk to credit. Like, you don't approach people. That's not the risk to credit way, right? You defer to your, you defer to your seniors, people who are better than you and these kinds of things.

I remember, this is all a true story. I remember I was a young grad student and Renee Patix and my colleague and I, who went to grad school together in New Jersey, Maryland. He's a German. He's German, yeah, that's right.

He and I saw Tom Pangle walking across the street in Washington, DC, the APSA, the American Political Science Association. I mean, that's okay. That's Tom Pangle. Let's go say, hey, and I walked up and I said, hey, Tom, I'm Greg, I'm Greg, and I'm, and Tom was very gracious and very nice.

And we walked our way and Renee was like, you can't say that to him. That's Tom Pangle. And I was like, well, you mean, he's like, that's like a real, like, he's established outside of these 300 people here at the APSA. No way knows who Tom Pangle is.

I mean, I'll do respect Tom Pangle. But like, we're not really putting your own circle and we help our fans on two legs at a time, you know? Yeah. Thanks, Jeremy.

It goes up against Hance's beloved professors. Right, right. But Wayne Ambler was just here, right? And extremely distinguished, very impressive professor.

But he seemed kind of democratic. And he's sort of very easygoing sort of humble roots, blue color. We're getting too far away from him really different. It's been a tough one.

This is helpful. I mean, the question really is, as an American, is it possible to be possessed of an aristocratic soul? Right. Yeah, I think that's right.

If you do have a nice, people who talk about a kind of natural aristocratic man who can exist even as a peanut farmer. Right. Right. He just gives some, he just gives some prescriptive, he makes some prescriptive remarks about what to do with people like that when talking about like Latin and Greek.

Right. So it seems very analytic, but there is some right sort of, yeah, prescriptive, right, or some sort of, and I was reminded by the way of one time that the three of us encountered someone who fancied himself quite literally an aristocrat and it did not go well. And I think that's that's all we need to say about that. So, don't feel, don't feel was an aristocrat.

He was, yeah. And he says nevertheless, that he was a friend of America. And that's why he's going to tell us all of our bad problems. Well, that's yet the notice.

He's like, I'm about to give it to you. Right. Right. It's like it's going to be, it's going to be some harsh.

He says, I want to be sincere. That's right. But he's saying it requires some courage on his part. I do think there's something, despite the fact of the book, he's about democracy, just reading this, there's a kind of aristocratic touch to the weight.

Oh, yeah. For sure. Extremely learned though, he often hides his life. Like he treats it like he's just sort of, oh, this is what I saw on these are my general ideas.

And, you know, I'm just thinking very carefully, obviously very thoughtful, very, but I think often he's got other bigger questions. He was young, right? Was things like his 30s when he was in the United States? I don't know.

I think he was. He was young when he went over Buma or whatever. Yeah. He did just one thing should be said, I think that when I talk about Tocqueville, and once you study this book, deeply, you can read this book.

I think superficially, and gleaned something nice from it. But Tocqueville was a philosopher. But he's more aristocratic than the aristocrats with whom he broke red in France. So he's a different level too.

So I don't want to forget. It's not just some aristocrat that comes and takes in the United States and writes about it. He's giving us the philosophical treatment. I think that's something you're not just born into.

I once heard her, I think I heard Mansfield say this and then I said it in his presence. And I couldn't tell if I was, anyway, that Tocqueville is basically very aristotelian, actually. Sort of how an Aristotle might analyze America if he had been born in the 19th century. There's a similar kind of political diagnosis, I think.

But in any event, I just wanted to point out this is how the kind of volume two begins. Hey, look, I'm your friend. I'm going to point out some things that maybe you're not going to take so well. Okay, chapter one, you're the stupidest person I know.

That's kind of how it goes. And I just, if we're going to be a little more precise, I'll only go to the... Sure, first off, I'll point out for that in the notice, the reader is led to infer or to make a conclusion for him or herself that Tocqueville is a friend to Demoxity, but he doesn't actually say that. He says, I'm going to say something nasty stuff about you.

And then he says, I shall respond simply that it is because I was not an adversary at the time or that I want to be sincere with it. So he doesn't say he's your friend. He says, I'm not your adversary. And then he says, men do not receive the truth from their enemies, and their friends scarcely offer it to them.

That's why I have spoken. I think the careful reader will see that Tocqueville has said that he's neither the enemy nor the friend. He's a friend of me. He's a friend of me as it were.

All right. So here we are, late on me, Daddy. Chapter one, on the philosophic methods of the Americans. Tocqueville says, I think there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States.

Yeah, we have no philosophic school. In fact, our philosophic methods brought to you by a Frenchman who we've never read. You can barely call it a method at all, at least the way it works in our minds, it's just natural partitions. Other than the insult, which I think, look, how is this not an insult?

Can I, let me throw another possibility out there, right? What an American reading desk, take this as an insult, and it risks to crack wood. Like if you told the French, oh, you're the care least about philosophy of any civilized thing, you'd be like, hey, come on. It'd be like, it's not an idea.

It'd be like, well, we could say it. Well, first of all, but in America, they'd be like, yeah, we're getting sh**ed on. That's a good point. That's a good point.

Actually, what they'd say is, I don't understand what you said, Frenchy, because that's in French, because Tofel wrote in French. And so they're not even reading this book, which I'm sort of doing that somewhat tongue in cheek, but like, I, Tofel wrote in French, it's not at all clear to me that his audience was the Americans. Well, just don't ask how much disdain we have for him, Greg. Right.

We just didn't read this book until Harvey Mansfield came along. Exactly. Except for the every man library version. Well, that's true.

Never forget the every man library. Yeah. So you think the Americans wouldn't be insulted because they'd be like, yeah, we're not fancy pants flossers. We actually get stuffed on.

We go to the moon, we build trains. Well, in a way, it's a weird compliment though. And I first of all, that's an interesting comment made out. I agree.

I was struck when he says that Americans have not needed to draw their philosophic method from books. They have found it in themselves. Is this a kind of compliment there? Where our natural operations are natural cast of mind.

It follows a Cartesian philosophic method. I mean, one thing that strikes me about Descartes, and I'm not sure how much he has this in mind, but Descartes, when he outlines his method, it says, yeah, you want to go through from the absolute smallest problems and the smallest basic constituents of the world and work your way off to general ones. But he says as small as you can get, really. And also, if you don't have a sense of the actual order, suppose an order.

So this looks a little bit like theory building, as according to circumstance. So I think there's one way in which to think of Americans as Cartesian, is they encounter a problem or a way of doing things. And they immediately try to think of, has he put it more efficient, simpler, more conducive to pleasure, things like that. They always try to streamline it a bit.

And so for that, you don't actually want general, very high principles, which you want is hardcore data related to the situation and a theory that works for them that may not be granted in general principles. And in fact, you might for this area versus that area versus the other area have different principles involved, contradictory principles. It doesn't matter. You're making things work.

And that's a kind of Cartesianism, right? Approaching a small problem in physics or in mechanics or something and saying, how can I do this better? Or how do I make this even work? And then coming up with an account or a way of doing things that might be highly confined to the situation, but you get things done and you move on, right?

Sure. But you ostensibly, in order to be able to get things done, you still have to be, have some sort of intellectual firepower or some kind of engine or something like that. And if I may, for just a moment, this quote at the very beginning of the very first sentence, I think there's no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States. I agree.

I think Americans would not be insulted by that. But it reminds me of a sentence that he has in Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7, that Chapter 12 on the omnipotence of the majority of the United States. It's on page 244 if you want to look, guys. Tofo says, I do not know any country where in general less independence of mine than genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.

I do think we'd be insulted by that. We aren't free. We don't have freedom of thought and we do not have freedom of speech. That seems totally untruth.

Yeah, it seems false. It seems false, right? But the philosophy stuff didn't bother us. And we were sort of, we sort of grant that.

That's a really good point. So less independence of mine. I think that's interesting because for the individual who's trying to be inventive in some sort of, usually it's involved in some kind of industry, right? Yeah.

Right. You do sense that your mind is independent, but even so far as you're sort of an unknowing Cartesian. And also, I mean, the whole thesis of the book, right, is that there's this general sort of force of equality affecting everything in your life and everything in your psychology. And almost a singular fashion.

And he's almost kind of worried that he seems too much to be doing this. That would suggest that though you are kind of free in a sort of smaller sense, right? In these industrial aspects, you are remarkably subservient or subject in your mind to these larger forces. Is that it?

Yeah. I find a lot of this in retrospect with the current vantage point, comical. We have the finest university system in the entire world, or the envy of the world in higher education. The world sends their brightest students to learn at our universities.

Just the amount of money and attention spent on the arts in the United States, and endorphs out of other countries. And so I don't know how correct his analysis. Well, if I may, I would say. So this leads me to chapter 10.

So Volume Two, Part One, Chapter 10, why the Americans apply themselves to the practice of sciences rather than to theory. So what I would say is, yeah, you're right. I mean, people send their best and brightest here to our universities. And I think that it is undeniable, and I think it took Phil Grant, the truth of the claim, that with respect to any kind of a practical science, we are probably better than anybody else in the world.

You know, anything that's mathematical engineering, biology, biological sciences, even medical sciences, things that are practical, yeah, we kill it. Do you think it's the case that people from around the world send their children here to study literature? That's obvious to me. Yeah, you think so?

Yes. Okay. You are finest universities. They're there to get a classical education.

Sure. Be a professor. Sure. I think I'm a kind of in between.

I mean, I agree with Greg that when I think of people coming from far and wide to study American university, I think they want to be doctors. They want to be engineers. And years, and years, things like that. I think those are the...

They're not coming here to study Shakespeare. Yeah, if you're going to study... Oh, really? I think most people would go to...

You don't think they're going to... You don't think they're going to... Some of our most fabled English departments at Princeton and Harvard to study Shakespeare? I sure they are, but I think...

They hold your library. I think... The largest collection of Shakespeare documents in the world. You don't think they're doing their research there?

Or they can go to Cambridge and Oxford. Those are two nice schools, right? Two of them. I mean, let's be serious.

I mean, if you were going to study Greek, if you're going to study Latin, if you're going to study... Well, foreign language literature, you know, of living languages is different, obviously. Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure we have great resources and with great wealth comes like all these other things.

But I don't think it's the case that the high arts or the fine arts are most consumed in most... I mean, like an opera house in New York City, they have one that struggles. When I lived in Berlin, there were four that were constantly being filled. I mean, it's a much smaller city.

It just seems night and day. And when you think about also the consumption of the kind of arts that are really dominant to you as it's film, it's TV, that's the stuff that's real Hollywood. Raw and... Yeah, I don't know.

And I don't know. It strikes me that while obviously there's a presence in me, great universities, if you want to study Shakespeare, it seems like you don't go to the United States University. But that's the English authors that's a little hard. And let me go a step farther, David.

So in our particular self-diocultural theory, local philosophy, who are the greatest minds of people that started the great schools here? So many of them are German, Jewish, and Chinese. No, I mean, not just them, right? But Arendt as well, and they're half a dozen others.

Yeah, that's another thing. That's another thing. A lot of the success of American universities has to do with the influx in the 20th century, right? Right.

I mean, you're like business-ness, like... Even the physicists get point, yeah. It was your example, only. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, but right. And we cultivated and nurtured that in our universities, and a lot of the stuff is... Well, even that take out as a very good example. Like, why do we attract all these physicists?

I mean, it was a very practical reason because it was those nice aristocratic Europeans that decided to kill, you know, 7 million Jews. Right, right. And then we wanted to raise for nuclear arms. What is Alice?

Well, I'm just like, I don't know. We should be careful about things like saying, you know, because for Tofuil, right, equality is exerting a force across the world, right? Yeah, sure. America is first.

So it's very hard to look at a book written, you know, way back when, like 200 years before... 1840. Yeah, so 200 years before World War II. And it's a risk to chronic Europe versus democratic.

No, no, sure, right. So I think... Earth's doctorate is already... I mean, there was...

I mean, Earth's doctorate is dead in German about this point, right? Yeah, and he says something... Yeah, that it's definitely on the way out at the very beginning of the marks in America. Right.

Retraces. So providential fact. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then you look at... And then you look at like what's going on in World War II Germany. I mean, this is a reaction against this, right?

Counterforce to the sort of egalitarian pressure. And then, you know, because of, you know, we don't have to go too deep in the weeds, but because of what's going on with late 19th century, early 20th century German law, right? It takes a nationalist event and a racial event that it wouldn't have taken, I think, too many years prior. So I don't know, it's...

I'm sorry, 100 years prior. Yeah. Right. But I mean, I can understand the frustration, but I don't think Topial is simply saying you guys are terrible.

I think what he's saying is here's some things you're very good at. You guys will actually destroy the rest of the world in technology and sciences and practical sciences. You just don't do literature on the arts very well. And, you know, you don't actually...

I find this really funny, this is on page, I think. What is it? 428, right? You don't actually build anything that lasts.

And you don't build things that last because you're well aware that you don't need the last because you'll make something better in three or five years. I mean, what's wrong with this? Yeah, sorry. I mean, just where are the things that...

I mean, like, I guess skyscrapers, what else stands? The test of time. I mean, Washington DC, I suppose the monument is there, but that's a very exceptional. Well, I'm not as old as Europe.

So we'll have to see, right? But they're not guests, but the... We have wonderful writers. So I don't know what the fuck he was talking about.

We don't have the philosophic school. That's true. Give me the writers. I don't know, Greg, who's your favorite writer?

I do like your own bill, right? Faulkner, Mark Twain, we have no writers. They had to come on the scene. I don't think he's saying we don't have...

We have no writers. I mean, this is not... I don't think this is accurate, but it's hard to deny when you read Mark Twain, even when it's subtle, that there's something very demonic about it. I mean, it's incredibly like...

Like, the characters are very low, according to aristocratic society. I mean, to the point that some people suspect that Huck Finn might have been, you know, black or slave, right? According to some theories, because his race is never identified. I mean, he's willing to get into the vernacular, the vulgar vernacular, in a way that an aristocratic writer would not, right?

And he mocks the high constantly for its heirs and everything. I don't think he's saying that you won't have writers. It'll disdain forms, right? It'll be kind of unsilably bizarre, which I think is, you know, bears true, right?

Well, let's look at 13th since we're on the argument. I mean, this is chapter 13, again, page 4, 5, the literary face of democratic centuries. I'll just read a few passages and we can comment. But because I, you know, I do like Melville.

I think Melville is very good. I think Twain's very good, but I'm not actually certain about Faulkner's work, but I realize that might give me some enemies. He says, when one enters the shop of a book selling the United States and respects the American books that fill the shelves, the number of works there appears very great, whereas that that of no author seems on the contrary, very small. That seems completely unadjectionable to me.

Like, that has been noble. And yeah, yeah, like he goes in and there's tons and tons of books. You don't know who any of them are. By the way, there's a lot of books about the Bible, all right?

Right? That seems also true. Yep. It's getting down three, four paragraphs.

Although America is perhaps the civilized country of our day, where people are least occupied with literature. One nevertheless meets a great quantity of individuals there who are interested in things of the mind and who make them if not the studied or whole lives, at least the charm of their leisure. But for the most part, English, England furnishes them with the books that they demand. So Shakespeare, Jane Austen, maybe it's the case that things have changed now that we're young, but...

I think he keeps that in account, right? That there's going to be a change. This is just at the present time. Another thing that reminded me of David, your favorite author on the age of 449.

Marquis Deude. More at rapidity of execution than at perfection of details. Who's out of my joke? I don't know.

A guy who's a book factory, James Patterson? Oh, Tom, yeah, yeah. He just creates a sketch of a plot and then he has other people, right? So he can turn him out and he's kind of industrialized it.

Right. Now I can't disagree with anything here. One interesting point though is he says Greg on that very first page. Right.

There's scarcely a pioneer's cabin where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare. Or recall having read the Feudal, Trauma, Henry V, or the first time in a longhouse. How about that? So Americans, my grandma had a copy of Shakespeare's warehouse.

I don't remember any other books in your house. Oh, really? Yeah. And it's weird.

It's that we can't... Well, first, there's only one Shakespeare, but we can't kind of create this. These great works, but we know it when we see it. Right.

That's to be the case. They put out something funny about that. There's a note by me and Philip Winthrop that says, Woghaus is Tokil's English. So he's literally saying in French something like, you know, put it in a lot of house.

Don't say, look house. It's looking like that. So it's kind of funny. It's almost like, oh, we don't have a language in French because we don't live in logs.

But look, in their longhouses that are so ridiculous in a way, they're reading Shakespeare. You know, so I think there's a lot of irony in that little choice. He could have said in a house made of logs, but he decided to just put it into English and emphasize that difference. Yeah.

Look, I don't disagree with what he's saying here. We have the Oprah Winfrey book club, and that's our... Well, she'll occasionally put like those to have skin hurt. Yeah.

It's such a weird... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Otherwise, it's these dumb books like My Beautiful Bones or Runaway Best Sellers or Frisky Shades of Grey, Huge Seller. Maybe it's Nighttime Reading. We should do an episode on that.

Every time I get to like this third or fourth shade, I suddenly lose interest against leaving to lose oxygen to the head, too. Maybe that way you're getting sleepy. That's true. The following chock to my literary industry.

What's that? The following chock to on the literary industry is starting to 14. Yeah. Go for it.

No. I mean, it's... He just pinpoints every kind of critique that the three of us might have. Every slinging arrow we will level up, you know, penguin or random house.

Right. For publishing the books they publish. And for denying all my attempts to publish my books. Yeah.

Yes, jerks. Yeah. Where'd you want to go, Alex? You had someplace you want to go next?

By the way, I have a quick question just to develop some time. If he is a... Well, we haven't established that he's a friend, but this is a great exertion of effort for somebody who doesn't give it to him or somehow neutral. Right.

So, he... What's he? What's he? He's holding up a mirror to ourselves.

Two Americans. I wonder if some of the intent is to prompt thoughtful Americans to see where the future banana peels will lie in the history of our country. Yeah. I can't help but think his audience was French speaking people first and foremost, since that's the language he wrote him.

So, I don't even know what extent he thought Americans would read this book, which is funny because I think it's read more here than the French by far. I suspect his audience... Why do you write this? I suspect he wrote it for himself, which I can come back to when I suspect he wrote it for two other audience members.

One or just French aristocrats. And I suspect that part of what he's up to here is just saying, hey, look, this is coming democratic century. It's coming and you should reconcile yourself to it like I have. In other words, reactionary politics will not succeed.

So, I think it's an attempt to placate them and to show them, by the way, and by the way, we haven't talked about this, but Tofil does talk about how, look, there are super big problems with democracy, but it's fairer familial relations or tenderer. There's a lot of good things that democracy's going to... There's not going to be these enormous gulfs of poverty. They're all these good things too, so then that often gets overlooked.

It's just that we tend to focus on what's lost, and that's these peaks, I think. Secondly, I do think actually he has in mind people like himself who might be somewhat philosophically inclined and who want to sort of read their minds. I just why I think this is Aristotelian platonic. He's showing you, especially in this part, part one of volume two, that your mind is democratic.

And so, this is the cave that we are all in, in 19th and now, in the 20th and 21st centuries. And so, one of the things I think he's trying to show some people is, and we get to this with chapter 15 in particular, why the study of Greek and Latin is so useful in democratic societies. If you want to liberate yourself from your particular accidental historical time and place, this is the way to do it. I think Tofil's trying to show you that there's something to it.

And then lastly, I'll just point out that I do think, I mean, obviously he published this book, but I think there's probably the book to me reads like Tofil thinking through these things for himself too, like just trying to figure out for himself what's going on. So, on the Greek Latin thing, I think this is maybe he means this for his French audience. I think it's one of those moments where you do see him being, I think, pretty overtly prescriptive, right? Right.

Right. Right. First, he first argues, I thought this chapter 15 by way, right? Chapter 15, yeah.

If you're reading along. I thought one interesting point was that I hadn't really thought about, but you talked about, yeah, Athens was a democracy, but really, we're talking about like less than 10% of the population of the area being able to vote. So, it's already a kind of aristocracy. I think there's a problem there because while we were a democracy, we're literate, right?

And these are not literate people who are excluded. So, it's not clear that they educated people were better educated. The average sort of free of them was better educated than us. But even still, he gives a kind of aristocratic bent and then he says, this is not a big sport 52 at the end, Greek and land ought not to be taught in all schools.

But it is important that those whose nature whose fortune destined them to cultivate letters or predispose them to that taste, find schools in which one can be made a perfect master of ancient literature and holy seed in its spirit. To attain this result, a few excellent universities, there's a redemption David would be worth more than a multitude of bad colleges, oops, where super full studies that are done badly, prove that necessary so as to be well. Now, what's talking about this passage is one, you're inclined to say, this is how it ought to be an America, but this seems very general. I'm not.

So, if he's writing for French audiences, this might be like, hey, democracy's coming. Just so you know, they disdain all tradition, they're going to call this stuff away. They probably already have done that or doing that in the US. I think this is a kind of bit of advice to say, just make sure that the best I have access and are pushing this direction, because that's absolutely necessary to have.

And look at a second to last sentence, because I think only that they have, I don't, I don't, I do not consider that the literary productions of the ancient is irreproachable. I think only that they have special qualities that can sort of marvelously the counter-barons are particular defense. They prop us up on the side where we lean. The question is, who he was referring to with the word or whether it's those with a natural aristocratic bent of mind, irrespective of whether they're in the United States or anywhere in the world, or if he means the French, or who he's referring to.

This is a particular context. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

That's really good. That's really good. So I don't know if he's trying to carve out a kind of aristocracy within the sea of democratic instinct. I mean, that's been the aim of all sort of democratic theorists from we so on, right?

I mean, to, I mean, Locke had to spend as well, but any kind of democratic, I guess any kind of democratic, there's always had their mind, maybe with the exception of Hobbes, who's kind of nice and liberal, but I think they've all had their mind on how to keep these sort of, you know, the tradition of thinking deeply about human institutions and the effect of the regime on the soul and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. So maybe as a mind of French. Right.

I took it to me. Yeah. Obviously the reader would say French, but I wonder if he just means all Democrats, period. Yeah.

All Democrats. And I do think he is generally, I read that passage earlier from on the on the tyranny of the majority of the majority of the majority. And he says this again later in volume two, I try to find it quickly, but where he says pretty explicitly that what he is really concerned about with here is freedom of mind. What he's worried most about democracies is that well, tyrannize over thought and people won't think freely for themselves.

And since this is a Strauss podcast kind of basically let's just admit it isn't this House Strauss begins on tyranny by saying that counterintuitively in fact there's these open societies that actually sort of strangely stifled, we thought a lot of this reminds me of actually, I mean, even this passage right here reminds me of, you know, what he says at the end of German, I was we talked about this in a Churchill, there's still the vestiges of the old education, right now, and I guess our idelings were a sort of version of this, but they've sort of quoted what's that Churchill quote David probably remembers it's something about long lines of I would, I mean, I'd make I'd make them learn Latin as a treat for the smart ones. I'd let them learn Greek or something like this. Yeah, yeah, but then also this funny one about learning English too, that he'd whip them with them. Yeah, and reminds me also that you referred to himself that men are all worms, Churchill referred to himself as a glowworm.

And it seems important to really have a few glowworms leashing around. Well, what else are we? We have two things we need to talk about religion and collectibility. Okay.

The Rousseau, the perfect ability stuff I thought was just interesting from Rousseau's angle, right? This idea of he says the Rousseau is one of three thinkers he read every day, by the way, and preparing for writing talks to the Americas, who is Rousseau, Montesquieu, and who's the third one, Pascal, actually. So anyway, the Rousseau link is explicit. So anyway, yeah, so the perfect ability, I mean, that's a core notion, especially in Rousseau's second discourse, right, on the origins of equality among men.

And he's a count there, sounds a lot like that. Perfect ability should not be taken as a positive thing. I think it's not in Rousseau, right? It means basically perfecting your rational capacities and greater refinement of your abilities and your faculties as a person, which does not necessarily become with greater happiness.

It was also in Rousseau, I think here you see echoes of it in in Tocquill, isn't the idea that perfect ability is what separates human beings from other species of animals? That a dog is a dog is a dog is a dog, whatever country it's from where we find it, but human so perfect ability doesn't become more perfect. I think this is common misconception. It just means that they're changeable and that you can you can change your nature, so to speak.

A man is capable of living differently in different times. And Tocquill says basically this on top of four 27, although a man resembles the animals in several points, one feature is peculiar to him alone. He perfects himself and they do not perfect themselves. The human species could not be able to discover this difference from the outset.

The idea of perfect ability is therefore as old as the world, equality did not get birth to it, but it gives it a new character. So somehow democracy amplifies this natural human belief tendency, idea of perfect ability. Yeah, and there seems to be a tension in this chapter, kind of ancient's modern, but kind of strungsly right where he says aristocrats confine progress in advance within certain impassibles, and as they say, those kind of natural limits to what not to do, right? And that you can approve certain things, but you can't really indefinitely infinitely perfect it, right?

Whereas this is more modern notion of a, right, the image of an ideal and always fugitive perfection. So I wonder whether part of what he's doing with this aristocratic versus democratic sort of tendencies is doing a kind of ancient and modern thing. Oh, okay. I just wonder, just struck me at this, this contrast in this chapter struck me as very much bringing to mind on these sort of Strauss's process.

Right. I actually do. I want to connect it to America's, I sort of, I think one of our core beliefs in America's idea in progress, the things are always getting better. And so there is a way in which perfect ability is connected, in fact, not just to change ability, but to like the thing that we, like the belief that we can make things better, like tomorrow is always going to be better than today.

And this is where he gives an example of the ship that I alluded to earlier, as I'm 428. He says, I meet an American sailor and I ask him why his country's vessels are built to last a short time. And he replies to me without hesitation that the art of navigation makes such rapid progress daily that the most beautiful ship would soon become almost useless if its existence were prolonged beyond a few years. I mean, sort of the American notion of collapsing the beautiful to the useless.

And this is the beginning of except over and over again, the American focus on utility. Right. What is something you used for? What's it good for?

Yeah, there's a kind of, you obviously start thinking of like disposability, start as well as like just, like when he's talking about language, we don't need to go sort of getting closer to the end, but when he talks about like language constantly changing stuff, you get a sense of like slang and constant mutability, constant disposability, not just because you're improving always, but also sometimes because you just want something different, right? You see this with clothes, with art, right? There isn't monument literature, no form. Yeah.

And while there are great books, I think produced and great authors, I think gave us right about that. They often just fall into the weeds, right? They don't have like that. Yeah.

It's depressing to admit. Yeah. Should we talk about religion? Yeah, I guess, I know, yeah, we probably should be about it.

I was just struck by this idea of the formlessness, because form is related somehow to hierarchy and, I don't know, superiority and inequality. And so there's a way in which the belief and equality seems to be undergirding this formlessness too. I don't know. It's metaphysical, right?

Because what he's talking about, our Cartesian method, right, is that we don't care about whether the principles go here or deriving everything. We just kind of work happens to this. And that that sort of betrays maybe a metaphysical presupposition of American mentality is that there are no forms, right? It's all invented to the moment to pleasure and stuff like that.

And that's what we're doing. And you can see this so much in language, it's really good, Alex, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, just how words, the meaning of words, like even just, yeah, gosh, that we don't even think just standard rules of grammar are sort of important anymore, right? It's more important that they yield to equality, because the forms are sort of constricting in them, right?

Yeah, yeah, versus the French who have a very, not a militia, I mean, a joke, but they have a council. Yeah, they do, to keep the French language pure, right? Whereas we celebrate here, the two words in the body. Right?

And my contrast to Americans is always like, what's the word of the year, like the new word? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They always do this when like some vulgar term from a rapsilon dated like whap or something like that finds its way to into the Western area. They're like, Oh, look at that.

We did it, right? Right. Yeah. And I think that's that gets at something where I think the aristocrats, it seems like have over emphasized form to the point that it even easily opened itself to sort of democratic critique as a list, overly overly stringent.

And maybe maybe took a look forward to it to a sort of democratic, I don't know, erosion of the pretense and maybe the sort of openness to actual form or actual is maybe this is the way to title religion. There's a philosophy in chapter five that I really like for 18. Yeah. This is reminding me I want to say something about aristocratic and democratic words and then Harvey Mansfield, maybe we can talk about it from recording.

Yeah. So this is a 14. He says, this is where he's arguing from a purely human perspective that you really do from the interests of this world, that you really do need religion, right? It's really, really important.

There's a comment here on page 14 that I thought was obliquely referencing, right? So he says, the first object to the principle advantage is a religion is to furnish a solution for each of these primordial questions that is clear precise, intelligible to the crowd and very lasting, right? So it has to come up with these questions. And the little further, he says, when religion is destroyed and the people doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others, each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters that most interest those like him and himself, one defends one's opinions badly or bandends them.

And as one despises of being able to resolve by oneself, the greatest problems that human destiny presents one is reduced like a coward's not thinking about them at all. And this innovates souls. So it seems like actual openness to the questions in common to every person is innovating. So there's a kind of push towards religion.

No, no, it's not innovating. It's the opposite. No, I think he's saying it right. He says it cannot fail to innovate souls, right?

Yeah, that means to make tired. So I thought that you cowardly, I thought that he was saying without without religion, this is what's going to result. Just innovate means to drain somebody's vitality, right? Yeah, yeah.

So it's, if you philosophic openness as a kind of general program that every person sort of encounters, they just find themselves confused and they lack the will so that religion is absolutely necessary. Yes. So is it fair to say that? Sorry, just to tie this back to the earlier part about forms seems like here, he's saying there's a kind of awareness of the questions, primordial questions that needs to be avoided unless doubt take a form.

So maybe this democratic form of doubt that's on the piecemeal fashion where you feel yourself powerful able to overcome things is a kind of best case scenario when the authority of religion has been so eroded. It just struck me there's a different account of philosophy here than the one in the aristocratic sensibilities. That makes sense. Yeah, my question is, so I haven't studied his so remarks on religion a long time.

Does he hold that, you know, so goes Christianity, so goes America? I think he thinks that democracy has a democracy's problematic and it doesn't provide people with some forms that they need to sort of orient their lives and that he thinks that one of the biggest reasons, one of the biggest reasons that America is so successful is because it has this huge store of Christianity in the social sphere that tends to balance any kind of absence of anything like religion or something else in the political sphere. And so I think you're right, there's no official state religion, but religion kind of performs its necessary role in the social sphere. Now that's not without some nuance because at one point he talks about the empire Christianity, which is probably not competent.

But I think he thinks that by and large Christianity, it performs a very solitary function in the United States. I suspect that one of the things he's saying though is that democracy is undermining this Christian social capital over time and not replenishing it. And so therefore, the question is what in the social sphere will serve this counterbalancing role that Christianity had played previously? And that strikes me as I think that's something that Tofu has pointed to as a huge potential problem in the future for America.

Yeah, that you don't have this thing that sort of holds people together publicly without the force of government. This is where you can see that these traditions, so the problem with the aristocratic forms is they're really traditional, they're stifling, right? And you're just sort of educated in them and then you exercise them and off you go, you dive sort of sometimes you read these old books, like not like the great books, we read just like old books and they are just incredibly formulaic in a way in the way that they're sort of repeating things that you see in other books or styles. But in a way, that provokes the very tendency that's eroding everything good about the tradition.

So what are the solutions? I mean, we talked a little bit about Greek and Latin, but what are the countervailing... Before we do one of the solution, I just want to point out, he says that this is in that same chapter I was reading, religion in here, he quotes me in Christianity in particular in case Americans, religion imposes a salutary yoke on the intellect. Like, it's helpful.

It gives you something like a way for viewing the world and understanding the world. And one must recognize that if it does not save men in the other world, it is at least very useful to their happiness and their greatness in this one. So it's somehow useful and necessary even. It's a salutary yoke.

What's the answer? I'm not sure. I mean, I think he holds out more hope for America than he does for the European West in that regard. Because it's not clear to me that the religion has the empire over the minds of the European in the middle of the 19th century, it does over the minds of the Americans at the same time.

I even looked at the religiosity figures in the United States. I don't know, church attendance is still Senate decline. I know that that's to be sure, but I don't know, church synagogue, mosque attendance is still higher than Europe. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. So the thing with Europe is they do hold on to tradition a lot more. I mean, you see them, you see what you see going on on the left in the United States, I think is way more fervently anti-tension.