Welcome back to the New Thinkery. My name is David Barr and with me as always is my good friend, Alex Preu and his lovely daughter Penelope is joining us. How are you? Are you both?
We're doing well. She's having a bomb. My wife is stuck in traffic coming back from Denver. So she'll be privy to Diana's wisdom.
Oh, excellent. Yeah, we have to start them young. It's a drowsy and tree that's a water itself, you know. So how are you doing?
I was talking about a new birth or freedom. She's like, I'm a new birth. Yeah. I'm doing well at David thanks, Raskin.
I also have a bottle. So everybody's everybody's good here. Good. Good.
And so we're excited to have Diana Shab on the show. I read her book in graduate school erotic liberalism, Women in Revolution, Monest Institute. Along with the aforementioned book, she's also more recently the author of his greatest speeches. How Lincoln moved the nation and it's out now by St.
Martin's, through St. Martin's Press. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, delighted to be here.
So Greg, what are we talking about? Well, we are delighted that Diana has to come on and discuss one of my actually I think it's my favorite speech by Abraham Lincoln. His so-called Lyceum speech sometimes is called what he called I think on the perpetuation of our political institutions. Alex and I were fortunate enough to have been invited to a Jack Miller Center conference back in the summer in August maybe.
And Diana gave a talk on the Lyceum address and I was blown away. I thought it was amazing and we've been pestering her with emails since then begging her to come be on the show to talk about it because this is a text that I've probably taught two or three dozen times and you know when one does that, one can get a little tired and one can sort of think that you've exhausted and run all the wisdom out of the particular text but Diana showed me that they were still allowed to learn from this text. So we're lucky to have her on. We're gonna discuss Lincoln's Lyceum address.
The speech he gave when he was a young man. Can you just tell us a little bit Professor Shab why this is an important text and maybe give us a little bit of the historical circumstances that sort of surrounded when he gave the speech? Yeah the background you know he's a young wig politician. He recently had moved to Springfield.
He was invited to give a talk at the Young Men's Lyceum, a kind of self-improvement association. Organizations like that were scattered you know all through the land. Local dignitaries would be invited to give an address. Sometimes very important visiting dignitaries Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a speech at the Springfield Lyceum.
So it's an important occasion for a young politician and you know he's 28 years old. He takes as his topic the perpetuation of our political institutions. So it is a very it's a teach about politics. It's a diagnosis of the diseases to which popular government is prone but it is not an explicitly partisan talk at all.
The general expectation was that you know these occasions were not not occasions for partisan sniping. You talk you talk a bit in your book about the distinctive meaning of perpetuation. You compared it to what you called was the way to use the grumpy conservatives. You talk about the decline of our institutions.
Can you talk a little bit about perpetuation because I think it's such a it's easy to just kind of read it as you know like yeah we want to you know have our have our the call here or something like that but in a way gets at the heart of the speech right. This idea about how things can decline and and the need to find new ways to preserve it in light of new contingencies. So yeah maybe you can talk. Yeah so you know he is diagnosing a decline.
So you know he might have featured that involved in the decline of our political institutions or you know if he wanted to just stress the steps to take to remediate the situation he could have called it the improvement of our political institutions. He doesn't either of those things. I also suggest that he didn't use the word conservation or preservation that those also in a way sort of track in a more more purely conservative direction. So I think the word perpetuation was carefully chosen.
It has a kind of religious resonance. He is thinking about how to make perpetual, how to allow to continue indefinitely in our political institutions but the term itself is in a way open ended because it doesn't tell you the means or the modes by which you put achieve that. Whether you do that through old modes or through new modes. So you know he's he's aiming at a kind of eternity or as close to eternity as a political order could come.
But it but it but the word itself or the formulation is genuinely open ended I think. So it's only as you work through the speech that you see exactly what he has in mind in the way in which he is combining old and new. Yeah I think also one of the things that perpetuation brings to mind is he has a lot of veneration or deference to the founding right. Later on he says some things about how you know conditions have changed and the original passion isn't there but um perpetuation I think and this is the way the speech starts.
It has a sense of you inherited something very worthwhile you want to continue it. So not a desire to simply try to replace it like the the lions or the eagles right or something right. And certainly in the in the second paragraph when he first talks about his generation and what their situation is the stress there is very much on you know we are the lucky inheritors we've inherited this woodland land and we have inherited this political edifice of liberty and you know they they did the great task you know the Hardy brave and patriotic generation and his hours only to transmit so they're the focus is just on you know we just got to keep on keeping on we just have to transmit this legacy. But I think you know as the speech unfolds he will later give a reconsideration of that founding generation if you'll present them in rather different terms so certainly as the speech unfolds that task of transmission begins to work much more difficult and you know then it kind of raises the question a generational question about the relationship between the founding and all successive generations.
Hey guys I bet you can tell if waste is pretty coarse. Yeah yeah I've been shounced from the rooftops about our next sponsor, Devyn and Hall. You know what Devyn and Hall? Of course I do.
Well I think our listeners they enjoy podcasts about classic texts and important thinkers but I think they wish they had some place to take their deeper questions. I just ignore all the emails like that. So I think they should go to Devyn and Hall and leave me the F alone. Whoa.
They can advance every new classical wisdom that they're doing. Why don't you tell me about it Greg? I think I will. This next semester they're doing a course on Aristotle which is a direct engagement with the works of well Aristotle you guessed it with an i for how he's thought is influenced to the Christian tradition a lot.
This seminar in this seminar they're going to say the Udamean ethics the politics the anima around the soul and the part of it in Etralia which are some of his lesser works on biological things. They're doing all kinds of stuff on Aristotle I gotta be honest it's 930 and Matlock's on so I'm kind of ready for bed but I think if I were younger man I would be super eager for this class and you don't even have to go to the hall I understand right David? That's right it's two hours per week on zoom of in-person live instruction it's conducted in a seminar style so participants can ask questions but if you just want to enroll to listen you can always download the conversation to play for yourself later it's low cost and dot at the course is $149 it runs from the 11th of April to the 17th of June. Registration is open until the end of March and of course their style is not your thing check out the other course offerings at Davenanthall.com from ancient languages to in-depth studies of great thinkers Davenanthall is a re-founding of the ancient university for the digital frontier and if you're not sure what Davenanthall is if you're not sure how to spell it maybe Allison remind us how to spell Davenanthall.com it's Dave right?
doesn't David? Dave? Uh huh. Davey got it.
Uh the nant and nant and nant. Yeah and hall. You can't spell halls so take a course on Aristotle. Right right let's do it it's too much for you.
Dave nanthall. Yeah and now back to the show. Back to the show. I was intrigued by I mean the speech opens as you just mentioned with a sort of deference to the founders and theirs was the task and they performed it right they did this amazing political action founding but perpetuation at least at the beginning of the speech seems like a much easier task like they built a house we just have to vacuum something like this right but then it changes later and there's this I mean you do a really nice job of capturing all the doublings is sort of returning back and forth to different questions and then treating them a second time in a different way so that by the end it almost seems like perpetuation is in fact they're more difficult task but I don't want to talk about doubling just yet I know that's a task that that's something we want to talk about on our show but I just want to ask sort of basic a basic question so that the speech says I'm going to address the perpetuation of our political institutions and so I guess at the basic level what does Lincoln take to be the greatest threat to the perpetuation of our political institutions what is the problem that he's at least ostensibly saying we should pay attention to here?
Yeah again because of this doubling there are actually two problems but the first problem the visible problem the immediate problem is what he calls mob rule and outbreaks of mob violence a growing disregard for the law which he says is becoming pervasive throughout the land it's occurring in both the free states and the slave states he does not actually trace explicitly trace the cause of these outbreaks to slavery but I think there is a subtext of slavery throughout the street and he introduces it initially by saying mob rule is occurring everywhere and it's not exclusive to either the free or the slave states but nonetheless he's then he's now sort of slipped in to his discussion that's that division yeah so the mob rule is how indicative of something deep right I'm always struck by he alludes to as you mentioned these examples of mob rule and the most prominent one is this example of this guy from St. Louis McIntosh who's in his words melado who was accused of murder and was at least Lincoln's likely guilty but you know should have had a trial and then he sort of there's some other examples it's not specific but gamblers other kinds of folks and what I guess one of the things that I'm struck by is that you know if I had sort of been his speech writer or his senator or his whatever I would have said why are you choosing this example of this murderous a lot of guy to prove that mob rule is bad why not choose like your audience is probably almost entirely white why not you know pathos why not get a little more sympathy out there and give them the example of some white guy who's been the victim of mob rule and in fact there was of course this very example the guy who was the victim of mob rule right uh Mr. Lovejoy the famous abolitionist Lovejoy abolitionist publisher who had been publishing an abolitionist paper across the river in in Missouri and had because the problems he ran into there and had come to the other side of the river and was publishing in in Alton, Illinois and was killed murdered in a mob melee um yeah so I mean your question is a good one why these examples these are rather problematic examples sort of morally questionable examples uh there are two two examples of mob rule that he talks about specifically and he gives two different accounts of what happens in those two instances so I don't we have time to yeah of course he goes with this I think it'd be the only thing to maybe figure out what he is up to here yeah so the the first instance actually is in Mississippi and it began he said with the hanging of gamblers uh gambling was a legal activity it had been recently legalized by the state legislature but it was still a very unpopular activity apparently uh and those who took exception to gamblers um you know took to running them out of town and uh and lynching them so he says it began with the hangings of the gamblers but then it spread to Negroes uh who were suspected of being involved in some sort of slave insurrection and then spread to whites supposed to be lead with the insurrectionary uh Negroes and then spread he says just strangers uh you know traveling into the state and uh who became suspect so he describes the way in which this mob action just the spirals out of out of control um and then the other instance yeah right there I just I want to read the end of that paragraph this is I think the fifth paragraph six paragraphs excuse me no no what I find what I find sort of haunting or eerie or I don't even know the right adjective is the amazing beauty with which he describes things that are are terrifying or evil right so you just went through all the various folks who are being victims of mob rule and he says here's this conclusion I'm describing as you just said thus went on this process of hanging from gamblers to Negroes from Negroes and from these to strangers till dead men were seen literally dangling from the bowels of trees upon every roadside and in numbers almost efficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest this is a really impressive a lot of rhetorical techniques in their alone but like just a beautiful mess a beautiful sentence here poetic and uh horrifying yeah it uh reminds one of the Billy Holiday song Strange Fruit right yeah so so he he gives me account in this in this way that we've just seen and then he does something very similar about the um burning uh burning alive of the mulatto man by the name of Magintosh uh seen in the street dragged to the suburbs of the city chained to a tree actually burned to death at all within a single hour from the time he'd been a free man attending to his own business at peace with the world so he does initially tell these stories in a way that would seem to appeal to to pay those right we are meant to be horror struck by this uh but then what does he do he big reveal the guy's a murderer yeah so he says this is what my love looks like and then the audience pushes back uh this is a technique of lincoln's to put questions in in the voice of other people so he's sort of anticipating how his audience might react at this moment and they apparently are not persuaded because they say well what does all this have to do with the perpetuation of our political institution okay I think this is a kind of admission on his part that uh his attempt to appeal to pay those is unlikely to be successful with this audience um and in part because he realizes that what is motivating the mobs is actually a sense of justice uh you know a vigilante justice they don't like gamblers uh and they don't much like blacks and they don't definitely don't like blacks who have been accused of crime or thought guilty of crime so now he retells the stories and uh now he says well you know gee if uh if a plague were to sweep through annually and just take off the gamblers you know a uh a gambler specific hovid uh that would be terrific uh society would be much better by that because these citizens are you know worse than useless uh they're pernicious uh and then and then he says and what about the reasoning with respect to the uh to the to the burning of the negro now no longer a mulatto in a way you might even not think this is the same story but it is uh the man that he addressed by his name magin posh uh who was a mulano is now just you know a negro uh burned at st louis and you know he was uh guilty of an outrageous murder in fact uh you know was as well for him as otherwise he would have died under sentence of law anyway so he really uh he pulls a rug out from under us and he actually says that the second account that he's giving is actually the correct reasoning with respect to these incidents says that's a correct reasoning uh the direct consequences here were really not that significant the loss of these particular individuals through lynching do we know anything diana about how the speech was received in real time are there any accounts uh what he's doing but first of all we it's so obvious that it's almost uh not worth the mention but just how profound of a subject matter it is for such a young man to tackle it's astounding uh but but i was just curious what what the reaction was yes he's going through these kinds of maneuvers that one picks up the subtlety one picks up upon reading the speech studying the speech rather but when you're listening i wonder yeah that's always a question you know would these uh yeah refinements and uh all of that he perceived in a moment but actually i do think the audience because i think he has structured this in this way in order to have the effect on the audience that he wants to have so he's told the stories one way and encountered resistance from them he's anticipated that resistance and actually vocalized that resistance what does this have to do with our political institutions he then retells the stories to basically agree with his audience you're right the direct consequences here are not all that significant and then he says but let me tell you about the indirect consequences let me tell you why you should all take this seriously uh and so he basically says you know i know you or even though you weren't involved in the mobs you're probably sympathetic with the passions that we're driving these mobs uh so so you see him here actually concretely dealing with the problem of passion and runaway passion how do you speak to a group member this is a group of young men this is the young men's lysia these would be the kinds of characters who you know might be likely to to join a mob and so he's he's speaking directly to them uh Greg did you want to yeah i i just i'm i'm fascinated by this thing he used to run with a few mobs back in the day that's really interesting i've seen the light i've seen the whole memories i saw the light i'm interested because what i went the the first doubling i think is the idea of the beginning that um founding is harder than perpetuating and i think he switches at the toward the end where you realize that perpetuating is actually more difficult in that case i think he begins from the audience this point of view and tries to show the audience that his view is the right one here in this example of uh makotash he begins with i suspect he begins with his own view but then in other words even the doublings aren't all parallel like sometimes he starts from their point of view and sometimes he starts from his own yeah that's really interesting that might be right okay um although the only thing that gives me pause about that is that he actually he actually agrees with an ass to your version of makotash yeah yeah he's similar to is the correct reason it right and that's the second account so i think actually he's pretty serious in downplaying the direct consequences because he's interested in the indirect consequences and if the indirect consequences that are really you know the ones that are the threat to the perpetuation of our political institutions yeah even for the direct consequences you know who cares basically yeah you can see this actually in in other speeches like pioria where he will also say it's not so much the direct effect of Kansas and Nebraska right uh which will also labor in to Kansas and Nebraska i mean that's bad he doesn't want that to happen but he says even worse is what that will mean in the long term it will mean that we have now removed our objection altogether to slavery and now three can go anywhere in the wide world where people are inclined to take it so i think he is all we he always has this this forward you know this forecasting uh though it is the indirect consequences they're more important and that's what he wants to bring to the attention of his audience i mean one way to think about the rhetorical move is that with the initial characterization he sets it up as him being on the side from the audience's perspective of injustice they think that's why he's decrying it when he then tells the whole and it sounds oh you're being so biased you didn't even reveal this guy's a murderer but then when he when he takes the other point you realize no no he's fully honest he's fully on the side of justice he also cares about law and so it has an emotional effect of heightening your passion and then making you realize you misread Lincoln and so there's this you're forced to think uh just to kind of keep up with what he's saying right and talk be a little more open and this is also then to illustrate the problem with passion the way in which somebody can manipulate your passions uh you know by not telling you the the whole story you know now that you know the rest of the story you'll maybe see it differently so he's in a way revealing uh you know how dangerous passion is and how how orders you know can practice demagoguery and he's in a way enlightening them I think about that so that they will be more aware almost of these of these tricks of the tricks of the trade so the next thing we want to talk about is sort of the next stage in your discussion and let me let me be clear just because we're moving on from that long paragraph for the listeners to appreciate what you actually do in the book you know you go through the length of the paragraphs why is this paragraph so long when was it five of them or just one sentence and quite short and you you you pay attention to these you know very important details and same thing with your chapter on the second inaugural right paying attention to which words are used when italicized capitalized which yeah the peculiarities of grammar it's a close reading it does it's never tedious it's always sort of walking you through the interesting implications and so it uh there's a real care that's devoted to this and and it's not just sort of done for its own sake there's real meaning brought out of it so for instance without long paragraph uh talking about the decay what happens if you allow mama it's got this sense of like a tour de force like a necessity and you sort of point that out I think little things like that really showed the genius of Lincoln but also I think you care with which you've written your own book but so going back to the the question of law moving on to the question of law you go into a digression on this point about what Lincoln well it's not a digression with Lincoln you talk about what Lincoln sees is the problem but then you also discuss uh any relation to civil disobedience as conceived by Martin Luther King jr and then comparing to Malcolm X I thought that comparison was really fascinating I do not see that conclusion coming but it was interesting I think it's worth discussing a little bit here just so that you can see how relevant the issues are and also how how subtle the issues are as well yeah so maybe just let me just connect a few things and then we can get to that discussion of civil disobedience or uncivil disobedience so Lincoln says the you know the real problem with this mob law is that eventually those um you know he admits that the the current mobs are driven by a quest for justice right they're ignoring the law in order to more speedily effect their view of justice but he says what happens when you do that you basically given license to those who care nothing about justice you know you're going to get the marauders and the the looters who will come out so that is the indirect dangers and then uh and then he says uh what effect will this have on the good citizen what will effect will it have on the very best citizens well if they see that popular governments is just degenerating into anarchy and chaos they'll give up on the whole project of self-government uh they will seek refuge in a strong man uh basically they will be willing to count and say change of regime so that's the threat to the participation of political institutions so he's given the problem he then has to uh state the solution and his solution is absolute law abidingness so uh he calls for a political religion of reverence for the law so it's not just law abidingness it's law abidingness in a particular spirit uh the spirit of reverential obedience so having stated that uh he then has to uh take account of an objection and it's not an objection he puts in someone else's voice he just says uh well you know don't mistake me don't think that i'm saying there are no bad laws uh of course there are bad laws and remember Lincoln is uh living in a time when you know slavery is legal in half the states and when the fugitive slave law uh is is in effect uh requirement that that people in the free states uh participate in the return of uh of fugitives so he's very aware of bad laws and he says but but still he insists uh bad laws must be religiously obeyed until repealed uh and the way i explain this i think this is a very stern lesson in sort of the foundations of democratic governance um justification of majority rule majorities are not always right uh but they uh they are our rightful rulers uh so there are all kinds of ways to get laws repealed you know right speech and press and assembly and petition and you know going through the political process uh but that is what Lincoln insists on so as i read his argument he says there is no such thing as civil disobedience all disobedience is uncivil and destructive of civil government all of all the things i learned from your analysis of this text this was the one thing that i really changed my understanding this uh most clearly so i'll just read a little bit of what Lincoln says i'll give you my misreading and then i'll sort of articulate how you corrected me on this so uh Lincoln says as you said let me not be interested in saying there's no such thing as bad laws i mean to say no such thing but i do mean to say that although bad laws uh if they exist should be repealed as soon as possible still while they continue in force for the sake of example they should be religiously observed so also in unprovided cases if such a rise let legal provision uh be made for them with the least possible delay but tell them let them if not too intolerable be born with it and i've always taken that parenthetical remark let them if not too intolerable be born with to imply that if there are intolerable unjust laws we should break them and can you just lay out your argument for you say grammar can come to our aid here because in other words you i took there to be a always follow law always follow law actually there's an out always follow the law and you're saying my little out was wrong so yeah can you just yeah we all want to see that wiggle room there we do i do because we have been i think very influenced by Martin Luther King uh absolutely so we're we're looking for that wiggle room uh yeah so if you go back to the uh the first sentence of that paragraph uh i think you could see there that he's actually talking about two different cases so again this is another kind of doubling i mean he's very carefully you know discriminating drawing these lines distinctions making the distinctions have to be made when i so presently or just observe his all the laws let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws case one nor that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made so there's two cases there's a case of bad law and then there's a case where there is no law as yet okay uh what he what he will next call an unprovided case yeah um and then he and then he addresses what what are the requirements in both of those cases well bad laws if they exist should be revealed as soon as possible still while they continue on force for the second example they should be religiously observed so bad law must obey always oh false false stop so also in unprovided cases so now he's shifting to the other option an unprovided case uh bad things are happening and there are no laws against those bad things the unprovided case he has such a rise so that's only the unprovided cases if such a rise let proper legal provisions be made for them with the least possible delay but till then let them if not too intolerable be born with so uh i think that wiggle room relates only to the unprovided cases and he then reiterates that in either case mob law is not the appropriate response and then he actually gives an example of an unprovided case and he says in any case that arises as for instance the promulgation of abolitionism so that would be considered by some people in unprovided case because there are lots of people southerners but not only southerners who think that abolitionism uh the promulgation of abolitionism should be outlawed and in fact right around this time period there were requests going out from uh southern legislatures calling upon northern legislatures to outlaw abolitionism and to denounce abolitionism and in fact Illinois had received one of these and the Illinois legislature will act on it uh they won't outlaw the promulgation of abolitionism but they will issue anti-abolition resolutions where they denounce abolitionism uh so i uh this is a very key moment in the speech where he is showing that somehow the controversy over slavery is really at the heart of everything that is happening uh at the heart of the breakdown in uh in law law and order why does he really go why does he ground it in the law of the city instead of eternal laws uh in this section uh you mean why doesn't he say um according to natural law and unjust law as well as well at all yeah yeah um but fair enough question um i i think Lincoln does believe in natural law or at least in natural rights so he believes in the self-evident truths of the declaration but he also understands those truths of declaration to establish the rightfulness of government by consent uh in other words the corollary of you know all men are created equal and endowed with rights the political corollary of that is government on the basis of consent and that means majority rule so precisely because of what may never be any of any agreement um you know as to actually you know which was or against the natural law which are not we are obliged to work through majority consent so the i mean what he's really trying to do here i think is to to show that law and justice can be brought more closely together uh and that there is a proper way to do that and what mob law does is to you know separate law from justice deny law in order to get a quicker arrival at your version of justice and you know the abolitionists are in their own way doing that also right they're the ones who are saying that uh you know our only guide is our own conscience in our own uh whatever our own conscience tells us the natural law is oh you give a really nice example of the unprovided case from Lincoln's presidency in the book uh with regard to the the widows of union soldiers african-american union soldiers i thought that was a really nice because i sort of always try to wrap my head around what would this mean in these cases and just what what should we what should the union do for the wives widows of union soldiers and you mentioned that he says well this very law seems to be that we ought to honor it just like we would for the for the white union soldiers so that's let's following what we ought to do in this unprovided case so there's there's some wiggle room yeah right we should proceed as if these marriages uh you know existed under law uh they did because slaves were not allowed to marry right yeah exactly but to go back to this promulgation of abolitionism uh i think what he does here is he's really quite remarkable because he doesn't he doesn't say what his own positions right but he just gives you this logical formulation well all right uh some people don't like the promulgation of abolitionism well one of two positions is necessarily true that is the thing is right within itself and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens or as well and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal and active and in either case is the interposition of mob law either necessary to justify or excuseable so i think what he's really doing there is he's trying to create space for civil debate and he's saying we can't just bury these moral questions we are going to have to face these questions is there anything wrong with the promulgation of abolitionism if you have that discussion about the promulgation of abolitionism you are eventually led to ask well what about abolitionism itself not just its promulgation not just free speech and pursuit of it but what about the thing itself is it right or wrong and to have that discussion you have to ask the main question what about slavery is it right or wrong and so i think he is leading these citizens who are just all caught up in either their pro-slavery or anti-slavery passions uh he's trying to get them to pull back from that and encourage real debate real discussion real civil discourse yeah the way you put it this time occurred to me was being able it's almost like um the the legal procedure forces a confrontation with the premises of the actual disagreement so you know one group goes around paying uh any black person that seems free right or and then the other group goes around hanging any slave owner any stuller that seems like they don't slice and there's all these inchoate ideas or principles operating in these actions that you know though justice might be done in a particular mob activity um it's a disservice to the intellects right of the nation and it's a it's a failure to be fully articulate in what your principles are and therefore you know you you you discuss this a little bit later i think in the second inaugural uh chapter but there's no way to get a kind of enduring sense of peace or or unity out of that unless you're hashing these out right um you know through the kind of legal procedure where you have no choice but to be articulating from the so yeah as you describe moving from the immediate claim to the bigger issue to the most fundamental issue here which is slavery um you do sense that there's a move from passion to reason which is in a way where the the speech is going right yeah i think that's right he's always trying to bring the debate to the level of principle and he in speech after speech you can see him doing that he seemed doing in a corporate union uh where where he says uh you say we're sectional uh we deny it uh what's your evidence uh and and then he eventually brings him to to say well you know it's really this question of slavery uh now we're at the level of principle that's where you should have began in the first place uh okay let's let's have that discussion principle can i um i'd like to return to something that pallets were a little bit ago and when i've taught this in the past i taught it in a bunch of different classes of classical ambition but i've also taught it in a class where i sort of just look at the law and i sort of frame the entire class with this speech and Martin Luther King jr's letter from Birmingham jail and i've always taught them in opposition and i think it sort of confuses students because i don't students come into the class with a certain prejudice on the one hand i really like Abraham Lincoln i really like and i really like Martin Luther King jr and so therefore it's sort of you know 18 year old kids they're like how can these two men whom i admire greatly how can they have such radically different understand things and you sort of lay this out very nicely as you say uh they fundamentally disagree on this foundational question of the nature of citizenship and the relationship between law and justice and so as you as you've already alluded to in your answer to David right king thinks that you have more obligation to break on just laws and the Lincoln as as you've corrected me there's no room for a quiccation should always follow law even if it's unjust and so i just i don't know i know that Alex wanted to talk about this i mean i don't know what else there's a say there's this clear opposition between the two of them and i was just wondering if if you had anything you want to share on this point i suppose uh well uh people should be able to buy the book of course i do you want to steal all the beans right i bring in some other voices too uh both malcomx and red or douglas and the way which they weigh in on this question um yeah i mean i i guess the only thing that i might say i mean we can talk about where uh king and Lincoln disagree but i i think it's important to always point out that much much the majority of the civil rights movement took place with no civil disobedience at all in other words things like you know the Montgomery bus boycott uh that's a mass action it's non-violent mass action but it involves no civil disobedience it involves no wall breaking uh so you know in a way we're sort of led astray because letter from Birmingham jail has become so much a part of the canon uh that we just think that that's sort of how the movement operated and you know most of what was done didn't involve civil disobedience at all all of the very dangerous work uh you know getting getting voters registered in the south that that involves no civil disobedience uh even even uh Rosa Parks uh that is technically not civil disobedience that is a kind of you could call it a kind of institutionalized civil disobedience that is a allowed as a result of judicial review the supremacy of the constitution and judicial review so there you you are sort of breaking a law in order to test the constitutionality of a law the reminiscible or state or federal law and the system is actually open to doing that right um i i guess what i was struck by um i don't know one of the words in your mouth was just that a sort of lincolnian i don't know if that's how you turn that into magic or not but how Lincoln might respond to a Martin Luther King and basically the idea being that of course he would believe i think it was fair saying Lincoln was of course believing the rightness of the cause right now that they're having some of their fundamental civil rights if not even something closer to natural rights being violated but um that this sets an enormously bad precedent um that this this sort of undermines attachment it definitely undermines the idea that the law is something that should be revered and so that and so that it sets it sets into people's minds the notion that they can they can be civilly disobedient whenever they object to a law so i now i think it's true that in the long run it has had some very bad effects and you can see it in even in the what we now define as peaceful protest uh it looks nothing like the peaceful protest of the 50s and 60s uh that's a kind of sign of that so i think Lincoln is probably right that this does have a disintegrative effect now i mean of course you know i think king tries to argue that there is a way to break law reverentially right so he does you know you have to do it lovingly you have to do it with willingness to accept the uh the penalty uh he attaches certain conditions to the way in which civil disobedience must be performed in order to remain civil i just don't think uh that those are sufficient and he says that this is in fact showing the highest reverence for the law right yeah yeah thought else yeah another one that you mentioned just in reference to current events openly right uh you're candid about your upfront about it whereas uh with and i don't think this is a part of this issue but with a lot of the stuff going on nowadays um there's a lot of hiding and trying to evade punishment right to get away with it um i think it's it's really interesting this question of a law and the question of how to this is such a difficult question we're always facing how to promote the changing of an unjust law right and you know some people will take the route of trying to get a celebrity to advocate for them because you know they have a larger platform but there's always the uh impetus to gather large groups of people and you point out that of all of our our constitutionally guaranteed rights this uh the right to assemble is only one with a frivial modifier right uh which uh again uh here's your your careful attention to grammar peaceably uh to assemble yeah it's it's an interesting uh point yeah so in the run of show i i don't know if we want to transition topics greg roe asked dr shab about lion kings uh in ambitions i don't know which it's a kunamatali y'all yeah it was the kind of uh novel interpretation greg had to go along with his previous misreadings but but what is this tribe of the where does ambition so now we're in the latter part uh the speed you know you know i even say why didn't the speech end with uh you know okay reverence for the law right now right now the moral solution is uh reverence for the law uh there's this little special case of the unprovided cases that's abolitionism that should be sort of the end of the speech uh but then Lincoln turns not from the current danger but to the future danger and that's where he introduces that time-honored category of the few and the many and this is also where he reexamens the founding and you might say that he's driven to reexamine the founding because his his diagnosis of the problem has maybe indicated that um you know the founders didn't achieve everything you know maybe we haven't yet uh proven the possibility of self-government and that leads him to this reconsideration of the founders and it's kind of shocking uh because he before he called them hardy brave and patriotic and now he reveals that the few among them were really seeking fame and celebrity and distinction and it just so happened that they could achieve those things by you know proving this unproven proposition of the capability of the people to govern themselves um and then he also uh gives a reconsideration of the the many uh presumably earlier they were part of that brave hardy and patriotic uh founding generation and now it turns out uh they were driven by the basis motives the basis passion uh hatred and revenge and all of that was directed against the British so again it was salutary the passions of the few and the passions of the many at the time of the founding were salutary and could be directed towards this great project of liberty and self-government but what Lincoln says is that now and in the future those passions will no longer have those salutary effects without an outside enemy those passions of hatred and revenge will prove divisive they will be directed inward against fellow Americans and the passions of the few for fame and distinction uh Lincoln says well you know for most people people are kind of moderate ambition the system will work ambition counteracting ambition will work if all you want to be is you know a governor or a senator or president of the United States if you have that kind of mediocre ambition uh this system will probably work for you uh but if you belong to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle if you are an aspiring Caesar Napoleon or Alexander um you know presidency of the United States would be small potatoes uh you would not be content to be a custodian in the house of the fathers you know it's not sufficient to be president number 44 but he's worried about Elon Musk is that who he's working on well yeah i mean i guess it it it it i think it's a real question for us to to examine whether we think people like this exist or not uh are they part of an older order that is just now gone uh are they now taking different routes and so maybe they're not such a threat uh to the political order uh tophill seems to think that democracy will so tamp down ambition make it so mediocre that tophill sees the real problem as uh you know we need to heighten ambition we need to have lofty ambition uh he wants to revive serious ambition uh Lincoln seems to think that this overweening ambition is bolting ambition is a permanent human possibility uh democracy will not change it it will arise and he says that uh the only solution to this is that the people be intelligent enough to recognize it uh and uh you know prepared to thwart it uh certainly at least prepared not to both these people into office yeah and these one of the one thing i kind of came away from with uh while reading uh this chapter was the sense that the constitution is good for these kind of little mini tyrants or petty tyrants who are content to go stream on c-spand or or tweet and get likes and then they feel content you know at night and and their ambition is kind of acted with other similar to but there's this even deeper ambition that is only satisfied by upending everything right and any cost right and even even in favor of a good outcome right like ending slavery right and so he's and i think this is this remark really helps make sense of of uh if things Lincoln did like holding his his second election right not not really forcing himself to go through the motions even to the possible detriment of the outcome because otherwise he'd be one of these these usurper alliance right yeah i i think that's right i mean when people read the speech uh some people say well Lincoln is talking about itself uh and he does seem to i don't know have the fact that he has this awareness of this human type might be an indication that he feels that temptation uh if he does feel that temptation i think he's successfully resisted uh and that his real purpose is to alert americans to others out there uh who might uh who might have these kinds of aspirations just i i've often i've often sort of wondered or thought that what not that Lincoln sees himself as that type i mean maybe maybe i am sort of inclined to that view but but that Lincoln sees so for the problem of law law the solution is you know revere the law let's you know have mothers preach this to their children and teachers and all that with the problem of these super ambitious types the napoleans and so on i wonder if he's not implying that the answer to that actually is someone of equal equal ambition but who is not devoted to tearing it down and so in the words like he loses these people who won't be satisfied because there's nothing left to build and so they might tear it down and there by the way i think he has in mind i think abolitionists on one hand but also um slave people on the other like cal hoons of the world who are like buying tear it all down so we can keep our slavery and so i just wonder if he doesn't like it's might take a link into counter these guys and so he's similar in some regards i don't know if i can put my finger on the way in which he's different like yeah i mean you know Harry japa who has an extensive chapter about this speech i think his suggestion is that according to what Lincoln officially says uh they're two possibilities you're either a founder or you are a you know an unfounder you're a founder republic or you destroy the republic uh and the presentation of ambition is in a way morally neutral so yeah if you have the option to be a founder uh you prefer to do the good thing but if those paths have been tread well then lincoln says you'll just have to set boldly forth upon the bad so if you can't emancipate the slaves you will uh insulate free men um what japa says is that there might be a third possibility and that would be to be the savior of the republic and in the moment of crisis the savior of the republic uh over tops the founder of the republic uh saving the union may be a more significant action than founding the union uh and you know it's true that in the rankings of residence uh i think most people put lincoln above washington or if you think of the lincoln memorial you know in this temple as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union the memory of abraham lincoln is enshrined forever there's a kind of acknowledgement of that in lincoln himself in his spring field farewell when he leaves uh to go to washington dc and he says i leave you know with a with a task upon me greater than that faced by washington and i so that i and you mentioned i think in the book you can correct if i'm wrong but that's his last mention of washington explicitly in one of these public talks is that yeah i mean you see in the lincoln address he ends with this kind of commercial working on our invocation washington and he does the same thing in the lincoln address uh there's some speeches in the fifties uh at fifties where he will also kind of invoke washington not not quite at the very end of the address but very near the end of the address and that that that ceases really uh once he assumes the presidency uh you could see it in the in the first inaugural he ends with god rather than with uh i'm wondering if um on this score and this is going a little out of order on the run show but i'm i think maybe partly spurred by things you said but i'm not gonna attribute them to you if i've misunderstood things but i take there to be an implicit critique of the founders in this speech and also in the gettiesburg address and i i don't know if this is fair to like in other words um see how best i can say this that they misunderstood some that the founders didn't adequately provide for the problem of perpetuation if that makes sense that they may not have adequately taken care of the fact that these other ambitious types might come around that they i'm an exaggerate but too much talking in reason and institutions uh to maintain the republican didn't of course mason talks about reverence in the federal papers and the other places and he's not nearly as coldly rational as jefferson but right that there's like that there needs to be this union of nature and convention and even religion all three working together to sort of keep the republic together i don't know if that's maybe that's not quite as clear as i want to go down here maybe to tie this to the next point about passion and reason right right and religion and reason bringing you to a kind of reverence i was reading that and it reminded me of federalist 37 where the kind of the list takes a step back and says okay look you might have your criticisms you might see there's some defects but add it all up when has there ever been such a confluence of events if you're a man of reason you're gonna say wow we're really lucky and if if you're a man of god you're gonna say oh this is the hand of the figure of the almighty right that's that's guiding us there's a way in which reflection in federalist 37 gets you somewhere close to reverence or somewhere close to to a kind of a sense of divine providence operating i want do and just to connect this in relation to the founders maybe i could take the counterpoint to great i get a little bit of a sense that he might be borrowing from fellers 37 or maybe that's that's not a well established connection but it just seems to echo it so much that reason can get you to this so is he maybe trying to do as a counterpoint to great not necessarily critiquing the founders but offering a kind of um a restatement or in in terms of the present issue right of this reason that gets you back to reverence well i guess i might take a position in between the in between the two of you so i i don't know that i would go so far as to call it a critique i mean there is this reconsideration of the founding um but it it it it seems to me that he accepts all that the founders have done i mean he believes in those mechanisms he believes in the institutions remember he's interested in the perpetuation of our institutions so he thinks that yeah the checks and balances work the ambition counteracting efficient works uh but but it it it it by itself is not sufficient so i think he picks up themes that are present in the founders but don't figure in the structure of our government so i mean i think his main point is just the point that self-government really doesn't work if you don't have self-governing individuals and so there has to be more attention to the character of the people that means there has to be more attention to the formulation of a public opinion that will support those institutions and i think actually that he can find much of that in washington's farewell address so in that way he's sort of continuing themes that are present in the founders so allux's this point about about poontlius i'm not sure we're talking here about the same federalist paper is it the one where he where cooglius is responding to jefferson's suggestion for uh constitutional conventions and yeah yeah i think it's i think it's that one because after 36th they kind of pause yeah they talk sort of the author of the i think it's the more just just the author of the notes no time state of Virginia right so you're trying to jefferson's desire to have a whole lot more you know change uh constant sort of institutionalized revolution and cooglius madison makes this argument uh for reverence uh the need for reverence we we want the constitution to be you know mostly untouched we don't want lots of amendments we don't want lots of constitutional conventions we don't ever want to repeat this experiment again if we don't have to uh but i think the difference is maybe that madison describes reverence as a salutary prejudice uh so he admits that it's a it's a prejudice it's you know it's a kind of filial piety uh and you know it works to the good actually and i think he says you if you had a nation of philosophers you could just rely on reason to encourage you know law abidingness and uh and not tampering with it with the constitution but you're not going to get that and so you need something in its stead and if you if you don't tamper much with the constitution then this prejudice will go will grow up around it and we'll have reverence for it so it's interesting that they both call for reverence but i think Lincoln suggests that this reverence can actually be a kind of um it's one of the fruits of reason so that when he puts forward his solution to how do you deal with these bad passions right the solution is reason right passion helped us in the in the past it can do so no more in fact in the future passion will be our enemy and what we need is instead reason we need to build new pillars to support the edifice of liberty and those pillars have to be worked out of the material the solid quarry of reason and he describes actually reverence as one of those pillars that reason can produce you call it a lesson on the part of the people sound morality and reverence for the constitution and laws are all things that are somehow crafted from reason you have a interesting you say it's more rot resistant yeah rot resistant right yeah so maybe maybe one way to summarize this before we close it out so we're kind of at the tail end of this and end with this reverence for Washington um i want to go back to the sort of situation right at the beginning right mob ocracy right there's people running around doing what they think is is just um and at the end he he's proposing that the reason we can work our way to a reference uh for um the the law and in between those two we see all these interesting rhetorical devices meant to make his audience more reflective is there a way that we can therefore take this speech maybe as more fundamentally a reflection on the importance of effective political rhetoric um that that that don't forget the life at the eagle but somebody like a Lincoln has to recognize the depth of the problem and work from from the passions that are there up towards this reason and it takes a kind of this sort of mixture it's almost like a rhetoric and dialectic right with the anticipatory questions but this kind of educative uh rhetoric you know yeah i think that's right you can just tell me what you think yeah so that that's another way to think about what he doesn't theorize or thematize uh so you got the founders you got the unfounders uh you maybe have these people who act as saviors uh but it seems to me if Lincoln is thinking that at this point you know he certainly can't have in mind uh the role that he plays himself uh in emancipating slaves i think what he has in mind uh is education in other words he understands the role of the legislature uh really in the way that erstald did uh the most important task of the legislator is education and so he really is acting as a kind of preceptor of the people he describes here's what the people have to be if they are going to defeat the Napoleonic types uh but he doesn't say whether the people can get there themselves and it may require someone like himself to to educate them and you see him here you know age 28 undertaking that task uh for uh for these young men a little bit younger than himself uh and it seems to me this is what he does throughout his career you see it from his you see it from his first public statement forward you see when he's 23 years old in his declaration of candidacy uh when he's 23 years old and he calls for uh more education he describes the curriculum that is needed in order to make people uh treasure liberty. Professor shawl i'm gonna do a clumsy segue here Lincoln has educator uh you have educated this book and but maybe we could turn talk about as we wind things down your own education how did you get interested in Lincoln or political thought generally political thought we were just mentioned about the game before we move on to this sure sure sure i was gonna end with it but now is as good time as any we'll do it again then we'll do it again then we'll do it again then we'll do it again then we'll do it now go ahead his greatest speech is how Lincoln moved the nation uh by Diana Schaup uh same arms rest it's got all the speeches in there uh it's extremely well written clearly written thoughtful and takes you through it step by step can't recommend this enough i think i actually can get this from my dad he's kind of a history that's a great idea yeah thanks um yeah my own education uh well went to uh Kenyon college which uh he could sort of plot my whole trajectory from uh from Kenyon forward pretty much what one would expect i mean it was a wonderful department uh had really been founded by Bob Horowitz uh studied there with with Bob and with Pam Janssen uh and went to the University of Chicago Joseph Propsy uh Ralph Lerner Leung Cass and uh Ralph Lerner did you so did you choose Kenyon by chance or was it did you know that had this reputation yeah actually uh um i was looking at you know decent liberal arts uh colleges in in Ohio within range of home we went to visit Kenyon and i sat in on their very famous course uh poli sci one two uh the quest for justice course i sat in when they were covering the apology and i was so captivated by it i just said this is it this is where i'm going uh supposed to get back in the car and go visit Oberlin i uh i said no i'm not going there who needs those hippies no sense taking me there my parents insisted on driving me there i refused to get out of the car come on no no yeah i refused to get out of the car i said no i'm going to Kenyon i'm flying early edition that's it wow and who was it was one of them lecturing that day or was it all of them working together or it was actually Bill Shapiro uh oh wow yeah and who taught it at Kenyon for a while uh but it was his class that i sat in on that is really something very cool okay and uh very nice okay well if you don't mind uh we have some silly questions now after the sort of serious questions they're sort of serious but uh it's mixed in with some silly it's lightning round so it's just sort of you know quick answer first thing that comes to mind oh Alex would like to know whatever let's me do this first what else i've got two questions first here i see a red lobe on your bookshelf there's just a lonely lobe right there what is that yeah well i'm actually uh i'm in an apartment i'm at harvard teaching the lincoln course so i only brought a few books with me so i have a few lincoln books and i have a few montas few books those are the two things that i'm but i i did also bring sisaro i just had the idea that i owned the sisaro for a while and that i need to look at it it was time yeah and my second question is uh what is your favorite breed of dog and why is it a portuguese water dog oh man okay this can not go to find a article this this should be its own episode uh you would love to have you back to talk about dogs because we wanted absolutely amazing dogs uh let me just maybe one long sentence on a portuguese water dog they have a perfect balance of the three main working drives that dogs have so uh they were used as uh fishermen's helpers by the portuguese fishermen so they have verse wrong retrieving instincts you know they would like retrieve overboard articles and things like that uh they were used to guard the boats and sound the alert for sharks so they have uh you know protection instincts and they have hurting instincts because they were actually used they would send the dogs out they would be these huge vast schools of tuna which are fairly slow moving fish and they would actually heard stories are they would herd the fish towards the nets and for people who don't know you have portuguese water dogs you train them to do their traditional we talked about this uh and uh jack miller yes i want a 60 foot fishing that just so my dogs can jump off a boat and carry it to another boat wow that's great what are their names uh the two we have right now are perry after uh after uh admiral perry all over head over here in cleveland yeah and uh and the young girl is zora zora great is also a dog lover and he has a strong he inclined towards which is uh what is it disabled chihuahuas uh look disabled dogs need love to see you alex yeah uh they're rescue i rescue chihuahuas it's true story and they're they're just they're just precious they can't do any tricks whatsoever that's not true they do tricks they sit and bark and roll oh that's gonna be tricks that's right i can recommend a uh you know a training group where you sign up with fantastic one of the dogs is actually very well trained my wife is trained him he's uh his name is stubby he is disabled as alex is is mentioning his leg is broken and in every hill probably but we trained him so he can go to you know hospitals and uh retirement communities and stuff like that so he's a he's a therapy dog yeah yeah yeah yeah it is great okay um what is your favorite work of philosophy well i suppose it has to either be the spirit of laws want to skew or uh i suppose eristotle that the politics of the epic very nice that's the first monoske we've got that's excellent we'll be back on to talk about monoskew at some point how about a favorite work of literature uh yeah uh british and american novelists so uh you have to pick one probably uh henry james portur de laite or the other close second would be georgelia middle mark maybe it's nodding yes very good uh we try to do more literature on the show at some point what's the favorite place you've ever visited well i'm pretty much a homebody uh but uh we did take a wonderful trip to portugal really like lisbon and we went to the dogs we went yes we went we went there to olea on the aldar so that we could visit the ancestral you know lands of the portuguese water dog that's really cool yeah we have a half of these i might have to take a trip to cuba and just hang out to go to cars to get in touch with my dog that's like yeah that's all right yeah that's all right yeah that's a shock these water dogs in uh in the aldar of any water they're all like ockers annual sort well what was your first car oh uh uh well it was the uh hand me down uh second family car it was a 1971 Dodge art uh grandpa top nice manual transmission uh no i didn't learn to drive one eventually but no that was uh that was okay very good um have you ever had any nicknames uh yeah uh don't feel obliged to share but you'd like to really took hold but um yeah moved from minnesota to ojio mid high school and i was a big biking span fran tarkington was quarterback at the time so my friends in ojio called me franny franny that's dear friend tarkington and then i have a friend now who knows how influenced i've been by harry jaffa and he sometimes calls me harry it harry it yeah very cool and work at the clear mind institute so they'll be really pleased uh yeah none of those have uh have uh have taken hold so i have two job related questions first question what was your first job and second question if you had not become a professor what do you think you'd be doing oh i should be a member of the tribe of the eagle right i have to ask that maybe a dog trainer i'm actually very good at it uh oh yeah um it's very cool and uh let's see what was the other one first job your first job i was a paper girl isn't that right yeah very entrepreneurial yeah very well paper route okay and uh who would you say is the best politician in your lifetime that's our last question one you don't have to answer that's not the last question oh no we got one more family doesn't everybody say Ronald Reagan i don't know the vast majority of our guests have said Ronald Reagan uh we've had once you make harder you know there are all kinds of people that i wanted as president uh who never got elected you know like jack hampt and uh yeah folks like that very cool david has another question for you the diana which uh podcast has provided you with more intellectual stimulation conversations with bill he's been on a podcast and different or the new friend of the show or what or the new thinkory well uh you know you you guys are like the great trilumvirate here so uh it's not a fair comparison that's fair you know it's free it's free to one it's free yeah and you've been on bill's show a few times right yeah yeah yeah yeah well diana thanks but you know but bill had his his text open did all of you have your text in front of you what you have like did you do you have the lysium address what i guess it is in the event it's in your book did you like this i had your book and i had my link in book and just like go back and forth between zero more more quickly but yeah i did so it has been a real pleasure i've been going on onto the guys about uh your talk at jack and those and thanks to the jack and all center for helping arrange this we really appreciate that and we sure hope to have you back some time and folks should rush right on by that book one last time it's his greatest his greatest speech is how linken moved to the nation by don't shop with st martin press you can buy it right now on amazon and wherever you buy your books don't forget to like rate subscribe follow the new sinkory we'll see you next time folks thanks so much bye bye bye