Interview: Jerry Weinberger on Ben Franklin's Autobiography

Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barr. And with me as always, is my good friend Alex Brieu. How are you?

I'm doing well. I feel very healthy and well and need no relief to my estate. How about you, Greg? How are you doing?

Oh, must be nice. Must be nice feeling well. The vid finally got me after two and a half years. I'm not happy to.

I'm feeling mallewood now finally. That's nice. So Greg realized that he got COVID and then proceeded on to his agent parents house. That's right.

There's a lot of time being. And then yes, Greg's parents have a lot of coin in the bank. They don't. I'm sequestered up here in the bonus room.

This is where I spent the entire last three or four days. It's like an old treadmill, some 30 year old couches. It's great. Some weird beer signs behind me.

So today our guest is Jerry Weinberger. He's the University Distinguished Professor Emeritus from Michigan State University. So Jerry's name, I think it was well known to me over the years and probably to Alex and Greg through our study of Francis Bacon. So he has a number of additions of Bacon's work, the history of the reign of in Henry VII, the New Atlantis and the Great Instoration, which I encourage everybody to purchase.

But his first book is tremendous. And it's titled Science, Faith in Politics, Francis Bacon, and the utopian roots of the modern age, a commentary on Bacon's advancement of learning. But today he's here to discuss Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which is also the subject of his latest book, Benjamin Franklin on Mast, on the unity of his moral religious and political thought. And you can purchase that at the University of Press, Kansas.

So Jerry, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Let's jump into this.

All right. And I think, so the esoteric thing is an interesting way into it because you quote in your book and you emphasize this right that he has his learning of, he reads that of on Smirbelia and it leads him eventually to a kind of appreciation of subtly qualifying with claims in public. And so he's misunderstood, but in a positive way by nearly everybody he runs into, he seems able to curate with them. But one of the things that's interesting that we were corresponding about beforehand is the genesis of your work on Franklin, which included a kind of aha moment, as well as the long process of writing the book, I think it took you 10 years.

We did. Yeah. Well, actually, yeah. Which frankly, the length I think has led to great clarity.

Yeah. Because it's very, very precise and clear in the way. So maybe give us a little bit of background on how the book gave it a big. Okay, sure.

Well, I had never read a word of Benjamin Franklin. And I was at the American Political Science Association meeting about 30 years ago. And I ran into a guy named, I don't you probably know of him, maybe Wilson Carrey McWilliams. He wrote this gigantic book on fraternity and his father was the founding editor of The Nation.

And I knew him. And he was an editor at the University Press of Kansas series on American political philosophy and law. And so he asked me to go to have a drink with him in the bar in Chicago where his convention hotel was. And that was something that Carrey did a lot.

And anyway, and so he said, I want you to write a book for our series on Benjamin Franklin. And I said, why? You know, I never read a word of him. And he said, well, if you do, you will find that he was America's foremost follower of Sir Francis's agent.

And so have a look and see what you think. So that's what started me on the road. And as I said, I did have this aha moment. I started reading the autobiography and I read it three or four times.

And the first thing I was surprised to see is that the book is not, his autobiography is not just about his coming from a good family, a poor but good family and getting into business and becoming very wealthy and famous and all those things. It's really a morality play about his youth. The whole first section of the autobiography is about how he saved himself from really the poison of the enlightenment. So by the time he was 14 years old, he had read the entire collection of writers and books that constitute the European and especially the English enlightenment.

And he used to be an oza. I mean, you name it. And as he tells the story of his life, he became this 14 year old deist and by reading his father's books of theology. But he tells us that in fact he wasn't just a deist.

He was, he became an atheist and he was actually run out of Boston. The reason he left Boston, he went to Philadelphia was, and he says this in the autobiography, I determined to leave when the good people of the city were pointing their fingers at me as a wretched infidel and atheist. And we're parallels with the young Rousseau. Oh yeah.

Yeah. And a young David Barr, I would say too. Chased out of Kensington, right? Yeah.

So anyway, so then he went to London. When he was 18, he went to London and he wrote this brilliant but scandalous metaphysical essay called Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, which effectively proved that the world is as good as it is the best world possible. And therefore, vice and virtue simply don't exist. And it's actually a comedy because it has some arguments in it that are just so ridiculous that the genius who wrote it couldn't possibly have thought they would have been arguments.

So for instance, he says because there's an absolute economy, a pleasure and pain in the world, a man who has been stretched on the rack for most of his life will have a moment when he realizes he's going to die of enormous and exquisite pleasure that balances everything out. And of course, he doesn't mention the fact, well, what if he doesn't, what if he says to me on the rack or what if somebody shoots him from the back of the head or, so these things were comical. But at any rate, he reports that he became a sound group. OK.

Under the influence of this atheistic nihilism, he became a kind of sound group. And that's true. I mean, if you believe what he says, and he betrayed his friends, he ignored his soon to be wife. He put a mash on his best friend's girl.

And he stole money from somebody who let him borrow. He wanted him to take some money to somebody else. And then he says, I saw I was getting in such trouble that I realized this is not good for me. And I'm going to wind up in jail or dead or whatever.

And so he then reports that he has this moral epitheming and a religious epitheming. And he comes to realize that virtue and vice are good and important things. The most important form of virtue and vice is public service and aiding your fellow human beings. And he came to his 10-point religion, which he put the rest of his life, he professed to believe it.

And there is God and his best worship by serving other people. And but the crucial thing is, and he judges our virtue and our vice and punishes or rewards us for that in the next life. Now that's particular profit. That's the doctrine of a particular project.

So the whole first story is I became an atheist, I denied particular providence. It got me in all kinds of trouble. I had a moral and religious epiphany and I came back to morality and I came back to particular providence. And then about 80 pages later, when he sums up his life, actually turning into his life in business, this is the turn from his moral, youthful moral of life to his political and business life.

And then that's where he says, well, the first principle is I always believed in particular providence. Now, as I said, it took me a while to realize this. And I even went so far as to go to my gym and ask some normal people, businessmen, people who aren't professors who don't believe anything. Professors will fall for anything.

They'll say, well, he forgot. I mean, a lot of people, some people I correspond with say, well, he just forgot that this happened. Well, that's absurd. So I went to about five people and I said, if you were ever an atheist and got in trouble and then got faith, would you forget that?

Could you possibly forget that and spiritual and religious and moral event in your life? And they just laughed. Belly, of course not. No, normally being could forget that.

And so, but what's amazing is that the the the most of the sort of standard Franklin scholarship is, well, yeah, this happened. He lost his religion and then he got it back. But they never, but never do they comment on this egregious, egregious contradiction that makes the entire thematic first part unintelligible. So maybe another element to bring in here that I think is interesting, right?

So there's this superficial, right? Obviously superficial because there's this contradiction, right? Spiritual journey. Yeah.

That turns out not to be so the questions. How do you solve this? But maybe another side of this you bring is you describe two socratic terms, right? Or two, yeah, ages and it's so it seems like there's also a philosophic journey here, right?

Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. Also has to do with the repudiation of this dissertation on liberty and necessity. Yeah.

You have thoughts on how this really but yeah. The other thing really quick, Jerry, just a back on the Talax's good question, a smaller insignificant one. I thought that when he kept citing Bunyan's children's progress, he was kind of telegraphing that he too is engaged in a kind of likely story, redemption that that wasn't really. Yeah.

I'm glad that I don't really have too much of an opinion about that. I don't know that too well. So, but according to his own explanation of his early life, he learned how to perform socratic reputations from reading Zenitha. And of course, if you want to learn about how Socrates used to confound people and make them conclude that their opinions don't make any sense about especially moral and political things, that's where you go to look and play out.

Can I, can I, can I, one second, there actually just trigger for me. You don't actually see Socrates doing much of that in the memorabilia, do you? I mean, that's a much more platonic Socrates. There are a guy who confounds people who refuse that.

Socrates and memorabilia, this might be just further element of Franklin's irony. He just seems like more of a moralist, which I think is a false, but I don't think I think Zenitha is not really presenting Zenitha as a moralist. But he doesn't really think he has that. But he thinks that he's presenting him as an I'm sorry.

Yeah, but I think what Franklin said about his experience with Zenitha is I learned how to perform socratic reputations from readings out. And then I actually performed them on my neighbor. And it wasn't long before I realized, well, he says, in my youth, I was so smart that I just, I was a loudmouth refuger of people. Okay, nothing fancy.

Just you're full of sh**, you know, and this is wrong and that's wrong. And his father told him to stop that. And so then after that, he came into contact with Zenitha and he says, ah ha, now I know how to do this. You don't just yell and scream at people.

You hoist them on the partard of their own presumptions and opinions. But he says, I did this for quite a while. And that's when he got run out of town because people thought he was an infidel and an atheist. And so he said, he went, they moved to a much more down key, you know, low key version of these recitations.

And he never actually less a c-1, okay? But he says he did them and performed them. And then at some point he stopped, you know, after he, or he gradually left it off and took up a second form of irony, so to speak, which is never to say anything parenthetically, you know, well, I think in my opinion, this should be the case or whatever. So at any rate, he came to under, you know, as I read the autobiography, he actually came to understand it from Zenitha and you could learn how to effectively deconstruct your own political and moral opinions.

And that's what I think he did. And that's what, and he did it for himself, but he did it to others because he couldn't be sure that he was, you know, is it just me or is it me and almost everybody like me? And I think the answer was yes. And it doesn't, he does it also in an interesting way on a mass scale by publishing point-counterpoint pieces in the local press, it's pseudonymous.

Oh, yeah. And some of those kind of public display, but still there's a mask. Yeah, they're masterful works of esotericism, they really are. And sometimes they're more obvious than other times, but some of them are just absolutely remarkable.

So for instance, if you Franklin wrote two essays that I think he published in the magazine called Oats Simplicity and Oats Anxiety. Okay. Well, the first line of simplicity is the first line of Francis Bacon's essay on cunning. And the first line of sincerity is the first line of Bacon's simulation and this simulation, which is about how to lie and when not to.

And then if you read them carefully, guess what? In fact, if you read them carefully and pull the spring, Oats Simplicity is all about how to be cunning and Oats sincerity is all about knowing when and where you should lie. So I'm back into an accident that he got this completely right. So some of them are brilliant.

And but I think that what I was more surprised to find out was that Franklin did not come to his unbelief by way of materialistic presuppositions. Okay. He has it out for materialism, which is the Enlightenment, Patsy, which is the Enlightenment path. This world is made of atoms and a going one direction and that's it.

And there's, yeah, there's a wonderful place where he wrote a piece called The Letter of a Drum. And then he wrote another piece about that piece called On That Odd Letter of a Drum. And of course, this is about a bunch of the first part of it is these preachers have come to town and they get a hotel. Well, no, there's this man who writes and says, I know the world is full of atheists and spinosists and hobbyists.

And I used to be one of them, but then I met a Reverend gentleman who told me about a miracle that he saw this miracle of the drum. And I actually started believing back in spooks and miracles again. And then something happened that maybe started somebody said, well, that's a million bars. And I said, yeah, you're beautiful.

You know, you're basically full of sh** about this drum stuff. And so he started his new faith in spirits, staggered. And then he's asking, then Franklin, the editor, what should I still continue to stagger or should I believe in spirits or not? And Franklin writes back in the name of somebody, a man named Fyloclerus, friend of the clergy.

And in this piece, he says, you should be careful. You know, up to now I've never seen you be irresponsible and attacked the clergy. But anybody who reads this piece knows you're being a wag. You're damaging the clergy and you should understand, you will fall, Franklin should understand that you should not undermine the clergy.

And then he introduces a character called Fyloclerus, okay? Who makes this, who makes a case for why writer of this letter is, in fact, a kind of a dogmatic wag. You know, the guy who writes this obvious parody is a dogmatic wag. And then, Frank, I got this right in front of me.

Oh, okay. So, Franklin eventually makes it clear that this guy is a wag, not because he's being funny about religion, but that because he refuses, he's dogmatically refusing to believe in the possibility of the miracle from the get go, okay? And then he has this guy, Phil, and here I'll read this if you don't mind, because it's really please please. Pyloclerus, besides, as far as we know, there is nothing impossible in the thing itself, i.e.

the miracle, we cannot be certain there are no spirits existing, is rather highly probable that there are. And no, neither, there are motives, nor methods of acting nor can we tell by what means, and they render themselves perceptible to our senses. He goes on to say that even those who study animals conclude that the mind and the body are somehow connected. And indeed, the anatomists, he says, and philosophers report that the brain and the body are connected and that the brain forms sounds and images based on the striking of air and light on the sensory nerves.

A blow upon the eye creates the sense of light when no light can in fact be present. Every kid is done this. You know, hey, you want to see something on the playground, push your eye and you'll see this light, you know, but no one whose eye is struck can see that light. Given these facts, says, by the clear, how can we be social, that a spirit could not likewise affect a man's eyes and cause him to have a vision that note that others cannot succeed and says final virus might not the same principle apply to the auditory nerves so that one person might hear a drum, though no one else heard it.

So the miracle was that this drum back. So he goes on to conclude, now how can we be assured that it is not in the power of the spirit without the body to operate in a like manner on the nerves of sight and give them the same vibrations as when a certain object appears before the eye, though no such object really is present. And accordingly, make a particular man see the apparition of any person or thing in pleasure when no one else in company can see it. So what he implies is something that actually if you start thinking about Hobbes, even Hobbes in the Leviathan, you know, Hobbes is a completely dogmatic materialist, but he does somehow give away a certain path to when he in the second half of the Leviathan, almost nobody beats the second parts of the Leviathan because it's all about religion and especially the lunatic religion that he thinks is going to be the religion of his, the world he's creating.

But even Hobbes flirts with the idea that there might be something like spirits that are in fact material. They're like really fine clouds or some kind of myths or something. And so I think that the upshot is that Franklin, much, I mean, Hobbes flirts with this, but then he drops it. Okay.

But Franklin does not drop this problem he's got with materialism. And so I thought it was entirely possible that materialism for him is empatent against religion, either because it's simply dogmatic. Okay. And just assuming that if just assumes that everything is matter and so there can't be spirits, okay, and they can't, they don't prove that even that they're elaborate metaphysical, you know, wingedings, they don't do it.

But also it might be even possible that materialism is empatent because materialism could be as Hobbes suggests kind of key to understanding what spirits are. So this is, I think the crucial, if I could point to something that I think is the most important thing that I think I found out about Franklin is that he does his beef with revelation is not based on the presumption of materialism. And he thinks materialism won't do the trick. And that's why ultimately what he does is that the source of religion is ultimately two things.

Our fear of death, that's of course compatible with hogs. But also it's because human beings want God because the absolute fact of their principles of morality, okay, it's the principles of morality. That lead people to religion because so many people who practice virtue lose, nice guys finish last, right? And so I think he realized that the way he convinced himself as best he could, that he could not, he did not have to fear a God.

Although at the end of the day, he said, you know, if God's a big spider, he wants to eat me alive, what can I do about that? You know, and I can't prove that that's not true either. But when he, when he convinced himself that responsibility, justice, all of the virtues are really fundamentally, that our understanding of the moral virtues is fundamentally confused. That's when the attachments, that's when he touched his heart from from a God.

You know, all his life, he told people he was going to have, he was going to have on his brain on his, what do you call the thing of the stone? Yeah, on his tombstone. Yeah. He realized Benjamin Franklin, a printer, for a second edition in the other world.

It would have been wonderful. But and he told this to people and wrote it to people for years during his life. And then of course, when he died, it wasn't there. And we have the document where he says, I don't want this thing on there at all.

Yeah. That's right. Gary, I have a quick question. So it's damn confusing sometimes to understand whether Franklin had a kind of project because you have this concern for the common wheel, which I think is, it's true.

Like I don't want to nay say it or be too cynical. But at the same time, he sends out these kind of secret misads. I don't know if they're directed to some future nocturnal council or future philosophers. I mean, would you phrase it in that manner that he has a kind of a secret project on a masculine or why the need for the masks?

Well, I think I think what was secret on his heart was his, was his own understanding of his own, of the confusion, of his moral opinion. That's what he makes it very, very hard to see. Because otherwise, the most amazing thing about about, and I say this in my book, one problem for my take on Franklin, which I think I fit, I answer, but if this guy is such effectively a kind of moral nice, right? If he is, why did he do all these projects?

Why did he do public service? And why did he, well, I think I think the answer to that is, the first answer is very, very simple. He liked it. He loved games and he loved solving problems and he was really an addict.

But also, he really was a devotee of bacon. Okay. And there's a place, I forget now, bacon actually says in the advancement of learning that modern experimental science will be able to cure every disease, including that of old age. Now that's the sound.

Okay. I think, I think I kind of agree with it. You know, better hurry up though. Well, for me, I'm a big trouble.

No, but I think if we could all live, as he said, if I could live 300 more years, right? Imagine 300 years from now, what modern science is going to be able to do? I mean, probably keep people alive for a three, he said, in fact, Franklin said, that modern science will 100 years be able to keep people alive to the Methuselen, you know, what is it, 969 years? That's how I would have to get back.

And then both Franklin and bacon, and one place say even death is curable disease. So he was a big, big devotee of the modern technological project, both because it was interesting. And he liked it. And that's what he did.

And so his other project was, he was always very worried about, you know, in the 1760s, you know, during the time, France was getting kicked out of Canada and everywhere else, and America. He was, and even before and after that, he was always extremely worried about about colonial defense, about the fragility of the defenses of our crucial courts. So he was just a guy who was, at the one hand, a philosopher, as I've described him, on the other hand, he was a project. He really liked it, and he was good at it.

And he always did things that he, no, we're good for him too. And he could hold me, because projects were as good for him as they were for anybody else. Yeah. And as much as he was a devotee to your bacon, one thing you bring out is that he was also, I mean, the materialism, right, the response materialism shows this, but he was also very suspicious and worried about some of the effects of the enlightenment.

Oh, yes, absolutely. And in particular, I got this, a sense of this reading in his book that, you know, you see Franklin, he's got his buddy Collins, that's kind of a drunk and a gambler. But he said he ran as much and even more than him, right? So they're both students that are both really well read, but they seem as a result of their reading or in line with their reading, getting more and more morally corrupt irreligious.

And it turns out, on the basis of what you were just talking about in this letter he writes in, or the style of this philochlaris, that it's not earned the atheism, right? And from what you saw about him being, it's not earned, like it's not the materialist atheism is not earned, right? It's dogmatic. Yeah, that's what's, and so it seems like, maybe you can spell this out a bit, it seems like he senses a kind of moral corruption board of the enlightenment that he's maybe hopeful that his own model of his own story and his return to a kind of religiosity in a peculiarly modern form kind of can be a guide or a model for his son or for other readers, people who will come across his book.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's correct. I mean, he didn't believe this, but he always professed and he thought it was good to do this because once again, he was, he was, I think one time I described him as an enlightenment critic of the enlightened, I think that's what that sums him up because he was an enlightenment man, no doubt about it, but he really understood the weaknesses of the enlightenment position on, especially on religion and revelation. And so that's why he, he makes it clear that materialism won't get you very far in this, in this issue. It's something else, and it has to be the coherence of our moral intuitions that ultimately lead us to, to believe in God.

And that's why unlike God, frankly, never thought religion would fade away. He didn't, people would have to stop having their moral intuitions for that to happen. And that's impossible. He thought that was simply impossible.

And there's also the, uh, zymological proof for the assistance of God as you're reminding us with your shirt there. Beers, prove that God loves us and wants us to be happy as everyone knows that Ben Franklin said, and that's absolutely true that he said that no doubt whatsoever. But at just small point, I don't know if there's a lot of things to it. What's the same?

What's the same? I do what's the same? What's your obviously? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, Alex.

Yeah. So I, I just want, as a small point, I just want to, if you can elaborate on Alex and I were texting, I'm in the COVID fog. I don't quite understand what all's going on, but I'm looking at these charts and he's got money through Saturday, the 13 virtues, he's got Xs and dashes. Oh, yeah.

And Bacon loves these charts too, right? These all these playful kinds of things. And I'm just thinking myself, this whole thing is esoteric. It's like layer upon layer and there's probably some silliness going on.

Yeah. The silliness, of course, 13 virtues that he's going to follow. We know that he read Machiavelli's young man who doesn't mention this. Everybody knows 13 means Machiavelli.

Everybody knows that. And the central virtue is sincerity. It's all just smacks. Yeah.

Okay. So have you played with the charts too? No, I haven't played with the charts. I'm okay.

I didn't look at the charts because I got too involved in the various descriptions of his of the virtues. Right. And then the things that he wrote about these virtues. Weird point is when he resins his vegetarian diet, he decides fish are the fish cannibalism suffices to justify eating fish.

And then he concludes, yeah, you can reason yourself any day for work. Oh, no, it's wonderful. What he says is this. What you said, I agree, but he after he talks about how, well, look, if the fish eat fish, why shouldn't I eat fish?

And then he says, such a wonderful thing is to be a rational preacher, since with reason, we can find a reason for whatever it is we want to do. And I think nothing sums up the human animal better than that. I mean, think about, you know, when you read, frankly, and you realize it's not bears and lions that are dangerous, sickness, or it's human beings. I mean, they're completely insane.

They commit the most god awful things. I mean, there's never been, I don't think there's ever been a sort of real full genocide among the animals. Like sometimes animals, just, you know, one species will somehow eat up another or something like that. But they don't do this for advantage.

They don't do it under some under the guys of some, you know, blinding, idiotic ideology. And so I think one of the things that is most important to think about, frankly, is he had no ideology. He was not an ideal on the reach on the regimes. Anyone will do.

And the most remarkable, you know, one of the things they did me in the head after I realized this big contradiction was when he got when he formed the bunto, you know, this club, he wrote out the rules for it. And then he writes out a question, a query for the court. And let's see what is it? It's he says, one of the questions is if the regime takes the man's property, does he have a right, you know, to resist or something to that effect?

And but does he have a right? There's a parenthesis and it's just or rather what he thinks is his right. Okay, parenthesis. Does he have the right to resist the government?

Okay, that's the question. But so he describes it's listen. And in another place, he says the same thing. A right is what anybody thinks is his right.

And if that's true, then there's no right at all. There's just there are no rights. And moreover, there are only things that people think of their rights. And so if we believe that a right is anything you think it's your right, then a right cannot possibly be what we should we take it to be an ordinary moral and political discourse.

But he says that and he says it twice. Yeah. So, so, while it's really fascinating. So we hold these truths to be self evidence and he's like, yeah, can you hold them to be?

Yeah. And I just wonder. Let's go. When when when when the committee met or convened to write the declaration, Jefferson told it's almost certainly seems to be the case that Jefferson recommended that Franklin not to be on the committee, because if he was, it would be a joke in the declaration of independence.

Yeah. But then when you look at the document of the declaration of independence, it's clearly Franklin's hand, who made the most important edit in the whole declaration, which is what? Which is sacred? Yeah.

Jefferson wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. Right. And Franklin scribbled them out and said, self-evident. Now, that's powerful, because frankly, we knew exactly what he was talking about.

That means God doesn't have to have anything to do with this, if it's self-evident, human reason can figure them out. Now, he didn't add that, by the way, self-evident, they're not self-evident because they're not self-evident because they're because right, so they're self-evident. They're in the middle here. Wow.

Wow. Wasn't he also responsible for the clause in the Constitution saying that this was a unanimous approval unanimously? But articles only had to be majority to be in there. I think so.

Yeah. So if you say there's this comical guy, like... He didn't have a whole lot to do at the Constitutional Convention, but that edit, I mean, at the declaration, but anybody was there when the Constitution was written. And he didn't have much to say about that, because he had been a unicameralist, most of his life.

But he did change his mind on that. And he signed off. In fact, he was the one who proposed the compromise of his vernover and lower house. But he also gave a very important speech on the, I think, Gouverneur Morris wanted to limit one of the property limitations on voting.

And frankly, just stood up and said, you know, our sailors just won this war with England with us. And I can tell you that every English limit we caught changed sides and joined us. But our men never changed sides to fight against their fellow citizens. If you disenfranchise these people, they'll never fight for you again.

It was a poor public speaker. So somebody else actually said, he wrote, read it out for him. But it changed everybody's mind. I mean, it really did.

And he was right about that. Yeah. I was curious about one thing that came up, which is his plans to start like a worldwide society of virtuous individuals. What was this?

And would they rule? I was exactly clear. But I thought this was incredibly Bayconian, right? And talk down wise and virtuous in coming together.

Oh, yeah. It was a useful business. What he did, you know, I mean, he was young. And I think he had, I think he has a big grain of salt in his mouth, you know, because by the time he had started all this, well, he was in the process of figuring out, you know, I think that that plume to applaud that he started, he was still thinking through it.

He was still engaged in the Socratic reputation at the time. They went on for quite a while. And he only gave them up when he felt he was really didn't have anything more to learn from it. Yeah.

Do you know anything about how many of his private letters have survived? Does he give away the game? All in person? You know, I don't know what correspondence is.

I've never done through the records, though. I guess all I did was pretty much focused on I focused on the writings that he points us to in the Auto-American because that's like, I think where he that's where he tells you, this is where I said something that is very important. Is there a passage or two that's among your favorites that we haven't touched on in the autobiography at this point? Like, is there something like anybody who reads it, you got to pay attention to this joke or to Sanico?

Oh, boy. I'll remember this in a few hours. I like that. Jerry, John, my memory, isn't it?

When he first gets to Philadelphia, isn't the first place he takes a nap that he forgets a full rest in the church? Or it's a gathering, a religious gathering under a tent or something, and he's left it a long time, he's tired, and he falls asleep and he gets his first, uh, long- He's a rip banal. No, no, no. He cuts his out.

His long spell of rest. I mean, though. Oh, well. I remember that.

Well, when he gets into town, he's dirty and he's dirty and he leech the bison buns and he spends money. Yeah. And then he gives him a way to a woman and her kids. Yeah, but then there's this wonderful story he tells about this guy who fools him.

You know, who says, I'm going to usually go to London and I'm going to send this huge pile of my life to go buy a printing press, you know, not with the name of the man. It's just hot out of my head. But I don't understand what that man had to gain from this other than like, what Franklin says, this is really wonderful. It's perfect.

Franklin. He says, so Franklin winds up in London with nothing. Okay, there's no letters of introduction. There's no money.

Nothing. And he says, what are we to make of a man who would do such a thing to a poor, innocent boy, speaking of himself? And then he says, well, you know, he was something of a fool and he was known to be a big, big, talker and blow-arm. He had that was his reputation.

And he says, that's just what he was. Okay. He's not mad. He's just said, well, you know, the guy's like a skunk, you know, a skunk stinks and this guy stinks.

And that's what he is. Was there any particular addition to this that you would recommend folks to home to get? I used the Cambridge just by chance, but I've always used the I'm just because it's hand. You mean, I've always liked the library of America.

It's okay. It's four inches thick and it's not just about even as the Canada. No, yes, it has the Canada. That's very interesting.

I got one thing I have to ask about. This came up early and I didn't get through the whole book in the whole autobiography. So I want to hear about this. Why did he try to electrocute a turkey?

Oh, this is hilarious. He once he figured out electricity. He liked getting demonstrations of what it could do because people say electricity. What the hell is that?

He said, well, it's the same thing that pops out of the sky. It gets your house and burns it down. And I discovered the principle of points, which he did, you know, he did this experiment to find if you have a flat piece of metal here and a piece of metal here, the lightning will always go to the point of it. He did it over and over and over and over again.

He said, well, that's, I don't know why it does this, but he does it. So he liked showing what electricity could do. And one thing he thought it could do would kill a turkey and then it would taste better if you electrocuted it as opposed to chopping its head off. So now, I don't think that was completely stupid on this part.

He thought, well, the blood disappears. All the blood comes out of the bird is probably more full of juicy, blay stuff if you just electrocuted. And so he tried, he put on a show doing this and he reached back to pull the lever and he wasn't looking at it. He touched the wrong wire and it knocked him down.

He burned him. He was unconscious. He nearly died. And he learned a hard lesson that way.

That's why, by the way, I'm absolutely convinced that this nonsensical story about him flying a kite with that key on it. He would not have done it. And two people who did that experiment in France, two physicists, both were electrocuted to death. He wouldn't have done it.

He'd already learned what you could do. And so I just, I don't believe it. Yeah. I mean, was it far from the microwave?

And maybe if he had gotten cooked, people could have tried him. But I don't know, you guys have any more questions or should we transition to a series? Yeah. Of course, on the show where Jerry gets to make up some myths about his childhood and his autobiography.

But I have one question. Is it true that he is our, the godfather of the library system in the United States? Franklin? Yeah.

Oh, yes. Yeah. That's a massive enlightenment project. Oh, yeah.

No, he really was. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's tremendous.

Yeah. Yeah. He wanted to. Can you talk to us?

Do you have anything, any final thoughts on the book? Yeah, but then go on forever. So I don't, I want to, I get part of the episode is we want to charm listeners into rereading or reading for the first time. The book and also purchasing your book.

Can you remind us of the title again? Oh, it's called Benjamin Franklin Unmasked on the unity of his moral, religious and political thought. Thank you. And we'll put it and we'll cheat this out.

We will put it in the link, which everybody did to purchase it. So, Jik Tok, if you could, we end the show with a lightning ground like Greg Hose, which should be fun. But before that listeners are always curious, especially when they hear their favorite professors on the show, their journey toward the philosophic life, how it started, especially interested in what had to have been a socratic term from Berkeley to Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. But if you can sharing stories and then great teachers or students along the way, who you remember with on this.

Yes. I had a history professor at, he was a professor of, look, somebody, his name was Carl Shorskate and he was a historian of the German, a Germany in, in, in, in Austria, in the fantasy act of, of the century and, and he was, he was my hero. I mean, I really, and I had never, I had never, I never studied political philosophy. I didn't do that as an undergraduate.

I mean, I did. I had, I had a kind of double interest when I was in college and I wound up, I studied Near Eastern languages. And then I also took, I had my, my, I was in the honors room and, and we had a special seminar. There was a special seminar about 10 or 12 people and we had to write a wallpaper.

And that I wrote on comp, I remember. And it was probably ridiculously overblown. But he, he then, I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask Carl Shorsk what I should do with my life. He said, well, what do you like to do?

I said, what I like to do? And he said, well, that's what you should do with your life. And, and that was, that was good. I thought.

And, and there was a, there was another professor I studied with whose name was Sheldon Wold. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. Yeah, I just heard it though. Yeah.

Well, he was, he was a big dealer at Berkeley and, and I had never heard of Leo Schaff and Berkeley. I didn't, I never heard his name. And, but I wrote a paper for him for, well, he, he, by the way, just died a few, you, you're so maybe two years ago. But I, so I wrote a paper on Rousseau.

And I concluded, you know, I was a long time ago. I'm not sure how I came to this conclusion, but I concluded that somehow Rousseau was one of the big important figures to introduce the principle of history and, and understanding society. So, Wold and said, where did you, where did you read this? Or where did you figure this out?

And I said, I don't know, I just thought about him. So when I go to Spain, and he said, you know, you should go, you should go to Harvard. Because there's somebody you should study was there named Harvey Mansfield. And Harvey had been at Berkeley for a year.

And so, you know, I always thought, you know, Wolden was, you know, I don't think Spassain's like, Spassain's like, well, and had a big fight, you know, and the Spassain's didn't know that this at the time. But he had written about how silly esoteric writing the whole idea of esotericism is. Didn't he take issue with the epilogue? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You with somebody else of that that was pretty, and then starts responding to that.

So, yeah. Yeah. So, there was, you know, this is Tash and all that stuff. But, so, there was, there was Sheldon Wolden telling me that I should go study with Harvey Mansfield.

So, I did. So, I had a choice of saying at Berkeley in various languages are going to Harvard in political science and do political philosophy. I remember I went out with my wife, and I am for breakfast, and it was weird. We've been married since we were children.

But I went out for dinner for breakfast at, you know, cafe in Berkeley and said, hey, you know, what are we going to do? You know, and it was like trying, it was like having a date aside what to do with the rest of your life. It was sort of weird. Yeah.

That's cool. You've been married since you were kids. I really admire that. I was 21 years old.

She was 20. And we're still, we just have, we've been married for 57 years. Wow. We still are.

That's great. Yeah. And what was it like at Harvard? And then how did you get into bacon and all that?

Because most people, I think know of you either from the work on Franklin or I think most often it's data mentioned the outside, where you work on bacon. Well, I think I came to bacon because I was interested in technology and the problem of technology and that seemed to be, I mean, I didn't know bacon very well, but I knew that he was associated with something called, you know, the project of modern science, the purpose of the relief of man's estate, you know. And so that's when I got interested in bacon. And it took me quite a while to understand bacon.

I just got a lot of things wrong when I was first thinking about it and even some of the writing I did about it. But bacon's essays are some of the most wonderful things that have ever been written in a language that really are. We love that you want to discuss some of them because we've wanted to do, we've done a few episodes on bacon, but we'd love to do one. Yeah.

And we did one with Faulkner. That was really good. But we, there's so much to cover. Yeah.

Well, they want one of the most interesting thing about the essays is first of all, there's no essay on one important topic, justice. There's no essay on justice. There's everything else, but not justice. But there is an essay on revenge.

Okay. Of revenge. And he describes revenge as a form of wild justice. Okay.

And then in criticizing a person who acts in the spirit of revenge, he describes a person who causes you a harm. Okay. Some who, a harm is sufficient enough for you to want revenge. He wants to explain to you the revenge doesn't make any sense.

And besides, the man who hired you is no different from a thorn that sticks you on a rose bush. Okay. In other words, that's what he is. You know, he is what he is.

And this is that same old, you know, sort of a draconian principle that things aren't with it, you know, are moral, are moral, intuitions are wrong. And people are just what they are. So to be a scoundrel or to be a human form of a thorn on it, it's to be suffering a condition. Okay.

Like that is a common cold. It's something you get and you are. And that's the end of it. So he describes a lot of his account of the various moral virtues.

They all boil down to the same thing. It's just a condition that people find themselves in. Just one last thing. So he said something to the effect of, well, he just popped out of my head.

So that's something to the effect of that. When somebody says, you know, I did a wrong thing and I wish I had known better. Okay. He said something like this.

No, no, no, you're wrong. If you didn't know better, you wish you had known that meant that you were ignorant at the time that you did it, right? Well, you became forgetful at the time you did it. Or and that's he does this with five or six different places about these various devices or virtues.

And that's how he wants us to understand that these things are conditions like having a cold, like having COVID. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're not responsible for having COVID.

Thank you. My wife keeps telling me it's my fault. But I think that's true. Thank you.

Jerry. So I have one last question before we turn to the lightning round is so it sounds like you've always had a sort of philosophic bone. Like you were always sort of interested in this in college. There wasn't anything in high school or like what drew you to Near Eastern languages.

You always had an intellectual back to something. Well, I went to I grew up in the same walking valley of California. I don't know if you guys know what that is. Well, it stretches from Bakersfield through Fresno and up to, you know, almost up to Sacramento.

And it's a huge cultural valley. And the people in it are poor. It's really hard to travel. And, and I went to high school.

I went to was the good one, but it was a tough place to be, you know, I knew two or three people who were murdered and let me jail. And so I like getting out of it. Fair enough. Do you like the music that comes from that area?

Like the Bakersfield country? Yeah, sure. More hanger. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Go please do. Well, when he wrote, they don't smoke marijuana. Yeah, no kicks on LSD.

Yeah, he was totally stoned on cocaine. Oh, okay. Yeah. Right.

He was kind of his mind. More on it. More on it. Because we don't smoke a lot because it's just wasted too low.

I got a good real hanger story. You know the song, White Lightning? That is him. Is it?

Okay. It's about people think it's about running moonshine, but it's actually about the time he tried to cook a turkey by electric you to get. All right. Okay.

Speaking of lightning, that was a good transition. Lightning got that. This seems like a best segue ever for lightning. So, Jerry, this is why we just asked silly questions of our guests.

Just, you know, hopefully get our audience know them. And if you can give an answer as quickly as you like, as slowly as you like it. If you don't like the question, just say no. Thank you.

Favorite philosopher. Plato. And then Benjamin Franklin. And then Franklin.

Number two. Nice. I'm sorry. Franklin really was a great thinker.

I've been enjoying reading him. I'm not going to lie. Favorite work of philosophy. The advancement of learning.

Oh, man, some great answers. What are your favorite work of literature? I'm not good on that, but I don't read as much as I should. That's a pretty common theme.

But I think it's got to be Tom Sawyer. Oh, very nice. I read that. Oh, no.

What else I read? I read, I read White Fang. Who was that? Jack London.

Jack London. Yeah. I used to be Jack London. We're actually a teenager.

Yeah. Yeah. That was good. I've got a big and related one.

Did Francis Bacon write the works that William Shakespeare or or did William Shakespeare write the works of Francis Bacon? Those are only two options. Okay. I think the answer is no.

That's the running joke. I don't actually think either. Yeah. I think no.

Yeah. But you know, it's not impossible. I mean, people did hide the, you know, right under pseudonym. I know.

I've never had any nicknames. No. No. Okay.

Oh, sure. I have the dumbest name I have. Nobody ever gave me a nickname because my name is that enough as a windburger? No, Jerry Jerry's a broad, fine name.

Oh, not as a, not as a, not as a, it's not short for anything. It's Joe's not our, our why. So I remember telling my father and mother, what did you do this to me for? Because how will anybody ever take anything I write seriously by somebody named it?

So I, you think white burgers are bad name? It's a white, I like, I like white and burgers. I don't. Sometimes I heard that.

Exactly. From, from the, from the kids in my school that a lot of, I mean, it was it, it was a, I said, it was a kind of tough place. And, and there were lots of, chcono kids who, who, who dressed in these white boyan zoot suit white thing. Oh, yeah, sure.

No. And they would always say, to me, Hey, wine burger, how's your wine? And do you like your burger? So I'm not funny.

We like T. Veril hybrid out here. All right. What was your first car?

Oh, 46 mark. Oh, what do you think you would have done? Had you not become a professor? Oh, boy.

I think I might have wanted to become a race car. Wow. Now we're talking. Who's the best polo?

Who answer? Well, I like cars and I, yeah, I'm a pretty good, uh, well, I'm an expert motorcycle rider. Is that right? Yeah.

You know, I pass the best for expert. Wow. See, this is why you asked the lightning round questions, folks. We're kind of like, what do you, what do you ride?