Hi, welcome back to the new Thinkery. If you're hearing my voice, you know that David Barr is not with me, but with me as always is my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you? Doing pretty well.
How are you doing? Doing well. Where's David? My understanding is that he was trying to use the Metro and DC and you know those turn style things that you or I just walked through when you tap your card.
He texted me frantically saying that he was stuck in one of those. That's a very hurtful thing to say, Greg, and who's taking his place today? Well, at the last moment, thankfully we were able to find a suitable more impressive co-host. Turn style for him.
Turn style for him. He's constantly, Tom Cleveland has never met a turn style. He can't make it through. And so here he is today.
Tom's been on the show, folks at home will know that Tom's been on the show. This is your fourth time? Is that right? I don't know.
You were a guest once or twice. You were a guest twice and you also helped a guest host with Ben Kleinerman once. And she was like, right. Or Steven Smith made it.
Steven Smith. Anyway, it's a bunch of times. So welcome back Tom. Good to see you.
We're glad you're able to pinch. Greg, who's our esteemed guest today? Our guest this evening, the folks at home is Lorraine Penkel. She's the professor and co-director of the Thomas Jefferson Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
She got her PhD from the University of Chicago and folks will know her from her many publications, including her books, two of which are with the University of Chicago Press. One is in character of the moral foundations of the University of Silicon Global Philosophy. And that's relatively recent. It just came out in 2020.
In 2014, she published with the same press in University of Chicago. Virtue was acknowledged. The moral foundations of Socratic political philosophy. And then also quite some time ago now, I guess you wrote the political philosophy of Benjamin Franklin, which is something we talked about having her on in the future to talk about in Franklin.
And then in 2003, Aristotle and Philosophy of Friendship with Cambridge University Press. And yeah, we're very pleased that she's here. But tonight we're talking about Aristotle right now. Yeah, Aristotle and the crisis of liberal democracy, which is actually the title of the talk that Lorraine kindly shared with us.
It touched on, I'm really excited for this because it touched us on a lot of themes that we've talked about a lot, right? More contemporary critiques of liberal democracy as well as sort of a lot of episodes we've taught on Strauss, for example, and the Trent of the Ancients, as well as I think Tom has thoughts or some questions in connection with chapter four of natural and history, right? Which I believe you quoted in your paper, Lorraine, but also stuff about natural law and natural right, et cetera. So I'm excited for this.
And I think it's going to be a great paper. Should we generate episode of the podcast? Great episode of the podcast. So thank you.
Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. So let's start at the beginning with the crisis of modernity as well as of liberal democracy in particular, and some of the paradoxes as well that you outlined. And then just give us an overview.
What is the crisis of modernity and what's the place of the crisis of liberal democracy within this larger question? Well, I don't think I'm qualified to say decisively what the crisis of modernity is. We all seem to be having our own crises of modernity. But the most prominent one right now is our worries about liberal democracy and whether that's going to survive.
And I think in that are coming to ahead some of many different concerns about humanity having perhaps lost its way, reason not fulfilling its purposes that we had the function that we had hoped that would fulfill and giving guidance to human beings. And reason seeming to tell us that perhaps we're alone in an alien hostile universe that again is not a good home for the human spirit and not giving us good guidance. But the more specific thing that I'm thinking about as a as a political theorist is the problem of democracy and what it takes to sustain a democracy. What kind of civic education we need?
What kind of civic faith we need? And here I think the absence of a clear shared civic faith is becoming especially apparent as we need it more because for, yeah, great. Just a small question. I didn't mean to interrupt the train of office.
I was just wondering if were there thinkers or books or schools of thought that sort of spurred you to this? I mean, I'm also interested in returning to aerosol to train this question. Are there some folks who whose sort of account of the crisis led you back to aerosol? I mean, some of them are coming fairly prominent these days, I suppose.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of my development of my own interests, I was a history major as an undergraduate and I was working on Thomas Jefferson and his thoughts about how you set up a republic that will be successful and what kind of education that requires. And so I was involved, the one book that you didn't mention that I wrote together as my husband, the Learning of Liberty. I was involved in writing that with him and elaborating our founders different thoughts about what it takes to sustain. Thank you.
What it takes to sustain freedom, to build freedom, to sustain freedom in a democracy in terms of the education that everyone needs and then Franklin became an important part of that. I'm not ever writing that book. As at the time of and shortly after the Soviet Union fell, the Iron Curtain came down, all of these countries were exploring the possibility of becoming liberal democracy. So we were thinking a lot as we wrote it about what else is necessary besides just parachuting in with some recommendations about how to set up a free economy and how to set up free elections.
And I thought all of our founders were much more reflective about that than some of our leaders. So that became a long, I was the beginning of a long train of meditation on these things. And at the same time I've been fascinated by the ancients and no one more than Aristotle and the wisdom that they seem to have. So at least in my own mind, these things have been in dialogue with each other for a very long time.
And now I'm exploring the possibility of writing at least an article, maybe a book on what Aristotle might have to say to us. You know, we like thought experiments. So my thought experiment is if we could just resurrect him for a little while to give us an advice, what would he say we should be doing with our current problems? You have a really good formula about how this crisis is sort of self-reinforcing.
It's on the first page. You said, we are not to the task of mean as individuals. The more we fret about lack of meaning, the worse it gets. The project of trying to find meaning for ourselves can just deepen our self-focus that our whole society is suffering from without showing us the way out.
I like that. There's a way in which modernity, you know, crafts the individual or focuses on the individual and then turns into a naval gaze or loses meaning and then just the only way out is more of the same. On page four, when you talk about his, when you talk about the turn to Aristotle, you say you want to look at his more realistic anthropology, which I thought was an interesting response. It's not a return to Aristotelian natural science full form, though you do discuss his idea of nature.
You are really focused on his understanding of what it means to be human in a more general sense. So I like that move because it seems like it's accepting the modern focus on the individual in this sort of abyss, you could say, but still find there's something concrete about the individual about human associations that can give us some normative guidance. If you want to put it that way, don't have guidance in how to live well, not as individuals, per se, like, you know, lost in a this, but together in communities. Yeah, or not merely as individuals, because Aristotle does pay a lot of attention to the individual and what happiness is and what it means to have a thriving life.
And it's only individuals that can be happy. It's not really cities as a whole. But I think he has a better understanding of what we are as individuals and why the meaning that we need so much, why it's so important and why we have to find it at least in large degree together with others and that can happen in different ways. It can happen in study groups and circles of friends.
It can happen in churches. It can happen in whole societies with fellow citizens. So he doesn't, he has a different anthropology that's more complicated. We're not these simple, solitary rights bearing individuals as luck and other Enlightenment thinkers teach that came together to form governments in order to defend those rights.
We were always together. We started out at least in families and little bands or little villages, but we built bigger things with higher purposes in mind, but we have to start with the fact that we were together with others from the get going. We need to find our meaning together. And then if I could just circle back a little bit to your question about how I'm thinking about this crisis that we're facing, I think for a long time that lock in anthropology, that state of nature anthropology wasn't really very convincing to most of us about what human beings are, but the whole structure that we built on it of liberal democracy, it was working so well that we thought, well, who, you know, who cares we don't have a metaphysical foundation or even a complete anthropology that works, the system works.
And it turns out that as the system is working less well, the lack of a shared good understanding of what we are and what we're trying to do has become more and more of a problem. Can I ask regarding the anthropology of Aristotle, I was wondering how much you thought that anthropology depends on certain aspects of his natural science. That is, you know, one prominent portion of it being some form of teleology that I think you make reference to, because there'd be an argument that his anthropology is great, and it depends on a natural science with a teleology that's no longer credible than there's nothing to do with it. So, could you say something?
Yeah, yeah. Good. So, in a certain way, his natural science, in a different way, maybe from what you were just suggesting, his natural science comes from his thinking about human beings and other living beings in this sense that when he's going at the question of what is a being, a being especially is a living being that has unity and that has a structure because it exists for itself and it has a, it's one of a kind because it's part of a group that are propagating themselves, they work being themselves. So it's not, he's not starting from at all from an alien breaking things down to their components and thinking that those are the atoms banging around with the real things, but all the contrary.
But then your question is, is there built into that an unjustified degree of assumption about the benevolence of nature and the directiveness of nature? And it's certainly there in his language. But I think when you, when you come back to this great fascination he had with living things, biological things, it's very, very solid. For example, in the case of an acorn, you know, that acorn is there to become an oak tree and it's got all the equipment that it needs and it's directed towards that.
So that is its telos, that's its fulfillment. Actually in the case of, you know, I don't know, a million acorns, all but one or a few of the million acorns, they never make it to become the magnificent tree that's the real fulfillment of acornness. So nature has this directedness. It's as if any of it uses the language, well nature is trying to do this for us, but it doesn't always succeed.
Nature tried to make the male stronger and smarter and the female perfect help make an absolutely complementary and nature kind of mess up on that one, you know, it works a little bit, but nearly as well as we might have liked. So and then he's got a bit of humor in there in his life. My wife reminds me that all the time, Lorraine. Male, listen, female mistake.
I still have what's the line that silence in a woman is an adornment, silence is a virtue in a woman. Well, who is he quoting? He's quoting the stark raving mad Ajax telling his very sober wife, Tecmessa, he should go back to bed rather than go out and try to kill all the generals because he's so angry that he didn't get the armor if you want to. So now where this is really serious, I think, is that nature gives us abilities and it gives us needs.
It gives us the capacity to be political and the need to be political. It gives us reason and the need for an education for that reason in order to thrive. And it gives the capacity for virtue in such a way that virtue is a natural fulfillment of our being, even though it's a really hard fulfillment to achieve, even harder than that acorn that does become the magnificent oaks that was maybe just all it needed was the right conditions. But we need thought and we need practice and we need habituation to become virtuous.
And yet when we do, there's a fulfillment and there is a completion. And I think the serious thoughts about how nature guides us are of that sort. The guidance and the guardrails are not very robust, but the result when it works, you can say is according to nature. Can I, this might be too crude of a summary, but there's one view of Aristotle or his teleology, according to which the world is organized for the sake of our happiness.
And in the politics, he talks about, I think, in discussion of acquisition seems to talk someone in that direction that the cows were put there for us to use them and then the cows eat the grass or whatever. Well ordered for us to do those things. You're suggesting that's not Aristotle's view. In fact, that's some of the view of teleology he's that you find in his natural science works is his teleology is first of all kind of local technology of the organism.
And then just now you were talking about a broader teleology that nature gives us something. But what you were telling, I think what you were saying, nature gives us is it doesn't give us what we need in order to live happily. And we accept it as far as we have reason and the ability to create it for ourselves. So it's nature provides us with faculties by which we can achieve that for ourselves rather than there being some natural order that is already pre-made for us.
Yeah, faculties and needs and potentialities. And so there is this paradoxical consequence that for human beings, it's natural to need these conventions of laws that keep us all in line because we all go mad if we don't have them unless we happen to be a godlike, absolutely rare, rare human type. And I think he's also suggesting, you know, look at the glasses, empty or half full and it's really helpful to look at it as half full, to be aware of all the gifts that nature gives us and to be grateful for those and to be somewhat more trusting rather than to be somewhat more harsh in our view of nature, you know, the Machiavellian view of nature is that and the Locky and View nature is this very stingy mother. And so we've got a conquer nature.
Aristotle thinks that's not actually the right approach. It's better to live more moderately, pay more attention to the natural limits, find an intelligent ways to live within those and to live in harmony with nature and looking to fulfill nature. So this is just the last that I have on the longest line, but I'm tempted to put it a little more cynically though, because you said what nature gives us is needs. But that sort of about the way of saying that it doesn't give us anything.
Well, you said nature gives us potentials and I just added needs. How about putting potentials away or the faculty's away? Right. That's one of the ways that nature gives us guidance.
You know, we're all here and we need each other and we need to get along and we don't just naturally get along. But then figuring out how to get along in a way that says fine to us, in a way that perfects us and gives us a rich life, that's possible. And that's what's natural in this paradoxically difficult way. Yeah.
So I think maybe this is a one of the parts I liked about your explication of aerosols anthropology is this notion of man as the animal that dualizes, right? Both solitary and communal, which I thought was great because it shows it provides a sort of basis to the modern view while showing that it's sort of insufficient, right? You know, and this I think is tied also. There's a lot of paradoxical qualities to it.
So another one I think is that really troubling or difficult passage from the ethics book five chapter seven on the changeability of natural rights. But you came up ultimately, maybe we can just sort of tread over this round a little bit, but working to this point, which I thought was really interesting. It's just later in your paper where you talk about how Aristotle might conceive of individual rights, not as obsessions, but as powers in a way, which I thought was a very interesting re-conception. You're talking about the second amendment in this regard, but this idea that the rights that we have are not simply something you get to have and you sort of keep, but they're sort of opening the door, you could say, to these potentialities to achieve their fulfillment.
So if you could just work through a little bit of that anthropology with an idea, with an angle to how he conceives of rights generally and how that's maybe useful to today's sort of misconceptions, I think you would put it of rights, I think that would be helpful. Okay, good. Yeah. So, you know, rights and liberties are both things that we make absolute claims about, thinking of ourselves as fundamentally individuals and thinking that nobody can make any demand on us except with our consent and except if there's some fair exchange going on here.
And so that leads us to a situation where we almost think the only normative claims that we can make, the only standards that we can hold each other to are standards that have this negative quality of not infringing on other people's rights or helping to protect them against some other imposition of somebody else. And this leaves us with a really impoverished understanding of what we are as moral beings and of the virtues that are important and possible for us. And perhaps highest of those virtues, there are a couple of different two or three different peaks and Aristotle's catalog of 11 virtues, but perhaps highest is justice or right, which is understood especially as the common good, it has different aspects, there are different ways of looking at it, but justice is what right is especially what's good for the whole community as he sketches it out. Another peak that's really important of course is practical wisdom, which isn't it's not a moral virtue.
So, if we think about justice as the common good of the whole community, it's never going to be perfect, there are always going to be trade-offs, but there are ways in which a healthy community is far, far better for all of us than being without one. Then how would Aristotle think about these great things that we have in America like freedom of religion and freedom of speech and even the rights of their arms? He doesn't talk about natural rights because he doesn't think that we exist in a human in a state of nature where we have those to begin with and bring them into society. He also doesn't talk about natural law because nature doesn't give us anything so complete as a law that has the form of rules, things that you always must or always must not do.
What nature gives us is pointers towards a justice that would be a common good. It always changes because there's nothing that you can codify in the form of a law that certain strange, terrible circumstances might not make an appropriate thing to make an exception to. But natural right as he frames it is, as he puts it, it has in this paradoxical way, it has the same power everywhere. It really exists.
He knows about relativism. He's their relativists all around him among the sophists. He says some people think all judgmental judgments, especially judgments about justice are just conventional, but that's not so. There is natural right.
It has the same power everywhere, but it's all changeable. You have to try to put those things together and he doesn't give us very many examples. But I think Strauss is helpful here. One of the best ways of thinking about this is that what's right by nature is a kind of hierarchy of goods that we all need.
Security would be at the bottom and the other needs of survival are rudimentary, but they need to be attended to first, but they shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of, we shouldn't be attending to them, to the exclusion of the higher goods reason and education and friendship and so on. So then you need wise statesmanship to balance these things. Now, one thing that wise statesmanship does then is decide how to keep the society safe against oppression and despotism. And that's where I'm thinking putting powers in the hands of individuals and we can call them rights makes a lot of sense.
For example, it's something like free speech. It's usually very bad motives that cause governments to try to squelch people's speech, although not always. That's something that we do together for the sake of the common good is to enshrine these rights in the Constitution. And I was suggesting about the Second Amendment that I think that's especially a case of this where it says in the text, because militia is important for free people.
The right to bear arms should be protected. So that's something that we were doing together so that we can have a healthy militia so that we can defend ourselves against enemies and would be usurpers. We don't tend to have the vocabulary and the framework to think about our rights that way. And so they tend to reduce to just absolute claims of individuals.
Yes, I have a right to have an assault weapon and take it wherever I want because that's my constitutional right. And now we've lost sight of common good when we're making those kinds of demands. And you just mentioned the possibility that even free speech could be thought of in this way. That it's a right that we have, perhaps not or could sometimes even be suspended.
You give the example of suspension of other civil rights and civil rights in the time of war and even sort of expanding the franchise in certain ways during times that might make most sense. Another example you get, I thought was really helpful, was I guess it's Aristotle's example, but you expound upon ways that help clarify makes sense of the text. As you speak about nature, nature is flexible, but it still provides some kind of standard analogy that Aristotle uses as right-handed, right-hand dominance versus ambidextarity. And I thought of, I'm interesting to hear you expound upon this a little bit, I'll read actually from your paper.
I don't have my pages, I'll have my pages, I'll have my page. But you say non-metaphorically ambidextarity then would represent the necessary and appropriate flexibility of a wise leader who willingly makes exceptions to generally selling rules in practice. As for example, it's a spending civil rights and national emergencies. Justice has the same power everywhere, everywhere.
Both violating its normal dictates when not forced by extreme circumstances and failing to make exceptions when necessary is likely to exact a serious price. There's this double-edged way in which it's flexible. Sometimes you should violate it and sometimes failing to violate it. Both of those can have negative outcomes for the common good it seems.
So I don't know, I was fascinated by this, it seemed to permeate throughout the paper, this right-hand dominance part. And I want to add to my question, I guess, before I can just- And what should be violated, of course, is not justice itself. Yeah, of course, sorry if I said that. I'm not, yeah, I just want to make sure that that was clear.
But any attempt that we make to reduce justice to an absolute rule, I can't ignore it if you will. I think the disagreement there was caught. I thought that was a really helpful part of the paper because it exposes the caricature that you see in some of the early modern philosophers, right, where they think that Aristotle, because it was Plato, because they are teething the best regimes, not concerned with practical politics, just because- but you're very clear that for Aristotle, as much as he might have this ideal, justice does involve some sort of compromise with circumstances, right? This is not an imaginary republic that he's merely trying to see.
But there are, first of all, a variety of best regimes, right? But it is far more, I think, down to earth than- Even the best regime itself should sometimes be compromised. I found that really persuasive. Sometimes the exvency of a national emergency might require a infranchising group that should not be in franchise for the sake of security or something.
That was something I had thought of before that this helps to explain why he gives multiple examples of the best regime. Sorry. Yeah, if there is even a best regime, I think the way he wrestles with that in the politics is really interesting because he's showing in some way the best regime is reason, we can say very generally, the best regime is one reason prevails, okay? But then that actually has three different really powerful forms.
One is just whoever is smartest. He should just be in charge. There's a good argument for that. Some people think, okay, that's Aristotle's best regime and everything else is just a compromise.
But there's also, you know, there's terrible problem with stability, what comes next after this person dies. There's the fact that the very, very wisest person might not want to rule, and so that's not even very just to force him to rule to demand that he do that. So the rule of the one wisest person is a kind of limit case that helps us to see in many ways that would be optimal. But then there are lots of things pointing to this completely different alternative, which is the rule of law.
Law at its best is reason reduced to rules. And it has this wonderful advantage that it's not passionate, it's not biased, it applies the same way to everyone. And so in a way that really is best. But of course, that it's too rigid in many ways.
The rigidity is a problem. Then the third thing is a kind of aristocracy, and it can be tighter or looser. And one thing that I think Aristotle intriguingly suggests to us is to try to make a very broad aristocracy of educated people as broad as we can make it. And a great advantage of that is that many people have the chance to share in taking turns leading and being led and developing their practical intelligence.
And so reason isn't just in somebody else's mind coming to you and giving you orders, but you're able to develop your own reason. And I think that's where our regime is at its best, and where we need to lean into making it the best version of it. It can be. Tonight, I fell up on one point that I think you really emphasize and which I'm convinced by, which is that Aristotle has a teaching of natural justice.
He does not have a teaching of natural law. And as you were saying, doesn't have a categorical imperative, some single rule. So that seems pretty persuasive to me on one hand. On the other hand, when I think of those elements of natural justice, one guide to them is what basically every society agrees upon, every decent society agrees upon.
So one example is if you have a POW, you should probably pay someone to get him back or try to get him back by some means or other. Aristotle seems to think something like religion, some kind of form of religion is necessary for any society. But I also, one thing that seems to be common pretty much every society is that they do. One agrees that there are some things that are simply just and some things that are simply unjust.
That is, people do think that there is something like natural law or that justice has the form of law. So, I guess two questions. Does that seem true to you? And if that's the case, it sort of means Aristotle's teaching regarding natural justice is incompatible with the promulgation of teaching.
Sorry, if that's not clear. Well, that's helpful. I think that's part of why his chapter on natural justice is so cryptic that he really wants us to go away and scratch our heads about it. He doesn't want to come out and say natural law doesn't make sense.
I mean, natural law hadn't been developed. But if it had, I think he would be very cautious about it for the reason that you give that our conscience, the better angels of our nature tells us there are certain things you just never do. That's important that we believe that, that we hold onto that, that we take guidance from that. And most of us are going to live our whole lives and never have to make an exception to most of those things.
Okay. So, the moral reasoning courses that bring in these crazy situations on streetcars where you have three people, you're going to kill this direction. And most of us are never on that kind of streetcar. And it really messes things up because the students go away and think, yes, it's all relative and no matter what you do, you're going to do something wrong.
So we don't have any guidance here. There are those very quiet about it. Alice was once on one of those trawlers and he was really perplexed as he couldn't figure out how to kill everybody on both sides. He really, really upset him.
He was the only one group to kill. As you tell by Griggs Moustache, he's the evil villain who's tied the people up to the game right away. I was here, I have one small series going to add to that for Tom, though. I mean, the same holds with religion, right?
Like it is a sort of natural kind of justice that a society needs a religion. And so I think that every particular religion insists that it's this particular religion, isn't that also a similar kind of universal claim? It's a general rule that societies ought to have a rule. I see that similar to what you were saying.
Like there is this flexibility and justice, but every city actually insists, no, there are these rigid categorical imperatives. And so there's that tension, but the tension is also in the other two examples that Lorraine brings out, don't you think? Yeah, interesting. So Aristotle, you know, he defends the classical polis and the classical polis was a community that had a shared civic religion.
And that was really important, blue holding them together. And I really think if he were to look at us, he would still say, well, it's too bad you can't be a classical polis because on balance, that really was best. Nietzsche talks about the same thing. You know, the need for human beings need horizons.
They need a shared understanding of what's sacred. They need shared aspirations that make life much richer than it would be otherwise. But there's this other thing in Aristotle that's kind of proto-modern and interesting and I think very relevant to us, which is that he pushes that into the background. He doesn't talk a lot about religion.
He does make it clear that it's important that human beings respect and revere the sacred, but he allows it to become more of a question who or what the divine is and nature to some degree takes the place of that. So what does that mean for us? I think it means that a healthy version of the United States will recognize the importance of religion and religious communities as really important homes for human spirits and for raising children and show more respect for those than we have done and more support for those than we have done. While at the same time, Aristotle also suggests that to come as close to being godlike as we can to come as close to the divinest we can as to philosophize, while also leaning around for philosophy.
Yeah, so maybe we can bring this around a little bit back to the crisis a bit. You present Aristotle as a sort of, this is maybe picking up on this proto-modern trend you just talked about, but you present Aristotle as providing a useful supplement or corrective. I'm not sure how you want to put that to, early in the paper you mentioned Psalm page three for a long time. A long time the problem with liberalism's premises seemed not to matter.
Its blessings were so clear. We proceeded as if our principles didn't need any grounding. I took that reference to be to this phrase, the blessings of liberty. It struck me that it is to a large degree very undetermined.
You looked at the second amendment where there seems to be more of a telos, there's more of a theology that's set up there. You can meet a militia, right? But in a way that's somewhat convenient. It seems like one of the underlying reds of your paper is, yeah, that's about the best that we have as far as getting guidance from the laws.
To what extent do you think, and maybe this is treading on some of these debates about Aristotle versus the founding of Aristotle, Locke, and you're treading your own territory near or against someone to what you see coming out of Harry Joff or something like that. It seems like you're trying to say this needs not to determine this needs, the supplements. I'm not sure there's much of a question that's not coming, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about how this might help with some of these earlier problems of a lack of a common civic culture or a common civic education or something like that. Maybe also including a little bit of that, what is your broad take on Aristotle and the founding?
Was it presupposed? Was it not really considered? Obviously it's somewhat understated, I think, but mildly, but anyway, sorry I'm rambling at this point. No, those are all good questions.
There are a lot of them in there. So just to pick up on this question about liberalism's premises that for a long time seems not to matter. I think especially the premises of equality and the importance of liberty, including individual liberty. Those are things that we agreed about, but in not agreeing about why they matter, we also don't agree anymore about what they mean.
In what way are we? Are we equal? Why do we owe each other equal treatment? What kind of equality is good?
What kind of liberty is good? Should everybody just be free to do absolutely whatever they want with their own lives and their own bodies? And if not, how can we possibly put any limits on that? I think Aristotle is helpful on both of those.
On the point of equality, I was trying to sketch out this possibility that even though he's not a Democrat, he gives us a lot to work with in understanding that we're all equally human in our capacities and in our needs. We all need an education to develop our abilities. We all need a moral education and we all need each other to have that, which maybe wasn't so clear when so many of us were being, I don't know, brought up in churches or in neighborhoods that were thriving because there were so many good jobs around and so on. But as things are breaking down, it's clearer that this is a problem for all of us and we're all equally in the same boat.
So I think Aristotle's analysis of how human beings are rational creatures and political creatures as political creatures needing fulfillment in a common community with common projects. That's an important basis for a different way of thinking about equality. And in terms of liberty, I would say he agrees about the importance of self-determination for individuals, but he thinks it takes a lot more preparation in order to be able to do that well, a lot more development of both moral and intellectual virtues to be able to do that well. And if we just think about it a little bit, I think that's clear to most of us.
It's clear to my students' freedom doesn't mean just being able to ingest whatever you want and get high on whatever you want, being addicted to your social media and to cocaine. These are ways that we indulge our desires, but we're not free. To be free, we have to be masters of our own ship knowing where we're going and being able to do the things that we recognize are valuable. There is a little bit of this.
I'm sorry, I was just saying there was a little bit of this in lock and is it wind-thrip with the liberty versus license and then liberty? What does the wind-thrip distinction make? So when there are some things that seeds in the history of American thought that liberty is not the freedom to do whatever you want. So there'll be nice things.
There's a much firmer grounding in Arizona. Yeah, and I think the American founding, unlike some schools of thought that would say it really is Aristotelian, it was mostly Lockean and Montesquian, but it was much more eclectic than just that. And there was a looking back with a lot of respect to the republicanism of ancient Greece and ancient Rome and those republican heroes and thought about what it takes to, you know, George Washington held up since atus as a hero. Those things are really important.
So Aristotle, I think, is valuable as a reminder of all the other meanings of freedom and all of the pretty extensive preparation we need in order to be able to live freely well. Did I get it three quarters of the questions in that last round? She just avoided the Jaffa question. I don't know if you guys want to jump in.
There's another point here. The ending of your paper, I thought was interesting on this question. You talk a little bit about the idea that I think has been really popular, which is this idea of public service, required public service, right? And then you end with this question, right?
Don't focus mainly on the question, what do I want to go on the question, how can I be the best version of myself that I can be? Which immediately my mind jumped to, well, for some people, that would be precisely to pick cocaine, get into social media, or even like, you know, idealistic projects of like transhumanism or any kind of like, you know, pick the technological sort of very modern sort of identity issues that you want. But then you add, at the end, what's the best contribution I can make? And it strikes me that how do you get, which you can't, I think, as easily adapt to that sort of modern view?
And so I wonder, to what extent is this solution, while this is a sort of political theory, sort of a discourse that you've composed, to what extent is the solution actually just a matter of coming up with such laws as instilling people the experience of this alternative, right? This alternative of meeting, right? Or communal engagement that shows them that there's more to their happiness than, you know, being on TikTok or something like that, or whatever sort of technological escapism or transcendence they're looking for, there is this sort of far more mundane or ordinary, but meaningful engagement with those communities. And I tell you, just add one more thing to that.
Isn't, maybe I'm wrong. It seems to me the manner which you orient people to thinking in this way is having them believe there is something that is simply right or simply wrong. The thing you were saying is denied by Aristotle's teaching on natural justice. That is to, maybe that's too, too strong, but when you're looking back to these older forms that orient people this way, like church and so forth, that is the core and what's most attractive and moving about such communities is the notion that this is simply the right thing to do and if you fail to do it, you're living poorly.
So I wonder how to swear that question. Yeah. So first to Alex's thought about the resonance that this question about the best version of myself would have with most people. I'm not sure.
Maybe my students are just exceptional, but I think with all of them, with all the young people that I talk to, they are not prepared to defend the idea that either just taking cocaine or being on social media is the fulfilled life. They will always raise that as well, what about Joe? If Joe says that's best to him, I might say that it isn't, but they'll never say it themselves because they realize there's something empty about that. So I keep saying, let's just talk about ourselves.
Those of us in this room, what makes sense to us? We're not responsible for Joe. I think Aristotle's picture of the virtues and of a rich whole life is pretty compelling to human beings everywhere. We're not nearly so different in the ends that we care about as I think Hobbes and Locke encouraged us to think and as modern relativism has gone even further with.
So it's going to have different particular forms for sure. And somebody may be fascinated with space exploration and somebody else with saving the Amazon and somebody else with protecting human rights and lots of different projects that we'll turn to if we're trying to find a place to make a contribution. That's great. That's very much in keeping with the spirit of America.
But I think most of us sense, also the saying of the Jewish, I forgot what's a turt soul, if I'm not for myself, who will be if I'm only for myself, what am I, if not now, when? I think that resonates with all of us. And the problem is finding ways to keep us thinking about those things when so many other easy and immediately gratifying things are competing with them. And this is where the American tradition of small communities, churches and small schools and voluntary associations and so on are so healthy.
They've been so important for so long now that they're becoming eroded. We need to much more actively find ways to encourage them and shore them up. So the two that I'm thinking might be especially constructive are more charter schools. Thomas Jefferson has this wonderful idea that the school is an education not only for the kids, but even and especially for the parents, let the parents join together in running school, give people as much authority over local things as they're willing to take on because that educates them.
So a community of people who are like-minded, who are thinking hard about how to educate their children, many charter schools and parochial schools have this character. That can be a wonderful little community for everybody involved in it. And then the other thought is universal youth service where again, there's lots of choice about where to work, but there's a message that the laws are giving to people. You all need to do this because this is part of being an American.
What the law says to us is really important in shaping what we think deserves our respect. And then Tom, I wanted to circle back to your question about don't you need these absolute rules in these thou shalt nots. That's one time to a very successful way of making successful oppressive people and successful communities for sure. But it's interesting that Aristotle doesn't give us thou shalt nots.
He doesn't talk about rules. He talks about virtues and vices. I respect. Even more compelling as a way of providing moral clarity that doesn't run into the, what about these exceptions and everything's relative, these responses we get.
But isn't it the case that he was writing in a society which he did not seek to radically change where there were plenty of those thou shalt nots coming from other sources. That is we live in a form of government where there's a tendency to avoid saying such things. To the extent we have absolute principles, it's something like rights. But as you say, as you open with, we don't even believe that anymore.
So I'm definitely with you that Aristotle does not want to push that further, but he's living in a condition where that's taken for granted that there is such a beginning. And I thought, I mean, just the comments you were making to Alex actually respond in some way, which is that it turns out people believe something like that, whether you're pushing it up. Anyway, yeah. Right.
So maybe my concern is a little too sophisticated that if human beings, you know, human beings have parents and parents tell them not to do stuff that like pretty much covers what I'm talking about. Yes, it does. And on your side, there's the fact that he makes so much of law and the importance of law backing everything up and the idea that the law is sacred and the law does have this character. Yeah.
And we tend to think of law as just this thing that we make as we negotiate our interests. But I think it has much more work to do in a healthy human community. And that's why it's even through the comment you're making about service. If there's a law saying that there's a service, let's say the general tenor of our community is that laws is just something we make.
But if you have a law that tells you you have to do something to be a good person, the rest that itself will send a message that there is something of importance like that, despite the general tenor of our government, otherwise. Yeah, I thought that was a very good part of the paper where you describe law as urging, because we're talking now about the last chapter of the ethics, right? But law is urging us down the right path. This is necessary, not just for people who have been poorly educated and not towards the noble or towards moral excellence, but even for people who are, right?
There are these moments where you might lapse. And this idea of having a law that says, you know, delts shouts at least go, feeds on people who are hungry or build somebody a house, like, you know, spend spend a summer doing something productive for someone, gets you off the couch. I mean, it does have a sense of this encouragement. Another thing that you said that just agree to me, it seems as though, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems as though what you're saying is that the sort of modern liberal democracy, a mass democracy with copious rights and freedoms does create the opportunity for these smaller, more closed societies that are more indicative of the Greek polis, right?
The Greek cities where you might not have the full fledged notion of the sacred or these thou shouts, but there is this. Oh, well, and some won't. Yes, I'm holding some on for sure. Yeah.
But there is, I think, a kind of an opportunity. The question then is, what do you do when the sort of overarching federal government, as it is now, seems increasingly hegemonic morally, right? And politically, that it, where you see you talk about charter schools, but I mean, I live in Colorado, there's lots of charter schools, but inevitably every couple of years, some lawmaker tries to pass the bill that's just going to basically gut the charter school system. There is this tendency to want to say, no, you belong in the state's education system with curriculum that we dictate and parents don't have a right to oversee education and all those issues that surround there.
How do you secure that top town or that sort of lack of enforcement so that you can get this more rudimentary engagement? Does that make a sense of question? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And it's a big problem.
And I think it, you know, the most we can do as intellectuals is just to talk about the advantages of something more centralized and more organic and support people that support candidates that share that vision, but it's always going to be a struggle. And, you know, but a couple of things about what you said, there are things that you can say in out loud in public and there are things that you can and actually nobody can say out loud and public parents have no business saying what their children should learn. Yeah, a lot of trouble here. Right.
We can keep pressing on that one. And on the other hand, they have a very good point and they're, I think, concerned about something really important when they say we need to all have a common education. And that's a disadvantage to this idea of encouraging everybody to go into different kinds of charter schools and parochial schools, because then do we become more fragmented? I think universal youth service would be one thing that would bring us back together again.
I think one of the most important types of school that would be voluntarily chosen by parents and the parents and volunteers should be involved in would be precisely a common neighborhood school whose goal is to make a hospitable home for families that disagree with each other and to figure out what are the common things we all agree about that our kids need to need to learn and need to develop like civil kindness and civility and so on. And that's, let's double down on those things. But it's a hard, hard problem. And I think one of the lessons for me in watching the trajectory of our government and the attempts of people in other places to form free governments and the failures of so many of those is that Frank Fukuyama is wrong.
You know, we haven't come to the end of history. It is not the case that everybody wants liberal democracy and that's just the default world can fall into. And if we do it, we might become less men. No, we're going to keep fighting with each other.
Living freely is just about the hardest thing that anybody ever does. And trying to reform this country to make it the best that it could be is one of the hardest tasks that we could imagine. When the other hand, hard tasks are good. They're stimulating their, their challenging and maybe what we need is a common challenge.
I was just going to say that seems like a really excellent point to transition to talking about your own intellectual journey because that seems like a nice positive hopeful and sort of encouraging comment that there's some fighting going on. So, and that's good for us. So, as we transition to this point, we like to have when we have our guests on especially the first time they're guests on the show, we just like to hear a little bit about their own intellectual biography. Whether they happen upon the study of book philosophy, we've found more often than not the answer is accidentally.
And so, you know, some, we've had maybe one or two people on who said they knew from childhood that they were fairly interested in these sorts of questions I find this bunk. I think it's roughly, it was really nice in high school. Yeah, that's what I said. Kindergarten, kindergarten, he said.
So, yeah, just tell us, you know, who are some influential professors or teachers, even if it's younger high school or middle school, even then, or some early books, maybe that turns you on or, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, good. So, yeah, I was one of those insufferable people who was serious as a kid and grew up in the kind of community that Tom has been praising. I was part of an evangelical Christian family that was part of a very serious church.
I went to high school kid. I went to the university church in Athens, Georgia. I think the best church. You were in Athens, Georgia.
I am. Yeah. Get out of here. I'm from Georgia and I spent several years in Athens.
I didn't know that. Right. Well, it's a beautiful town. A very thoughtful and intellectually open church on the university campus.
And I was wrestling for years and years and years with the problem of faith and the problem of free will and how can anybody be blamed for thinking? A is true versus that B is true. Don't we all think what seems persuasive to us and how does free will make sense? Don't we always choose the thing that at that moment of choosing seems like the best thing to choose?
So when I got to college, well, first of all, I went to Yale as an undergraduate and just happened to your piece of absolute luck. I happened to have a college tour from a guy who was in the direct studies program, the great books program there. And so he should apply to direct studies. So not knowing anything about it, I applied to direct studies.
And then the first night I was on the Yale campus before classes started, I was there for an orientation and I was asking everybody, I met. I was the group of teachers who should I study with. And one of them said, you've got to study with Tom Pangle. So he was my teacher.
And he gave a lecture for the beginning of the direct studies program saying, if you take this program seriously, you're going to be up at night wrestling with these big problems that you're not going to be able to solve. And I thought, OK, this is for me. So that was my introduction to was was mom or dad a professor at UGA or what brought you all to the campus at UGA? Yeah, yeah.
So favorite books in high school, probably CS Lewis in college. I loved all kinds of things, including Aristotle, but maybe before that Homer, the Iliad, what's going on there with Tate and all these gods. So I've always loved literature. I remember reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Summer After My Freshman year.
That was just absolutely fabulous. And a little later Booker T. Washington was up from slavery. I was inspired by him, inspired by Franklin.
And I kept gravitating to ancient Greeks and American founders for some reason. They had two different visions of how human beings can make sense of their lives and live intelligently that both seem compelling to me. Is there a founder, I'm wondering, because you mentioned Franklin in one of your first cultures on Franklin, is there a founder who seems most sympathetic to the ancients? But we had Weinberger on and we talked about Franklin and he mentioned that he didn't think that Franklin was fully, I say that right now, the most analogous.
He mentioned that he thought that Franklin wasn't fully convinced of the rights business, for example. And then of course, there's an autobiography he talked about Socrates and Jesus and imitating Zenefans and Socrates. I was just wondering if there was a founder that you thought was most compatible with him. Well, Franklin is interesting because he spent so much time reading Zenefans memorabilia.
And I think he learned a lot from it. And in some important ways, he was a kind of proto-socratic. So he has a little dialogue that he wrote for his newspaper on why virtue is knowledge and things like that. So he went pretty far with some of the practical and simple moral teachings of Socrates in that book.
I think Jerry Weinberger imagines that reads Franklin as being much more moral skeptic than I do. He reads him as being much more of a morally serious and very philanthropic, but also very puckish, humorous, playful soul. So he has a lot of interesting, different cross-currents going on in him. And then so straight from Yale, became clear that grad school was just the inevitable next step.
And this was the only place to do it was Chicago or in these people with him to do it. Yeah, Chicago and the Committee on Social Thought and the Great Books program, they were seen like a very congenial place. I actually, because I was so interested in education after I finished my coursework, I went and became a high school teacher for a couple years. And I was thinking about that as a possible alternative career.
I did something similar actually. Yeah. Certain thoughts and certain questions that I left too much on the shelf and I had to come back to. Very nice.
And at Chicago, were there teachers in particular that stand out? Alan Bloom and Leon Cass were the two that I studied with the most. Yeah. You have a good bloom story.
There's got to be one or two that you could share. Oh, I don't know. You don't have to. I'll show you one after we get off.
That's the perfect moment. Fair enough. Great. Do you want to do your where?
Sure. I'm happy to do lightning round. Lorraine, we mentioned this before. We're recording.
We have some silly questions and feel free to say that's ridiculous. I'm not answering that. You have. I have.
I'm sorry. I'm not answering that. Thank you very much. And we can go ahead and say we got this again.
So do you have a favorite philosopher? Oh, it's got to be Aristotle. I've written two books on him and I'm threatening to write a third. So yeah, very good.
Do you have a sense of what the third would be? This one I see. Yeah, I mean, this project might become a short book. Yeah, it was.
Do you have a favorite work of philosophy? Well, again, since I read two books about it, it's Aristotle's ethics. Very good. How about a favorite work of literature?
Probably Homer's Iliad. Wow. I'm going to stay with that. Okay.
You smiled. I like that. It seems like that. It's a convincing answer.
I love teaching it. Is that right? I think Homer was just absolutely brilliant and he just came out of nowhere. And, you know, he may not have even been literate or if he was, he was working with an oral tradition.
Yeah, he was just almost philosophic and a great educator for Plato. Yeah. I absolutely possibly in a certain way even wiser than Plato. So another thing that I might work on is Plato in a certain context between them.
I'm always struggling with the talk at Harvard on that theme before. There's a college in Harvard, you know, Socratic. Yeah, there's a job. I'm more smarter than Plato because it was a big controversy.
A scandal. Yeah, he might have had a better effect on his followers than Plato did because Homer gave us the Greeks and Plato gave us Platonism. Oh, that's really good. I'm always struck by how elegantly simplistic his style is, right?
He speeches and deeds and always related and raised interesting questions, psychological, political, theological and just, you know, somebody lays claim to, makes a claim about themselves or about the world or about others and then you read what happens and then it's just a, it seems like he had a very good grasp of the relationship between speech and deed and how they complicate one another. It's just so delightful to read and clear, you know, in a way. Yeah. All right.
I have another question for you. What do you think you would be doing if you had not become a professor? I probably would be a teacher at or a director of a charter school. Oh, very nice.
I might have chosen to be a psychotherapist because I'm just so fascinated by the human soul and I would just, I always kind of keep the position of somebody who can lift up the skull and just see into the brain of all these people and they just, did you get told everything? Did you get paper at NPSA one time on sort of neuropsychology and aerosol? An evolutionary psychology. Right, right, right.
That was great. God, I was there. That's good. Okay.
Yeah, very interesting. What was your first car? It was a Volkswagen Beetle. That's not the first time we got that answer, by the way.
Yeah, it was bright green. I don't know if they were all bright green. No, very cool. And last question.
What's the favorite place you've ever visited? Lake Como in Northern Italy. It's the most beautiful spot on earth. There you go.
That's decisive. And their nature and culture are not in any tension whatsoever. They just harmonize perfectly. That sounds beautiful.
Well, I will, on behalf of the folks here at the New Thinkery, thank you Lorraine for being generous with your time and for sharing this article with us on Aristotle and Modern Liberalism. Thanks to Tom Cleveland for Cleveland rocks. We all know that. We've got a little pinch yet and for us.
What? That's why you're grimacing Alex. You don't like my gorny puns. Don't forget, folks at home, please like, rate, subscribe.
And Lorraine, we'd like to have you back on at some point. If you ever want to talk about anything else, Ben Franklin or Plato's critique of Homer or, you know, if this book comes out and you want to talk some wares, we're also good for that. We're good for selling a book or two. So thanks again, Alex.
Anything else? Thank you so much for having me. Very good. Wonderful.
We'll see you next week, folks.