Ep. 209: Guest Francis Fukuyama on Identity Politics (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Our question for episode 209 is something like, what primarily motivates political action? Or maybe why are political problems so intractable? And we are talking to Dr. Francis Fukuyama about his 2018 book, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. For more information, please visit. This is Mark Linsenmayer, whose inner self is entirely non social in origin in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:25 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, isothymically living in Austin, Texas.

0:29 Wes: This is Wes Owen, feeling very thumotic in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:33 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Francis: This is Francis Fukuyama. I'm in Palo Alto, California and looking forward to our conversation.

0:41 Mark: Well, thank you so much for joining us. This is a great treat for us. So you've got a whole view of human nature here and how we should understand that to best understand what's going on politically. This is, of course, a later elaboration of your 1992 book the End of History and the Last man that really went into quite a bit of philosophical depth. In fact, most of us looked at part three of that book about this concept of thumos that we'll be talking about that comes all the way back to Plato spiritedness, something that is supposed to be missing in contemporary economic analyses. And so that's the thing that you kind of added to the national lexicon. And now with this book, we're adding specifically the notion of identity and identity politics and how to understand what's going on right now based on this concept that you set up in the earlier book.

1:27 Francis: I think that in order to understand the concept of identity, you really do need to go back to the basis that it rests on in human nature. So in Plato's Republic, Socrates, in talking about what a just city would be, says that there are are three parts of the soul. Or he asks whether there aren't three parts of the soul. The first part is desire, that is to say, our want for material goods like food and drink and possessions. The second is reason, our rationality, our ability to calculate. And if you think about it, those first two components compose what economists understand to be the basis of human behavior.

They talk about rational utility maximization. So the desiring part corresponds to what they call preferences. And the rational part is obviously the rational utility maximizer, much beloved of economists. But Socrates asked, isn't there a third part that craves not material goods, but the approval and the respect of other people that we feel we have an inner worth, and when it's not given to us, we feel angry. We demand that respect. And I think that this is critical, really, in understanding the emergence of the modern notion of identity. Because people feel, oftentimes because they are disrespected members of classes of people that are not given recognition by the surrounding society, they feel angry.

And so identity builds off of this third part of the soul. Plato did call this thumos, which is usually translated as spiritedness. And I think that that's key to understanding a lot of what's going on in the world, because we complain about people not seemingly being economically rational in voting for Brexit or for Donald Trump or things of that sort. But I think that thumos is a missing component that may explain why they are behaving the way they are.

3:29 Dylan: Wouldn't you also rightly interpret then most political revolutions as thumotic activities? Right. Then, like, if I just casually looked at the American Revolution for independence, you would say, in fact, well, look, it wasn't economic, it was spiritedness, desire for recognition by a nation or by individuals within it.

3:52 Francis: That's exactly right. So I think that actually the demand for recognition is what propels many people into politics. So that was true. I think, as you said of the American Revolution, what Tocqueville said of the French Revolution was that it actually wasn't driven initially by poor people demanding food and resources. It was actually driven by middle class lawyers. They're the ones that took the tennis court oath, who felt that the monarchy was not respecting their position in society. They had expectations for reform in France in the decade before the revolution, and those disappointed expectations led to anger and to their willingness to overturn the monarchy.

So I think that in fact, the philosopher Hegel, in the phenomenology of spirit, really says that the whole of human history is driven by a struggle for recognition, that this is the master slave dialectic, where the slaves are not respected. And it's their demand for that basic respect that really has been the motor for the political upheavals that certainly were characteristic of his period in European history. Now, I should go on because I think that you can't build a theory of what's going on now simply on a permanent characteristic of human nature.

Because you then have to explain why now, why all of a sudden populism and the rise of populist politicians. And for that I think you need some other concepts that are more historically contingent. So one of them, I think, is the rise of a concept of inside and outside. That is to say we have these hidden inner selves. We have selves that are deep and that we oftentimes find that the surrounding society doesn't respect that outer self. And in my account, really the first example of that is really the Protestant Reformation where Martin Luther says essentially that God doesn't care about all of the rituals defined by the Catholic Church.

He doesn't care whether you go to mass or say the rosary. God only cares about the inner belief. That's all that is going to save you. And the outer world, with all of its rules and laws and norms, is worthless if you don't have that validation of the inner self. And I think that sets up the emergence over the coming centuries in European thought for this idea that the authentic inner self is really what has value and meaning. And it sets up not just a political but a revolutionary agenda where it's not the inner self that needs to be made to conform with the outer rules and regulations.

It's really the outer rules that have to change in order to accommodate that inner self. And I think that many of the social movements that we've seen in recent years are based on that kind of understanding of the need to change society and its culture to better recognize the dignity of those inner selves.

6:56 Wes: Yeah. So one of the things I think that's most interesting about your book is precisely this. What I think of as a complication in the transition from megalothymia to isothymia. That's a transition you spend a lot of time describing in the end of history. This transition from an aristocratic notion of people's worth to the idea of recognizing human dignity and equality on the basis of their capacity for moral choice. So one complication you describe is this inner outer distinction and this conflict with repressive social mores against which the inner self needs to be vindicated in some way.

But the other one is the advent with the rise of liberal democracy and market economies and pluralism and urbanization and all those factors, you get this loss of tight knit communities and traditional values. And it's the interesting interaction of those two complications which they seem to work together to lead to this sort of slide backward from isothymia to megalothymia in the form of identifying with the superiority of some group based on nationality or ethnicity or so on. I think we could talk a little bit more about that, how those two factors specifically, because that backslide.

It's not like you're going to backwards in history to this sort of tight knit community that is no longer there. It's ersatz in a way, that sort of identification.

8:32 Dylan: In some ways, liberal democracy has its own undermining effect in its implementation that over time, things like rights and so forth, with this sliding back and forth that you just described, Wes, you end up undermining the very structure of liberal democracy, making it less strong, because you are mismanaging that balance. And before part of that balance was managed by a fairly strong set of community values that could withstand the isothymic impulses. And so that balance got kind of managed on its own. And now as those isothymic impulses, they get translated into overpowering the communitarian impulses that in the whole thing ends up starting to shake around a little bit or a lot in some cases.

9:23 Francis: Yeah. On the transition from megalothumia to isothumia. So that's obviously a critical, I would say, third component of modern identity, which has to do with the democratization of dignity. Because if you go back to Plato in the Republic, he says only the warriors have dignity. And this was not just in 5th century Athens. I think in virtually all aristocratic societies, which was most societies around the world, that was the case. There wasn't a belief that everybody deserved dignity. But primarily, people who risked their lives on behalf of the community were the only ones that had dignity.

And one of the big transitions that begins to happen in the west initially is this shift from the belief that only a few have dignity to the fact that every human being has dignity intrinsically, as a human being. And I think as I trace it in both End of History and the Last man and in my Identity book, a lot of this really does have to do with a kind of secularized version of Christianity, because in Christian doctrine, there's a universal equality of human beings based on their capacity to choose God. This becomes transmuted into a belief in human agency.

And there are certain thinkers that are critical in this. Jean Jacques Rousseau does not take Martin Luther's Christian perspective, but he talks about innate perfectibility of every human being. Immanuel Kant is probably the most systematic in saying that it's really that capacity for moral choice that lies at the base of human agency and therefore is at the root of fundamental human equality. And I think if you think about rights and the way that we understand universal human rights today, it has to be based on something like that belief in equality, based on the equality of dignity, again based on the equality of agency.

Because obviously we're not equal in many respects. We're not equal physically, mentally, certainly in terms of our resources. But I do think that when you peel back the understanding of universal human rights, it really does have to do with the fact that we believe all human beings, whatever their actual social status, have this capacity to choose for themselves and for their communities. And that's really the basis on which we believe that people should be respected in terms of their right to think, to speak, to associate, and ultimately to vote in a liberal democratic political order.

So that's one of the transitions. Now, the other part that you mentioned is really quite complicated because the question then is if you believe that human beings have agency, what are the limits to that agency? And I think that for someone like Luther, it was actually very limited. It had to do with your ability to accept God, but it didn't have to do with your ability to become a Hindu or a Buddhist or to act in some other religious tradition. But as societies interacted with one another, it became clear that you wouldn't get this kind of uniformity in the moral and therefore the definition of what the boundaries of human agency were.

And I think that's what in a sense leads you to a lot of our current confusion, because we actually now have a lot of competing definitions of agency and what we are allowed to choose. And I think in modern liberal thought it's actually become quite incoherent. I mean, do we actually have the right to choose to live in a democratic society and that's kind of the boundaries of our choice? Or do we get to make up different rules? Or do the communities that we come out of get to make up different rules governing those communities? And I think that's really what's at issue.

And I think to the extent that there's a self undermining quality, and I agree that that is a problem in liberal societies, I think that's kind of at the core of the difficulty.

13:32 Seth: But isn't that notion of self undermining you almost described like the dialectic of response between a sort of universalist approach and then something more nationalistic or identity based? So if you think about the Enlightenment and you're talking about sort of a universalization based on reason, right? So we first have Luther and then Rousseau and Kant and the Enlightenment thinkers. The response to that is the nationalism that brought on the first part of the 20th century and the great conflicts after which we have NATO and the United nations, and we go back towards this universalist approach which correspondingly connects much more deeply with an economic system that translates dignity into dollars.

And then now we're seeing a response to that which is, again, particular against the universalist movement. And there's a nationalist component to it, for sure, as you mentioned with Trump and Brexit and so forth, but there's also this identity component that you diagnose, bringing together. It's a richer version of the response to universalism and that, you know, you're sort of proposing a modified universalism, if you will, as a response to that. But are we not just talking about a dialectic that as long as there's somebody who's going to be disadvantaged by one side or the other, whether through exclusion economically or via dignity or exclusion via race or sexual preference or whatever, we're just going to continue to have this push, pull and a drive towards one and the other?

14:59 Francis: Yeah, I think that that is the case. The way I would put the problem is that although I think there is an argument that the desire not to live in an authoritarian, oppressive, tyrannical regime is pretty universal, if you actually succeed in living in a society that is basically democratic and allows you this essential recognition as a citizen, oftentimes it's just not enough. It's psychologically not enough. Because basically the society is saying, yes, you're one of millions of equal citizens, you have rights as a citizen. We're not going to interfere with those.

But people want other forms of belonging and community and identity based on a richer, deeper, thicker kind of shared culture. And I think that in practice, most liberal democracies have accommodated that up to a certain point. They've said, okay, you can enjoy your ethnic food and your ethnic traditions and so forth, as long as it doesn't impinge on the boundaries that are established by the need to create a common democratic community. And, you know, I think that's kind of the compromise that we've lived with for the last however many decades.

But it's challenged by, you know, a number of internal contradictions, because some of those practices, some of those norms and those cultural practices actually aren't necessarily compatible with the norms that are necessary to maintain a democracy. And so I think that the area where this comes up most clearly is in Europe, where you have Muslim communities which basically mistreat women or they don't treat women according to the norms that we expect in an individualistic liberal democracy. You know, the family decides that the girl has to marry a certain person and she doesn't get to exercise her individual choice.

So that's one form of it. But the other issues really have to do with these deep disagreements over the nature of dignity. So again, the whole abortion Controversy is built around that where you've got the dignity of a woman's right to choose versus the dignity of an unborn child. And that, it seems to me, is a kind of fundamentally unresolvable issue where you can't really split the difference, although we've certainly politically tried to do that. So I think that does explain some of the conundrums we're in at the moment.

17:31 Seth: I tend to think about this in terms of exclusion and participation, and I tend to think of it in terms of economic reality. That if everybody had basic economic means, it still probably wouldn't be fulfilling. Right. For a lot of people who weren't getting meaningful work or whatever. I think that the example you give that demonstrates this most clearly is when you're talking about gay marriage, that if we had a legal union that conferred all of the legal rights on same sex couples, that marriage did, but we didn't call it marriage. That you pointed out that it's not sufficient that there was a movement to try and give it the dignity of the institution, which is really a form of social recognition that wouldn't exist with, say, a civil union.

That there's really that second order or next level of recognition that's not necessarily related to the legal rights, the economic rights, and so on and so forth.

18:22 Dylan: In fact, it goes both ways, right? Because it's not just people being partisans for gay marriage. It's also. That's exactly the same argument that people being against it, right. Is that they don't want it to have that recognition of dignity because it undermines the dignity of marriage. In fact, that's almost exactly the language that they would use.

18:44 Francis: Yeah. So it really is this value disagreement that is not very easily bridgeable because you have to really recognize one or the other. Now, I do want to say that the economic side of this is still important because I do think that economics and dignity are very much tied up. I got a chapter in the book about how complicated that relationship is because in fact, having a job and having an income in a modern market economy is in fact a marker of dignity. Because it means that society is willing to compensate you for what you do. That means that what you do has value.

And therefore if you lose a job, it's not simply a loss of resources, which could be made up in a number of ways, but it's also society saying, well, actually we don't see that you've got any particular use to us at the moment. And I think that blow to dignity is really what makes people, especially people that had a certain middle class status where they thought that they were doing something. I think that explains why there's a particular kind of anger attached to the loss of that job that would not necessarily be the same as a poor person who couldn't get the job in the first place, but had just somehow come to accept the fact that they were going to be poor.

And I think again, that really explains a lot of the anger that lies behind some of the populist movements that we're seeing today in North America and in Europe.

20:18 Mark: So one of the points I found especially interesting in your way of diagnosing social ills here is so just as the Marxist will see economic motives everywhere, even if you don't think you're acting under economic motives, the Marxist will look at you and say, actually your attitudes, even your philosophy, your whole book that you wrote, reflects very well your position in society, your economic interests. Well, there's something similar going on in here, in that when somebody makes a claim about gay marriage, about abortion, especially whenever they make a moral claim. I think that you're following Nietzsche in saying that moral claims are very much tied up in a practical sense with

20:57 Wes: assertions of self or a demand for recognition of one's.

21:01 Mark: Yes, to create a value is to demand that you be recognized as someone who is worthy to create a value, right? That making a moral claim is in effect an assertion of yourself. It doesn't sound like that. It sounds like you're pointing at God, you're pointing at some objective thing out in the world. But that's that Nietzsche psychology coming through that actually what's going on in there in every case is really something like the will to power or which is cashed out in here. We can talk about the difference between these in the demand for recognition that you are in effect spreading your judgment over the world by affirming something.

21:38 Wes: Let me just add something to that. You know, it's not just a matter of value creation, right? Values are something we absorb culturally or as we grow up by way of identifying with parents and people we admire, teachers and just, you know, people who are important to us in general. We identify with them and we identify with their values. And so to desire their recognition. Desire, the desire of the other is in large part part of our. The mechanism by which we adopt those values for ourselves. And the theory is that when we are bothered that others don't have those values, when that outrages us, you can think of that in terms of sense of justice and injustice.

But it's also felt as A attack on status or dignity, it's a humiliation. So that's the way in which identity and valuation, I think, are intricately tied together. But I think, Francis Marc, is you're offering a challenge, right, to that sort of idea. Maybe the positing of values is not reducible in some sense to this thumotic mechanism, is that right?

22:47 Mark: Well, I think actually it might be that this is what really follows from a sort of mature sense of the origin of ethics. If you give up any sense that ethical rules are things that are woven into the fabric of the universe and we discover them, if you really think that they are created by cultures and ultimately created by individuals, then you should see this play out. It's not just that they were created way back in the midst of time by human beings and we merely inherit them, but that every time we make a moral assertion, we are kind of redoing that originary moment of positing a value that that's what ethics is all about, is about self assertion. I don't know, Frank, what do you think about that? Am I totally mutilating your thesis here?

23:30 Francis: In social theory, there's been this long standing kind of division between people who think that moral values have basically a utilitarian function, or there's a functionalist theory about morality, and then others that believe that actually values are really more of a, as you said, a moral assertion of individuals or of particular communities, as in all of these contra, you know, like Marx versus Weber on materialism versus Ideal. I mean, I always come down somewhere in the middle of these things because I think that both of them have a certain logic.

And so there is a logic to the functionalist theory of the origins of values. I mean, this is really associated with Emile Durkheim and his account of the origins of religion that if you don't have shared values, you can't have a community, you can't have collective action. Communities won't be able to defend themselves if they don't agree on certain fundamental premises and are able to communicate and to cooperate. And so that's really one of the reasons why morality cannot take this Nietzschean. In fact, I would say that one of the challenges to modern liberal democracies that Nietzsche's thought poses is if you believe that actually everybody as a human agent should be able to posit new values, you don't have a society after that because you don't have this fundamental social agreement.

However, having said that and made that case for functionalism, I think it's the case that the actual origin of Values is very, in a way arbitrary or it does revolve around these individual assertions of values where particular leaders, you know, the Prophet Muhammad, for example, if that individual had not arisen in 7th century Arabia, you wouldn't have Islam and all of the rules and norms and values that flow from that particular religious tradition. And so in that sense, Nietzsche is correct that there's a willful value assertion that is also needed to explain why we have the particular communities and values that we do around the world.

25:45 Mark: So I think this reflects more widely. We have an ongoing, whenever we have a political philosophy episode going back to Rawls, at least where the way that you put it repeatedly in the current book is just as you were saying, how much common culture do we need to make a society work? And the Rawlsian liberalism says, well, you need some minimum common commitment. But there's a lot of room beyond that for variation. And that should be the goal of a liberal society, is to allow variation. That we will not have a, as a society, as a government, have a thick conception of the good, you know, like that would be a whole religion would imply and impose that on everybody. We're going to let a thousand flowers bloom. But there's still that. If you allow complete illiberalism, then that undermines the foundations. You know, there's some sort of Kantian self contradiction in that form of government.

26:42 Dylan: It's not government.

26:45 Mark: Yeah, it's a practical matter. How much can you allow? So we had a free speech episode last year where you know, we were looking at somebody like Stanley Fish saying similarly that you can't allow completely illiberal, attacking the foundations of speech speech, or at least not in a very substantial way because there's something again sort of this Kantian the logic of the speech itself contradicts itself. If it undermines the presuppositions, that makes the forum possible, the word allow.

27:15 Dylan: And I think that ends up being part of the big question.

27:18 Francis: Right.

27:19 Dylan: When I read the Identity Book and use this phrase associated with American liberal democracy of a creedal constitution or credal agreement, that it's less a question of it being allowed than a question of articulating what that common vision is and constantly defending it. So it wouldn't be the case that you would have to ban criticisms of free speech. You just say, look, being American or being whatever, that's what we agreed to. And you have a robust defending of that by the institutions and the people who are members of that leading institution.

And to the extent that that gets undermined, you have a real threat to that community itself because the values by which it's being held together are being threatened. It's not that you have to ban the discussion of it, though, is that you have to have robust articulation of what those values are and a defense of them. And so when I look back, when I hear people say, well, this is what it means to be an American, and that conversation is about what those shared values are. One of the signs, I think you point to this in the Identity book is to the extent that the national conversation moves away, particularly on the left, from defining what it means to be American and focusing more on concepts of diversity or really the particularizing of it rather than what held things together, that undermines the strength of the argument, that undermines that community.

28:48 Francis: Look, this is really the center of the discussions we're having socially now. And in fact, it's a more neuralgic discussion in Europe than it is in the United States. You know, the basic premise of liberalism per se is that you're going to put off agreement on final ends in favor of an agreement on a set of procedures that will allow people that disagree on those final ends to live together. So this comes out of the wars of religion in Europe in the 16th, 17th centuries. They say at the end, okay, forget about arguing over Protestantism versus Catholicism, it's a matter of private belief.

We're just going to have a set of. But the problem with that has always been, as both of you have just said, how basic do those rules have to be, how minimal? And in fact, I think if you look at real world liberal societies, they actually have a much thicker common culture than simply the agreement on those rules. And I think if they didn't have a thicker sense of shared tradition, values, rituals, whatnot, you would not generate the kind of moral attachment to the community that's really necessary to keep the community going. And so that's really the issue.

And I think the reason I say that it's a bigger problem in Europe is that most European societies actually do have much thicker shared cultures than the United States. I mean, the United States has always been racially, ethnically, regionally, far more diverse than most European societies. And so our sense of a shared civic culture has therefore been relatively limited to these kinds of political values. I would say even in the case of the United States, you do have things that thicken the culture. You know, you've got sports, the sport of baseball, you know, was created after the Civil War, in a sense, to give people something in common to the think and talk about that would get their minds off of the north south wounds that had persisted in the late 19th century after that terrible conflict.

But in Europe, culture is much thicker than that. I mean, every European country has rituals about food, about holidays, about all sorts of historical traditions that actually give a much stronger meaning to the shared community. But the problem is that some of those traditions and rules actually exclude people that weren't born into them. And so the clearest case of that has to do with ethnicity, where concepts like Dutch or German or Swedish traditionally have had a very distinct ethnic implication in a way that America, I think by the time of the civil rights movement had ceased to have that kind of ethnic connotation.

And so the question that all of us face is, of course you want to have more than what the Germans call a. I mean basically a constitutional state where there's completely minimal agreement on the basic legal rules. You need something a little bit thicker than that to give some emotional weight to the sense of community. But how far does that go? In Europe, a lot of this has revolved around these arguments over clothing. Is it acceptable for certain members of the community to wear burqas and niqabs, you know, these full faced veils that certain very devout Muslim women wear?

Because doesn't that actually make a statement about female equality that's really not compatible with the rules of the society? If you're a member of the community, do you have to respect certain historical traditions, the holidays that are celebrated that are basically Christian holidays, this sort of thing? In the United States, I think we have a much more minimal kind of shared culture. But I do think that we need to worry about how to bolster that to give people more of an emotional attachment. Because I do think that a lot of the progressive left has basically said for the last couple of decades, just don't worry about it, we don't need this common culture.

We're all going to just do our own individual things and concentrate on those individual identities. And I think that this is not good for democracy per se, because if you don't have a shared emotional attachment to your democratic institutions, the system isn't going to work very well.

33:20 Mark: But it seems like there's a difference between a shared commitment to democratic institutions and liking each other. You know, having a common culture in terms of all going to the baseball game together and the, you know, you actually recommend in your book, we need to have more songs that we all sing. You know, that makes us have this fellow feeling, it seems like that is the joy of modern society that we've evolved so that we don't have to like each other, so that we don't have to have this much in common for things to work. That in a primitive society, you know, it's very informal and it's based on good individual relationships between all the actors.

But capitalism freed us from having to keep things in a small scale this way where you personally know everybody and build a relationship with them by establishing more customs, more rules that, you know, allow the system to function in the same way. Dylan was just saying, well, you don't have to outlaw the conclusion of our free speech episode. I raised this fish's potential worry about speech that undermines the foundation. But actually, as a practical matter, lots of people can rail against free speech. You know, as long as they don't take up arms against each other, the speech remains free.

It doesn't, as a practical matter, actually undermine anything. So it's only insofar as our society is dangerously underdeveloped. In other words, like, we really don't have a real democracy where everybody actually votes and everybody feels represent, you know, that there are structural problems in it, that that's what is making this call for that we need more informal things to bolster that. But maybe the other side of this should be that we push to further develop the rules, the customs, to actually make things properly supportive of the foundations, the democratic foundations, so that we don't need to sing songs together.

I don't want to sing songs together. That should not be the goal.

35:05 Francis: I actually think that there is a greater danger than you're suggesting in the current situation, which really has to do with all of the arguments we've been having over free speech on the Internet. Because I think that it's not the case that allowing everybody to basically express their opinions as long as they respect the basic rules is conducive to actually good democratic practice. Because I think that the way that social media has been weaponized and used to deliberately undermine not just the opinions or the interpretations of people that you disagree with, but to undermine the factual basis on which we deliberate and comment about issues that are of public interest to the whole community, it's, I think, getting to a dangerous point.

And I think that the polarization in the United States is the single greatest weakness of our contemporary democracy. It's not in the formal rules. It's really in the fact that the polarization has become affective, or what political scientists call affective, meaning it's very deeply emotional. We think that people that disagree with us are not just Mistaken about policy. But they're basically traitors. They're not Americans or they're somehow deeply subversive of our shared values. I'm not sure that this kind of free for all is actually going to produce a functional democracy.

And I think we're right now in the middle of a government shutdown. I mean, I think one of the problems of our current president actually is his lack of respect for certain shared informal norms. A lot of the things he's done, like attacking the special prosecutor, attacking his own bureaucracy, the, the FBI, courts, the media, none of that is illegal. I mean, under a minimal understanding of free speech, he's a citizen, he can say whatever the hell he feels like saying. It's only that informal structure that observes a certain degree of civility and puts boundaries around essentially the lies that you're willing to tell in order to get your way.

That I think maintains a kind of common political culture. And I think that's really under threat right now. So I do think that you need something more than this minimal liberal understanding of what we share, because I do think the informal norms are pretty important.

37:30 Dylan: I think we underestimate both the informal, but in some ways the formal norms that we put up around say technological developments or communication developments. I mean, if I take free speech and right now with media, we have this kind of proliferation of ways of speaking to one another that is relatively ungoverned by anything but however our cultural norms about it. But if I think about the rise of just printing or something like that, one thing that happens is you have institutions that develop around there for say, different kinds of publication that have an agreement on what constitutes good writing.

So you end up getting implicit standards along the way like what a good newspaper is versus a bad newspaper. So it's not that you don't have tabloids and crappy ill understood ways of communicating. It's that you do have institutions and in many cases laws that establish what those standards are. Same thing with scientific communications, right? You come up with a set of rules, maybe peer review, certain kinds of ways of commonly deciding that well, this is good versus this is bad and, and even something as mundane as look like plumbing standards, right?

So early in electricity and plumbing developments, it's a complete free for all. Every company is out there making their own sets of screws with their own sets of thread sizes and their own sets of dimensions. And what happens is that nothing fits together and that you have to go out and you have to go to Company X and all the stuff in your house has to be company X or company Y. But then maybe you could argue for some practical economic reasons, but also for those reasons of standardization have the effect of empowering everybody in the community and actually making everybody more equal to one another.

Not just economically, but I can go down to Home Depot and I don't care who made the screw, except in the sense of maybe, you know, I have some secondary considerations regarding quality or was made in the US or da da da da. But I know that screw is going to fit when I go get a quarter 20 screw because there's a standard that they all agree to. And so these things that underlie those kinds of regulations, I think we have a very similar parallel sets under, like what it means to be a good journalist, what constitutes high quality publication, what's the standard for scientific justification?

All of those things are part of that, I would use the word thick cultural understanding of what really embodies our values. And when we have undermined what those are, that becomes a real problem. So when we say that, well, look, all media is just equal to every other kind of media, especially at the highest levels of our culture, to say that none of it has any distinctions, that becomes a real problem.

40:19 Francis: I mean, you can multiply the examples of this. So in line with things Mark's been saying about contemporary capitalism, I think one of the things that's happened with the rise of finance capitalism in the United States is that Wall street has gone from being a very sort of limited, clubby group of people that actually did have certain informal standards by which they would compete. A lot of corporate America felt that they were embedded in particular local communities and they had a certain sense of obligation to those communities, certain social responsibilities.

And over the last generation, that kind of capitalism has been replaced by a more, much more ruthless, bottom line oriented attitude that has, I think, taken away a lot of those kinds of shared rules. And I think that that's not healthy for the society. So you're right. I mean, a lot of the rules do have to be embedded in formal structures. I think in general, not everything can be formalized because you end up with extremely rigid legalistic approaches to everything. But that means that, you know, you've still got this layer of shared informal norms that really are the lubricant that keeps societies operating.

41:36 Mark: I was trying to draw a distinction between, as you say, these norms and goodwill. But you might want to actually relate those things and say you don't get the norms unless you have the goodwill. And if you don't have the goodwill, then the norms that you have erode. I would have to think about that more with regard to specific economic situations, cultural situations, to see whether that makes any sense. It seems like that's your position, that there's no sharp dividing line between really the two. That customs of treating people well versus customs of using the same size pipe, that those things actually blend into each other, as different as they sound.

42:14 Francis: You know, I actually wrote a book back in the 1990s called Trust where I talked about this issue explicitly. And the question is basically, does trust proceed from the shared values or do the shared values proceed from prior trust? I think it goes in both directions. I actually argue that it was the prior shared values that created the trust. Although trust can also arise by spontaneous interaction where you tend to gravitate towards cooperating with people that behave in a trustworthy manner. And so the trust sort of spontaneously generates itself.

But I think both of them are important because in a sense, the trust is necessary to get you over rough patches where you might not necessarily want to cooperate, but because you do have a kind of emotional predisposition to being trustworthy and seeing other people as trustworthy, you interact with them more efficiently or in a better way. But it's also the case that the shared norms do arise from that. So both of them, I think, are important.

43:23 Seth: I'm glad you brought that up. I haven't read your book Trust, but I just was staring at my notes on chapter 11 from your book at the time, where you talk about the transition from the individual to the group. And you mentioned this idea of lived experience. And isn't it this idea that. I don't know if you say this explicitly, but that's. This is how I picked it up, that the part of the identity movement is this notion of a lived experience that's unique and in some sense defined by characteristics that can't be shared. Race, sex, gender, whatever the case may be.

And so if we take as our starting point the idea that each individual has a lived experience that somehow is defined by the characteristics that make them unique, and that that lived experience is not something that could be shared by somebody who doesn't have those exact characteristics, that we essentially remove the possibility of a foundation for trust because we're moving a possibility for a foundation of understanding, sharing, empathy. And, you know, you're essentially creating a wall between people. That was kind of what I took out of that.

And that's what you were just making me think of when you mentioned trust there.

44:32 Francis: No, that's right. You know, the difference between lived experience and Experience simply is that ability to cross the, these boundaries, these social boundaries, and actually have empathy and therefore develop trust with other people. And so obviously nobody's lived experience is ever going to be fully accessible to other people. And the more marginalized the community that you come from, the more that is going to be a difficult challenge. And so I don't dispute the fact that lived experience is oftentimes really critical to the way that people understand themselves.

And it's very difficult to cross those boundaries. But if you say in principle that you can't cross those boundaries, then basically you're saying it's really not possible to have a common society because nobody's going to be able to empathize fundamentally with people that are different from them. So the other problem, I think, with the way that that's understood these days is that it's understood in very, you know, in these kind of fixed categories that are based on things like race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. And so it creates a kind of sharp wall between groups based on characteristics that in the end may not be that important.

45:48 Seth: Yeah, well, and you also highlight that just from a conceptual standpoint, this corresponds to a shift from the idea that identity is something that's attached to individuals, to identity becoming a function of group, which is really just in groups being defined by sort of an accident of the contingent facts of your birth and your height, abilities and so forth. And it's antithetical to the Enlightenment idea that we can somehow transcend our circumstances through reason and understanding and not only connect with others, but sort of overcome the limitations of the categories that we get born into.

And this brings me back to that idea that we're cycling through a sort of universalist versus a particularist kind of dynamic over the last two or three hundred years. And that we're just going through a phase that's more focused on that individualist, which for good lefty liberals like me is bad.

46:45 Francis: Yeah, in all fairness, there is a kind of naive liberal view that says, yes, we're all equal human beings. And so what's the problem?

46:54 Seth: That's me.

46:56 Francis: We got the laws that give you rights and we're going to treat you equally. And so why are you complaining about your particular experiences? And unfortunately, that just doesn't happen in existing real world liberal societies. And so there is going to be this constant demand for these more particular forms of recognition. But my view is you have to have a balance. People are going to have these experiences and some of them actually will not be shareable very broadly, but on the other hand, you also have to have identities that are based on more integrative principles, because without that you can't have collective action, you can't have deliberation, you can't have democratic discourse. And that's also necessary, I think, for a successful society.

47:42 Mark: So was it. Am I right in reading identity as. And maybe this is a. An evolution of your thinking since the end of history book, that there's a slide that's almost inevitable, not necessarily on the individual psychological level, but once you get this out to a group between in the first book, it's isothumia. That's good. That is the end of history. That's what we want society. That's the only way that we can make society make sense, is to have everybody recognized equally. But once you have that, and the mechanism that you gave in the identity book is isothumia can be based on many different things.

Recognize me just as a citizen, equal to everybody else. But then as you were just outlining, that's evolved into no, I want you to recognize my particularities and in particular my group membership. And that that rolls inevitably into megalothumia is not just. Yes, that is a characteristic of tyrants and individuals who want to have more and more power. But that's where the bad kind of nationalism comes from. And that that is almost inevitable. That you set up something like black is beautiful as a counterpoint to past oppression. But once you establish that, then even just the grammar of the word beautiful is on.

This analysis of thumos as self assertion is contrasting it with something that is not beautiful. And once you pick out a particular group as having this special characteristic, and you are essentially, we might liberals hope that we're just saying no, we just want you to appreciate in us, in our particularity. But is it part of your thesis here that no. That inevitably at least is perceived as an expression of superiority of that group?

49:25 Francis: Well, I don't know that I would use the word inevitably. I think that that has been the tendency of a lot of social movements to in order to mobilize their members internally, they set up a kind of us versus them mentality where people within the circle, the community circle, are good and people outside that circle are bad. And so I think that that frequently happens. However, I don't think it's inevitable. I think that you can have group identities that don't turn aggressive or discriminatory towards people on the outside necessarily. And that's the kind of group identity I think we should actually tolerate. Not just tolerate but probably welcome in a liberal society. But I think you're right that there's a kind of natural human tendency to build solidarity by demonizing other people. And I think that that's the case of certain part of contemporary American identity politics.

50:28 Mark: Well, and you give the example in your book of historical Germany that you know, if people don't like the black is beautiful example. This is a pretty uncontroversial one that it was before there was a unified Germany. It was a bunch of different states and they were always picked on by their neighbors. And so they had kind of low regional self esteem and in establishing themselves as no, there's a unified Germany with a unified culture. Well, we can see exactly where that led in terms of the gross nationalism and, and its claim of superiority.

50:55 Francis: But this gets back to the question of whether this evolution is inevitable. And I think that the history of nationalisms shows that it's not. So Germany is an extreme case. I think Russia today is a case of making that transition from isothumia to megalothumia. But you've got Canada, you've got New Zealand, you've got lots of countries where you do have a sense of national identity, but it doesn't lead to this kind of aggression and desire to dominate other people. So I don't think that there's a mechanism that necessarily propels you from one to the other.

And in fact, I think the trick of maintaining a viable modern democracy is to allow people to have these group identities because that does give them community and belonging and sense of personal satisfaction, but to keep those from shading over into assertions that are harmful to people outside of the group. I think that's really the challenge that we face.

51:58 Dylan: Just a slightly different tack on it is where do you put China in this sort of scope? Because we've been talking mainly about the evolution of liberal democracy. And both explicitly and implicitly there would be a formulation against the notion of liberal democracy as being the right end in the first place in the case of China's government. And obviously there's also a different cultural tradition. We see things going on over there that I would interpret in my liberal democratic view, say for instance, the way in which the Uyghurs are getting treated that I would cast it in that kind of structure.

And I sort of wonder if as on the one hand. Right. Because if I'm not missing something in terms of the question of what the shared values are and maybe leading to a kind of misinterpretation of what's going on, I Suppose you could still apply the tripartite soul and the notion of all politics as being a kind of activity of balance about dignity and so forth to the China example. But there seems to be a different conclusion regarding. I'll stop there. I'm wondering what your comments and thoughts are on it.

53:09 Francis: So there's no question that not everybody shares this current Western and particularly American view of equality based on individual agency. But to the extent that anyone, myself included, ever argued in favor of something like universal values, it would have to be a more historically contingent kind of argument saying that this desire for equal recognition is not universal initially, but it becomes universal. And I think if you look at the history of the west itself, that's what happened. I mean, 500 years ago, no European believed in human equality, or they believed in it in a religious sense for Christian believers, but certainly in social practice.

That was not the way they organized their societies. And so it emerged as a product of a broader modernization that. That educated people that gave people the ability to exercise their agency more fully. And I think that in China today, to the extent that anyone had a hope that they would join a kind of liberal, democratic world community, it was based on a similar hypothesis about modernization, that as people got richer, they became middle class, they began to own property, they were better educated, they were. They were more connected to the outside world that they also would undergo a kind of value shift and they would accept the need for, in the first place, a liberal order where they could talk freely and associate and so forth, and then down the road, some form of political democratization.

It's not happening now, but I'm still not willing to give up on that, you know, on the notion that it may happen in time.

54:55 Dylan: Well, it's a whole nother book, right. But there's a deep connection here with technology development and the way it gets used. And I think the China examples and the use of the Internet is an interesting example of how that communication and the regulation of Internet communication, once thought of simply as being genuinely a force of democracy, ends up being regulated in such a way as to be not simply a partisan of that value.

55:26 Francis: We've been surprised in many respects by the impact of technology. I mean, you don't have to go to China to see the downsides of the Internet. I think we see lots of it right here at home.

55:38 Mark: So I told Frank that we'll do our second half without him because he has a couple more events today, but I wanted to make sure. Does anybody have any significant topics that we want to bring up with him

55:47 Seth: before we let him free, I have one quick question. Maybe not so quick. Who was this book for? What audience were you writing this book to address? Who do you imagine is going to read it and be aware and convinced by your argument?

56:02 Francis: Well, my assumption was that, you know, people on the populist right were not going to be persuaded by anything in it particularly so it was not meant for them. I think that it was people more in the political center, but also to people on the left, because I actually do think it's quite important that the president not be reelected in 2020. I was really happy that the Democrats took over the House of Representatives during the midterm elections. But I think that in order for there to be a corrective to this sort of populism, more progressive people need to understand what's driving it.

And I think that there was a tendency to think a couple of different things. I mean, first, that this is simply just a matter of economics, and you can fix this by economic policies, which I don't think is correct. But the other thing is, I do think there is a certain blindness to some of the more legitimate concerns that populist voters have about not being recognized. These are situations where they're not necessarily racist or xenophobic, but they do feel that the elites and the two political parties really didn't do anything while their communities were being devastated as a result of deindustrialization.

They may think immigration in principle is a good thing, but if immigrants don't ultimately assimilate in the second third generations, that that's going to lead to a problem. And so I do think that there are observations about what's driving this current political moment we're in that are important to understand in order to get out of it. So I think that was basically my motive.

57:46 Mark: Well, I found this very helpful, very clarifying. I'm not sure if I completely buy it, but in terms of bringing in the notion of thumos to analyzing mass human motivation, that I've long recognized that the economic model was insufficient. But sort of what had been handed down to me from Hegel and Nietzsche was that thumos really is the alternative. It's not necessarily a specific demand for recognition, but it's more people do all sorts of crazy stuff, and economists aren't taking that into account. And that might well be true, but at least by naming that craziness, thumos makes it somewhat more not rational.

You know, it's the thing on Star Trek when Kirk is saying there's something that makes us specifically Human. And that sounds like a lame sort of romantic response. You know, how could it be that our irrationality, our emotionality is what gives us some superiority over the logical Vulcans or aliens or whoever. This economic model, the Last man model. But if you look at it sort of more fundamentally, that this is the seat, right? We have the is ought distinction. And that ethics can't come purely from reason and can't even come purely from desire, because why would we affirm some desires?

Our desires conflict. So that you need this idea of thumos to even get meaning, to get valuation in there in the first place. And having that as a tool that, as you say, it crops up in so many different ways towards some of which are very admirable goals and some of which are very not admirable goals. But in a one fairly simple concept. We'll try to thresh into the details after we let you go here. Gives you a vocabulary at least, or hermeneutic for trying to talk about some very complicated stuff that has maybe eluded the grasp of economists that assume that we are in some way rational or political scientists.

59:33 Francis: Yeah. Well, it's ironic that this is a concept that's actually been around for about 2,500 years and we have to rediscover it periodically. But I think that's right.

59:43 Seth: Yeah. Thank you for helping spirit realize the full recognition of universal human potentiality over there.

59:50 Francis: Okay, good. I'm happy to do it.

59:53 Mark: You're a tool of Hegelian history in the self understanding of the spirit, right?

59:58 Francis: That's right.

59:59 Seth: Well, aren't we all?

1:00:00 Mark: That's his audience is the absolute spirit. That's who is supposed to read this book.

1:00:05 Seth: Okay.

1:00:05 Wes: All right, great. Thanks.