Ep. 209: Francis Fukuyama on Identity Politics (Part Two: Discussion)

0:00 Francis: Thank you. Great discussion.

0:01 Dylan: Thanks.

0:02 Wes: Thank you.

0:03 Dylan: It was a pleasure meeting you, Frank.

0:05 Mark: Well, that was a good interview.

0:06 Seth: I thought he was a good guest.

0:08 Dylan: I thought we got a good overview in the first hour.

0:10 Mark: What was the big hole for folks that we just didn't even get into with him that you thought was really central? Was there anything that we should start off with?

0:18 Wes: Like that part of the argument that I think is complicated or it's not clear how it fits together is what I think of as the complications of the transition from megalothymia to isothymia. And he mentions a few of them. Right. So there's the tendency to regress. And one of the problems is just.

0:35 Mark: So you're saying there's a historical movement that we start out in a Hobbesian. Is that the starting point?

0:41 Wes: No, I'm talking about The. So his transition from megalothymia to isothymia is just that historical transition from. Yeah, maybe, Mark, this is what you're saying, but it's just that transition from the aristocratic sensibility of wanting recognition for one's superiority to the liberal democracy sense of recognition, wanting recognition in the form of equal rights for oneself as an autonomous human being capable of autonomy and moral choice. And in a way, that's the story he tells in the End of History. It's about that transition and the triumph of liberal democracy, the triumph of isothymia.

And here he's trying to say, well, look, yes, I understand it's being complicated now by certain factors. And that's why we get this backslide into nationalism and identity politics. And the factors that I think he identifies are one, just a natural byproduct of liberal democracy and market economies, which is a sort of breakdown of traditional social cohesion and the advent of pluralism and all the stuff that comes along with industrialization and urbanization. And the second stuff is just that typical class dynamics, income inequality, and things like that can lead to this sort of thing, because relative deprivation can be felt as a blow to one's dignity, a blow to one's pride.

But the most interesting thing and the most complicated, and I'm not sure that we got into it enough, is his concept of what he thinks of as the modern conception of identity, and that is this idea that there's this inner, authentic self that's in conflict with repressive social mores. And he traces a development from Luther to Rousseau in this, and then onto a sort of what he calls a therapeutic culture bent on increasing one's self esteem. It's unclear how all that fits together exactly. To me, the relationship between identity in general, identity and recognition is unclear.

I don't know if you guys thought we tackled that enough in the interview, but.

2:47 Seth: No, I agree we didn't. And I agree that it's also a topic to cover.

2:50 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I think we probably covered at least what the notion of a thumotic portion of the soul is at least an overview. But central to his discussion is just what you outlined, Wes. And at the very least, going through his argument would be good. I think that's a great way to go.

3:06 Seth: I think there's another topic, too, I'd like to get to, if we have time, is just trying to understand his notion of some kind of enlightened nationalism or reconstructed nationalism as the answer versus going back to a more traditional Enlightenment form of universalism. Like, why is it that he thinks we need to reform the concept of nationalism as opposed to doing what we've traditionally done in response, which is build pan geographic or global kind of concepts of rights and dignity that we try to force. And maybe it's because we tried it and it didn't work, I don't know.

3:42 Mark: But yeah, it might be that. The next big time philosopher that I will ask, we talked about in the same breath as Fukuyama is Kwame Anthony Appiah, who wrote this book Cosmopolitanism recently. And while I have not, of course, read more than the beginning of that so far, it seems like his answer is, you know, by the title there, cosmopolitanism, that the identity politics, the identifying yourself primarily as a member of a group and not as a. An individual. You know, the liberal civil rights, individual citizenship thing, which I think you were just mentioning, Seth, that I think what cosmopolitanism is suggesting is that no, we don't need just a reconstructed nationalism. We don't need to redirect these primitive urges. We just need to get rid of the primitive urges.

4:24 Dylan: Let's make sure we make room time to talk about it. Because the way you guys are, even that language of reconstructed nationalism, there's a lot of baggage associated with just talking about it that way that I didn't get obviously of the end of his book.

4:36 Seth: Oh, interesting. Okay.

4:38 Wes: Yeah, I think it's helpful to make a distinction. Right. And just call nationalism just as Orwell did. The thing that you're doing when you are trying to assert the superiority of one's nation or group and then use another word like patriotism, when you're just talking about a sort of positive attachment to a way of life or to a culture or to a certain set of principles, in his case, Fukuyama is advocated. We give up any attachment to an ethnic identity or a cultural identity insofar as that's just attached to ethnicity or to a kind of thing that an immigrant, for instance, couldn't partake in and embrace a cultural identity which is actually kind of based in principles.

Right. Based in democratic principles, based in the sort of thing that anyone can adopt and assimilate into and have as a shared national goal. And I would think of that as a sort of patriotic attitude rather than a nationalistic one.

5:33 Dylan: Exactly. That's exactly right. And also that part of that involves a kind of positive commitment to those values which we're going to talk about this sort of after going through more of the book. But I think the way in which you talk about and argue about what it means to be an American doesn't have to be nationalistic in the sense of asserting superiority, but it can be patriotic in the sense of talking about what those virtues are.

5:59 Seth: I can grant that distinction between patriotism and nationalism and still take issue with the idea that your root structure is somehow rooted in geography and a particular history. You know, I'm not sure that his sort of very American brand of melting pot immigrant assimilation into against the broader ideal actually makes sense in other liberal democracies around the world in quite the same way. I mean he tried to hand wave across France and Britain and Germany and these other places, but I'm not 100% sure that that works. But let's save that for later.

6:37 Mark: Just because west brought up the nationalism in Orwell sense. So what Fukuyama is defending is a creedal identification as opposed to a ethnic identification or something. I think those both would though count for Orwell as nationalisms. In other words, tribalism is the way we normally use the term. Now that of course, Orwell had very much in mind the communists. How much more creedal can you get? Workers of the world unite. It has nothing to do with being from a particular ethnic group. So I think the kind of way that Orwell condemns this sort of factionalism, tribalism applies very much to Fukuyama's solution. It's just as I think some of you were saying. You know, Fukuyama I think thinks that certainly Thumos is unavoidable. It's part of human nature and grouping is unavoidable as part of human nature. So how do we make this unavoidable stuff as harmless as possible?

7:29 Wes: Yeah, I just want to add to that just because like notes on Nationalism is sort of a exercise in self application. Right? So he's not just out to condemn other creeds as potentially nationalist. And it's not the content of the creed that's necessarily the problem. Right. So you could have anti racist nationalism, what he calls color feeling, or you could have Trotskyist or socialist nationalism, or you could have anti nationalist nationalism. His own notes on Nationalism could be seen as a sort of nationalist treatise if it's in the spirit of establishing the superiority of the anti nationalist identity unit to other units.

So it's less a matter of content than a matter of whether you have that patriotic attachment to the good of one's group, whether it's defined by creed or ethnicity or whatever, or you are attached to the idea of hey, my side is right and I'm better than you, or my side is superior in some way, which could just be superior in the rightness of my creed. So I think Mark is right. Like a democratic principles creedalistic. Creedalistic. A creedal national identity, identitarianism could easily become nationalist. And we've seen that. I mean, that's the kind of thing that functions, say, in an invasion of Iraq, where we're going to bring them democracy.

That's that sort of nationalism at work. Well, I mean, it could be. You could argue the other way, but it could be.

8:58 Dylan: The challenge is, how do you talk about having a group and talking about that group in a way that makes a difference, if you agree that it makes a difference? So that's Fukuyama's criticism, is that having a group identity, being members of that group is fundamental to things functioning properly. So you could criticize it from that perspective. You could say, well, look, you're just wrong about that. There's no need for any kind of group identity. I don't actually agree. I think he's right about that. And then the question is, how do you have a group identity that isn't poisonous in the way we're talking about? And to me, it's very similar to the idea, how do you have a spiritedness that isn't poisonous?

9:39 Seth: It starts with it being voluntary and not defined by some accidental trait of birth.

9:45 Wes: I think this is a good segue for just thinking about where the thumotic portion of the soul comes from. Right. Part of his whole chapter three account of Rousseau. Rousseau's point is that the thumotic portion of the soul is essentially social. And I think Rousseau is right. So what I mean by that is the thumotic part of the soul is principally about the way we've identified with an internalized values. The way we do that is psychosocial and then more immediately cultural. Right. So I want to please my parents or avoid their wrath. You know, they're telling me I'm not supposed to do this, I'm not supposed to do that.

I start adopting that set of values. I start adopting certain aspirations, you know, and it extends to peers and friends and teachers and authority figures and society in general. You know, I might want to do something great like write a novel and be rewarded with recognition for that.

10:44 Dylan: Or beat somebody in a fight.

10:45 Wes: Yeah, but the point is, those sorts of identifications, arguably, I think identification is the word when we're talking about this sort of internalization of values and in a way, internalization of others to some extent, or the desire of the other, they actually build the self. What we call character, we could think of this, even in the Aristotelian sense, as a set of dispositions to think and feel and behave, character is largely built up of those sorts of identifications. And the reason why I think that's important is I'm just trying to point to the fact that what we call the self is inherently social and at the same time cultural in that sense. There's no escaping that.

11:31 Mark: So can we say, though, that what you've described is it's social in origin? But I don't think that necessarily means. It doesn't follow strictly from that, that everything, for instance, is a matter of trying to get increased status. The entire reason that we're self conscious in the first place, that we have an inner life, is because, contrary to all appearances, it seems the inner life is inner. It has to do with you. But as Wittgenstein's private language argument and many other variations off this, this was the point of Hegel's master slave story, that these ultimately have their origin, have their reference to something that is social.

We just talked on the Durkheim suicide episode, even thinking about the meaning of life, you know, that these things are at least inherited. We're speaking a public language. There's always an implicit reference to some social background. But that doesn't mean that what emerges out of that is itself directly, socially referential. It doesn't mean we're necessarily fooling ourselves that our inner life is just for us or something like that. If you think that you started out in the world as a individual, selfish entity and now you should pursue your desires, that's wrong.

That's a story about origins. But once you are at this place where you are self conscious, I don't know that we can see everything in terms of a quest for status or a social referent.

12:53 Wes: Yeah, I think if everything is a quest for status, then you are a narcissist. This is the other aspect of it, the culture of narcissism and the therapeutic culture he describes. The whole point of therapy is not to bring you back to the instinctual, necessarily, or to the inner self in that sense, but therapy is kind of a therapy of the thumotic condition. But you want to go from one type of Thomas to another. Right. Like you could think of narcissism as sort of a thumotic pathology. And the solution to that isn't the abandonment of Thomas, but it's something else. It has something to do with. Well, I don't know how to put it right now, but yeah, I just

13:31 Seth: want to Point out that I'm not sure that in Fukuyama's account that Rousseau is going to the extent that Wes is talking about, where he's really just giving Rousseau credit for taking Luther's distinction between the inner self and the outer self and putting it at opposition with society, that society exists to constrain that innate natural inner self that wants to express itself. Rousseau doesn't get us to the point yet where that inner self demands recognition from society. He's just expressing the tension that exists between those societal and social constraints against the desires of the inner self and

14:11 Dylan: having the inner self trump the outer self.

14:14 Wes: Yeah, but the account he tells, and I think this is right, Rousseau's natural man, or his first man, the man in the state of nature, is pre linguistic and really pre social. Everything that Rousseau describes after, he's talking about basic socialization and the development of self consciousness. So it's almost like we're talking about an animal. So if you want to think of Rousseau's natural man, I think it's just helpful to think about animals that are operating purely instinctually or purely according to desire, and not according to any. I mean, I think there's an element of reason involved with animals too, but minimally, according to any sort of Thomas.

Yeah, and what happens, like the story of our downfall for Rousseau is the story of the development of Thomas. Because what happens is Rousseau calls it sort of honor and a sense of being slighted when people don't recognize us. That all develops. You know, we go from being simply desiring creatures to being creatures who can compare ourselves to others. And we go from having simple self love and simple empathy to vanity. Here's a quote. Here's the way Fukuyama puts it. Simple self interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition.

So, yeah, the contrast when we're talking about going from outer self to inner self, it's strange because the outer self that he's describing in the case of Rousseau is in a way, the thumotic self.

15:38 Seth: Let me read from the book, page 33. Rousseau's secularization of the inner self and the priority he gives it over social convention is thus a critical stepping stone to the modern idea of identity. But Rousseau, as we have seen, did not believe that the desire for recognition was natural to human beings. He argued that the emotion of pride and the proclivity to compare oneself to others did not exist among early human beings, and that their emergence in human history laid the foundation for subsequent human unhappiness. Fukuyama goes on to say that that's actually one of the things that Rousseau got wrong because he sides with Plato where thumos is an integral part of the soul. The desire for recognition is a critical part of human beings from birth. It's not socially inculcated.

16:22 Wes: So this is where I disagree, but go ahead.

16:24 Seth: His position is that Rousseau gets us part of the way there, but he doesn't adequately address the issue of thumos

16:31 Dylan: and articulate the disagreement. Is the disagreement with the interpretation of Rousseau, the disagreement in the character of thumos and inner self and outer self.

16:42 Mark: Can I just ask a clarifying question which is, and I think he brings this up in the book, is, is thumos a. Does it have to be a particularly human trait? He describes it as so, but clearly we see in lots of animals between dogs and packs, something that's very much like what we see as elementary day to day expressions of thumos.

17:02 Dylan: But why does that matter for the argument, Mark? I mean, it only matters so far as Wes says that animals might have it, but in some minimal extent. And even if you don't want to grant that, even if you want to grant that animals have thumos, it doesn't matter in terms of it.

17:16 Wes: We just want to say to the extent that the social is developed and self consciousness is developed, Thomas is developed. In other words, to have Thomas you have to have this capacity to recognize the recognition of the other. And whatever you want to say about primates and dogs and things like that, we know that there are incredible differences even between chimpanzees and human beings about that ability to get into the mind of another. You know, the chimpanzees couldn't pass that test of the false belief test. They couldn't have a theory of mind as sophisticated as say, a human four year old. But yeah, I don't think we have to resolve all that. We just have to say that when we're talking about Thomas, we're talking about the social element of the human psyche. And it's only going to be developed to the extent that self consciousness is developed.

18:08 Seth: I can tell you that the way that I desire the adoration and respect of all of the PEL fans out there that are anonymous to me for the most part, my dog Rico Suave does not care about them. He only cares about me.

18:23 Mark: Yeah, yeah, exactly, whether it matters. I mean, what you're adding is a level of abstraction. And so the idea of a reputation, of course is A high level abstraction that only humans can have. But is it still fundamentally the same kind of thing as the dog understanding your reaction to him in a fundamentally social way? Yes.

18:43 Seth: But is the dog exercising a judgment of worth in doing that? Is he saying, I'm validated? Because this person.

18:49 Dylan: That's why I like putting the word dignity into the conversation about thumos, rather than just saying it's the social part. Because it has to do with the way you understand yourself in relationship to the outer world. It's not as simple as saying, I have an inner world, I have an outer world. Or there's an inner world, there's an outer world. It has to do with the connection between them.

19:09 Wes: So, yeah, if you've walked into your home and your dog is slinking in the corner looking ashamed because it did something wrong, and then you find out it ripped something up or did something else, that's an essentially thumotic function. Right. It can't be ashamed of itself. And even if you come back and say, oh, dogs can't really be ashamed, it's sort of a gradation or approximation. I totally agree. But at bottom, you see the beginnings of a thumotic function. They have to be aware of your negative awareness of them.

19:40 Dylan: Yeah, this is exactly how the thumotic portion of the soul is a distinct portion of it. It's the part that has that kind of reflexivity. Desire would be rooted in yourself, that you are actively inclined towards things outside of you. Your calculating, reasonable part has to do with the way in which you are processing things outside you. But the thumotic part has to do with the way you understand how the things outside you are understanding you and your reaction to those.

20:10 Seth: Okay, interesting point, Dylan. Let's take that tripartite structure that you just described. Desire. It's what you want. The intentional object, whatever. Then there's the calculative or the reason part, which is the part of you that figures out how to get that. You know, what Fukuyama says is thumos is what assigns value to that, whether it's positive or negative. So if you assign positive value to it, you think, oh, this is a good thing, and I'm figuring out how to get it, and it's great and I feel good about myself. But if it's a bad thing that you desire and you realize it's a bad thing, but you're still figuring out how to get it.

I think he's trying to get to the point that the value concept, that there's some innate value or that value gets Assigned by the individual to their own desires is the thing that distinguishes us. That's something that Rico Suave is not doing. He's not assigned assigning value to his desires.

21:02 Dylan: Yeah, and you're also pointing out another important aspect of Thumos. It's in line with the social question and the dignity question, but by itself, the assigning of values to our desires and hierarchies to our preferences, that's a thumotic activity, but it isn't always or wholly completely social. And I think that's the vector along which you can talk about an inner life in which you are making value distinctions that aren't necessarily only influenced, or maybe not even primarily influenced by your social interactions. They're at least as much influenced by your own internal, calculative and desiring life.

21:42 Wes: Yeah, I think that is actually really crucial. Something I wanted to talk about as well. The sense in which we can be self recognizers. Right? In sense in which we've internalized all of these different influences, but also use them to forge our own code, let's say, or our own internal recognizer. And that's what we're faced with, essentially, anyway. This is like the object, right? This is the thing that we've internalized that we're dealing with. It's not. I'm not literally going out and saying, oh, at some point saying, oh, mom and dad are going to be unhappy with me if I don't brush my teeth this morning.

I just know that's good for me and I perform that function for myself. And that says a lot because. Right. The narcissist in some sense has a deficit of that internalization and looks for external supply. Right. Is concerned about status, is overly concerned about getting it from the outside. And that is the type of thing that will lead you to want to shore up your sense of self by identification with a group and kind of nationalistic identification with a group.

22:47 Dylan: But what you just articulated is the path where you get to identity. What you just said is exactly how those two parts of the thumotic portion of the soul get you to the notion of identity.

22:59 Wes: Say more about that.

23:00 Dylan: Well, that part of your soul that involves defining for itself its values and its preferences. Part of that is in line with the reflection that you have from the rest the of. Of the world and your upbringing and stuff like that, but also the way in which your own self, through your own desires and your own calculations, act upon yourself as a sort of third thing. So in a very similar way, maybe I would even say the same way. But let's say at least a similar way that you're affected by what others are thinking of you. There's also a sense of yourself as a third person, what you yourself think of yourself.

23:40 Wes: Yeah, and I think this is the true inner self. This is my objection, because the true inner self is conscience. Right. As opposed to bad conscience. That's what Luther is getting at with his faith and his conscience, as opposed to the bullshitty stuff that was going on with the Catholic Church and simply displaying one's faith, whether one had really had it or not, in works and in rituals and things like that. So the inner self is also, on my view, essentially thumotic as well. It's just a different kind. It's of the two sorts that we've sort of outlined.

24:12 Mark: Let me make a comparison to just confuse things that I brought up earlier, which is this sounds a lot like will to power. So is this thumos basically the same thing as what Nietzsche means by will to power? Obviously we're not going to read Nietzsche. We're not quoting Nietzsche.

24:28 Seth: I don't agree with that.

24:29 Dylan: Nietzsche thinks he's talking about the same kind of thing. Maybe he also thinks that he's saying it more profoundly and carefully and fully than Socrates is. But just to whip out that they're exactly the same thing. There's a lot of talking to do about that. So what's the point that you want to jump off of Mark by making that equation, what do you want to be able to say and blame thummose for?

24:51 Wes: Will to power is not always bad, by the way. There's good and bad versions. So I'll leave it to Mark now.

24:56 Mark: Right. The way we've been talking about thumos here makes it sound like there's unhealthy, narcissistic thumos. There's basically the two sides of Rousseau. We are saying Rousseau, on the one hand, according to Fukuyama's analysis, is pointing at the bad stuff. Our dependence on society, our bowing to peer pressure, essentially. And then also the growth of an authentic self is also thumotic in origin. And that is a way of saying that there's a good thumos and a bad thumos. And when we say will to power, that sounds like it's necessarily power over others.

And then when we're trying to be good liberal interpreters of Nietzsche, which Fukuyama is not incidentally, then we want to say no, no, no. Will to power can be just me identifying with something that I'm doing. And really, in other words, Having an authentic self doing what Wes was just describing, where I have developed my own sense of myself so that I have my own conscious and I have an independence. So that is an expression of will to power that is not necessarily stamping on other people. Yeah.

26:01 Wes: Can I remind us of some of the different versions of will to power

26:04 Mark: insofar as they are matching the different versions of thumos here?

26:07 Wes: Yeah. Well, just like bad conscience is will to power. Right. So when someone feels really guilty or has a really harsh superego and this is what he associates with slave to morality, that's a messed up version of will to power. Essentially, the will to power has been derailed in an unhealthy way. And then there is ultimately. Right, there's gay science. There is will to appearance, as Nietzsche puts it. There's the will to sublimate to the aesthetic. You might disagree, but that arguably is the sort of will to power that Nietzsche thinks is the highest and best expression.

There is raw blond beast, will to power. Right. Just the master dominating over the slave or a caste system. But Nietzsche actually rejects that and says that slave morality and ressentiment actually are versions of that. They're just covert versions of that nasty oppressiveness. And he's actually looking for something else.

27:05 Seth: You're conflating two different things. Thumos and the inner versus the outer are two different things. So the idea of thumos has existed since at least Plato. Again, we're talking about Fukuyama's interpretation. But the distinction between inner and outer that comes from Luther, which is religious in nature. It's the. The individual's ability to be a moral agent. Right. And then evolves in Rousseau to become more social or lay the groundwork for the political. The prioritization of the individual over the society does not in itself entail the need for the individual to get recognition from the society for their individuality.

Rousseau's distinction is about pursuing whatever those drives and desires are that are individual and that he thinks of society as obstructing that. But it doesn't contain a thumotic element. Those two things come together to become the modern basis for identity. And I think those two things are required for Nietzsche's will to power. So I just feel like we're kind of mudding the waters here.

28:07 Wes: Well, I just. I don't think that the non thematic version of the inner self really exists. Like, that's my point. The self, as we know, is inherently thumotic.

28:16 Mark: I think, Seth, maybe the reason that you're reacting the way you are is because in the identity book. I really think you're right that he paints a simpler picture where Thumos really just is. You know, he gives, of course, this history that we've been saying that goes back to Plato, but then he separately talks about identity. And he doesn't necessarily say Thumos is the source of all self consciousness or something like. That's not in the identity book. That's in the end of history book. And I don't know if he didn't bring that up again because it just complicated things too much, or if he changed his mind about the simple relationship between the two or what.

28:49 Dylan: At the very least, you can just take the cue from the title because identity politics is related to the demand for dignity. And that notion of dignity and whatever demand an individual would have have either for themselves or as a member of a group is related to the thumotic portion of the soul. You know, that's a tight line. That basically is what his book is about. And making the grander claim that actually our self consciousness is directly related to our thumotic portion of our soul. What fundamentally makes us human is distinct from animals.

29:24 Mark: Well, the way you just put it, it does sound like self consciousness is pointing at yourself and being able to say that is a thing that exists and is worthy to exist. So, like, built into self consciousness, I think according to his story, is right there, the notion of dignity.

29:38 Wes: It is, yeah. Because. Right. Remember, to be human is to be able to risk one's life or really ultimately one's consciousness or one's identity. You subject yourself to the threat of death or to the threat of psychical annihilation or humiliation. That's what makes us human. That's what makes us moral agents. Being able to take that risk.

29:58 Seth: I can buy that, that the, you know, the maxim to thine own self be true is sort of in some sense underwritten by recognition that comes from God. And then once God disappears, you have to replace that recognition with something else. But it's still ultimately part of the whole experience.

30:14 Mark: And the first part of that, though, is that it started as social and then we abstracted that to God. So we made up a pretend impartial spectator to substitute for the actual kings of the earth. You know, someone who would be morally superior to those kings. And so I guess that's a question. When you get rid of God, do you then need to replace it with actual people again? Or do you replace it with something even less superstitious, more abstract, Something like the inner self, the conscience?

30:45 Seth: There's no replacement for God.

30:46 Francis: As.

30:47 Mark: As a spectator of your inner life.

30:49 Wes: The only replacement for God is a good golden calf.

30:53 Mark: Sorry, is an elf on the shelf to stare at you.

30:56 Seth: I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna say that the evidence indicates that that was not an adequate replacement, Wes. But I'm.

31:01 Wes: It got a bad rep. So he's gonna cast this inner self type of recognition as one of the problems that complicates the transition to democracy and leads to identity politics. So I think it's his chapter on expressive individualism that kind of gets at some of that.

31:19 Seth: Yeah, that's where I was headed to. Page 55. You want to quote?

31:23 Wes: Go for it.

31:24 Seth: Modern liberal societies are heirs to the moral confusion left by the disappearance of a shared religious horizon. Their constitutions protect individual dignity and individual rights, and that dignity seems to be centered on individuals and ability to make moral choices. But what is the scope of these choices? Is choice limited to acceptance or rejection of a set of moral rules established by the surrounding society? Or does true autonomy include the ability to make up those rules as well? With the decline during the 20th century in Western societies of a shared belief in Christianity, different rules and values from other cultures began displacing traditional ones, as well as the option of not believing at all, et cetera, et cetera.

So the Nietzschean highest form of artistic expression, which is value creation, has not been clearly embraced by modern Western liberal democracies in the Death of God. So we're confused.

32:18 Dylan: The notion that everyone making up their own values would be sufficient is insufficient. So the next paragraph. The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible. If we do not agree on a minimal common culture, we cannot cooperate on shared tasks and will not regard the same institutions as legitimate. Indeed, we will not even be able to communicate with one another absent a common language with mutual understood meanings. And so this is the benefit and the bane right of the social and the thumotic part of the soul.

In one hand, it can lead to oppressive culture. It can lead to all kinds of despotic problems. On the other hand, in order to have a self, you have to have a society. In order to have society, you have to have something in common that holds it together. And there becomes the argument right is what is sufficient, what is necessary for that to happen. To me, part of it is recognizing that there's a kind of ascent and a kind of work that's involved in keeping a society together. And. And that work might feel kind of passive in the sense that well, everybody just happens to agree.

They go through these motions together and they happen to do it, do those activities that make it hold together. And I think part of what he's saying at the end is, well, especially in an era when you lose, let's call it common traditions that act as that unseen glue, then it becomes. Has to be more of a kind of positive project or you have to put in work as an individual. Right. Just like you don't have a community with your neighbors unless you actually go meet your neighbors.

34:01 Francis: Right.

34:01 Dylan: It's not a community. It's just a bunch of people living together. You don't have a family unless you have a bunch of people in their family who actually effectively agree to be a family.

34:10 Wes: Like, there are institutions which encourage us to do the required work. Right. So if we are automatically going to church every Sunday or participating in some other community where there's some requirement to do something, and it's not like I have to make plans, I have to get up a coat and say, okay, I'm going to get everyone together. Because the latter tends to fall apart and leave people isolated, and the former is what we start to lack in a pluralistic society.

34:37 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, like in a smaller way, these accidental communities that you have, like going to college where you have a whole bunch of people you're going to school with. What is the structure of that? Well, it's the structure of going to fricking school and having class every day, and you're all living together and you, you know, you're all on this train where, you know, you got to go to class, you got to register for classes, you have a whole set of institutional motions that then become a kind of foundation for your community.

35:05 Mark: So it sounds good in the abstract to say we have to have certain things in common in order for society to work. But when it gets to specifics, I mean, like, we're still on page 55. The quote that I had pointed out, he does say the clear line runs from Nietzsche's work beyond good and Evil to the assertion by the US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs Casey decision that liberty is, quote, the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. So I assume that it's about abortion, that it's about, we shall have our own metaphysical opinion about when life begins. So that's a very specific thing.

35:44 Wes: Mark, you know, you both, you and I have taught this case at college. Did you know that it's in the contemporary moral problems class.

35:50 Mark: Yes. Okay, so it is one of those, one of the watershed abortion related cases.

35:54 Seth: Just like to caution everybody, the last group of people you ever want to listen to about any metaphysical or important philosophical topic is the US Supreme Court.

36:04 Mark: I think at some point we'll do a philosophy and law thing like we did in that class. It was useful to read some of

36:08 Wes: the opinions like that to give this some clarity. And this is rooted in Roe vs. Wade. The idea is that this is an unanswerable metaphysical question because you have this thing that starts out as a clump of cells and then eventually is a recognizable human being. And there's no obvious line where it goes from one to another. So we're going to call that metaphysically unanswerable. And at that point where we have to express some sort of agnosticism regarding some issue like that to please everyone, we divide it up into trimesters and we, we say you regulate that, you can regulate war.

As it approaches the point where everyone agrees it's a human being with rights. So this whole idea of the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning and the mystery of human life, more charitably the context there is just when we're faced with sort of unanswerable questions where there's going to be radical disagreement about the metaphysics and the ethics.

37:03 Mark: And that should be something that a liberal society allows pluralism based on. But I think that he's raising this here because he doesn't actually think that's the case, that this sounds like immigration.

37:13 Dylan: That's absolutely not what he's doing there. Maybe he is ultimately of that point of view, but here he's just making what seems to be a pretty plain interpretive thing, which is that notion that the right to define your own concept of existence and value is clearly not.

37:29 Mark: And as the passage after that you suggest he said, the problem with that is that it does not allow a state to function. Right. And that's what is at issue is, is Nietzsche really a threat? Of course we know that Nietzsche himself was very hostile to liberalism. And insofar as he would have anything

37:47 Wes: directly to say about this, I think it's complicated actually. Nietzsche liberalism, because I don't think he's as anti liberal as he seems sometimes, but.

37:55 Mark: Exactly. But Fukuyama follows Bloom's interpretation. Bloom was his professor and his primary influencer in some of these interpretive matters. You know, from the fact that the Republic is the central book to focus on through this interpretation of Nietzsche and Weber and other folks that he lets down. So the reason that we found it worth having so many episodes on Nietzsche, and it keeps coming up, is because we do believe that in line with the Walter Kaufmann interpretation, that there is a liberal version of Nietzsche, that you can be radically pluralistic about some things, but yet think that there's just something about the intellectual conscience itself, for instance, that would allow a society to hold together.

According to Fukuyama's interpretation, if everybody really took Nietzsche's ethics seriously, there would be chaos. We would all be going this way and that way, and there would be no commonality whatsoever. Whereas I think that you can have very literally different views on immigration, on abortion, on things, on these metaphysical questions, on profound ethical questions, and still maybe, you know, it's more convenient, things go smoother the more that we have in common in our beliefs. But we're a robust enough liberal society that we can and in fact must survive the dissolution of these commonalities.

39:11 Dylan: I think the knob of the question is what amounts to the commonalities. Because what you just said, Mark, is that we can survive as a society with a dissolution of these commonalities. And what you're saying is that there's some commonalities that are oppressive and that I think that are idiosyncratic, that the foundation of a liberal society is to allow for that kind of pluralism. But I'm going to have as a liberal society, right? So all he's saying, it seems to me, is that you have to have something that's the society and that's the things that you agree on. And in your case, at the very least, you're going to agree that it's a liberal society. And then you're going to have to have a way of talking about a liberal society as a thing that we're all going to hold together as a value.

39:50 Wes: You could just give a more charitable reading of Nietzsche as embracing pluralism and not the kind of pluralism that could survive within a broader framework.

39:59 Dylan: To me, that's a question of the point of interpretation of Nietzsche. And it's fine to disagree with the interpretation that, well, you know what, actually, Nietzsche has. You know, there's a liberal interpretation and there's this nod, and all depends upon whether there's room enough in Nietzsche's understanding of the aesthetic life to allow for a pluralistic liberal democracy or not. But you're still not going to avoid the argument that you have to have something that amounts to what you're going to assent to in your Society. I think that's the basic point. And there's going to be an interpretive conflict about Nietzsche himself and whether or not Nietzsche leads more to one direction or the other.

40:36 Wes: But the larger issue, other than interpreting Nietzsche is just his creedal identity right at the end, is pretty abstract and does leave room for pluralism in all kinds of different ways in which people could define their own concept of existence and stuff, which I think is not the most sophisticated way to read it. Because for Nietzsche, you know, becoming oneself, there are constraints on that. Your telos is still antecedently there. It's just much more specific than the human telos. And you have to figure out what it is and become it. Telos, by the way, that is a thumotic thing, right?

Your aspirations, what you want to strive for, all that stuff. So the broader point is just because we're talking about a pluralistic society with a creedal broader identity, that does leave a lot of room for this more inner self stuff. Once we lose the traditional communal stuff, there is a problem and we are prone to nihilism. I mean, that's the problem that Nietzsche diagnosed. But it's not clear to me that you can criticize whether or not everyone can do the becoming oneself thing. It's not in and of itself a bad thing, and it's not inconsistent with the broader creedal identity.

41:47 Dylan: So Nietzsche has points to the danger of nihilism. And I think that both sides of this argument, the one that says that what's really missing is something to replace religion in some way, which inevitably gets read as we're missing, is nationalism.

42:04 Wes: Right?

42:04 Dylan: Or you don't need. That is the stronger argument against something like what Fukuyama is talking about is just asserting that, look, all we really need is economics. Liberal democracy is going to work best if it just addresses the calculating and the desiring part of the soul. And everything else is just going to work out because we just don't need it. And maybe I'll have to throw in a little bit of minimal utilitarian view regarding minimum sufficiency of people being able to satisfy those desires so they don't get pushed over the edge. But you have a society that all you do is utilitarianly regulate people's boundaries for the ranges of their desires and satisfy their economic needs. And that is far from something like a notion of a social identity. You make it into a company.

42:59 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we all agree that just leaving it at the desiring and rational portions of the soul is problematic.

43:07 Dylan: I don't know if we all disagree about that. That seems to me what Mark is saying.

43:11 Wes: So let me just say my final word on this topic. I'm just saying that the broad credal identity that he proposes as a solution to nihilism, in a way, to the problem of nihilism, is itself pretty abstract and I suspect not likely to be all that satisfying. I think in a way the Nietzsche solution, the inner self solution, is actually richer the idea of encouraging people to take responsibility for themselves and to be creators and to pursue certain creative aspirations. And that does fall in line, by the way, with some suggestions he makes in the end of history. Like we have to have these thumotic outlets in a society like ours, right? And that includes like striving to do great things, artistically or otherwise, because we're not going to get it from being aristocrats for megalothymia or from tight traditional communal ties.

44:08 Dylan: I mean, in fact, that's good, right? It's better to have people with those really, really strong thumotic desires want to become moved movie stars or CEOs that want to have them want to become Alexander.

44:19 Wes: Yeah, unless we need an Alexander.

44:21 Mark: So I wasn't saying that society as a whole should leave thumos alone and assume that it'll all work out itself. Because the fundamental thing in a liberal democratic society is the commitment to isothumia that everyone has dignity, everyone should be treated in terms of figuring out what exactly that means in terms of practical action. Well, you have to see what people actually complain about. And then you have to have a system that deliberates between competing interests in this way. And so something like prejudice is a matter of national concern and potentially actually legal action, that there is something to the separate is necessarily unequal.

For instance. And so if you were really saying hands off, we're only going to have the government or the culture at large, social pressures be involved on a societal level with things that have to do with making economics run smoothly that would clearly not satisfy that condition. Everybody being respected as an individual, because that is constantly under attack from many sides. That doesn't mean that the government or social pressure should have carte blanche in correcting all such situations. This is just a practical matter to be figured out by the side society as it proceeds.

However, I still would claim that less commonality. I mean, Dylan, you were just saying we have to have something in common. You have to have commitment to liberalism. Yes, of course, but what does that mean in terms of concrete action and the things that we see in this book, right? Frank is very concerned about immigration, and he thinks that we should sympathize with the Brexiters and the Trumpers insofar as they are concerned about immigration and especially in Europe, because all these Muslims coming in, escaping from their bad political situations, they are not being integrated well enough.

And without being sort of on the ground and evaluating whether this is a problem and how this should cash out. In particular laws, should you be allowed to wear a headscarf? Or is having your face covered, you know, a fundamental violation of citizens dealing with each other as individuals and not as masked strangers? Like, these are concrete things that I don't want to decide in bulk in advance. But I think that the goal should be that we allow as much of this pluralism as is feasibly possible. The goal should not be how can we whip up as much commonality?

I don't know, maybe these are not incompatible goals.

46:56 Dylan: The best example of how this could work, and he uses this example, one of the challenges in places like Germany or England or Sweden is talking about immigrants becoming German or Swedish or English, and that there's a challenge to that because that notion is so ethnically oriented. Whereas the notion of immigrating to America and becoming an American has a real content, has a real idea. And there's even in our own country, the tradition, the notion that you can become an American. You go, you have a process in which you become an American. And that, to me, is where it's such a powerful thing, the notion of immigration, that there's a way to get on the inside. And in fact, there has historically been great pride at becoming an American. And that process of joining the American experiment and participating in the American dream, that's all part of national identity that holds people.

47:54 Mark: Creedal national identity. Yes. I totally accept his argument that creedal identities are better than involuntary identities that I have no problem with in America,

48:04 Dylan: we don't believe you grew up out of the ground.

48:06 Wes: Autochthony.

48:08 Mark: All right, so where did we leave? I feel like Seth was ready to quote more from the text, and we completely left that behind. And.

48:17 Seth: Well, no, I was just going to alert our listeners, if you ever wonder why to spend time on the greats, you know, why to read Plato and Kant and Nietzsche. It's because everybody else you read always ends up back there talking about them, quoting them, getting angry with them, something like that. There's a reason why they're the greats. And so I apologize if that's too traditional, canonical, but it's true. Or it could just be our Biases.

48:43 Mark: And we should add to that list Herder, Johann Gottfried Herder. We just had an episode on is mentioned in this identity book, in Chapter 7 on Nationalism and religion. We mentioned that he kind of came up with the notion of Zeitgeist, the sort of spirit of the times. And that that was, according to Fukuyama, something that was very much twisted into the notion of the German Volk. And so Herder, like Nietzsche, was misinterpreted to create just in what we read by Herder talking about the art of a land being related to the national character. Like that is definitely part of the intellectual heritage of what Fukuyama is talking about here, both what he's analyzing and in the way he is analyzing it.

49:25 Seth: If we're going to go through the explication, it'll be kind of involved. But essentially there's a notion of participation that's involved in all these movements of the inner versus the outer in society. And the question is, do you get to participate in creating your own values or realizing your inner self versus the strictures of society? And have you been displaced? And so he traces the notion of nationalism as a response to all of this free thinking. Disruptive individualism is kind of two elements to it. One is that the ideas aren't necessarily embraced and embodied by everybody.

You still have the realities of economic life that make it such that there are people who cannot participate, who don't have the opportunities to realize their individualistic self. And then you have the advent of industrialism where you have mass migration from the countryside into the cities, where there's a displacement and there's this kind of simultaneous two things. One is it's a liberation of those individuals who had a place and had a sense of self when they were living in the rural communities and they move to the city and they're suddenly exposed to all these things and realize that they can be more different than what they had expected.

But they're also completely displaced and they're searching for a belonging. And that he traces the idea of somebody selling a sense of belonging for all of these displaced non participating people in the sense of national identity. And that that's the rise of nationalism, which I think he associates predominantly with a populist development.

51:10 Mark: So despite the detail of Frank's philosophical analyses, he's a political commentator. The Nietzschean cynicism comes in very quick. Something like, why do you say political

51:22 Dylan: commentator versus a political theorist?

51:25 Mark: Because he's talking very specifically about things, you know, wrong with Black Lives Matter and with Trumpianism, he's really getting down to the nitty gritty. Yes, of course he's doing a lot of theory, but if you are cynical about this, you might think that he sort of decided on the specifics of where he's going to come down in terms of what he's going to condemn and what he's going to condone, and then the theory is all just kind of justification after the fact. I guess I'm separating these things. I think you could find his explanatory apparatus very useful and still end up with a very different actual political view in terms of what specific measures you are for and against.

What I've described as he talks about is a thick nationalism. This is what we associate with conservatism through Burke. Burke is no, we can't have unrestricted individualism divorced from tradition. There's too much chaos. We will have a total social breakdown. That's what happened in the French Revolution or in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Even as imperfect as it is, we need to work with the power structures that are already in place, with the identities that we have, with the traditions that we come from, and steadily improve upon those.

And if things have been eroded by modern technology, by globalization, then we need to in some way replace those lost social ties in a way that ultimately sounds like it's a yearning toward a past where, you know, there was a more organic connection between people. In other words, he is a conservative, even though he was saying he doesn't like Trump, but thinks that the leftist identity groups are very much justified in their objections to past problems, whereas the rightist identity groups. Well, he has mixed comments on those. He certainly thinks that there are groups of people who's.

Who've been ignored.

53:22 Wes: What specifically is conservative?

53:24 Mark: Just what I said there. Burkean conservatism pervades his recommended solution.

53:28 Wes: Well, the recommended solution of creedal identity and embracing democratic principles.

53:34 Mark: The recommended solution is us all singing together and not just having creedal identity, but specific identity. Right. The idea of singing together, it means that we are making inroads to develop a common culture, to get something like what Herder was talking about, you know, a Volk that then could have its own national character that we all have human feeling for. That's very different than saying we all believe in common, in the universal rights of human beings to dignity. That's very abstract compared to what he wants. He wants something concrete.

54:06 Wes: I mean, I understand what you're saying. Yeah, he wants that concrete thing, but I'm not sure that's inherently conservative. He is still thinking of a framework in which pluralism can thrive, as far as I'm concerned. Right. Otherwise they wouldn't be. That is the creed. We want an attachment to it, which is visceral. Right. Just so that democracy actually survives. That's motivating and that gets down deep into us. But I'm not sure that in and of itself is conservative.

54:33 Mark: I don't know. Did other folks get this feeling going into this book in the same way that we did with the Allan Bloom?

54:38 Dylan: It's way different than Allan Bloom. It's not nearly as reactionary as Allan Bloom is.

54:43 Wes: Obviously he would be accused by people on the far side of the left of being a neoliberal, and they would not like his positive regard for the market or his libertarian tendencies. You might call him a libertarian. A certain segment of the left, of course, would see him as conservative and would definitely not be pleased by a lot of this.

55:02 Dylan: If anything, it seems to me you could accuse him of being centrist. And I certainly did not find the things that he was talking about as being decidedly liberal or progressive. He's not, but I guess I wouldn't call it conservative either. Accepted so far, as you put it, to the center of a highly progressive point of view.

55:21 Seth: He struck me as nostalgic. But he's not nostalgic for a former time, unless it's some idea of Chicago or New York in the 50s. He's nostalgic for an idea of a time. He's nostalgic for a principle of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being fully realized for all individuals. And I think it's more about. He's conservative in the sense that he buys into the idea of American liberal democracy as it might be construed from the highest principles. But he's dismayed at the fact that people are not buying into it like he is anymore. The issue is not with the ideal. The issue is with people believing it and buying into it anymore. I think he's nostalgic for a time when we did that and post war America, you might say there was that sense that we bought into this idea and that's what he wants.

56:12 Dylan: And if anything, the kind of nostalgia he has. And he said this in the conversation we had with him. If anything, it's pointed towards liberals rather than conservatives in the sense of saying, look, there is a way to talk about your liberal progressive values that involves also talking about America as a positive place.

56:34 Mark: Yes. And he explicitly rebutted what I thought was his main critique of liberalist identity politics, which is as soon as you name a group and as soon as you say that group has its own particular virtues. And I want to be recognized intersectionally for the various things that I have suffered as a member of this group and also this group and also this group. All of which are oppressed. Of course I'm speaking in the abstract, not of my actual self. From what I understood is that there is an inevitable slide from isothumotic recognition to then some claim of superiority.

And the way he responded to it is like, well, certainly not all groups who identify and gain pride in themselves become aggressive towards other groups. That's different than saying there's no sense of superiority. Like when he mentioned Canada and New Zealand and like, well, at least there's a harmless way of doing it. You could be Germany and then try to invade everybody. Or you could be Canada and just be smug. But at least you're going to get smugness.

57:44 Wes: Think you have the best maple syrup in the world. There are two things. One is that national pride for instance, like if you're proud of something. Yeah, it's like the way Orwell tries to define an innocent version of this as patriotism. Like it's a way of life you value and, and you want to see it preserved and so on. But there's a fine line between saying that and saying my way of life is just better than yours. If you're proud of it, you're proud of it for a reason. The second thing for me having to do with identity politics is there's a fine line between identifying oneself as a victim of something and then identifying other groups as aggressors or as victimizers simply by virtue of their some sort of involuntary identity.

And then also there's the problem of victimhood can be a form of moral superiority. Once I've taken that step, if I'm a victim, if I belong to a category of traditionally people who traditionally have been victimized in some sort of way and another person with their privilege and all that stuff. They belong to a group that has historically contained the victimizers. Then these assertions of things like white privilege and so on, they can be seen as at a moral level asserting natural group based superiority. So I think that's the danger. There's a very fine line between recognizing

59:05 Dylan: distinctions of fortune and taking some important input from that.

59:11 Mark: That is essentially why I brought up will to power. I would like if he had a third term. So there's isothumia, which is the desire to be treated equally. There's megalothumia which is desire to be treated better than others, to be recognized

59:25 Wes: for being better or being more excellent.

59:27 Mark: Yes, it seems like the partisan of pride in group is to say that there is something distinctive and wonderful about this group. But that does not have to imply that it is comparable to other groups in the relevant sense. It's just like when you love somebody and you love somebody individually for their peculiarities. It's not necessary that you literally believe that this person is better than all the other people. It's just that you have a personal relationship to that. And so is that not just what something like black is beautiful is trying to do?

Granted, it is historically set as a reaction to a culture that said black was not beautiful. And so I'm exerting that in contrast to that. So in that sense, it is making some reference to victimhood. But still, if you get it, essentially what it is trying to do, it's to make itself not marginalized. In other words, to be marginalized is to refer to the greater society as the main thing. And I'm merely this thing on the margin identifying myself. No, it's to put itself front and center. And so in that sense, it is to reorient without everything coming down to a zero sum game of better than worse than status.

1:00:48 Wes: Let's think about a version of that to which we'd all naturally be opposed. Like something like white pride. Why is that objectionable? Is there a version of that which is just white patriotism as opposed to white nationalism?

1:01:00 Dylan: The form that it usually takes is some other kind of ethnic pride. Right. Being proud of being Irish.

1:01:06 Wes: I would never be proud of being Irish. And I came here from Ireland when I was nine.

1:01:13 Mark: What if you were just said, you know, I really think the Western canon as it has been traditionally taught, so including ancient Greece, people that don't have anything in common with me, and instead of the word white, which obviously means, you know, it's super racist, I'm gonna say I'm really proud to be a member of this Western tradition. Is there anything wrong with that?

1:01:37 Wes: I don't think so, but I think you would be in dangerous territory in humanities academic department if you ever said that.

1:01:45 Mark: I'm not actually asking because this is something I want to do and I want to know if it's okay. I'm asking as a matter of principle. How would Fukuyama analyze that?

1:01:56 Wes: Yeah, I think he would be okay with that. But the difference is, I don't go around thinking, yeah, I was raised in a Western culture and we did all these Great things invented natural science or whatever. And then someone says, no, it actually was in this culture back. And therefore I feel proud. This whole thing of me identifying with what Orwell calls the power unit. Right. And feeling amplified by that. I think that's the problem. It's one thing to value a way of life, like to value. And yeah, I think, Mark, you have a very good idea just talking about valuing the Western tradition and loving it, loving Western literature, loving Western philosophy, and then wanting to use that as a way to say, yeah, like to amplify myself to boost my self esteem, to get to one of the themes in his book, like the idea that I'm going to use something like that to boost my self esteem.

And first of all, that's awfully fragile and insecure. I just don't think it's a good road for anyone to go down. I think you can value it without identifying it so personally with oneself, I guess.

1:03:03 Dylan: Isn't part of that pride having to do with feeling like you're part of that thing that you think is great? Just like the identity that you'd have with any kind of activity? You're proud of your kids doing well at the track meet, right?

1:03:18 Wes: I'm not part of that. I mean, are you saying you're not

1:03:21 Dylan: part of that in particular?

1:03:23 Wes: Yeah, I don't read Shakespeare and think, yeah, like we're related and he was an amazing writer or something like that.

1:03:29 Mark: It would more be because you would be a devotee of Shakespeare and so as a fan, you feel part of the fan community. And insofar as then you write anything yourself, you would be participating in that tradition.

1:03:41 Wes: But it doesn't do anything for me thematically. It doesn't win me recognition. That's what I'm talking about. Like, I can't take pride in myself because of Shakespeare.

1:03:50 Dylan: Do you guys remember My Big Fat Greek Wedding? The father in there and the deal with him is that every single word that in any single distinction that had any dignity to it to use the way we've been talking about it was always traceable back to something Greek. So like kimono. Kimono was a Greek word.

1:04:09 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:04:09 Dylan: There's a whole joke about it how it's sort of a funny portrayal of what you're talking about, Wes, that his validation had to do with you said, well, my parents were English and Shakespeare was English and Shakespeare was the greatest author that ever lived, and therefore I'm part of something that's the greatest thing that ever lived. That's the kind of thing you're talking about.

1:04:28 Wes: Yeah, and this is something I thought about a bit because there was a time like after the Boston bombings, I actually worried a lot about the anti Muslim backlash and all that stuff. And I wrote an article about this and trying to say, look, this is not about something being wrong with Islam. This is about identity. And it could be any form of identity, religious, but any group you could think of which would motivate people to engage in this kind of violence if they think that their group has been slighted in some way. But not just that. Like once you read the New York Times profile on the Tsarnaev brothers who did the Boston bombing, you see all their own personal problems, especially their personal humiliations, Right?

So the way in which their status has been wounded personally and they feel like losers and needing to redeem that through first of all by saying, hey, yeah, so I'm Chechnya and I'm Muslim and look at all the stuff that's being done to my people. You know, they don't worry about their particular personal feelings. Now it's politicized, now it's magnified. Look at all the stuff that's done to my people and I'm going to get your people back because of it. That's the type of personal political barrier which worries me when it comes to using one's culture to bolster one's self esteem or to justify retaliations, to feel personally slighted if your larger power unit is slighted.

1:05:59 Mark: So it's not clear to me that Fukuyama's recommended nationalism would be immune from that. And this is maybe what is wrong with that. From my point of view. You want to foster fellow feeling, you want to foster creedal identity. But if that means that everybody feels part of something and reacts negatively when that thing gets attacked, well, that is exactly the psychologically suspect thing that you are talking about. So if somebody attacks Plato, if I've identified with Western philosophy, you can't attack Plato. You can't. Like that was kind of our, you know, a starting point of this podcast is that even though we are participating in that tradition, like the guy is dead, like, it's fine, it's don't, you know, just like our stoics, specifically when Ryan Holiday was on, you know, saying that about the stoics, that he has a creedal identity as a stoic because he thinks these ideas are great, but is not ultimately, if, if some member of the family is attacked, it would be very unstoic of him to react hostilely to that.

I think to Answer my own question. I think Fukuyama would be fine with that kind of creedal identity as long as it was open. So Fukuyama himself is from a Japanese background, parents were in an internment camp and you can listen to other interviews where he talks about all this stuff. But he is clearly a participant in the Western philosophy tradition, going back to Plato, etc. Because he talks about those guys. He's not writing in the Zen tradition. So if it's open to anybody to be a fan and it doesn't result in these aggressive actions, whether feeling victimized as a member of a group or feeling superior as a member of a group, as long as it doesn't have bad practical consequences.

Identify with whatever creedal identity you want and in fact having a multi layered one where you appreciate your heritage, then also appreciate the country that you're living in now and also appreciate your status as a world citizen. Like those are tendrils of love that are reaching out. Like, what could be wrong with that?

1:07:59 Wes: You know, I'm reminded of our Crito episode actually now because so I'm thinking about coming here from Ireland and like feeling Irish, basically an Irish accent. I didn't have any memories from, you know, being born in America and like doing the Pledge of Allegiance or. I don't even, I don't even think I did it. I just thought it was so weird. I just refrained from doing it in the same way I thought confession was really weird in Catholic school in Ireland. Just didn't do it. And I've never felt patriotic right until I've been in situations where I think being in Europe and you get, oh, you're an American, let me tell you everything that's wrong with America thing.

And then thinking that the criticisms are sort of uncomprehending, like, oh yeah, this is the sort of thing an outsider would say based on watching films or based on envy or just their imaginary conception of what the United States is. Very, very simplistic, but definitely getting that feeling of like the same way someone would talk about your mom or your family. Like, we have problems, but you don't know us and you don't have the right to talk about. Like, definitely like a visceral sense of having been identified with that country. And I think part of it is, and this is something that I see as sort of the key point in the Crito is that your country and its customs and its laws and all those sort of things are really like psychologically constitutive of you in some sense.

So it's hard when your country is slighted. It's hard not actually to feel slighted personally, to the extent to which you're aware of its formative forces being part of you. So I think that. I'm not sure that's a problem that we can actually skirt around. And even in a society like the United States, where it doesn't have an ethno, you know, it's not like being in a French national identity, for instance, with all of its history and the language and so on and so forth, there's still something there which I think people possess viscerally. They can become nationalists really quickly, even if you don't feel like it.

You know, I'm sure During World War I a lot of people probably didn't think a lot about their attachment to their country or their willingness to fight for it until that kind of spirit got stirred up. And then a lot of people were gung ho to do that and did really destructive things because of it.

1:10:13 Mark: Well, surely the problem when you were a young Irish boy is that you were drunk all the time, is that right?

1:10:21 Wes: Actually, I was looking at some anti Irish, like just all the nasty anti Irish stuff that used to be published in papers and the cartoons representing them as people pigs.

1:10:32 Dylan: And especially around the immigration period in the early 20th century. It's pretty amazing.

1:10:39 Wes: Late 19th century.

1:10:40 Francis: Yeah.

1:10:41 Wes: But you know, it's all true. It's all true. Speaking as an Irish person, any other

1:10:48 Mark: closing thoughts, Seth or Dylan?

1:10:50 Seth: Any.

1:10:50 Mark: Any last words? Did you like the book?

1:10:53 Seth: Yeah, I liked it until we got to the point where he was talking about this. As we mentioned early on, the patriotism, sort of what I call reformed national, but the patriotism. So before I talk about that, let me say one thing about that. I thought his diagnosis was really spot on. In chapter 10, he talks about how somehow we've transitioned from this idea that the liberal society is designed to protect individual rights to encouraging the full actualization of the inner self. So in other words, he calls it the triumph of the therapeutic. The idea that the state's job is not just to protect your rights, but to recognize your dignity and give you the space to fully realize and experience yourself.

And I would say that that feels very right to me because it's not just the state, as we had in our episode when we talked to the president of St. John's and I went off on a rant about Reed. It's happening in institutions across the place. And I had this conversation literally every day with my wife about her 20 something employees who just feel like it's her job as the owner of the company. It's Viva Despa's job to validate them and pay them what they're worth and give them these things and acknowledge their innate worth.

1:12:13 Wes: God damn millennials.

1:12:15 Seth: I'm just saying that it's definitely something that there is a movement where institutions are now somehow responsible for something that they weren't responsible before. And so there's a whole implicit concept of the function of state. And it's not just society. It's also formal institutions and their role and what they're supposed to do versus what we used to think of as the individual's job for self determination. But let's circle back to this notion of either patriotism or reformed nationalism. One of the things that I felt was missing from his analysis is a real recognition of the power of what I'll call corporations.

It's increasingly becoming the case that governments. I'm not saying they're irrelevant, but the role and the function of governments inside of this fluid modern global economy is their power is weakening. And I think to look towards nationalism is. And patriotism is to look towards institutions of state as somehow a remedy for the situation that he finds. And it's not clear to me that they're in a position to do that. And the Trump and the Brexit and the nationalist reaction, the desire to close the borders and to protect trade and to fight against globalization.

Ultimately it comes down to a question of whether you think individual governments are stronger than the power of global capitalism. And I don't believe they are. I think his real beef in a lot of respects is with capitalism and not necessarily with other sorts of things where the idea that identity has become associated with economic worth. And so the shift in the global economy made possible to shift jobs and skills and technology is changing things in a way that used to not be the case. And that's really what's driving a lot of this. And relying on people to identify with some sense of patriotism for a country that can't guarantee their economic security against the next change or the next innovation or the next shift in political dynamics doesn't seem like it's a good response or an effective response.

1:14:27 Mark: Excellent. Anything last from you, Dylan. Did you like the book?

1:14:31 Dylan: I enjoyed reading the book. I would also point people to the end of History book. Even if you don't agree with it, ultimately, I think the analysis is very interesting. I think he's a pleasant enough writer. Pleasant writer.

1:14:44 Mark: The kind of frustrating thing about identity, just as A read is that he recaps so much, you could literally start anywhere in the book and he will re explain what he has just said in the previous chapter.

1:14:54 Wes: I completely agree. It's like watching Dateline NBC and, you know, you come back and they recap the whole, yeah, she was pushed off a cliff. And then.

1:15:02 Dylan: Anyway, he says that at the very beginning in the opening, in the introduction to the book, the End of History

1:15:09 Wes: is the same way. They could be much, much shorter books with less repetition and organized a little bit differently. Just because when I go through and do my rewrite, my summary, I just find, okay, this chapter should be here and it should be here. I would change the way things are structured and make it less repetitious. But very enjoyable writing. And in the End of History, I found the theory section 3. I think it is on the Struggle for Recognition. Just really a cool, fascinating analysis of a bunch of different. Not just Hegel, but a bunch of different political philosophers and how they're all related.

1:15:44 Mark: Yeah, and good to know that there is a version of Hegel that we haven't run into before. He refers to it as the Kojève Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, because who the hell if you go listen to our episode on Hegel's master slave, who the hell knows what he's talking about? But at least the way Kojève describes it, at least it's a coherent story. It doesn't match everything I was taught that Hegel actually believes, but at least it is concrete enough to react to. So I appreciated that. And it had in common with the Bloom book, especially this identity book, taken in isolation, that it's just saying, oh yeah, this was Kant's view, without actually quoting, without getting into the scholarship, because it's written for, you know, a general reader audience.

He really wants to make a difference in the world politically. And so he avoids some of the arcane scholarly questions that would be useful. And maybe he addresses those more in the endnotes, because I didn't get to that.

1:16:37 Seth: Are you saying Fukuyama wants to make a difference in the world politically?

1:16:41 Mark: Oh, yes. You didn't get that?

1:16:43 Seth: No. That's why I asked him the question in the interview. Who's your target audience? He's like, well, it's not conservatives I'm trying to chastise the left for. Let's see Fukuyama go to some of these college campuses where intersectionality is all the rage and see what kind of reception it gets. I mean, if he's part of the Bloom tradition, it's not going to be positive. I'm not sure who he was thinking he's going to convince and of what

1:17:06 Mark: he's trying to split the difference. He's trying to please everybody.

1:17:10 Wes: All it takes is one tweet, Seth, and he will never speak at a college campus again. That hashtag goes viral.

1:17:18 Mark: Don't you think he's part of the intellectual dark web?

1:17:20 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

1:17:23 Seth: All right. One day we'll have Cornel west on here.

1:17:26 Mark: All right, thanks, guys. Next time we are talking about Franz Fanon, we'll be rejoined by our friend Lawrence Ware to discuss Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.

1:17:37 Francis: Is it Fanon?

1:17:37 Seth: So we'll Fanon, Franz Fanon.

1:17:40 Mark: You shouldn't even say the last n because it's French.

1:17:43 Wes: Let's not get that French franc Vron.

1:17:48 Mark: So come back. We'll be able to elaborate a little more on this, but this was our promised identity politics episode. It just happened. And it wasn't annoying in the way that when we usually talk about that, I don't think so. We'll have another chance to be annoying next time. Please go to partialexaminedlife.com comment on this episode, especially if you're familiar with the book and not merely giving a gut reaction to whatever political slant we had. We'd love to hear your ideas on this and you can do that on our Facebook group, you can do it on Twitter, etc.

Etc. I want to remind you again that Partially Examined Life Live tickets are available and that we still have plenty of Copies of the 2019 Wall calendar now with free domestic shipping. You can find out more about those by going to partiallyexaminedlife.com their big sidebar banners for each of those. Our closing song is by Richard X. Heyman, who, like Fukuyama, is very interested in history. This song is called Cornerstone and we talk about it specifically on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 61. So look for that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks everybody and good night.

1:18:51 Wes: Good night.

1:18:51 Seth: Good night.

1:18:52 Dylan: Good night.

1:19:08 Unknown speaker: Walking through the town was a building we used to pass each day the oldest one around all the walls were worn in the trim turn gray Thought I'd lived for good but now here I am on this rundown train the same old neighbor but buildings gone out of thing we made except for the cornerstone and it's all I. Know and the leaves. And when you buy a T on the granite to make me happy upon the cornerstone. I. In this world we rely upon them to stay the same and one day when you're old, you realize as you search in vain fall that cornerstone. Sam.