Ep. 374: Discussing Liberalism (Lincoln, et al) with Walter Sterling (Part One)

0:08 Dylan: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 374 is something like, what's the crisis of liberal democracy and what's to be done about it? For our episode, we read Lincoln's Lyceum speech on the perpetuation of our political institutions, Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, the section of that book, first introduction and the first chapter of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, and Francis Fukuyama's Liberalism and Its Discontents, the essay version that preceded the release of his book. This is Dylan Casey considering whether property rights really are required in a liberal democracy.

0:51 Seth: From Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin escaping into romanticism in Lisbon, Portugal.

0:59 Wes: I don't like the sound of that. This is Wes Alwan believing in My Own perfectibility, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:05 Walter: And this is Walter Sterling, president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

1:12 Dylan: Well, thank you for joining us, Walter. I probably should have said that at the beginning that we had a esteemed guest with us in our episode today, and this is sort of a topical area for us. And you and I had talked about connecting and having you on the podcast. And the topic that we both resonated with was this sort of question that's about the state of both our institutions surrounding liberal democracy, but also liberal democracy itself and the various challenges to it. And, you know, it's part of the public conversation with respect to whether our form of some explicit form of government is satisfactory, some of the questioning of the roles of higher education or of science, that sort of thing.

And I've been wanting to do a episode where we sort of engage this topic a little more broadly. And when you and I talked about it, you resonated with that as well. And we came up with a reading list that would at least get us in that direction. And I think it'd be worthwhile to have you just say, say a little bit about what you're doing and your role and what. Some initial thoughts here.

2:28 Seth: Sure.

2:28 Walter: And thank you for having me join you today and having this opportunity to talk about these themes that I care about and think about a lot. I am the president of St. John's College, an institution I know you all are well aware of. And we're a liberal arts college with a distinctive model that's tied to an integrated curriculum, great books, education, Socratic seminar discussion, and so on. But broadly speaking, I find myself thinking all the time about the mission and meaning and character of liberal education and the liberal arts and that ideal of education and the kind of communities that form around it in the context of the world we're in today.

And while I think about what I see as the crisis of or challenges to liberal democracy as a citizen and a father and so on, I'm constantly thinking about it through the lens of liberal education, where I find myself arguing that a liberal education is needed. I say now more than ever in this country because I think there's a special connection between the character of that education and the kind of citizenry that can uphold and sustain our form of polity. So I've published pieces recently, I think I shared them with you, that are calling out widely recognized fraying of our civil and political order.

I usually emphasize, you know, language like hyper partisanship, hyperpolarization, tribalism and so on, and then try to talk about what kind of educational values and communities can be antidotal to that. So I've sort of backed into these themes in a way through my vocation as an academic and a college president. But for me, all roads lead to reflecting on this challenge to our society and our political life and trying to think through what that means for the future of this kind. And it's not in any way unique to the United States that we'll probably approach the discussion appropriately from that context, given what we're reading.

4:27 Dylan: I found myself pretty happy with the selections that we made. And I was really glad that we put in the Lincoln along with sort of the contemporary summary pieces. And I had read it before, but in rereading it, I was really struck by the notion that are the American version of liberal democracy. And the liberal democracy in general has been challenged from the beginning in a variety of ways, and both in the terms of whether or not it's a preferable form of government, but also from the standpoint of other forces that would seek to. Or other forces that would be at play, I should say, that would cause it to be.

Need to be reinforced all the time. I think that's sort of where Lincoln's speech comes in, in trying to articulate how problems and conflicts get resolved in the context of a liberal democracy, which in his argument goes to what are sort of the fundamental tenets that you're going to have to hold on to? What are the, in some sense, the almost religious partisanship that you would have towards those institutions and how they should be implemented. So I'm looking forward to talking about that a lot.

5:51 Wes: Yeah, he's giving a speech at a time when he says there's a mobocratic spirit at foot in the land. I think, is it 1838?

6:03 Dylan: Yes, is the speech.

6:04 Wes: And so it's about 50 years after the Constitutions and a little more than that after the revolution. So it's kind of weird to think about how close the revolution is to the time of Lincoln and then ultimately to the Civil War. It's not that long before the United States undecided experiment, as Lincoln calls it, is in trouble. And he's talking specifically about things like lynchings. Right. There's a real mob rule and a real disrespect for the law, which I think is quite relevant to our current situation. And I was really curious about this and I did a little research, And I think 1838 is where these sorts of events peak.

Like, this is actually a time when there's the most events of extrajudicial violence and riots and lots of interesting things. I can't remember some of the specific events right now. So it really is a perilous time that, that Lincoln is speaking in and he wants to tell us, you know, how it is that we are going to rectify this. Ultimately, we can discuss whether we like his solution because it's a call to rationality. But, you know, in between this diagnosis of the problem and the solution that he calls for, he has a lot of interesting things to say about how one would safeguard liberal republican democracy.

And in particular, what do you do about ambitious, distinction seeking people who can be very useful at a foundational and revolutionary moment to a society? But once the project of governance has begun, the very much more boring project than revolution, how do you channel those energies, those geniuses with all these talents, into that when it's less exciting and interesting than founding a country?

7:53 Dylan: Seth, did you have any initial impressions or.

7:56 Seth: Well, yeah, I'm. I'll apologize in advance to Walter for being the gadfly. I'm quite pessimistic and feeling very troubled right now. But in a broader context, I have come over the course of doing this podcast for 17 years, or however long it's been, and reading so many different philosophy texts to question the Enlightenment faith, pun intended, in reason, as a response to this. And I, I'm concerned. I feel like there's a fetishization of reason as a response to these movements. So I was particularly agitated by Pinker's essay. But. And he's, you know, he's right to call romanticism sort of a counter Enlightenment movement.

And it's certainly something I Feel as though there are. I know that we were having some pre gaming talking about Deneen, and I don't think that, you know, Deneen's. He's obviously sort of, you know, he's not making much of an argument. He's just making a lot of claims. But I don't know that the diagnosis is entirely incorrect either. In the part that we read, you know, we'll see what kind of response. So I get concerned, you know, I just. I'm interested to see how this plays out. But I just. When you look at the history of societies that break down in the face of a populist, totalitarian kind of movement against a democratic movement, there's rarely a rectification that happens within the political structure.

And rationally, there's going to be violence as part of the reordering of the society, whatever that might look like. And usually that violence isn't just like a type of civil conflict, although that's often part of it. But it oftentimes has to do with minorities and groups being targeted as part of the whole program. So I feel like, you know, what's needed is not reason and discussion, but action. That's where I'm coming from.

10:04 Walter: One of the things that strikes me, first of all, I imagine we all have the experience. I have it. You already said it, Dylan. Incredibly resonant piece to read, both in terms of the challenges of the moment, but also as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, and for other reasons. I think it's remarkable to read this Lyceum address today. I thought I might just call out, in the vein of a little bit of what was just said, this sentence early on. He says, we find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.

So it doesn't surprise us to hear Lincoln speak of the genius of the American republic as exceptional, but that's his assertion. It's the finest form of government for civil and religious liberty of any that's ever been attained. But then part of what the piece shows is that that excellence does not necessarily go together with durability, that it's susceptible to various weaknesses. And I feel like that's a theme that in a certain sense cuts across the readings today. Whether you praise it or blame it, mostly we're going to talk about praise of it, but Deneen's the exception.

And Fukuyama maybe has a balanced approach to this, but there's something extraordinary about the project of liberal democracy in trying to do what Lincoln calls out there, protect civil and religious liberty. It's accomplished extraordinary things, but there are threats that it's particularly vulnerable to. And it's not clear how that excellence necessarily leads to durability or what it needs to have support it to be durable.

11:51 Dylan: Yeah.

11:51 Wes: And he brings up a few of the challenges to durability. Right. We've been bequeathed this political edifice, as he calls it, of liberty and equal rights. And then there's the question of transmitting them from generation to generation. And how do you do that? Because they're susceptible.

12:09 Walter: Right.

12:09 Wes: He mentions foreign influence, he mentions just decay over time. There's always the problem of internal corruption in governments. And he raises the possibility, and this kind of reminds me of Plato's Laws a little bit, which we're also reading now, but raises the possibility that our primary task is to protect this liberal system against external threats. And of course he's going to say no, actually that's not the case. The danger comes from within. And again, it's about this lack of respect for the law, which I think he's ultimately right when he says that figuring out how to instill respect for the law is critically important to preserving these institutions.

And then he goes into the question of what the difference is between the foundational moment and the foundational moment of revolution and establishing a constitution and the project of governments and the project of transmission from generation to generation of these institutions once they've been created. And part of the problem, he's going to mention human passions. For those who are worried that the Enlightenment doesn't give enough credit to the problem of the passions. I think. I don't think that's right. And as Fukuyama points out, Enlightenment thinkers are very engaged with the passions.

And in particular Lincoln mentions envy and avarice and jealousy. And I think envy is really important. And he makes this move to the problem of ambition. So in a society, the most talented people, the most ambitious people are seeking distinction and they're seeking some recognition for their genius. And at a foundational moment that is naturally channeled into erecting these institutions, partly because they have an external enemy to fight against. Right. And in England, partly because it's such a radical thing. It's this experiment in self governance and founding a country is a great right.

It's a magnificent thing to be engaged in, but it's much more boring to actually have to govern. And then at that point, let's find the quotation here. So he'll say distinction will be his paramount object. And although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet that opportunity being passed, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down. And then he'll go on in the next paragraph to another reason. The powerful influence which is which the interesting scenes of the revolution had upon the passions of the people, as distinguished from their judgment by this influence.

The jealousy, envy and avarice incident to our nature, and so common to a state of peace, prosperity and conscious strength, were for this time in great measure smothered and rendered inactive, while the deep rooted principles of hate and powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus from the forces of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature were either made to lie dormant or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest of cause, that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.

So it's really interesting he goes here because he's getting at the moral psychology of this. And we could ask the same questions about an individual that we ask about, right, the. The liberal state here, which is how we manage the passions once we get beyond the point where they can just be turned outward, but after a certain point they become internally destructive. And part of that question is, yeah, what do you do with ambitious, distinction seeking human beings who circumstantially can do great good, but in times of peace, if it takes tearing things down in order to win that distinction, they'll do that.

15:53 Dylan: And isn't part of that just the mode of change making? So it doesn't even have to be somebody whose ambition is to, say, rule over everything. It could be simply someone who feels fiercely that things aren't going in the right way. He has a section earlier than this about where he says in his call to the importance of having a government by laws, following laws is, he reminds us that of course there are bad laws and so talks about, you know, the ways in which we must be managing the change of those laws. And so when I hear about the ways in which we have to be managing the passions, it doesn't just go for the desire to, say, be Napoleon and rule has to do with the desire to rectify and change things, even for the better.

You're absolutely consumed with the notion that what's happening is the wrong thing. And so therefore you need to foment a revolution and maybe foment that revolution contrary to the rules under which you would want to rule after that. Right. And you sort of convince yourself of that matter. And I think that's also what he's talking to here. And that fact, I think goes to the criticisms, not so much in the Deneen, but the formulation that Fukuyama has regarding the challenge of on the left, of being impatient from the. For different kinds of change and saying the institutions that we have are no longer responsive, satisfactorily responsive.

In fact, the indictment of those institutions as being the preservers. This is the critical theory, criticism that the very institutions itself are the preservers of the problem, rather than the mechanism by which one would revise the institutions.

18:03 Wes: Yeah, so it's about tearing down the institutions. Our wrath, our passions can be turned against those institutions. And we might think it's time for another revolutionary moment, which I think is bonkers. But yeah, it seems like it's a

18:19 Dylan: misreading of the problem and a misreading of the solution.

18:21 Walter: You're saying that revolutionary impulse is a misreading of the problem and the misreading of the solution or following through on it?

18:28 Dylan: Yes, that's what I would say.

18:29 Walter: Yes, that train of thought seems right to me. I mean, it does dwell on the ambitious individuals, and I think that's its own problem to think through. But what I hear you highlighting is there's this rhetoric of an extreme reverence and a kind of extreme self discipline in respecting the way we would put it these days, the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, the legitimate laws that have been passed, legitimate procedures, even when we find them unjust, wrong, bad, inadequate, maybe contrary to our interest, but also contrary to our sense of right and wrong and so on.

And it seems, I mean, to my ear, it's not just saying that it's an extreme step to go pick up your musket and take to the streets and start to overthrow the government. But that there's a kind of habit of character, intellect, thought, that's really going to have to elevate those values of respect for law in a kind of hypertrophic way to preserve this form of government. Almost an unnatural suppression of first instincts about how we might respond to certain situations. It's kind of a high calling, he's trying to state there. But it's not entirely intuitive.

Even if you accept that revolution's a

19:46 Wes: dramatic step, the revolutionary impulse doesn't have to manifest itself obviously, literally in a revolution. You can just undermine the institutions.

19:54 Dylan: Exactly.

19:55 Wes: For instance, by staffing, by filling the civil service with your own partisan hacks when it's Been at some degree of independence or compromising the independence of the courts or doing any number of things. So the institutions, in other words, they're only as good as the ethos of the people who inhabit them. Which is why in the end his emphasis is on education. Right. And turning this into a national religion, this respect for these institutions. Without that, you might as well have had a revolution.

20:24 Seth: If we want to be charitable to Lincoln here and tied in with some of the other themes, right, that there's. Pinker brings this up and Deneen is talking about it as well. Fukuyama, the idea of progress. So you have, you know, scientific progress, you have intellectual progress and they also talking about moral progress. This idea that part of the Enlightenment program is this belief that we are becoming more, I guess enlightened is, but more morally aware, more aware of our participation in a universal community, etc. Etc. And you could read Lincoln in this speech as saying maybe that type of development isn't our strong suit and what we need is some kind of a guardrail.

He's insisting on respect for the rule of law as something that helps put the boundaries on citizens behavior because he's aware that that kind of acculturation or maturation of the. Of the moral character of the individual isn't really what we were set up to do. Or maybe he thinks it's just not at the same level as kind of the political, economic and, you know, technological progress that we're making.

21:40 Wes: Yeah. His question is how do we preserve what we have? It's not a question about encouragement of Enlightenment progress exactly. It's how do we preserve what we.

21:50 Seth: Well, it's not an appeal you're not appealing. We don't preserve it by appealing to something in like somebody's best nature or something like that.

21:58 Wes: Yeah, this is the way he puts it. In the end, they were the pillars of the Temple of Liberty. And now that they have crumbled away this pillars, and we should talk about this because it includes memory of the rev, a living memory of, you know, people with stories and scars about the revolution. That's an important part of the speech. But those pillars are gone. And now that they have crumbled away, the temple must fall. Unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Just a line that's bound to not resonate well with Seth.

Unfortunately, passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in the future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason must furnish all of the materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular a reverence for the constitution and laws. So in the end, despite the appeal to reason, this is really about education. And of course, this is an idea that we've seen again and again in the readings that we've done for this podcast, including notably Wright Schiller's letters on aesthetic education.

Because Schiller is writing in the wake of the French Revolution and the failure of that and his idea and the idea of others at that time is that, well, the people weren't properly prepared to receive it. They didn't have the right virtues. This is something that'll come up in Deneen as well. They didn't have the right character. So you can't just do a top down imposition. You can have all the best institutions if you want, but if the people don't have the character and the kind of education that's required, then that system of government is bound to fail.

It's not really just a top down thing. So I, I see that as the note on which Lincoln is ending. It's, it's an appeal to education, which is ironically kind of a fundamentally authoritarian thing. Right, because when we take children early on and this becomes a debate in our country, right. What curriculum are we going to give to them? It's not a choice for the children. What values are we going to instill? Even after the separation of church and state? Like the way I grew up, you know, when I came to America at nine, what I experienced in the classroom, you know, it did involve a lot of this reverence for, for instance, for freedom of speech.

That was a thing, and I was highly influenced by that. But the influence itself, right, so you might call it a liberal principle, but the influence itself is not liberal. It's more like the foundational moment. The foundational moment is essentially violent for any, for a country and for educational influence. So there's a paradox at the heart of this. We need this authoritarian influence. And then we might think here of Plato's Republic as well. But we need some sort of influence that we generate that the subject of the influence in this case children, they have no say in it, but that will supposedly will ground their freedom later

24:46 Dylan: on resonant with that and with Lincoln's call for rule of law. Is this really an implementation of the cultivation of autonomy, both the autonomy of the republic and cultivating the autonomy of the individuals who are members of the republic as being central to the activity? Now you're raising the point, Wes, that there's some tension and I think you're using authoritarian provocatively here on purpose that there's something to me, the way I

25:15 Wes: would take it, it's authoritarian in the non pejorative sense.

25:18 Dylan: Yes. Yeah.

25:20 Wes: Which in the only non pejorative sense.

25:22 Seth: Yeah.

25:23 Wes: And early classroom.

25:24 Dylan: It's the same way that I think you would need to take Lincoln's beginning and call for civic and religious freedom and then talk of what needs to become the national religion with respect to the reverence for our institutions and the rule of law. And it amounts to what are the things that we need to cultivate and expect in terms of our habits overall and our citizenry, which goes to what kind of education do we have in general as members of the Republic that go towards cultivating the autonomy of the republic? You know, no different than we have to have for ourselves.

If that is our goal. And I happen to agree with the goal of cultivating the autonomy of the republic and of us as individuals, I'm well aligned with that. And so, you know, just like for an individual, you need to cultivate an education as a way of embodying your own freedom. The same thing is true for our republic. Walter, you've been trying to get in

26:31 Walter: just in terms of Wes's provocation. Of course, we could say all education is guidance of a sort. You're saying authoritarian, paternalistic, it's cultivation, it's guidance. But I mean, Lincoln's not going to accept. I don't think you were finally asserting that. Well, he's advocating for a kind of inculcation of values that is forced and arbitrary on people and it molds them in the same way that would exist in a totalitarian regime or a theocratic regime or some other regime. He's going to say he's advocating for an education. I mean, he's not using the language of liberal education, but I'd say for something like a liberally educated citizenry in the sense of individuals whose reason has been cultivated to the point that they can responsibly exercise their freedom, both political and otherwise, in a liberal democratic environment.

And in that sense, it's certainly what I believe, and that I think the founders argued for too, that this kind of regime requires to some degree a liberally educated citizenry to sustain it in a way that you wouldn't say is true of monarchy, aristocracy, other forms of regime. They're all going to have some kind of education that's oriented towards them. But this seems like a special requirement, but also an education into Freedom. And we could debate whether that's a real difference or whether we think these are all some form of value laden, culturally conditioned educations.

But I don't think that. I don't think Lincoln thinks that he's using reason with a capital R. And we need people to rise to a certain level of that if they're going to be able to preserve what they've got in terms of civil and political religious liberty.

28:20 Wes: Yeah. Despite my use of authoritarian in this provocative sense, it's really just to illustrate a paradoxical point and I don't want to get us too far off track on this, but it's right. So think about free speech, the institution of free speech. We want a reflective discursive process, and you might call it a marketplace of ideas, but the institution itself isn't the product of the marketplace. And it can't just simply exist without people being educated into being interested in free speech and having that as a value. In a society where it's not a value, the institution ceases to function properly.

And the value itself is instilled in an early age. So we want to make people free with the right type of education. But in early infancy, the formative moments, it's entirely unfree. It's just the luck of the draw with what you're getting from your parents. And then in very early education, we, the adults decide what to give the children. And we were hoping to develop their autonomy, but they don't have the autonomy at the point to say, well, actually I think this sort of education would be better. Similarly, you can say the same thing about states, right?

We want liberal. I think we should have. States ought to be liberal democracies. But as we know, the foundational moment for a state isn't a democratic moment for most European nations. Right. It's just grounded on a history of centuries and centuries of violence. At the point where you draw the boundaries for the polis, that's the foundational moment, the moment of violence. And then what's internal to the polis, we want liberalism and freedom to follow on that. And I only bring all of this up because Lincoln is pointing to this kind of tension and paradox when he's talking about the revolutionary moment versus the moment of governance, the moment where the state is being founded.

And the United States is very unique in that it's deliberately founded. Right. It's not just a contingent product of all these history of infighting among European nations. But yeah, the distinction between that moment and then the moment of governance, which is the internal moment. But you do reintroduce an element with education. Right. With this instilling of the right values from a young age or religion of making a national religion of reverence for the law. You introduce a grounds or a basis for the liberal, which itself is not liberal. It transcends the liberal.

It's not a liberal value to instill liberal values.

30:41 Dylan: Free speech is a good one. And you know, similar to you, Wes, when I think about, like, what are the waypoints of my own sort of education and in the national religion and what I would take as those tenets. Right. You know, from either the Declaration of Independence or from the Constitution or both, Free speech is one of those ones that's big for me. And for me, the manifestation of that is the notion that as standard bearers for free speech, we would be defending people to say that we ought not have free speech. And there's a paradox in that. Right, but in which you would annihilate the principle if the people who are saying that win. Right. But it's part of the. The operation of it to allow for that to be part of the discussion.

31:37 Wes: Right. But we don't make it the school curriculum from an early age.

31:40 Dylan: That's right.

31:41 Wes: Anti free speech, anti liberal propaganda, you know, or nationalist ra ra ra.

31:47 Walter: Right.

31:47 Dylan: And.

31:48 Wes: And I'm all for that.

31:49 Walter: I'm, I'm.

31:49 Wes: By the way, you know, when I say this educational moment, I think is important. I think Lincoln is right. I think we have to instill this reverence and find some way to maintain this reverence if we can. It's not that easy to do. I mean, a lot of it's kind of not up to us. And I think it's something that's faded significantly in our society, as far as I can tell. Might just be getting old. But it does seem that reverence seems to have faded. And I think that's very dangerous.

32:12 Walter: Well, I mean, that's what I see as the through line of our readings. And in a sense, the point of agreement between the. I guess are one severe critic of liberalism and the more or less extreme defenders of it. That the way I would put it, and what I find so interesting from Lincoln on here is that there's something like this, that when civil and religious liberty, when liberal democracy is working, it somehow becomes the air we breathe. We take for granted the peaceful coexistence that it makes possible in a way that the revolutionary generation or the emancipated generation doesn't take it for granted.

They fought for it, et cetera. But we come to Take it for granted. And there's something thin about it or invisible about it that makes it tempting to not appreciate what an accomplishment it is if you're a defender of it or if you're a critic of it, to say, in the end, it's not enough. It's not as satisfying as deeper, thicker values that we need to pursue or rediscover, recover if you're Deneen. But again, to me, the common thread there is that there's a way in which we come to take it for granted. We're not able to savor it or appreciate it or see it or be as satisfied by it as we might be or as its defenders would hope we would be.

And it seems like it takes this kind of rational project of understanding what the consequences are, of starting to unravel it or understanding how these complex structures and some of the ways in which they might limit us turn out to be essential for something that we will come to cherish tremendously if we ever lose it or if it's taken away from us. This is a little bit of a different point than getting to a place where you understand why you want to defend people who are saying the most hateful things from your point of view or defend people who are challenging the very foundation of society as you understand it.

But it seems related to me in the sense that there's something thin or something invisible about the accomplishments of liberal democracy that make it vulnerable to critique or vulnerable to negligence, neglectful stewardship as it goes on and as we move away from conditions that might make it look so obviously desirable by contrast with the alternatives.

34:39 Dylan: Yes, I think this is a good point to introduce Deneen and talk about some of his formulation of the criticism of liberalism. His book's called why Liberalism Failed. It was a pretty big book, as these things go. Was it four years ago that it came out?

34:59 Walter: I think it's 2018. I think it was the same year as the Pinker book.

35:03 Wes: J.D. vance is a big fan. He was recently on a hanging out with Orban in Hungary, so he's true to his word.

35:12 Walter: But it's a book that when you read it, it felt like. Like it was waiting to be written, that book to articulate something that a lot of people were feeling. And it. It's like it fit that space somehow.

35:22 Wes: Well, I mean, a lot of it has been written by Sandel and. Yes, and, you know, liberalism, which is also a bad book, but at least looks like a good book. This doesn't even look like a good book. Sorry, I'M going to hold back from my ranting, but go ahead, Dylan.

35:39 Dylan: At least from my perspective, Sandel's book, the Limits of Liberalism, Liberalism and the

35:45 Wes: Limits of Justice, I think.

35:46 Dylan: Yeah, you know, pointing out that there are this kind of thinness of liberal democracy that Walter's referring to in terms of the tenets of it that would, you know, not be sufficient to sustain individuals and then by extension, insufficient to sustain a liberal community. The Deneen criticism to me goes much further than that. Than that observation from Sandel's perspective to really just claiming that the failure of liberalism is intrinsic to its structure. His argument is that it was bound to fail from the beginning because the kind of government envision of one that is tying diverse people and cultivating their autonomy and demanding their dignity just doesn't exist.

I mean, that's basically his contention. I myself find it kind of flabbergasting. But to me, he dresses up some of that in a criticism of, well, you know, we're really community oriented people, we need the connections of others, and liberalism cultivates an ethos of individualism that is counter to the communitarian nature that we need to. Have you brought up liberalism, Sandel's book? You know, in the 80s there were a parade of books like this. I read them when I was an undergrad. Habits of the Heart and other books that basically make a communitarian critique of the individualism that might be viewed as part of the culture of America and the observation that a strong American culture demands a strong community and so looking for the ways in which that can be part of us.

And for Deneen, that amounts to throwing the whole thing out. We should formulate his criticism maybe a little bit more than what I. Yeah, so he gives.

37:51 Wes: Should we look at page 24 in the introduction where he begins articulating these three efforts? So, okay, he's articulated a pre liberal conception of society. He's thinking of ancient Greek virtue ethics, which just makes me laugh because this book just exudes viciousness in every page. Sorry, that's the last ranty thing I'm gonna say. This is page 23 to 24.

38:17 Dylan: Yep.

38:18 Wes: And yeah, so liberty was more about the cultivation of virtue, let's say. And then he'll say a hallmark, a signal hallmark of modernity was the rejection of this long standing view of politics. And then he'll go on to talk about three main efforts undergirded this revolution in thought and practice. The Enlightenment and the politics that follows upon that.

38:43 Dylan: Yeah, so liberty is the cultivation of virtue as being the thing that he is pointing to as the great thing that was true.

38:54 Wes: Yeah. Kind of a pre liberal conception of what freedom is. Right. Freedom is more about virtue activity in accordance with virtue.

39:05 Seth: Right.

39:06 Dylan: Yep.

39:06 Wes: So temperance and justice, thinking of justice as a virtue. Those sorts of virtues are how we become free. Is a. From the standpoint of moral psychology. And this is something, by the way, you know, this is a conception of freedom that Nietzsche returns to. Right. Nietzsche has a strong anti liberal critique of free will, but he's still interested in spiritual freedom, which we could think of as psychological freedom, which is in line with this kind of virtue ethics conception of freedom as opposed to liberal freedom, which is of course just more about. It's less about psychology and more about liberty to do what you want as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others, let's say.

39:44 Dylan: Yeah. Freedom from. Rather than freedom for.

39:46 Wes: Yeah. I would suggest maybe we just look at these three efforts that he's talking about here.

39:52 Dylan: So the first one is politics would be. This is the main efforts undergirding the revolution in thought and practice that he had attributes to liberal democracy. That politics would be based upon reliability of the low rather than aspiration to the high.

40:08 Wes: Right. So the focus on virtue was rejected as ineffectual and paternalistic.

40:13 Dylan: Right? Yep.

40:14 Wes: And he's going to blame part of this on Machiavelli.

40:18 Dylan: Ridiculous. I was surprised that he pointed to Machiavelli in this respect. This has been a while since I read the Prince, but I can't say that I ever thought in the. I don't know, four or five times I've read that book that he was cultivating a praise of the low over the high.

40:36 Walter: I mean this is not a thought original with Deneen.

40:40 Dylan: Okay.

40:41 Walter: I mean I would say this partly maps onto the way Leo Strauss tells the story of the modern founding. And I don't think it's unique to Strauss to think about it this way.

40:52 Dylan: This way either.

40:52 Walter: I'm not trying to take us away from these three, but I thought to some degree when he told the story here, he's loading language in that sets up his critique. But I didn't think this by itself was an unfair way of telling the career of how we got here through the revolutions in political thought from Machiavelli to. Well, he doesn't even go that far here. I felt like it's a little bit later that he puts a fine point on the fact that all of this means that liberalism is committed to a certain view of the human being. Our deepest nature, what our telos is and so on. That's deforming. That seems to me to be the place to challenge the claim. But I know the language in here is setting that up.

41:37 Wes: Yeah, this history is a big history, and it involves a lot of thinkers other than Machiavelli, who's the one who shows up in this first point. And the background to it is decades of horrific religious war after the Protestant revolution. People dying. I mean, it's something like a third of the entire population of Europe dead. It's not unmotivated. It's not, you know, oh, Machiavelli came along. And it's highly motivated thinking to avoid the horrors of what came before. And that's what bothers me. Sorry, I'm really just breaking my own rule here. It's not helpful for me to do this. I understand we should articulate him in a fair way. You know, his points are in a fair way. But that's just something. I mean, it is important to say, right. Liberalism, it's not just coming out of some vacuum.

42:26 Dylan: It's a response.

42:27 Wes: Humanity already has a lot of experience with the alternative. By this point, the way I'm inclined

42:31 Walter: to go at it, which, you know, which is, again, we could look at some passages. I'm not trying to take us away. Away from where we were. But it seems to me, in a way, Deneen acknowledges what I think. All of our other readings today assert that the liberal Democratic project, liberalism understood as a system of government that's going to be pluralistic. And we could try to unpack that language. Or governing over diversity, as Fukuyama says, civil and religious liberty. That the defenders of liberalism seems to me are saying we want our politics to not be committed to one answer of all the ultimate religious ethical questions and so on.

We understand that we have different answers. And we don't want to have to fight a war to eliminate the opposition. And in the absence of that, we're going to come up with a system that's going to allow for mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and all these other things that we pack into civil liberties and the kind of systems that defend it. But I think the further thought would be in order that I can still believe in my God and in what I view as the highest, deepest meaning, but I'm going to do it respecting all of these political innovations that allow for pluralistic coexistence, et cetera.

And you can believe in your ultimate answers to those ultimate questions. And there can be some tensions and paradoxes in Here for sure. But it seems like what Deneen's saying that none of the others would say is that you can't have that both ways. And there's something about the liberal democratic project that actually ends up being a univocal answer to the ultimate questions. And it rules out these other values and it limits them and it curtails them. And it's that logic that seems to me Lincoln and. And Fukuyama at least would. Would contest.

44:22 Wes: Yeah, this is a much more helpful way of putting this. Liberalism is a response to pluralism, which is a point. Yes, Fukuyama emphasizes. And really it's about religious tolerance early on. It's a very minimalistic goal, which is how do we arrange things that people don't aren't killing millions of each other, at least for a little while. Just like, give it a pause, see what happens. How do we do that?

44:44 Dylan: So this is a good place for us to take a short break. If you want to hear the rest of our conversation, please sign up. Become a supporter@ partialexaminedlife.com support or get us through Patreon or Apple podcasts, and you can participate in a conversation in general on a blog post for our episode@ partialexaminedlife.com you can email us or connect to us on Facebook or Twitter. We'll be back. Thanks.

45:09 Wes: Thank you.