Understanding Liberalism: Part IV - Classical Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and the Founding

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00:12

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, for our fourth discussion.

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And this is gonna tie up a lot of the loose ends on liberalism, classical liberalism, modern liberalism.

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What is liberalism and why is it a problem? What kinds of things and assumptions have we been dealing with regarding current events and issues that come up?

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So with me to discuss this topic is Ben Crenshaw, once again, and Tymon Klein.

00:40

Thank you for joining me, guys, I appreciate it. Howdy, John. Thanks, John. And we discussed a cold open here, kind of, and we're just gonna play this clip and then discuss it.

00:51

So I'm not trying to scare anyone, I know Halloween just happened, but I give you Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez.

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It states, our responsibility is to the stability and the security of the region.

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That means being able to support, support, yes,

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Israel in its defensive capacities, right? In that context, but it also means that the

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United States has a responsibility to ensure accountability to human rights, to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and to ensure that horrors do not happen in the names of victims who do not want their tragedy used to justify further violence and injustice.

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Right. Beautifully said. Okay, beautifully said. So Ben, I think you were the one that suggested it.

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I'll let you explain why we opened with that clip. Sure. I mean, in a previous recording, we talked about this post -war consensus and its dedication to human rights.

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And I contrasted that to natural rights, which was more in line with the founding and an earlier kind of maybe earlier proto -liberalism that came out of the natural law tradition.

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And so here we have OAC talking about human rights as the foundation by which we kind of have this universal polity in which, oh, we're gonna protect

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Israel, we're gonna support Israel's right to defend herself. And at the same time, we're gonna prevent genocide in Palestine.

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And so it shows, it's a good clip of the liberal mind, how the liberal mindset works. It's a global mind, it's a mind dedicated to this kind of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, this love of humanity, this support of human rights around the world, democracy.

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And so, you know, you defend Israel as a democracy and at the same time defend the rights of the Palestinians.

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And we can have our cake and eat it too, and we don't have to make any hard choices. And this is the justification for America's foreign policy and so forth.

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So it's just a good kind of clip to see how the modern liberal mind works.

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And I think it gives us a good opening in this podcast to talk, you know, to go back to the popular critique of liberalism by, you know, scholar, conservative scholars like Patrick Deneen and others, and then kind of contrast that with early modern liberal thought of say,

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Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and then contrast them with the founding. Because the argument of like, you know, the modern critics of liberalism is that it's the poison pill theory, that this is just the final outworking of something that's been going on since Francis Bacon, or maybe we even go back to Machiavelli.

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It's, you know, 16th century political thought, you know, kind of just run to its logical end and its exhaustion.

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So is that true? Maybe, maybe not. So I thought it was a good way to open and encapsulate some of the things we've been talking about.

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Yeah, yeah, the universal human rights language is pervasive and it's a new innovation.

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That's what most people don't realize. This is not, I don't even know how many years, I mean, last century,

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I suppose, is when we've seen that normalized. You mentioned Deneen, and I know we wanted to start talking a little bit.

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We've mentioned him before, but he reduced liberalism down to three things, unbounded choice, conquest of nature, and forced egalitarianism.

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And that he blames these things for being the problem with our current system, and says that, or at least suggests,

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I should say, that this was also, perhaps, part of the founding of the United States. And so,

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Ben, I think you were the one who wanted to start there. So I'll let you talk, and then Tymon, about Deneen's critique and where you think, perhaps, it's inadequate, or where you think that maybe he's onto something with some of those early liberal thinkers.

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Sure. So, you know, I'll say, like, I appreciate Deneen and his work.

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I mean, I read him. It's interesting. I think you should read him. I've said this before. Don't just take my word from it, but don't just take his word for it either.

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Read him, and then go back and read the sources he points to, and critically examine them. So on issues like voluntarism, or human choice, or no, you know, there's no obligations that fall outside the realm of unchosen bonds.

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That's some of the language that's used. So, you know, you don't, I don't think, I think all of his critiques are true of the kind of neoliberalism or modern liberalism that we're dealing with today.

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That certainly is an ideology. It's like, you know, if, take marriage. But, you know, when did no -fault divorce first begin?

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1970s. So before that, there was this understanding, at least within marriage, that you had a duty or an obligation to this person all the way through the rest.

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It was kind of an exclusive and permanent covenant relationship. And so the whole idea of choice ought to determine the bounds of your duties, say, in regard to marriage, that's something that's come about in the past 50 years.

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Now you could say, okay, we see an element of it in Locke, and maybe we could get to that. Locke's wrong on that element, and there's other things he's wrong on.

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So the two points here, the first is that the critique by Deneen and others is actually a good critique of modern liberalism, but it's not a very good critique of what was going on in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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They actually miss a lot of things that we should be talking about, or that we could talk about. And so it's kind of a

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J .V. University game that they're playing, I think. You have to go to other scholarly literature to find some more interesting and compelling critiques.

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So I'll give one example. Let's say conquest of nature. So they'll say, you know, liberalism has this whole ethos of conquering and overcoming nature, using technology and a new science of politics, you know, changes in communications and financial revolutions and industry and digital revolution and so forth.

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And so there's no natural boundaries. Okay, well, what does Machiavelli say in chapter 25 of the

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Prince? Well, he says, Fortuna, which is his concept of luck, chance, is like a woman that has to be controlled.

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And she controls about half of our actions and the rest is left up to us. And so what Machiavelli is saying is, okay, there's some things in the world that are out of your control, like the rain will fall and the river might flood.

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That's out of your control. But you could build a dike or a levee, or you could build an irrigation system and channel the water.

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So there's some things in nature that are in your control. And what he is combating here is this kind of fatalism and pessimism that was often found in medieval political thought in which, well, whatever happens in nature and the world,

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God wills it, you know, it's outside of our control. You know, we just have to accept whatever happens.

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We have no agency or ability to act in the physical nature itself. Otherwise, you know, this is an act of rebellion.

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So I think, you know, you could say that that's an exoteric reading of Machiavelli.

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Maybe he's doing something more radical or subversive. Again, on this conquest of nature, you could look at Locke in the second treatise in section 43, he talks in his chapter on property, he talks about, he says that, you know, nature basically provides virtually nothing when it comes to productivity and, you know, the goods, the material goods of life.

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And he's, what he's trying to do there is he's basically saying, like, sure, you can, you can work the ground and, you know, bring forth good things, whether it's, you know, food or, you know, other kind of industry, but it doesn't just pop up spontaneously.

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You've got to do something there. And so he's elevating labor and the kind of work that humans can do cooperatively with the raw materials of nature in order to accomplish things.

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And again, this is kind of to overcome this kind of pessimistic in law in which, you know, you're paralyzed because there's these forces in nature that just come against you and you can't do anything about it.

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So in this critique of, you know, my critique of Deany is he never talks about this.

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You know, he never, there's no balanced analysis of what should be our approach to nature.

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Nature, there's nature drunk and there's nature sober. Nature drunk will kill you. And nature sober is a proper order understanding of how

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God created nature and its kind of inbuilt teleology and its purposes and how we can, humans can add their labor and their intelligence to use the raw materials that God has given us for good as God designed us.

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Now, that's not a conquest of nature. Today, what we have is a pathology. We have this deep perversion of that.

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And I think that's because we've completely, you know, we've rejected the divine origin of ourselves and of nature and of the end of life.

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And we've elevated human beings as being, you know, kind of just pure material, selfish creatures for their own physical comforts because, well, heck, we're all gonna die and burn up at the end.

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Anyway, life seems pretty meaningless. Get what you can out of it. That's a modern pathology. And I just think that it's kind of cheap when, you know,

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Dineen and others critique liberalism, but they never bring up these other deeper matters that are actually really interesting and they're important to work through.

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Because the danger is that we revert back to some kind of reverence of nature in the sense that we can't use our minds.

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We can't use our industry and our talents the way God designed us because that's conquering nature and that's rebellion against God.

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That's autonomy, that's man's law or something like that. So I think that they are bringing up good issues.

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It's just the way they discuss them is very shallow and one dimensional. And there's a whole world out there. If you go back and read a lot of these early modern thinkers, it's a really interesting discussion.

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Do I agree with them all? No, and I can give more critiques of all these guys,

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Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and so forth. I wanna get into that some, the real critiques, the real issues that they get wrong that then

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Dineen and others don't even talk about. So yeah, that's probably enough to go off for now.

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Yeah, and for those who are tuning in, what Ben's talking about, Patrick Dineen wrote a book where he goes after liberalism and he reduces it down to unbounded choice, conquest of nature and forced egalitarianism.

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And I recommend the book. It does have some interesting things to say for sure. But the question is whether or not this is, can this be attributed to the founding and whether or not this really even encapsulates all of what classical liberalism was when the people who we attribute to designing that entire system, if you wanna call it a system, they didn't know it was classical liberalism at the time, but they were involved in this project supposedly, whether that applies to all of them.

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And so we're downstream from them at the point we're at now, we can see all these things.

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In fact, if you read Dineen's book, it's kind of eerie. You're like, oh yeah, that's exactly what's going on in front of me here, here, and here.

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And even as you were talking, Ben, I was thinking of examples from the industrial revolution to the present of this conquest of nature.

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In fact, I'll just mention one real quick, Thomas Cole, the famous Hudson Valley painter, his house isn't far from mine and I visited it not long ago.

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And that was one of his things. And he was a wig. He would have been more conservative, we would say, but he was concerned that there was just, that it was excessive, that in the

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Catskill Mountains specifically with the railroad going through, chopping down ancient grows of trees where it was unnecessary to chop them down, overhunting, all these things were things that concerned him.

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And so environmentalists today want to claim him, but he wasn't an environmentalist. He wanted to just manage the land responsibly with stewardship, that was all it was, and not just let the market decide what you, hunting out a region or chopping down all the trees and beauty also has a value to it.

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So anyway, I'm rambling a little, but I can locate what Daneen is saying in that kind of a thing.

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Timon, you haven't said anything yet. So I want to give you an opportunity. What are your thoughts as you've listened to Ben and I talk?

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No, I, of course, am in a violent agreement with Ben about the, you know,

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Daneen's critique has, certainly has merit for our current situation, but my problem when

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I read it as well, which was years ago now, but I don't think I'm gonna misrepresent him.

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My problem was also the historical narrative or that was my biggest issue with it. You know, his first couple of chapters and just defining what liberalism is as conceived today and as it operates, almost purely observational, the first few chapters is great, except for the, you know, he has to have somewhere that he sort of attaches this operation in theory to historical precedent and development.

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And I think that was a shortcoming or weakness of the book. And to be fair, it's not the focus of the book and he doesn't spend a ton of time even trying to develop his particular argument of where he wants to land the plane in the past.

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It's much more interested in, you know, what's kind of happened or going on and he's describing phenomenon.

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So all that to be fair to Daneen, but my issues or my quibbles were in the same general area that Ben's were.

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And Ben brought up, you know, conquest of nature idea. We could pick another one of Daneen's ideas such as, however he puts it,

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Ben, unalloyed choice or sort of consent -based operations in politics, whatever you wanna say, which is, you know, you can sum all this up with a sort of radical individualism even before you get to the egalitarian aspect.

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But just this idea of choice -based sort of rationale and, you know, being a sort of subjective life based on,

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I don't know what we would say, but detached from tradition and from precedent and from history itself.

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Timon, let me interrupt you real quick. Just, I want you to continue, but just so people who are listening have a concrete example of what you're talking about.

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You're talking about one man, one vote, and that should determine all our political decisions.

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You're talking about you get married, but you can get out of it through no fault divorce because choice is most important.

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You're talking about labor relationships. There should never be anything that interferes with your choice of where you want to be employed, where you wanna go to school, all of those kinds of things.

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Your participation. Your sexual identity. Sexual identity, you can be, want. And so the highest good is participation in this market where there's unbounded choice.

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So anyway, I just want people to know what you're talking about. No, that's right. And all these flow together. I mean,

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Ben was picking apart one aspect of Deneen's definition of liberalism, but the conquest of nature coincides with or flows from the individual choice aspect.

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Because of course, as we've seen it played out today, if choice as a principle is driven to its furthest conclusion, it includes choice over nature, right?

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What nature dictates, which then flows into the conquest of nature. So these things are all complimentary and kind of actually one thing.

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So the choice, yeah. Choice to any kind of social attachments, but also to anything that providence or nature might dictate.

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You know, and I think that's fair for, again, if you're describing what's happened, where we are now.

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But if you're looking at the early modern period, you know, I just don't see this sort of, I don't think it would be fair to describe the people that Deneen wants to pull in to be sort of avatars of this theory or at least the seeds of it.

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I don't think it's fair to describe them this way. You know, I don't see a big choice rationale operative in Hobbes.

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I just don't see that. Does Hobbes, you know, I'm a big fan of Richard Baxter, who's a, you know, mid to late 17th century critic of Hobbes and Spinoza.

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He doesn't critique them for sort of appealing to unbounded reason and choice and, you know, the subjectivism.

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He critiques them for degrading man and saying they're turning him into a complete brute that, you know, is driven totally by appetite.

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So it's actually like a regression. And, you know, everything's sort of dictated for him based on these animalistic instincts.

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And that's a conservative, we would say now, critique of Hobbes and Spinoza. And Baxter wants to appeal to a more medieval basis for governance and society and these things.

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So not only do I not find Deneen's definition of liberalism in some of these early modern theorists he wants to peg it on,

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I also do not see it working out as quickly as Deneen wants it to.

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And he also does not, to pick up on what Ben was saying, he doesn't account for this sort of slow, we could say century or maybe two centuries long argument about these things.

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So he wants to make it this seamless progression Hobbes, Machiavelli, whomever he's gonna blame it on, introduces the idea that it immediately pollinates or metastasizes and it's just off to the races.

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Well, there's, you know, text upon text of debate on these things. There's a massive Christian reaction to Machiavelli that doesn't just reject him, but wants to say, okay, this is good insofar as it goes, but we need to reintroduce to sort of spiritual ends -based politics.

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And then we can use these realist observations, these sorts of things. So the point is, it's just much more complicated.

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And, you know, this is an ongoing debate about, maybe you could even say in a prudential way of how to do politics and how to conceive of the source of sovereignty and power and all these things.

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It's just very complicated. And I think Deneen, you have to do this if you're doing, even if you're doing pure history, you have to flatten some things out and create a narrative,

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I get that. But I think because it's so central to Deneen's argument and results in a degradation of the founding, that in this instance, it was a bit of malpractice on this front.

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I think to make it stick, he had to demonstrate his case better. And I don't think it can be demonstrated.

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I do have a question though about this, because I think you're right, but this is,

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I guess, what I'm wondering. These ideas had to come from somewhere because we are where we are and we can see all these things being played out.

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And we see even the battle against wokeness with some of the more post -war types.

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They are exuding the liberalism Deneen is complaining about in defense against what they think is a woke incursion, when in reality, they've created the conditions for the woke stuff to even happen.

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We talked about that in the last episode. So where did the ideas come from though? Because with Hobbes, you mentioned

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Hobbes, and I was just thinking, okay, Hobbes did think the Leviathan state needed to exist in order to protect the weaker people from being in, they're really in a sense, and he doesn't elevate choice the way maybe

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Deneen puts it, but it is to protect them against the unbounded choices of the strong, because the strong will take their stuff and enact violence against them and those kinds of things.

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So you need a Leviathan state to keep peace and order there. So I can see perhaps the acorn, not just in Hobbes, but also in Locke and Rousseau and others that could blossom into the tree we have today if people took their ideas two steps farther.

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Is that a fair thing to say? Or is that off you think as well? Well, I have a brief comment on that and then

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I'll let Ben take it away. I mean, what I would say the difference between, so Hobbes is in my view, simplifying an equation and an assessment that had been done multiple times before he ever took it up.

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And is really, of course, Hobbes is known for his pessimism and he kind of reduces man to a single element and therefore reduces the necessity or the purpose of the state or government to almost a single element.

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That's the biggest problem to me. It is not the same, what I would say today, statism, what

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Hobbes is often accused of, today stands for a militant enabling of unallowed choice.

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Whereas Hobbes is saying the sole purpose of the state is to reduce or constrict choice because it can damage others.

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Now it's basically the polar opposite. So to say that this idea originates with Hobbes is very confusing to me because it's so diametrically opposed.

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Even if the commonality you could draw between the two is a reduction of anthropology in a bad way to basically an animalistic instinct.

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And I think that's what they share. But in the other sense already described, I think they're diametrically opposed and that's what confuses me about people like Dineen or whomever that want to root that aspect in Hobbes himself.

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John, you and I are already bonded in the first episode over like our favorite of these guys is Hobbes if you have to pick one.

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But so I'm prone to defend him in many ways, but that makes, so Ben, tell me if I'm off and then chime in where you can take us further here.

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No, I think that's great. I would also say with Locke, he reserves a huge element of prerogative for his godlike prince or the leader executive to not only override the laws made by the legislature for the common good, but to rule against them or in their stead.

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So it's not, there's an element of kind of popular government and Locke's account of the origin and the form of government through consent of everybody to create the political society and then the will of the majority to the legislature, but it's not just rubber stamped.

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All of it, of course, for Locke has to be according to the law of nature, the natural law, which in the first treatise he says is nothing other than reason, which is the voice of God within you.

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And that's not unbounded choice that goes back to divine law. And of course, in his questions concerning the law of nature, he says every, like any good natural lawyer,

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James Wilson, Hugo Grotius, Emerald Vertell, Samuel Parker, you name it, all of them were like, if you have a natural law, you gotta have a divine law, make a lawgiver.

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And that lawgiver says, you can do some things and can't do others. So right there, you have a constriction on an unbounded choice by human beings.

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Now, you could say that in theory, but then you have the whole question of, well, how do you then control people?

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Or how do you instill that within them? Do you do that through the strong arm of the law or do you do it through other institutions like the church and the family and so forth?

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And these different thinkers in the early modern period had different understandings of those, the roles of those institutions, but they were all still all there.

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So for example, like I would disagree with Locke where he talks about marriage and he says that, you know, after two people come together for the sake of procreation and after their children have been born and raised and left, then there's no need for those two people to be married anymore.

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And they can choose to dissolve that marriage and go marry elsewhere. So I think, so if you wanna critique

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Locke, you'd have a critique like that. Now, is that just unbounded choice? Like I got married and a year later,

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I just don't like this person for irreparable differences, we're going to divorce.

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No, there's still a duty there to care for the child and just stick it out for 20 years. I mean, that's not a long, short period of time.

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And so there's a problem with Locke's philosophy when it comes to marriage and because he eliminates basically the covenantal element of marriage, but it's not just unbounded choice.

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Now here's another critique of Locke in his essay concerning human understanding. I mean, John, you were asking about maybe there are some seeds, some acorns here.

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Okay, maybe, but again, like there's a big jump from a seed to the full flowering, who waters it, who develops it, who cares for that idea throughout the 19th and 20th century to get to where we are today.

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So essay concerning human understanding, what's Locke's moral philosophy? Well, it basically comes down to what we would call rational

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Epicureanism, rational hedonism. What Locke does is he says that good is identical to pleasure and pain, or evil is identical to pain.

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So he actually defines good and evil according to pleasure and pain, like the ancient

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Epicureans. And the problem with this is that, he wants to say on the one hand, there's a kind of commonality, like if everybody sticks their hand on a hot oven, they're going to scream, it's gonna hurt.

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So everybody knows pain in the same way, everybody knows pleasure in the same way. He's trying to find basically an epiphenomenal founding for good and evil, because he doesn't think that you humans have the capacity to actually know the real essences of things.

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There's a nominal essence, which is kind of this phenomenon, this epiphenomenon that's kind of a reflection or a ripple associated with the essence of a thing.

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And so the essence of the good, we can't know, we can't like grab it directly, we have to know it through pleasure.

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Same with evil and pain. But the problem here is that, at least everyone knows, pain and pleasure are always subjectively experienced.

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Somebody may find running a marathon to be extremely pleasurable, I would find it miserable. Other people find reading eight hours a day miserable.

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I love it. So what is pain and what is pleasure? There is some commonality there, but it's also deeply subjective.

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So if the good is based upon what you find to be pleasurable, Locke tries to kind of corral the subjective element of it, the relativistic nature of his moral philosophy, by adding this rational element to say, well, your reason needs to then adjudicate over, well, if I do this thing and it caused me immediate pleasure now, maybe it hurts me in the long run and I have my eternal soul to, you know, and you do this whole calculation of pain and pleasures in order to know what you ought to do rationally in the present.

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But there is kind of this C, this element of subjective good and evil there.

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Now, were there ancient hedonists and Epicureans? Yeah. Go read De Finibus by Cicero.

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He talks about it. So is this a new idea? It's not really a new idea.

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Locke is trading on older ideas. Even rational hedonism is an older ancient concept. So, you know, in one sense, all of these guys, maybe they're reintroducing some older concepts that had been around for a long time at previous iterations, either during the, you know, pre -Socratic or the classical period, high classical period, or even during the medieval period.

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But they refashioned them and then sold it in a way that was very appealing to the masses.

30:04

So like Locke's Second Treatise is extremely easy to read and just grab. Very easy to re -channel and to build a kind of basic logic, and, you know, step -by -step political, you know, polity or political philosophy off of that makes sense, especially to an

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English mind, not so much to a German mind. But, so yeah, do you, are there maybe some seeds there?

30:29

Yes, but it's really complex and it's very interesting. Deneen never talks about, you know, Epicureanism, its strengths and weaknesses and its flaws and where it can go astray and so forth.

30:39

So it's like, I have critiques of Locke, I have critiques of Hobbes. I mean, Hobbes does the same thing in Leviathan where he says that, you know, good and evil are, they have no objective nature in the nature of things themselves.

30:52

It's just a relative term to the individual. Yeah, the way that, you know,

30:57

Hobbes relates passion and appetite and reason and appetite. He says that reason is just a scout and a spy for the appetites.

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And so like what Hyman was saying, he just reduces man to this brute, appetitive creature that's kind of in happiness is just this longing and this desire, this search of, you know, desire after desire.

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Both Hobbes and Locke eliminate the sumum bonum, the greatest good and the finis ultimis, the final end of man.

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And so they present man as being this kind of just restless, seeking, appetitive and desirous creature who's kind of rationally dealing with his appetites and his pains and pleasures to try to get the best out of life that he can.

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There's a deficient understanding of the human beings. And so it leads to deficiencies in politics. But the problem is again, that these modern critiques never get into it.

31:47

Well, let's, and we should add here, Ben, two things to critique Deneen. One, we don't have to totally interrogate this, but I think,

31:57

I mean, his Catholicism cannot be discounted because the way the Catholics develop, typically there's two ways they basically do history, you know, which is to blame so much of this on the either just before or right around the

32:14

Reformation, you know, all hell breaks loose. Or you have later

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Catholics, post Vatican II Catholics, especially that do this kind of weird history to make themselves basically intricate to America, right from the beginning.

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So that's kind of two ways. And Deneen is not gonna be the latter. He's going to be more of the former, you know,

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Luther introduces nominalism and everything, you know, falls apart, whatever. The thing to note about, which is something

32:43

Ben already plugged of the source of some of these ideas, you can't get to the

32:49

Reformation for sure, but early modern kind of political theory, which by the way, Catholics and the Counter -Reformation are taking up the same ideas and working with them as well.

32:58

So this is not just a Protestant thing. In fact, they play off each other, but you can't have this without the, you know, what's called sort of the humanist movements of the

33:06

Renaissance, which obviously directly affect certain theological developments, but it is the recovery of ancient texts and ideas, right?

33:16

It's not until the later medieval period that you can have Aristotle back in the bloodstream in Latin, these sorts of things.

33:24

And so, you know, it's no surprise Calvin's first scholarly work is a commentary on Seneca, like that's what all these guys are doing that are most of the reformers are humanist in their education.

33:36

A lot of them are lawyers actually, but they're getting these texts back. And so it's changing the way people are thinking.

33:43

You would have had shifts in political theory regardless of the Protestant Reformation on this basis alone, right?

33:50

The second thing I wanted to bring up is that if we're looking for the source code and the sort of seamless stream of bad ideas that go right up to the founding, there's a problem for Deneen historically, because if you look at the text, and this was the case in the late 17th century on up through the 18th century, most people are very nervous about citing

34:10

Machiavelli favorably. In fact, a lot of the citations are in this, are limited to the same colloquial way

34:17

Machiavelli cited today. You'll see that as just a stand in for cynicism or even atheism.

34:24

And the same goes for Hobbes because of Hobbes' suspected atheism. Locke is less problematic because the worst he suspected of is

34:33

Socinianism, right? So some Trinitarian problems not confirmed and not as relevant later.

34:40

But my point is like these guys are actually in many ways ostracized by the founding generation and not used favorably.

34:47

So if you're going to begin to try to root the problem with the founding and these people that supposedly introduced all the bad liberal ideas, the problem is the citations are not as easy to find in a favorable way.

35:01

I mean, someone like John Adams will deal with them because he's like a pure scholar and can kind of do that in a intelligent way.

35:08

And he just reads everything. He's probably the only like real robust political philosopher of the founders that everyone kind of thinks of.

35:17

But my point is, it's just, it's not like this, you know, what's ubiquitous is the Bible and you know, things like this, the influences that are more proximate have to do with a lot of theological inheritance in America less so than something like Hobbes or Machiavelli.

35:35

And this is never addressed by, well, a lot of historians. So maybe Deneen can't be blamed, but certainly not by Deneen.

35:42

And then the final thing I'll say is if you account for those other influences, which is

35:48

Protestant religion, right? That's the thing that, it's the only thing that is shared by almost all the founders, right?

35:55

They all have different assessments of certain political theorists and ideas. Protestantism of some version is shared by almost all of them, at least culturally.

36:03

But that's never investigated as a potential conditioner of the reception of ideas. So how does one read

36:10

Locke as a 18th century American Protestant is something that's probably very difficult to figure out for a modern mind, especially, you know, a

36:18

Catholic political theorist at Notre Dame. You would be able to filter things much easier than we would be able to today.

36:27

And everyone would just immediately kind of get it and know what's good and what's bad. And that's the case with the reception of all these major political theorists that got attention in their own day.

36:37

The good is taken with the bad. That goes for, it even goes for someone like Thomas Paine, right,

36:46

Thomas Paine's Age of Reason is roundly castigated in America and Jefferson almost gets in huge trouble for basically endorsing it.

36:54

It's bad for him because Americans just hate it. Whereas, you know, common sense is received well generally and not as well as sermons, but well for a political track.

37:08

And you know why? It's basically written like a sermon with biblical imagery, right? So like, how do you receive this as an

37:14

American Protestant? That is the real question that will tell you how those ideas actually conditioned people and what they liked and what they didn't like, because they're much more intellectually free than we are today, where you can pick and choose and be eccentric in many ways.

37:29

And you see this in Protestant political texts all the time. Yeah, we see in film and literature and maybe even in our own lives sometimes when people get into a situation where they're in a net or they're captured or their backs to a wall for some reason, they will start musing on how they got there and who's to blame and what life turns they may have taken that led them to this terrible path that they're on.

37:56

And I think something similar is going on here. I know when I wrote the book, A Christianian Social Justice, trying to answer questions on where did this social justice stuff come from?

38:06

I had to survey a number of thinkers and I was trying to get away because I know history is complex and there's converging forces, but trying to get away from this and I'll pick on James Lindsay a little bit here, though I appreciate some of the things that he's done.

38:22

There is, I think an oversimplification that I noticed in people like him and there are many others, not just him.

38:28

I mean, it's pretty much your run of the mill conservative reaction is to blame one thing.

38:34

So I remember with James Lindsay specifically and I didn't read a lot of his material, but the stuff that I was sent early on was basically blaming

38:44

Foucault, right? The reason we're woke is Foucault. It's also Derrida, I guess it's

38:50

Levinist, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. It's these French deconstructionists. Well, then it shifted. If you read,

38:57

I only got a few pages into his book, Cynical Theories, but I looked through the chapters and it was basically, it was constructed that way, that it started with this postmodern turn and that's how we got to where we are.

39:07

He shifted though and it became Marx for a while. Like Marx is the reason we're here. And I think the last

39:13

I checked and I don't really check much, but when he was attacking people that are friends of mine, it was

39:19

Hegel. Hegel's the one, right? And I think this is very common in if you listen to talk radio, like typically

39:27

Marx is like blamed for everything. If you're a Calvinist, right? Servetus or Arminius is blamed for everything.

39:36

It's like all our problems go back to that. And when we look at classical, or sorry,

39:42

I should say modern liberalism and we're trying to reconstruct how did we get here? It's kind of a complicated story that takes centuries to tell of converging forces.

39:53

You can't just reduce it down to, well, Toblock, Rousseau, right? It's these three guys.

39:58

Those three guys certainly had contributions, but there were developments that took place.

40:04

And we can't survey all of them in a podcast like this, but I know Mill was mentioned before we started recording,

40:10

Hegel, Rawls. I'm mentioning Ayn Rand. I don't know if we'll get to talk about libertarianism, but we should probably.

40:17

All of these things made contributions to get us to where we are today.

40:23

And so I just wanted to say that just from a historical angle, these are complex things. These are hard. And I think our minds want simple answers so often.

40:32

And maybe that's what Dineen does a little bit is it's that Catholic kind of like, well, if we can blame Protestantism for this, like that's a simple answer.

40:39

And it also puts us in a good light. And so anyway, I just felt like I should make that point.

40:47

If you're ready to switch to the founding, we can do that. But I thought we could also perhaps take some time to talk a little bit about these other thinkers.

40:56

Maybe Ayn Rand, libertarianism, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Rawls. I don't know if Ben, if you wanna survey any of these thinkers or point out some contributions they made that led us to our current situation.

41:09

Oh boy. I mean, yeah, the great conversation is very complex at this point.

41:19

Mill was 19th century thinker, political thinker who took this concept of liberty of the freedom or liberty of the individual within civil society.

41:29

And it's specifically explicitly in his book on liberty, employed it as a solvent to destroy tradition and custom and to kind of free the individual from kind of the tyranny of like religious superstition or mores and norms, customs of an older Christian or medieval way of life, whether it's religious thought and practice or the relations between the sexes or hierarchy, social hierarchy or classes.

42:05

So he's taking an idea that isn't in and of itself necessarily wrong.

42:12

And he's specifically trying to reorient in a revolutionary way to dissolve and reorient society, employing the concept of liberty or freedom, which the

42:25

Americans rightly loved. And I think within proper bounds should be embraced.

42:32

And he's using it for his own kind of perverted ends. I mean, this happens over and over.

42:38

You know, Hegel is again a 19th century German thinker a very much an alien political thought to the

42:50

Americans. It comes to America through certain thinkers like Walter Bagot and Francis Lieber and their push for the

43:01

German university system in America through say John Hopkins University and so forth.

43:07

That's where Woodrow Wilson was for a time. And you know, the

43:12

Hegelian, you know, you could say lots about Hegel. The kind of the mainstay of his thought is a dialectic that kind of erases or scrubs all essences from human life.

43:27

And so everything is kind of in this roiling flux. He kind of in a sense goes back to Heraclitus, although that's more like Nietzsche.

43:36

But yeah, his dialectic is saying that there's this kind of a spirit or Geist, this providence that oversees all of human history.

43:43

And it's seeking to resolve all of the problems, the thorny dilemmas that have been plaguing the human quest for knowledge throughout the history of philosophy and the history of man's search to understand himself and his place in the universe.

43:59

And that everything is, it's automatic, it is necessary. So every kind of epoch has its own logic to it, its own ethos, its own, you know, moral justifications, its own principles and moral theory.

44:15

And then there's this continual progress. So out of Hegel, you have this ethos of progress. It gets picked up in America.

44:22

Of course, that's why you have the movement of the progressives and progressivism today. And of course, there's, you know, there's other antecedents to this concept of progress.

44:33

And I'll say one thing like this, you know, Deneen in his new book, Regime Change, you know, he's got this whole chapter where he talks about kind of the liberal concept of progress and then the later modern concept of progress.

44:48

And he, again, tries to tie these together, that Locke had an ideal of progress and then the progressives had a different ideal or, you know, continuation, a kind of later iteration on this.

44:59

Well, you know, there was at the founding, to take up the founding for a minute, there certainly was this concept of an improvement in the science of politics.

45:09

And Alexander Hamilton talks about this in Federalist No. 9. And he says, what is this improvement? It includes a representative government, an extended sphere, an independent judiciary, a bicameral legislature, things like that.

45:23

These were, you know, this was not a new science of politics.

45:28

This wasn't like year zero, the French Revolution, something de novo. No, it was building on a long and storied tradition that the

45:37

Americans had accepted, trying to add a few new elements that themselves had been tested and been thought about in previous generations.

45:50

You know, so for example, like a bicameral legislature, you find this in the Puritans. John Conn's talking about this and so forth.

45:56

So it's there, it's been, it's in the American bloodstream and now it's picked up at the founding and it's part of this kind of improved science of politics.

46:06

But never once is this, you know, kind of universal and endless ethos of just human progress until we reach some kind of nirvana or immortality or something like that.

46:17

And we can never do anything wrong. And we're just, the current thing is always good. And the next thing coming is even better.

46:23

There's nothing like that whatsoever. So trying to link, you know, the founding generation's concept of an improvement on politics to try to create a quote unquote, more perfect union as the constitution talks about is entirely and utterly distinct from a later 20th century progressive kind of radical

46:45

Jacobin godless understanding of politics is just, you know, the search for self -fulfillment individually and collectively that has no end until we basically deify ourselves.

46:58

Founders knew nothing of that. So you have to make these distinctions. The founders weren't

47:04

Hegelian. They weren't libertarian. They weren't Millsian in any way, shape or form. So you could say more about that.

47:11

Those are the two thinkers. I mean, you could go on about Rawls and he's kind of this 20th century iteration of Kant.

47:17

Founders weren't Kantian, blah, blah, blah. You know, you could go on like this for a long time. Well, Ben, if I could hop in on what you just ended with before Rawls.

47:29

Again, about the reception of things and what they may or may, you know. So one, you know, in it, if I remember right,

47:36

Hamilton is talking about the improvements and he's not even, if I remember right, insinuating that like he himself and the other guys around at the time have developed these improvement.

47:47

He says the improvements have happened since the ancients, right? So it's meaning that the claim that something has happened since Aristotle does not seem to be particularly radical or progressive to me.

48:01

And he brings up the aspects you talked about, which were not developed sort of out of thin air in 1789 or whatever, 87, 89, 91.

48:12

None of this was not new there. And you see this from their own, the data we have of the process of their conclusions comes from their survey, both of the ancient philosophers, more recent ones, history, and then contemporary models.

48:27

So it's clear that they are not pulling this out of hat. It's just a good sort of political prudential approach to these things.

48:35

Okay, the other thing we would have to say is for a Catholic in particular to sort of shun a doctrine of development is particularly problematic since that's a lot of what they hang their hat on themselves, right?

48:51

Unless you want to say, unless you want to nullify certain changes that happen to get them to the point of where you have the

49:02

Bishop of Rome as the Vicar of Christ on earth, preeminent above all other bishops and other.

49:07

Okay, so you get my point. So to have this sort of idea in politics of development is not the same as complete overhaul, which is what we would say modern progressives have done, complete overhaul.

49:20

And then I think if nothing else, the central point, Ben, that you made is that progress, we'll use that.

49:29

Well, let me say this first. You could also say the developments, these improvements, how would a Protestant read them in the 18th century?

49:36

Might it be through a post -millenarian and providentialist reading? Okay, so that should condition your idea of the reception of them as if you have an eschatological and providentialist, which by the way,

49:49

Thomas Jefferson did as well, pretty bad deist, because that's something that Spinoza and probably

49:54

Hobbes did not really appreciate, but Jefferson did, right? So this sort of high providence view, most of the deists did, not

50:02

Paine probably. But anyway, so if you have those two lanes that you're in, that's very different.

50:08

If it's an eschatological reading, it's different than like a futurist cyborg reading, okay, of these things of development, because it's still ends -based and it's still dictated by God and the scope of history.

50:19

So it's very different. But the most important thing Ben said has to do with human nature itself, which the founders and even these

50:27

Enlightenment people were quoting, thought was basically static for the most part, right?

50:33

And so if human nature is static to you, you are not a modern progressive liberal. You're just not.

50:39

And progress, however it's invoked in prior times is not working the same as you think it is now.

50:45

I think that's the central point. And all excellent thoughts there.

50:52

We have kind of a hard decision to make here because we've been going 10 minutes shy of an hour and we do need to talk about the founding a little more.

51:00

I really wanted to beat up on Ayn Rand a little, but maybe what we can do - Well, I wanna do that too, for sure. You can go for it, John. That's a whole -

51:05

Well, I was thinking maybe what we could do since we're naturally talking about the founding, we're leading into that, we're gonna do another episode just so everyone knows who's listening and we're gonna do

51:14

Q &A. And if no one, maybe what we'll do is we'll start talking about libertarians to start off the podcast.

51:20

And then as people ask questions and call in and that kind of thing, we'll take any question that you have about anything we've talked about in this series or if it's just something we haven't talked about, but it's related to liberalism and political philosophy,

51:33

Tymon and Ben are here, and then we'll answer it for you because they know everything now. Let's talk about the founding a little here because off camera,

51:42

I shared a thought and maybe Tymon, you could just jump off of this thought that, and it's an undeveloped thought, but I remember

51:52

Daniel Dreisbach, who's a scholar who has written some great books on the founding, specifically the

51:59

Christian or biblical kind of formation of the United States. And he was doing a lecture at Liberty University while I was there and a discussion formed in a

52:10

Q &A afterward on sovereignty and where the founders located sovereignty.

52:15

And I think the assumption today is that it's we the people, meaning individuals in a democracy make the choices for what government they want to govern themselves and what decisions they want made.

52:27

And that's where sovereignty reduces too. That's the decision -making mechanism and that the colonists were fighting for that system versus a top -down monarchy, right?

52:39

You hear this all the time on talk radio that that's what being an American is. And he basically was hesitant.

52:47

He said, I can't, that's not what they thought. I can't say that that's what the founders believed because Jefferson believed in a natural aristocracy, that it would have been foreign to them to not believe in some kind of a class of hierarchy where,

53:00

I mean, the Virginia presidents, they make speeches, Washington made one where like, hey, I'm not qualified to do this.

53:06

Hope you'll help me because, but it's my duty because these are my people. This is the position that I'm in.

53:11

So they very much saw themselves as taking, playing a certain role, which is contrary to that notion.

53:18

They also believed in the sovereignty of really an organic community. When they say we the people, they're talking about body politic, they're talking about states, they're talking about things that have developed over time in certain localities that could be different than other localities, and that's okay.

53:33

But they didn't want to, kind of like a garden when it's growing and it's naturally developing, you don't wanna come in and wholesale, plow it all up and do something different.

53:42

They wanted to preserve what they thought were true and valuable there. They, especially the

53:47

Jeffersonian tradition is all about living with nature, right? Contra to Dineen's conquest of nature idea.

53:55

I think, and Ben mentioned rights and duties. When they talk about rights, they're talking about responsibilities we have.

54:01

All of these things seem to be in complete contradiction to what Dineen is saying liberalism is.

54:08

And so the question that I'll pitch in time, and if you wanna go and then Ben, you could just jump off of this is two part.

54:18

Were the founders liberals? Because they say things that sound like Locke, right? Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness is quoted all the time is that's

54:25

Lockean. They say these things. And then, and we've already, I guess, debunked a little bit that like, not all liberal is like what

54:33

Dineen's talking about in modern liberalism and so forth. That's not all found in Locke or Rousseau or Hobbes, but they do use this language that we associate with the enlightenment at times.

54:44

So what extent is there a connection there? And then if it's not a close connection, if these are really medieval thinking people who use borrow this language occasionally, where did the liberalism come in then?

54:57

How did we get to a very simple answer? How did we get to where we are today? I mean, is it Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson?

55:04

And I mean, is it just a natural development that took place over time or what? So, Dineen, what do you think?

55:11

Yeah, well, I'll take the first question and then

55:17

Ben can add to that. And then we'll do the second one because the first one is more clear to me. At the moment.

55:23

So were the founders liberals? I mean, I don't like to be lame and do this thing of like, oh,

55:30

I reject all your labels and categories, therefore you can't define me. That's not the point.

55:35

But if you're going to do good intellectual history, it seems to me that you have to, at some point, remove yourself, even if momentarily, because you probably have to return to it and be in conversation with others.

55:46

But even if momentarily, you have to remove yourself from categories imposed upon the past for this purpose of organization that others have developed beforehand, if you really want to figure out what's going on.

55:58

And so to define something, though, as liberal with this imposed category, you would have to have something in the founders, whatever you're pointing to.

56:07

The next question you should say is, is there something prior to them, or let's say even prior to Locke, wherever the liberalism is starting, is there something prior to it that is either a close enough antecedent that it's nearly identical, or something that is actually identical, or you get what

56:26

I'm saying. So the point is, when you talk about life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and you have to ask yourself what those concepts mean to them, because it's clearly a shorthand.

56:36

It's almost like a bumper sticker. They're able to use it that freely. You have to ask how they would think of those terms, which are decidedly not how modern liberals would think of them.

56:47

And then you have to also look at it in the context of its invocation. And so when you get to,

56:53

I say this all the time, it's super repetitive, but it's just basic points. What's the first grievance in the

56:58

Declaration? It's that the king is not given appropriate consent. Okay, well, what's that? Well, it means there's a customary expectation of how legislations was supposed to pass in between the colonies and the parliament, and the king and parliament, which is appealing to a common law and English traditional expectation and way of governing.

57:21

That's not innovative. That means you're appealing to something that is not pure, abstract reason, whatever its tradition.

57:28

The next thing it says is for the common good, meaning of the colonists. Invocation of the common good is a very classical form of justification for law and politics, right?

57:38

So you're doing something that's very, very old there, and it's your first kind of ballet where Jefferson says to the watching world, whatever, let facts speak for themselves, whatever, it's paraphrased.

57:52

And then that's the first one he gives, right? So that you would seemingly lead with your best one. And there's other grievances that coincide with that very sort of traditional forms of what a polity deserves.

58:02

And then it's also appealing to ancient British constitutionalism that if we of course know is nowhere written down in this regard.

58:10

So none of that seems liberal or innovative to me. And then the formula already set up, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness has very old antecedents of use of happiness.

58:21

A near one, we should say, that is sort of a bridge. We should investigate this as like Samuel Willard in his commentary on the

58:29

Westminster Shorter Catechism, 200 something lectures, uses happiness in this way, extremely congruent.

58:37

He's probably like last generation of Puritan patriarchs in Massachusetts. And this was read by all kinds of people.

58:45

So you can start tracking these kinds of ideas back and see that it's what the natural or assumed,

58:52

Jefferson could have snuck something in, but there seems to be an established way of thinking about this, meaning happiness is the complete good of man that's ultimately has to be driven into God himself.

59:04

So that's a roundabout way. Those are like almost historical anecdotes, but I just get frustrated in many ways and make it a methodological point.

59:12

And I just don't see even a sort of surface level or basic rigor in approaching this question of where the founders liberal.

59:20

And then you have to say, what do you mean by that? And in what regard? And then is there any other explanation other than just liberalism for the ideas that are most in play, that even weave through our own modern hindsight curation process have decided were the most important ones.

59:38

We're not even sure what was most important to them, but we've cherry picked. And even with those ideas,

59:44

I just think it's not as simple as people want to make it. And to your point, John, there are medieval antecedents for many of these things that I think provide better explanation of continuity than is typically appreciated.

59:58

So I'll end there for a minute and Ben can chime in. Yeah, thank you, Tymon. Ben, what are your thoughts? I would say,

01:00:07

I would definitely echo what Tymon said there. So let's take something like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

01:00:16

In political philosophy, you have this concept of the two horizons, the man's temporal horizon of his life now, this is the actual or the real.

01:00:28

What Machiavelli would say, you take men as you find them. What is, how do men act and behave in the world as you find it, as it just presents itself to you.

01:00:39

And then you have the eternal horizon. This is the man's eternal life, his divine and his heavenly life.

01:00:47

And this is the ideal and the future. And throughout ancient political thought, you certainly have these two intentions.

01:00:59

Say for example, in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, he starts with the opinion of the people.

01:01:07

What do the people think about this thing called virtue or this thing called happiness? What did the people say?

01:01:14

So he starts with, well, how do you see men as they act right now? What are their opinions? But then there's a dialectic on that opinion by which you move to this higher realm.

01:01:23

So by book eight to 10, you have this long discussion of friendship and the highest good.

01:01:30

And the highest good is this complete virtue and this perfection of man's character as a good in itself.

01:01:38

And he says that there's a divine element in man's rationality. This is the ideal.

01:01:45

And men should be progressing, moving toward that ideal because it's kind of their end, what is good for them.

01:01:56

So to get to the question of are the founders liberal, what do you say? If we label say

01:02:01

Machiavelli as a liberal thinker, what does Machiavelli do? Well, Machiavelli completely eliminates the second horizon, the eternal horizon.

01:02:09

He just says, no, politics is this base thing in which you take men as they are and you try to basically create a state that governs them so that they survive.

01:02:18

It's utilitarian, it's kind of this calculus. And there's a lot of realism there, which

01:02:25

I think appeals to people, especially when you're dealing with certain evangelical

01:02:32

Christian groups today that are totally caught up in say a dispensational or kind of this ideal of things are just gonna work out perfectly at some point.

01:02:44

And you're like, no, you actually have to take seriously men as they are. There's a lot you can learn from Machiavelli.

01:02:51

Well, what about the founders? Okay, so life is certainly the lower horizon, the immediate horizon of you have to have self -preservation.

01:03:02

Locke talks about how self -preservation, Hobbes obviously does, Machiavelli does. Is that a liberal element of the founding?

01:03:08

Okay, sure, they talk about self -preservation, but so does Aristotle, one of the politics. So liberty then would be a more flourishing life and happiness is this retrieval, this

01:03:19

Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, the best possible life that men can have that takes up both his temporal goods, these material goods that are necessary to be able to achieve the higher goods, this second horizon.

01:03:32

So you have both horizons in the founding. You don't have both horizons in Machiavelli.

01:03:38

Do you have both horizons in Hobbes? Yes, in an extent, although Hobbes bases his on, his political philosophy is grounded on this war of all against all, this alienation, this hostility, this fear, which then drives men into political society as opposed to a more positive view that the founders had that men are social by nature and politics is a development and a completion of an inbuilt teleology designed by God, as opposed to this alien and external state that then imposes itself upon you to just keep men from killing each other.

01:04:18

So are they liberal in certain elements? Sort of, in other elements, absolutely not.

01:04:25

What else to say? So yes and no.

01:04:31

You have the two horizons in the founders. You certainly have a divine element that's absolutely there.

01:04:42

You do have an emphasis upon something like property, but property is, it's like say

01:04:50

Locke. He defines property as men mixing their labor with the earth and therefore men own what they mix their labor with, but he also says that all men are the property of God.

01:05:02

So men's property in the material world is also defined by God's ownership of you.

01:05:09

Did the founders believe that? Absolutely. So, are the founders liberal?

01:05:16

I chafe against the question. I think the question in some ways is actually a product of 20th century scholarship on the founding, which really tried to say, we've got this thing called liberalism.

01:05:29

We're gonna define it as a rights -based policy. We're going to define all elements of political thought according to rights, positive rights and negative rights.

01:05:38

And rights of the individual, the private realm versus rights of the states and the public realm and so forth.

01:05:45

That's a 20th century project. And then we inherit the question from that.

01:05:51

Whereas if you were to go back to the founding and you were to ask them, like John Adams or Theophilus Parsons or Hamilton, are you a liberal?

01:06:02

They would say, what's a liberal? I don't know what a liberal is. I'm a Republican. I believe in the res publica, the things of the people.

01:06:10

And what's the thing of the people? It is the common good. It's the salus populi, the good of the people, the wellbeing of the people.

01:06:20

That's what they believed in. Did they think that men had natural rights and natural duties before God and each other?

01:06:27

Yeah, and that was part of this whole kind of moral person of the good of all the people.

01:06:36

So that is a completely, that's really an alien concept to us. I would say it's more of a form of like Christian republicanism or a

01:06:46

Christian covenantal politics. I think you can actually read the Declaration of Independence as a covenant.

01:06:53

And that comes right out of like the Puritan tradition. It has deep ties in American history.

01:07:00

So is that liberal? I wouldn't say that that's liberal, especially as it's defined in the 20th century.

01:07:07

So I just think like, instead of, yeah, kind of like time, instead of like placing labels on it, be able to go back and read the founders themselves and just understand thoroughly what they were saying and why, that'll completely reshape your understanding of America.

01:07:26

One of the things too that I'll add is there's a quote from John Dickinson, one of the founding fathers, where he says in response to,

01:07:34

I think it's James Madison, he says, experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.

01:07:39

It was not reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanisms of the British constitution. It was not reason that discovered or even could have discovered the odd and in the eye of those who are governed by reason, the absurd mode of trial by jury.

01:07:54

Accidents probably produce these discoveries and experience has given sanction to them. This then was our guide.

01:08:00

And he's talking about the revolution, that this was our guide. And the reason I wanna bring up that quote is one of the things that I think is so fundamental to liberalism, it is ideological.

01:08:13

It is not based upon experience and tradition. It is based upon abstract thought and then imposition of that onto the real world.

01:08:25

And the founders, that's just not the language they spoke in. They weren't, many will point out, how could

01:08:32

Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence and own slaves? Well, you could say about a thousand things about the founding generation.

01:08:39

They had blasphemy laws. They had official state religions. Women could not vote.

01:08:45

I mean, there's tons of things that they had that today would be considered so abhorrent and limitations on human freedom and those kinds of things.

01:08:54

And they did not see any contradiction there. They weren't, even in their private correspondences,

01:09:02

I mean, many will try to upplay the distaste that many of the founders had for slavery and wanting to get rid of it and stopping the slave trade by 1808 and those kinds of things.

01:09:11

But they weren't your moral crusaders that were trying to, like abolitionists later, immediately right now, we must, no matter what the consequences are, do this thing that will economically harm the nation.

01:09:26

They were trying to, through the natural channels that already existed, handle these issues.

01:09:33

And that to me, that's so different than liberalism. It's just not even on the same planet. And to suggest that these men were liberals, well, maybe they use some language from Locke, but it's like, you're not gonna find, unless you're going to extreme examples like Thomas Paine or something, great examples of it.

01:09:52

These were traditional people for the most part. They were, as I say, I think medieval is not a bad word to use here.

01:10:02

So that's my three cents. We do have to land the plane soon. And I know I asked another question.

01:10:07

And so I do wanna give you both an opportunity on, okay, so where did it come from? Glenn Beck for a while was saying, stop saying liberal, it's the progressives.

01:10:16

It's the progressives that are the problem. Woodrow Wilson changed everything in America. It was great before. And then he changed it.

01:10:23

And there's a million versions of this in conservative circles about, it was Lincoln, he changed it all.

01:10:29

Or it was FDR, it was LBJ or Carter or some of the more boomer generation.

01:10:35

It was Obama. Things were great before Obama. It was Occam. It was Occam. It was William of Occam, right?

01:10:42

And maybe there's - It was a Catholic by the way. So I'm just saying. Yeah, yeah. Feel free to bash the

01:10:48

Catholics. So Tymon, I'll start with you and then Ben and we can close after that. Yeah, I mean,

01:10:53

I guess this is sort of, it's not a cop -out, but it is going back to what

01:10:59

I was saying before. I think the, you know, there's lots of intervening causality between the founding generation and the things we're dealing with today, the predominant pathologies that drive everything from individual choices in everyday life to policy itself.

01:11:19

There's just a lot of things that happen. And many of those things that are often unaccounted for in very, you mentioned

01:11:24

Glenn Beck, whatever, these sort of simplistic narratives are actually radical changes in material conditions.

01:11:31

And I would include in those things, wars, conflicts, major upheaval.

01:11:37

These have a way of, these things have a way of changing the way people look at the world and what their more immediate goals are, which affect long -term goals.

01:11:49

You have things in between the founding and our present day, most immediately people can think of the civil war, but something that's also radically destabilizing is the second great awakening, which somewhat coincides with that.

01:12:07

It's where you get just crazy types of things. I mean, it's where you get Scientology in these things. And these are connected to trends that are going on over in the continent and an elite society and the emergence of new sciences and industrialization.

01:12:21

I mean, all of this is just very difficult to account for. And it's happening at the same time that you're having massive expansion westward, which is going to destabilize communities, thin them.

01:12:32

But on the backend, you're having massive immigration, relatively unchecked, which is going to refill those older communities with newcomers that have different, it's hard to account for.

01:12:44

So my point is it's much more fun and comforting to say it was

01:12:50

Lincoln. Lincoln did this to us, but the breakdown of this

01:12:56

Republican assumption and spirit that Ben was talking about that you would find in the founders can just as easily be answered by sort of these factors, causal factors that no individual was necessarily responsible for, but it leads to a breakdown.

01:13:13

I mean, even the founders talk about this, right? The country is already too big to them to maintain the level of homogeneity.

01:13:21

What we could say is conservatism, a good public spirit that is required of a

01:13:29

Republican citizen. These things are super fragile. They understand that ideas are fragile for you to perpetuate them generationally.

01:13:39

And the size and scope of the Republic is probably going to be detrimental to that.

01:13:45

And this is going to lead to different kinds of pursuit of private interest in individualism over other things.

01:13:53

That's a perennial problem. Otherwise, political philosophers would not talk about it. And what you can do at a certain stage with enough sort of leeway is, develop that into an ideology that becomes a governing for all of your political theory.

01:14:09

And you've had Americans basically gobble that up. Now, that's not to say that Hegel and everybody else is not,

01:14:17

John Stuart Mill certainly giving new rationales for these ways of being in given changes that have happened.

01:14:24

But I think in many ways, they're explaining and then theorizing phenomenon that's already occurred or is occurring at the time.

01:14:31

And it's a sort of form of justification rather than a conservative thing to do would be to defend the older ways of being in the face of radical change and try to explain to people how they can continue to live rightly.

01:14:47

So that's the, to me, the real liberal spirit is to see material changes, technological changes and leverage them for your own expedience and benefit and escape from suffering and from the human condition itself, rather than trying to think about how good political life should continue even given these disruptions.

01:15:14

So that's a bit of a cop -out, I will admit, because I'm not gonna give, I don't think I can give you a single thinker that's like, this is the guy, this is where it starts, which is what

01:15:23

Glenn Beck wants. I'm just like, these things happen, we should be able to soberly investigate them.

01:15:29

Like not everything Nietzsche says is terrible. In fact, his critique of liberal Christianity is pretty helpful if you read it in context, we shouldn't be like that.

01:15:40

But it's, so there's no one person that's the source code, but you can look at ideas and say, these are bad ideas.

01:15:45

These are, I'm fine categorizing them as liberal ideas because they are radically egalitarian and forced libertinism, whatever you wanna say.

01:15:56

But as saying like, this is called, if we could just get Hegel out of people's brains, everything would be fine.

01:16:01

I don't think that's true because the founders are already dealing with a sort of rebellious and individualist spirit that could be a potential problem, which every political thinker kind of recognizes at some point.

01:16:14

So this is also not to be like William F. Buckley and be like the perpetual struggle of man is between atheism and liberalism or whatever he said.

01:16:23

But it is a perennial problem because we're dealing, you could say liberalism is the embrace of the worst of human impulses, sinful impulses, and then leveraging them into a political theory.

01:16:38

And certainly that would be true of something like, you mentioned Rand earlier, objectivism is kind of that impulse.

01:16:46

So rambling answer, but I'm just not comfortable being like this is the one guy.

01:16:51

I like how you incorporated man's nature. According to a

01:16:57

Christian, we understand there's a sinful tendency here and there's vices and all of that. And coming up with things to justify that certainly is attractive because then you don't have to think of yourself as evil and you're just expanding human choice and that kind of thing.

01:17:12

Ben, I'll give you the last word and then we'll land the plane. Sure, just real quick to follow up on what

01:17:17

Tymon was saying about the founders bemoaning things in their own day. You have

01:17:23

Mercy Otis Warren, who was a historian during the founding era in the 1790s and the early 1800s decrying the moral degeneracy of the people and the revolution and the founding is already over.

01:17:36

And that sounds preposterous to us, but even then you had this great concern, which probably actually, that's actually very typical of American, kind of an

01:17:49

American ethos and mindset is a concern over a laxity and a loss of seriousness for life or concern for one's neighbor or the divine or for a good and moral life.

01:18:07

It's actually a focus on that by the pastors and the civil magistrate and the lawyers and the leaders, the aristocrats of society is how they actually maintained it.

01:18:18

And so this was the point of the Jeremiah, this Puritan sermon was they would bring up these issues in order to kind of spur the people on from becoming avaristic and lazy and negligent or indifferent in their duties and their moral and religious duties.

01:18:37

So it's just, that's been part of the American tradition. Now I'll say, I completely agree with Tymon about the material conditions, changes in material conditions are actually really important answer to where the liberalism that we're dealing with today come from.

01:18:54

Likewise, I don't have a great answer, but I'll say this, when you study modern scholarship and its interpretation of American politics in terms of the motivations of people and how we got to where we are today, there's kind of three different camps.

01:19:13

There's the materialistic camp, which is, you could call it progressive, you could call it

01:19:19

Marxist. It's basically a environmental kind of determinism, whether it's one's family or material conditions or wealth or psychology or biology, whatever it is, the ideas that you have are not what really motivates you.

01:19:38

Your ideas are downstream of these material conditions. So you can change the material conditions, then you change men's sentiments and his passions and his interests.

01:19:46

And that's how you change society. That's how you drive things forward. That's a very materialistic foundation or an interpretation of how things change or how we got to where we are.

01:19:59

On the other hand, you have an idealism that says, there's these ideas and we should go to these treatises by Christian or non -Christian enlightenment thinkers.

01:20:12

And if we could just find the right thinker and the right treatise, this will explain everything because ideas are what motivate people.

01:20:19

And so you have this concept of the new moral theory and political thought and interpretation that ideas are what motivate people to do what they do.

01:20:30

Okay, there's an element of truth in that. Although there is this, I think especially in conservatism, there's this tendency and it is kind of a pathology or an idolization of ideas as being the end all and be all.

01:20:47

If we can just find the right idea, not only can we explain how we got here, but we can fix everything. We just gotta have the right theory and then we'll just propagate this theory through a newspaper or a journal and this will fix

01:20:59

America. That's not gonna work. Ideas are important, but that's not the totality of human life.

01:21:05

And then the third option, beyond materialism or idealism is what I would call like a symbolic traditionalism.

01:21:13

And you find this in the work of Eric Vogelin who was a 20th century political thinker. And he emphasized that what you really have in America is you have symbols and a way of life, these deep customs determined by language and heritage and ancestry and a way of life that is in many ways very material, it's connected to land, it's connected to language and religion and custom and different norms and the ways you grew up and social behavior and expectations.

01:21:44

And yes, it also involves ideas. These symbols become imbued with ideas and then these help to shape kind of a people's self -understanding or self -interpretation.

01:21:56

And so it's a little bit of both. And so in terms of explaining the origin of liberalism, I think you have all three.

01:22:02

You definitely have some ideas from certain thinkers that get picked up and recycled and then abused and then distorted and reused in way in thinkers like Mill or in the progressives using

01:22:18

Hegel or others 20th century crits using postmodern

01:22:24

French philosophers or Marx or something like that. You also have a materialism, you have massive changes and urbanization and material and industry and global communications and networks and all of these things, these make possible the achievement of certain ways of life and standards and wealth that weren't there to begin with.

01:22:51

It makes achievable a kind of conquest of nature that maybe was there in a proto form in the 17th century, but couldn't even be conceived of what was possible because you couldn't have the thing, what were these new things in Switzerland?

01:23:09

There's like suicide pods or whatever, it's like pretty soon we're gonna be growing babies in a lab.

01:23:15

So the material changes actually are doing a lot of the driving forward. And then finally, there is this evolution of the symbolism.

01:23:23

So you have somebody like FDR, he takes up the mantle of life, liberty and property and his

01:23:29

Commonwealth speech in 1932, he redefines these rights, but he uses the same language in the symbols in his 1941 and 44

01:23:39

State of the Union addresses. He takes the language of rights and equality and liberty, but he imbues them with new meaning and new symbolism in order to kind of adjust them to the exigencies of the time.

01:23:54

So you had this symbolism and way of life that is still present in America, but it's continually being pushed to new boundaries.

01:24:01

So you have like, you could have civil rights language and law in the 19th century that gets picked up in the 20th century with the

01:24:06

Civil Rights Act, but it's completely reimagined in a totally different way with a different goal, a different foundation, a different anthropology, a different moral philosophy.

01:24:16

So you have these symbols that have been taken and twisted and given a new meaning.

01:24:24

So you have the material, you have the ideal, you have the symbolism and the customary elements and all of this goes into kind of modern liberalism.

01:24:32

And last thing I would say, if you really want to understand in many ways what's happened in the 20th century,

01:24:37

I'd highly recommend picking up a copy of Kevin Slack's War on the

01:24:42

American Republic, just published by Encounter Books, where he goes through these kind of, these elements of progressivism, liberalism, radicalism, neoliberalism, identity politics, and despotism.

01:24:54

And he shows both the ideas and the material conditions and the policies, the kind of historical shifts, how these things happened to get us to where we are today.

01:25:06

It's not just one thinker. You can't just be like, ah, bacon, and that's it. You know, I read the

01:25:11

Noble Morganum or the New Atlantis and boom, that explains everything. That's lazy. There's a lot more to the story.

01:25:18

So go pick up Kevin Slack's book. It's a good way of thinking about how we got here.

01:25:24

I appreciate the recommendation. I hadn't heard of that book. And yeah, thank you both of you for contributing.

01:25:29

We've been going almost an hour and a half now. And for those who are used to perhaps more biblical contents and that's just your diet, which is good.

01:25:39

It's good to have biblical preaching and stuff. A lot of these ideas and names and terms, they might not be familiar if you're one of those people, and that's okay.

01:25:48

But I think it is important for Christians to start familiarizing themselves with history, with philosophy to some extent, just because that's how we apply scripture.

01:25:57

That's how we know the context of the world we live in and we know how to apply the principles that we learned from God's word.

01:26:03

So I think this is extremely helpful. And if you haven't listened to the whole series,

01:26:10

I would start with the first one. This is number four, and we're gonna have a fifth one. So if you are interested in participating in that, there will be information coming soon on how to do that.

01:26:20

Of course, if you're a patron of the podcast, Conversations That Matter, link is in the info section, then you can call in when we do our time for that.

01:26:31

But if not, you can just come on the live chat and ask whatever question you want. And that should be Lord willing next week, but we have to coordinate our schedule.