Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
yaran brook and yoram hazoni this is
iran's third time on this podcast in
yoram's first time
euron brook is an objectivist
philosopher chairman of the iran
institute host of the euron brook show
and the co-author of free market
revolution and equal is unfair
yo ramazoni is a national conservatism
thinker chairman of the edmund burke
foundation that hosted the national
conservatism conference he's also the
host of the nat khan talk
and author of the virtue of nationalism
and an upcoming book called conservatism
a
rediscovery allow me to say a few words
about each part of the uh two word title
of this episode nationalism debate
first debate
i would like to have a few conversations
this year that are a kind of debate with
two or three people that hold differing
views on a particular topic but come to
the table with respect for each other
and a desire to learn and discover
something interesting together through
the empathetic exploration of the
tension between their ideas
this is not strictly a debate it is
simply a conversation
there's no structure
there's no winners
except of course just a bit of trash
talking to keep it fun
some of these topics will be very
difficult and i hope you can keep an
open mind and have patience with me
as kind of moderator who tries to bring
out the best in each person and the
ideas discussed
okay that's my comment on the word
debate now on to the word nationalism
this debate could have been called
nationalism versus individualism
or national conservatism versus
individualism or just conservatism
versus
individualism as we discuss in this
episode these words have slightly
different meanings depending on who you
ask this is especially true i think for
any word that ends in ism
i personally enjoy the discussion of the
meaning of such philosophical words i
don't think it's possible to arrive at a
perfect definition that everybody agrees
with
but the process of trying to do so for a
bit is interesting and productive at
least to me
as long as we don't get stuck there some
folks sometimes do in these
conversations
this is the lex friedman podcast to
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in the description and now here's my
conversation with yaran brooke and joram
i attended the excellent debate between
the two of you yesterday ut austin the
debate was between ideas of conservatism
represented by yoramazoni
and ideas of individualism represented
by yaran brook
let's start with the topics of the
debate you're on how do you define
conservatism maybe in the way you were
thinking about it yesterday
what to you are
some principles of conservatism
let me define it and then we can we can
get into principles if if you want when
i when i talk about political
conservatism i'm talking about uh a
political standpoint that
regards the recovery elaboration and
restoration of
tradition
as the key to maintaining a nation and
strengthening it through time
okay so this is something
that if you have time to talk about it
like we do on the show it's worth
emphasizing that conservatism uh is is
not like liberalism or marxism
liberalism and marxism are both
uh kind of universal theories and they
claim to be able to tell you
what's good for human beings at all
times in all places
and conservatism is a little bit
different because it's going to carry
different values
uh in every nation and every tribe you
know even every family you can say has
somewhat different values and the the
these loyalty groups they compete with
one another
that's the way human beings work so it's
deeply rooted in history of that
particular area of land well i wouldn't
necessarily say land you're right that
many forms of conservatism are tied to a
particular place so how does the
implementation of conservatism to you
differ
from the ideal of conservatism the
implementations you've seen of political
conservatism in the united states and
the rest of the world just to give some
context
because uh it's a loaded term like most
political terms
so when people think about conservative
in the united states they think about
the republican party
what can you kind of disambiguate some
of this what are we supposed to think
yeah that's a really important question
um usually the word conservative is
associated with
uh edmund burke and with the
uh with the the english common law
tradition
uh going back you know centuries and
centuries there's kind of a classical
english conservative tradition
that goes
uh fortescue hooker
uh coke selden
hale burke uh blackstone before burke um
if you take that kind of as a as a as a
benchmark and you compare it then you
can compare it to things like
uh the american federalist party at the
time of the the american founding is in
many respects very much
very much in keeping with that tradition
um
as you go forward
there's uh in
increasing mix of liberalism into
conservatism and i think i i think by
the time you get to the 1960s with uh
william buckley and frank meyer you know
the the jargon term is fusionism by the
time you get there
um
it's it's arguable that their
conservatism isn't very conservative
anymore that it's kind of a uh
a public liberalism mixed with a private
conservatism
so a lot of the debate that we have
today about you know what does the word
conservatism actually mean a lot of the
confusion comes from that comes from the
fact that
um that on on the one hand we have
people use use the term
i think properly historically to refer
to this this common law tradition of
which burke was a spokesman
but but there are lots of other people
who when they say conservatives they
just mean liberal
uh and um
i think that that's a big problem i mean
it's a it's a problem just to have an
intelligent debate as difficult when uh
when people are using the the the word
almost in too antithetical what would
you say the essential idea of
conservatism is time you mentioned your
father's a physicist so a lot of
physicists when they form models of the
universe
they don't consider time so everything
is
dealt with instantaneously a particle is
represented fully by its current state
velocity and position
you're saying
so you're arguing
um with with all of physics and and your
father as we always do uh that their
time matters
uh in conservatives that's the
fundamental element is the full history
matters and you cannot separate the
individual from the history from the
roots that they come from the parallel
in political theory
is
is what's called rationalism
i guess we'll probably talk about that
some
rationalism is kind of an instantaneous
timeless thing before i mentioned that
liberalism and various enlightenment
theories
they don't include time at all their
goal is to
say look there's such a thing as
universal human reason
all human beings if they're reason
properly will come to the same
conclusions
if that's true then it removes
the time consideration it removes
tradition and context because
everywhere where you are at any time you
ought to be able to use reason
and come to the same conclusions about
politics or morals so that's a that's a
theory like uh
immanuel kant or
john locke as an example hobbes is an
example
that kind of political theorizing
really does say
at a given instant we can
know pretty much everything that we need
to know at least the big things
uh and conservatism is the opposite it's
a it's a it's a traditionalist view
exactly as you say that uh that says
that history is crucial
so
iran
you say that uh history is interesting
but perhaps not crucial if in in the
context of individualism no i mean i
think i think there's a false dichotomy
he presented here and and that is that
one view holds that
uh you can derive any anything from a
particular historical path and a kind of
an empirical view
and if we know the history we know where
we should be tomorrow we know what what
where we should stand today and the the
other path is we ignore history we
ignore facts we know what's going on we
can derive from some
a priori axioms we can derive a truth
right now and both are false both of
those views in my view are false
and uh you know i'm rand and i i reject
uh uh both of those views and i think
the better thinkers of the enlightenment
did as well although they sometimes fall
into the trap of appearing like
rationalists and yom and i uh agree on
one thing and that is that kant is is is
one of uh
you know we've we've we've talked about
this in the past alex but we both hate
cons we both think kant is
is i at least think kant is probably the
the most destructive philosopher
uh since plato
uh who is pretty destructive himself but
um
and part of the problem is that kant
divorces reason from reality that is he
divorces reason from history he divorces
reason from experience because we don't
have direct experience of reality
according to cartwright we we're we're
removed from that direct experience but
i i view kant as the anti-enlightenment
that is i view khan's as the destroyer
of good enlightenment thinking and and
joram and
acknowledge a lot of um history of
philosophy people who do history of
philosophy if you can't as the
embodiment of the enlightenment that is
the the ultimate but but i i think
that's a mistake i think both russo
and kant uh fundamentally the goal the
mission in life is to destroy the
indictment
so my view is neither of those options
are the right option that is uh the true
reason based reason is not divorce from
reality it's quite the opposite reason
is a tool it's a faculty of identifying
and integrating
what it's identifying integrating the
facts of reality as
as as as we know them through
sense perception or through the study of
history through what actually happened
so it's the integration of those facts
it's the knowledge of that history and
then what we do is we abstract away
principles based on what's worked in the
past what hasn't worked in the past the
consequences of different ideas
different paths different actions we
abstract away principles that then can
be universal
not always we make mistakes right we can
come up with a universal principle it
sends out that it's not
but if we have the whole scope of human
history we can derive principles as we
do
in life as individuals we derive
principles that are then
truths that we can live by but you don't
do that by ignoring history you do that
by learning history by understanding
history by understanding in a sense
tradition and where it leads to and then
trying to do better and i think good
thinkers are constantly trying to do
better based on what they know about the
past and what they know about the
president what's the difference between
studying history
on a journey of reason
and tradition
so you mentioned that burke understood
that reason begins with inherited
tradition yesterday so what's the
difference between studying history but
then being free to go any way you want
and
tradition where it feels more
um not i don't want to say a negative
term like burden but it's uh
there's more of a momentum that forces
you to go the same way as your ancestors
it's the recognition that people are
wrong
often are wrong and parents
including your parents including your
your teachers including everybody
everybody is potentially wrong
and that that you can't accept anybody
just because they happen to come before
you uh that is you have to evaluate and
judge and you have to have a standard by
which they're valued and judged the
actions of those who came before you
whether they are
your parents whether they are the state
in which you happen to be born whether
they are
somebody on the other side of planet
earth
you can judge them if you have a
standard now my standard and i think the
right standard is human well-being that
is
that which is good for human beings
human beings uh you know is is the
standard by which we judge i can say
that certain periods of history were bad
they happened it's important to study
them it's important to understand what
they did that made them bad so we cannot
do that again and i can say certain
cultures certain periods in time were
good why because they promoted
human well-being and human flourishing
that's the standard then derive from
that okay what is it that made a
particular culture
good what is it that made that
particular culture
positive in terms of human well-being
and human flourishing what made this bad
and hopefully from that i can derive a
principle okay if i want human
flourishing and human well-being in the
future i want to be more like these guys
unless those guys i want to derive what
is the principle that will guide me in
the future that's i think how human
knowledge ultimately develops i think
people often make a mistake just
i'm not saying you're wrong but lots of
people you know don't actually read the
original sources and so what happens is
uh people will attack conservatives
assuming that conservatives think that
whatever comes from the past is right
and actually it's it it's very difficult
to find a thinker who actually says
something like that the the selden or
burke the big the the big conservative
theorists uh hooker they're they're all
people who
understand that the tradition
uh carries with it mistakes that were
made in the past
and uh and this is actually i think an
important part of of their empiricism
is that they see the search for truth as
something a society does by trial and
error and what that means is that in any
given moment
you have to be aware of the possibility
that things that you've inherited are
actually false and the job of the
political thinker or the jurist or the
the the philosopher
is not to dig in and say you know
whatever it is that we've inherited is
right
the the job is to look at uh the society
as a whole and say look we we have this
job of
first of all first of all conservation
just making sure that we don't lose good
things that we've had and and second
seeing if we can repair things in order
to
to improve them where it's necessary or
where it's possible
and that process is actually a creative
process this is a way in which i think
it is similar to euron's philosophy that
you take the inherited
uh tradition
and you look for way that you can shape
it in order to make it something uh
better than it was
that's that's a that's a baseline for
for what we call conservatism yes the
comments of the trial and error
the errors is uh you're proud of the
errors
it's a feature not a bug so the you
mentioned trial and error a few times
yesterday it's a really interesting kind
of idea
it's basically accepting that the
journey is going to have flaws as
opposed to saying
i mean the uh
the conclusion there is the current
system is flawed and it will always be
flawed
and you try to improve it when you
listen to iran talk there's much more of
optimism for the system being
perfect
now or potentially soon or could be
perfect and to me the way i heard it is
almost like
accepting that the system is flawed and
through trial and error will improve
and
uh euron says
no
we can have
a perfection now
that's why it sounds to me yeah yeah and
i think that's right i think the
difference is that
at some points just like in science i
think
one can stop the trial and error and say
i can now see a pattern here i i can see
you know that that certain actions lead
to bad consequences certain actions lead
to good consequences let me try to let
me try to abstract away what is it that
is good and what is it that are bad
and build a system around what is good
and and reject what is bad i i think
ultimately if you if you read the
founding fathers and whether we call
them conservatives individuals
what the founding fathers actually did
all of them i think is study history
they all did they all talk about history
they'll talk about examples of other
cultures whether it's
uh whether they go back to uh uh to the
republic in venice or back to the
ancient greeks so
they they studied these they they
learned lessons from them they they try
to figure out what has worked in the
past and what hasn't and tried to drive
principles now in my view
they got pretty close to what i would
consider
kind of an ideal
but they didn't get it completely right
and and here we sit 200 something years
after uh the declaration and after the
constitution i think we can look back
and say okay well what did they get
right what did they get wrong based on
how is it done and and where the flaws
and where the and we can improve on it
um i think we can get closer to
perfection um and uh and and based on
those kind of observations based on that
kind of abstraction that kind of
discovery of what is true just like
at some point you do the experiments you
do the trial and error and now you come
up with a scientific principle it it is
true that 100 years later you might
discover that hey i missed something
there's something uh
but to not
take the full lesson
to insist on incrementalism to insist on
we're just going to tinker with the
system instead of saying no there's
something really wrong
with having a king there's something
really wrong with
uh not having any representation or
whatever the the standard it needs to be
i in the name of we don't want to move
too fast i think is a mistake and the
problem with trial and error in
politics
is that
we're talking about human life right so
so there was a big
trial
around communism
and you know 100 million people paid the
price for the trial
i could have told them in advance as did
many people that it would not work there
are principles of human nature
principles of that we can study from
history principles about economics and
and other aspects well we know it's not
going to work you don't need to try it
again you know we've had communal
arrangements throughout history there
was an experiment with fascism and and
they've been experiments with all kinds
of political systems okay we we've done
them sad that we did them because many
of us knew they wouldn't work
we should learn the lesson and i think
that all of history now converges on one
lesson and that is what we need to do is
build systems that protect individual
freedom that is the core that's what
ultimately leads to human flourishing
and human success and and and human
achievement and to the extent that we
place anything above that individual
whether it's the state whether it's the
ethnicity whether it's the race whether
it's the bourgeois where it's whatever
it happens to be the class or whatever
whenever we place something above the
individual a consequence of negative
that's one of these principles that i
think we can derive from studying
two you know 3 000 years of civilization
uh and and
it's tragic i think because we're going
to keep experimenting sadly i i see it
right i'm not winning this battle uh i'm
losing the battle we're going to keep
experimenting with different forms of
collectivism we're going to keep paying
the price in human life
and in
missed opportunities for human
flourishing and human success and human
wealth and prosperity well look if we
let's take communism as a good example
none of the the major conservative
thinkers would say you know what's a
good idea a good idea would be to
experiment by
raising everything that we've inherited
and starting from scratch i mean that's
the conservative complaint or accusation
against uh uh rationalists i mean as
opposed to empiricism using rationalism
let's take you know let's take descartes
kind of as a as a benchmark you'll also
maybe define rationalism
yeah these are two terms that are in
philosophy especially in epistemology
they're often
uh compared to one another your own said
that it's an uh that it's a false
dichotomy and and maybe it is a bit
exaggerated but that doesn't mean it's
not useful for for conceptualizing the
the domain so
rationalist is somebody like descartes
who says
um
i'm going to set aside i'm going to try
to set aside everything i know
everything i've inherited i'm going to
start from scratch and he explicitly
says you know
in evaluating the the inheritance of the
past he explicitly says
you take a look at the histories that we
have they're not reliable you take a
look at the moral and the scientific
writings that we receive they're not
very good his baseline is to look
very critically at the past and say
look i'm evaluating it i i think all in
all it's just not worth very much
and so whatever i do
going
beginning from scratch is going to be
better as long as and he here's his
caveat this is as long as i'm proceeding
from
uh from self-evident
uh assumptions from self-evident
premises things that you can't argue
against i think therefore i am right and
then from there deducing what what he
calls infallible conclusions so that
model of self-evident premises to
infallible conclusions
i'm i'm calling that rationalism i think
that's kind of a kind of a standard you
know academic uh uh jargon term and it's
opposed to uh empiricism which is a a
thinker i i think in universities
usually the you know the empiricist is
uh is david yum and uh david young uh
will say
we can't learn anything the way that
descartes said i mean there is nothing
that's that self-evident and that
infallible so so
yum proposes
based on uh newton and and boyle and you
know the the the uh the the new physical
sciences so um proposes uh a science of
man and the science of man sounds an
awful lot like what euron just said
which is we're going to take a look at
human nature at the nature of societies
human nature we're going to try to
abstract towards
fixed principles for describing it human
societies we're going to try to do the
same thing and from there we get you
know for ex for example contemporary
economics
but we also get you know sociology and
anthropology which which cut in in a
different different direction so
um
that's rationalism versus empiricism can
i just say go ahead please yeah it just
i agree with that i think i think it's a
i think empiricism
the one thing i disagree is that i think
empiricism
rarely comes to these abstractions i
mean they they want more facts it's
always about
collecting more evidence in in the abs
but
this is where
you know i think i need so unusual and
where i i think
there's something new here right and and
that's a bold statement given the
history of philosophy but i think ayn
rand is
is something new and and and she so she
says yes
we agree about rationalism and it's
inherently wrong
empiricism has the problem of of okay
where does it lead it's it's
you never come to a conclusion you're
just accumulating evidence there's
something in addition there's a third
alternative which she is positing
which is
using empirical evidence not denying
empirical evidence
recognizing that are some axioms there's
some actions that we all uh at the base
of all of our knowledge that that are
starting points we're not rejecting
extrematic knowledge
and integrating those two and
identifying the fact that based on these
axioms and based on these empirical
evidence we can come to truths
just again like we do in science we have
certain axioms scientific axioms we have
certain experiments that we want and
then we can come to some identification
of a truth and that truth is always
going to be challenged by new
information by new knowledge but as long
as that's what we know that is the that
that is what true so truth is contextual
in the sense that it's contextual it's
based on
that knowledge uh that surrounds you so
for it to change if you get new facts
it's always it's always available to
change if the facts that you get and and
there really are i mean the the burden
of
of of changing what you've come to a
conclusion of truth is high so you'd
have to have real evidence that it's not
true but that happens all the time so it
happens at science right we discovered
that what we thought was true is not
true and and it can happen in politics
and ethics even more so than in science
because they're much
messier uh fields
but uh the idea is that you can come to
a truth but it's not just deductive uh
most truths are inductive
we learn from from obs observing reality
and and again coming to principles about
what works and what's not and here i
think this is
ein rand is different she she doesn't
fall into the and she's different in her
politics and she's different in her
epistemology she doesn't fall into the
conventional
view she's she's an opponent of hume and
she's an opponent of the cuts
she's certainly an opponent of kant's um
and uh and you know i i think she's
right right so if it's okay
can we walk back to uh criticism of
communism
you're both critics of communism
socialism
why did communism fail you started to
say
that
conservatives criticize it on the
basis of like rationalism that you're
throwing away the past you're starting
from scratch
is that the fundamental description of
why communism failed i think the
fundamental difference between
rationalists and empiricists is the
question of whether you're throwing away
the past
that's the argument and it cashes out as
a distinction between
abstract universal rationalist political
theories
and uh
empirical political theories empirical
political theories are are they're
always going to say something like
um
look uh
there are many different societies
we can say that some are better and some
are worse but the problem is that
you know that that there are many
different ways in which a society can be
better or worse
there's an ongoing competition and we're
learning on an ongoing basis what are
the ways in which societies can be
better and worse
that creates a kind of i'd say a mild
skepticism a moderate skepticism among
conservatives i don't think too many
conservatives have a problem looking at
the
at the soviet union which is brutal and
murderous ineffective and it's a it
economics totally ineffective you know
spiritually and then collapsed okay so
so so i think it's easier for us to look
at a system like that uh and say you
know what on earth what what should we
learn from that
but the main conservative tradition is
pretty tolerant of a diversity of
different kinds of society and is slow
to insist that france is so tyrannical
it just needs a revolution because
what's going to come after the
revolution is going to be much better
the assumption is that there's lots of
things that are
good about most societies and that a a
clean slate leads you to
to throw out all of the inherited things
that you don't even know how to notice
until they're gone could i actually play
devil's advocate here and address
something you've also said
can we as opposed to knowing the
empirical data of the 20th century that
communism presented can we go back to
the beginning of the 20th century
can you
empathize or steal man or put yourself
in a place
of the soviet union where the workers
are being disrespected
and
can you not see that the conservatives
could be pro-communism
or like communism is such a strongly
negative word in modern day political
discourse that you can't like you have
to put yourself
in the mind of
uh people who like red colors
who like
what it was it was
it's all about the branding i think
um just but also like the ideas of
solidarity
of nation of togetherness
of uh respect for fellow man i mean all
of these things that kind of communist
represents can you not see
that this idea
uh is actually uh
going along with conservatism it is in
some ways respecting the the deep ideals
of the past
but proposing a new way
to raise those ideals
implement those ideas in the system yes
i'm going to try to do it what you're
suggesting but historically we actually
have a more useful option i think for
both of our positions instead of you
know pretending that we like the actual
communists
we have conservative statesmen like
disraeli and bismarck who initiated
um
social legislation right the the the
uh the the first step to towards saying
uh look we're one nation we're
undergoing industrialization
that industrialization is
important and positive but it's also
doing
a lot of damage to a lot of people and
in particular it's doing damage not just
to individuals and families but it's
it's doing damage to the to the social
fabric the capacity of britain or german
to remain cohesive societies is being
harmed
and so it's these two conservative
statesmen israeli and bismarck who who
actually take the first steps
in order to legislate for you know for
what today we would consider to be
minimal social programs uh pensions and
disability insurance and those kinds of
things so for sure conservatives
do look at industrialization as a rapid
change and they say
we we do have to care about the nation
as a whole and we have to care about it
as a unity and and i assume that iran
will say
look that's the first step towards the
the catastrophe of communism but
before your own drives that nail into
the
let me try to make a distinction because
when you read marx
you're reading an intellectual
descendant of descartes
you're reading somebody who says
um
look
every society has
uh consists of oppressors and oppressed
right and and and that's an improvement
in some ways over liberal thinking
because at least he's seeing he's seeing
groups as a as a a real social
phenomenon but he says every society has
a oppressor class and oppressed class
there are different classes they're
different groups and whenever one is
stronger it exploits the ones that are
weaker
all right
that is the the foundation of a
revolutionary
political theory why because the moment
that you say that the only relationship
between
the stronger and the weaker is
exploitation
the moment that you say that then you're
pushed into the position and marx and
angle say this explicitly you're pushed
into the position we're saying when will
the exploitation end never until there's
a revolution what happens when there's a
revolution you eliminate the oppressor
class it's annihilationist i mean you
you can
immediately when you read it see why
it's different from from uh descartes or
bismarck because they're trying to keep
everybody you know somehow at peace with
one another and marx is saying there is
no peace that oppressor class has to be
annihilated and and then they go ahead
and do it and they and they and they
kill 100 million people so i i do think
that
despite the fact your question is is
good and right there are certain
similarities in concern but still i
think you can tell the difference
between that extra step of revolution to
you is where the problem comes like that
extra step of let's kill all the
oppressors
that's the problem right and then to you
you're on the whole step one is the
problem well it's all a problem b first
i don't view communism as um
something that radical in a sense that i
i think it it comes from a tradition of
collectivism i think it comes from a
tradition of looking at groups and and
measuring things in terms of groups it
comes from tradition where you expect
some people to be sacrificed for the
greater good of the of the whole
uh i i think it comes from a tradition
where
mysticism a revelation as as the source
of of truth
is accepted i view marx as
in some sense very christian i i i don't
think he's this radical rejecting i i
think he's just reformatting
christianity in a sense he's replacing
in a sense he's replacing god with the
proletarian
knowledge you know you have to you have
to get knowledge from somewhere so you
need the dictatorship of the palestinian
you need somebody the stalin the lenin
who who somehow communes with the spirit
the the spirit of the proletarian
there's no rationality not rationalism
there's no rationality in marx
there is a lot of mysticism and there is
a lot of
hand waving and there's a lot of
sacrifice and a lot of original sin in
the way he views humanity
side view marx as
as one more collectivists in in a whole
string of collectivists uh you know and
and i think i think the
the the bismarck in response which
bismarck i mean
i know less about israeli so i'll focus
on bismarck and bismarck is really
responding to political pressures from
the left and and and uh he's responding
to
the rise of of communism socialism
but what bismarck is doing he's uh
putting something alternative he's
presenting an alternative
to the proletarian as the standard by
which we should uh we should measure the
good
and this and and what he's replacing it
is the state he's replacing the
proletarian with the state and that has
exactly the same problems that is first
it requires sacrificing some to others
which which is what the welfare state
basically legitimizes
um it it places the state above all so
the state now becomes i think the
biggest evil of bismarck and i i
definitely view him as a negative force
in history is uh public education i mean
i mean the germans really
dig in on public education and really
develop it and really the american model
of public education is is
copying
the the german the prussian uh
bismarcking public education
real quick why
the public education is such a root of
moral evil for you well because it now
says that there's one uh standard and
that standard is determined by
government by by a bureaucracy by by uh
whatever the government deems as in the
national interest and bismarck's very
explicit about this he's training the
workers of the future uh you know they
they need to catch up and and you know
with england and other places and they
need to train the workers and there's
going to be a
he's going to train some people to be
the managerial class he's going to train
other people to be and he decides right
the the government the bureaucracy is
going to decide who's who and where they
go there's no individual choice there's
no individual uh is showing an ability
to break out of what what the government
has decided is their little box uh
there's very little freedom there's very
little
you know ultimately there's very little
competition there's very little
innovation and this is the problem we
have today in american education which
we can get to is there's no competition
and no innovation we have one
standard fit all and then we have
conflicts about what should be taught
and the conflicts now not pedagogical
they're not about what works and what
doesn't
nobody cares about that it's about
political agendas right it's about what
my group wants to be taught and what
that group wants to be taught rather
than actually discovering how do we get
kids to read i mean we all know how to
get kids to read but there's a political
agenda about not teaching phonics for
example so
a lot of schools don't teach phonics
even though the kids will never learn
how to read properly so it becomes
politics and i i don't believe politics
belongs in education i think education
is a product it's a service
and we know how to deliver products and
services really really efficiently at a
really really low price
at a really really high quality and
that's leaving it to the market to do
but your fundamental criticism is that
the state can use education
to uh further authoritarian aims well or
whatever the aims i mean think about the
conservative today critique of american
educational system it's dominated by the
left yeah what did you expect right if
you leave it if you leave it up to the
state to fund they're going to fund the
things that promote
state growth and state intervention and
the left is better at that it has been
better at that than the right and and
they now dominate our educational
institutions but look if we go back to
bismarck my problem is placing the state
above the individual so if if communism
places the the class above the
individual what matters is class
individuals are nothing they're cogs in
a machine
bismarck the certainly the german
tradition much more than the british
tradition or the american tradition the
german tradition is to place the state
above the individual i think that's
equally evil and and the outcome is
fascism and the outcome is the same the
outcome is the deaths of tens of
millions of people
when taken to to its ultimate conclusion
just like socialism the ultimate
conclusion of it is
uh communism uh uh you know nationalism
in that form kind of the smoking form
the ultimate conclusion is uh is uh
nazism or some form of fascism um
because
you don't care about the individual
individual doesn't matter i think this
is one of the differences
in the anglo you know anglo-american
tradition where the anglo-american
tradition even the conservatives
have always acknowledged and it goes
back to you
especially the conservatives yes the
conservatives were there first they they
acknowledged well you've you've defined
conservatives to include all the good
thinkers of the distant past and they're
all good thinkers we agree on that i'm
defining conservatism
the way that burke does i'm just
look this is a very simple observation
burke thinks when you open burke and you
actually read him he starts naming all
of these people who he's defending and
it's bizarre i'm sorry it's just in
intellectual sloppiness for people to be
publishing books called burke the first
conservative the founding conservatives
the founder i mean this is non-stop it's
it's a it's a view that says burke
reacts to the french revolution so
conservatism has no prior tradition it's
just reacting to the french revolution
and this is i mean this is this is just
uh absurd
questions yeah on conservatism are there
any conservatives that are embracing of
revolutions so are they ultimately
against
the concept of revolution yes burke
himself embraces the polish revolution
uh which takes place almost exactly at
the same time as the french revolution
and the argument's really interesting
because there's a common mistake is
assuming that burke and conservative
thinkers are always in favor of slow
change i i think that's that's also just
factually mistaken um
burke is against the french revolution
because he thinks that there are
actually
tried and true
uh things that work things that work for
human human flourishing and freedom
included as as a very important part of
human flourishing
um
he like many others takes the uh takes
the uh the british the english
constitution to be a a a model of
something that works you know so it has
a king it has various other things that
that you know maybe euron will say well
that that's a mistake but still
for centuries it's the leader in many
things that i think we can easily agree
are human flourishing and
burke says
look what's wrong with the french
revolution what's wrong with the french
revolution is that they is that they
have a system that has all sorts of
problems but they could they could be
repairing it
and instead what they're doing by over
by by overthrowing everything is they're
moving away from what we know is good
for for human beings then he looks at
the polish revolution and he says the
polls do the opposite the polls have a
non-functioning traditional constitution
it's it's too democratic it it's
impossible to get uh to to raise armies
and and and to defend the country
because because of the fact that every
nobleman has a veto
so the the polish revolution moves in
the direction of the british
constitution they repair their
constitution
through a quick a rapid revolution they
install a king along the model that
looks a lot like britain and burke
supports he says
this is a good revolution so it's it
it's not
um the
the need to quickly make a change in
order to save yourself that that's not
what conservatives are objecting to what
they're objecting to is
instead of looking at experience in
order to try to make a
slow or quick improvement a measured
improvement to achieve a particular goal
instead of doing that you say look the
whole thing has just been wrong and what
we've really got to do is annihilate a
certain part of the population and then
make completely new laws in a completely
new theory that that's what he's
objecting to that's the french
revolution and that then becomes you
know the model for for communist
revolutions and for me the i mean the
french revolution is clearly
a real evil and wrong but it's not that
it was a revolution and it's not that it
tried to change everything i mean let's
remember what was going on in france at
the time and people were starving and
the monarchy in particular was
completely detached completely detached
from the suffering of the people and
something needed to change
the the the unfortunate thing is that
that
the change was motivated by a a an
egalitarian philosophy not egalitarian
in a sense that i think the founding
fathers talked about it but in galilee
in a sense of real equality quality of
outcome uh motivated by a philosophy by
rousseau's philosophy and it inevitably
led you could tell that the ideas were
going to lead to this to massive
destruction and death and an
annihilation of a class
you can't annihilation is never an
option that is it
it's not true that a good revolution
never leads to mass death uh of just
whole groups of people because a good
revolution is about the sanctity of the
individual it's about preservation
liberty of the individual and and again
that that goes back to and and defense
revolution denies and russo denies
really that in civilization there is a
value and a thing called the individual
i think this is a good place
to have this discussion
the founding fathers of the united
states
are they
um
individualists or are they conservatives
so in this particular revolution that
founded this country at the core of
which are some
fascinating some powerful ideas
were those founding fathers were those
ideas coming from a place of
conservatism or did they put
primary value into the freedom and the
power of the individual what do you
think
there were both
i mean this is i this is something
that's a little bit difficult for
sometimes for for for americans i mean
even very educated americans they l they
they talk about the founding fathers as
though it's kind of like this this yeah
this this collective you know uh entity
with with a single brain and a single
single value system but i i think at the
time that's not the way they uh
not the way any of them saw it so
roughly there's two camps and they map
on to the rationalist versus
traditionalist empiricist dichotomy that
i proposed earlier and the um so on the
one hand you have
real revolutionaries like uh jefferson
and payne these are the people who burke
was writing against these are the people
who supported the french revolution so
when you say real so when you say pain
you're referring to revolutionaries in a
bad way like this is a problem these are
people who will say
history up until now has has has been
you know like with with descartes but
applied to politics history up until now
has been
you know just a story of
ugliness foolishness stupidity and evil
and uh if you apply reason
we'll all come to
roughly we'll all come to the same
conclusions you know and pain writes a
book called the age of reason and the
age of reason is a a manifesto for
here is the answer to political and
moral problems throughout history we
have the answers and it's in the same
school as russo's uh the social con no
you you don't like that not at all oh i
thought it was like i think they're the
opposites okay so let me just throw in a
question on uh jefferson and payne
do you think
america would exist without those two
figures
so like uh how how important is spice
in the uh in the flavor of the dish
you're making i don't want to try to run
the counter factual i don't you know i
don't have confidence that i know the
answer to the question but it's so much
fun you know what i'm going to offer
something that i think is more fun more
fun than the counterfactual is
america had two revolutions not one okay
at first there is a revolution that is
strongly spiced
with
this kind this kind of rationalism
and then there's a ten year period after
the declaration of independence there's
a ten-year period under which america
has a constitution its first
constitution which today they call the
articles of the confederation but
there's a constitution from 1777
and that constitution is
based on in a lot of ways on the hottest
new ideas it has instead of the
traditional british system with a
division of powers between you know an
executive and a bicameral camera
legislature instead instead of that
traditional english
uh model which most of the states had as
their governments instead of that they
say no we're going to have uh one
uh elected body
okay and that body that congress it's
going to be the executive it's going to
be the legislative it's going to be it's
going to be everything and it's going to
run as a big committee these these are
the ideas of the french revolution you
get to actually see them implemented in
uh in pennsylvania in the pennsylvania
constitution and then and then later in
the national assembly in france it's a
disaster the thing doesn't work it's
completely made up it's not based on any
kind it's it's neither based on
historical experience nor is it based on
historical custom on what people are
used to and what what they succeed in
creating with this first constitution is
it's wonderfully rational but it's a
complete disaster it doesn't allow the
raising of taxes it doesn't allow the
mustering of troops it doesn't allow
giving orders to to soldiers to fight a
war
and if it if that had continued if that
had continued to be the the the
the american constitution america never
would have been an independent country
they aren't willing to do that
counter-factual
what happens uh during those years
where uh where
uh washington and jay and knox and
hamilton and morris there's like this
group of conservatives they're mostly
soldiers and lawyers other than
washington most of them are from you
know from northern cities and this group
is much more conservative
than uh than the uh than the tom paine
and and jefferson school you some some
historians some historians call them the
nationalist party
historically they give up the word
nationalism and they call themselves the
federalists but they're basically the
nationalist party what does that mean it
means on the one hand that their goal is
to create an independent nation
independent from britain but on the
other hand
they believe that that they already have
uh national
legal traditions the common law the the
forms of government that have been uh
imported from from britain and of course
christianity which they consider to be
you know part of their inheritance
this this pharaoh federalist party
is the conservative party
these are people who are extremely close
in in ideas to burke and these are
people who wrote the constitution of the
united states the second constitution
the second revolution in 1787
when washington leads the establishment
of a new constitution which you know
maybe technically legally it wasn't even
legal under the old constitution but it
was democratic and what it did is it
said we're going to take what we know
about
english government what we've learned by
pl applying english government in the
states we're going to create a national
government a unified national government
that's going to muster power in its
hands enough power to be able to do
things like
fighting wars to defend a unified people
those are conservatives now it it's
reasonable to say
well look there was no king so how
conservative could they be but i think
that's a reasonable question
but don't forget that the american
colonies the the english colonies in
america by that point had been around
for 150 years they had written
constitutions they had already adapted
for an entire century adapted the
english constitution to local conditions
where there's no aristocracy and there's
no king
you know i think you can see that as as
a positive thing on the other hand they
have slavery that's an innovation that
that's not english
so it's a little bit different from the
english constitution but those those men
are conservatives they make the the
minimum changes that they need for the
to the english constitution and and they
they largely replicate it which is why
the jeffersonians hated them so much
they call them apostates they say
they've betrayed
equality and liberty and fraternity by
adopting an english-style constitution
so i would imagine you're on you would
put emphasis of the success of the key
ideas at the founding of this country
elsewhere
at the at the freedom of the individual
so the yes the tradition of the british
empire i mean the one thing i agree with
yom is is is the fact that yes the
founding fathers were not a monolith i
mean they argued they debated they
disagreed they they wrote against each
other i mean jefferson and adams for
decades didn't even speak to each other
though they did make up uh and and had a
fascinating fascinating relationship you
and i are making up today
it's like the founding fathers
uh you know there's there's this massive
debate and and discussion
but i don't i don't agree with the
characterization of pain and jefferson i
don't think it's just to call them
rationalists because i don't think
they're rationalists people who've
looked at history at the problems in
history and and remember this is the
18th century and they
uh
were coming out of 100 years earlier
some of the bloodiest wars in all of
human history were happening in in in
europe uh
many of them over religion
um
you know they had seen what was going on
in in france and other countries where
people were with people who were
starving uh and where kings were
frolicking in in palaces in spite of
that
uh
they were very aware of the relative
freedom that the british tradition
uh had had given englishmen i think they
knew that they understood that
and i think they were building on that
they were taking the observation of the
past
and trying to come up with a more
perfect system
and i think they did and in that sense
i'm a huge fan of jefferson you know
they're two things that i'm i think
unfortunate about jefferson one is that
uh
he continued to hold slaves which is
which