Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the 245th episode of the Atlas Society Asks. I'm Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society. And I am very excited to welcome Professor Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown University to discuss his book American Awakening, Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Times. Professor, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Thank you, Jack, for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: So in doing a little bit of research about you, I discovered something I wasn't expecting, which is that you have a passion for solar electric sailboats.
[00:00:41] Speaker C: I do.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: So look, I'm old enough to have been quite aware during the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo missions to the moon, and, and, and I always wanted to be an astronaut. I mean, that's the truth of the matter. And so I actually was in the sciences for a very, very long time and, and finally left because I didn't think they could answer the most important questions about how we should live. But I continued my love of science and I picked up this old beat UP sailboat in 1999 and was at a place where I had to replace the engine or try something new. And I thought, no, let me try this alternative technology. And I've had a number of iterations of it. I'm now the latest. It's got lithium batteries.
I'm a firm believer in these advanced technologies. It's just they're not economical enough yet to be on the grid. And that's the problem, is we're trying to force these things onto the grid. But it's extraordinary technology and I've worked with wonderful engineers who you've never heard of, but there's a lot of interest in entrepreneurship and building a new world out there. And the solar electric community is part of that.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Well, here in Malibu, where power is unreliable, I've got my Tesla solar roof, my Tesla power walls, Tesla car, and my Starlink. And this past weekend, I actually decided to go and buy flowers and bring them to the local Tesla dealer here in Malibu because, number one, I'm just so damn grateful. But also because I'm pretty mad about these protests against Tesla. Using the framework that you develop in American Awakening, how can we understand these nonsensical protests against such a great company and a man who has done so much for the environment?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: So the big picture view I have is the following. We. We have, we have two ways forward.
One is what I call the politics of competence, where we're not looking to scapegoat people, we're looking to build a world together. We're looking to corral our engineering talents and build fantastic communities.
And that, to me, is the liberal, conservative vision of the Founders. You have limited government because you have citizen competence.
And what we have as the alternative for us today is the politics of innocent victimhood. This is the Democratic Party.
And if you're operating on the basis of the politics of innocent victimhood, what you always must have is a scapegoat. And Trump Derangement Syndrome is a great example of this. But one should not be surprised at all that Elon Musk is the new scapegoat, the new object of cathartic rage. This is what we have to understand, is the politics of the left, is the politics of cathartic rage. You can't build a world on that. And that's the problem. We're either going to be destroyed by the politics of innocent victimhood and cathartic rage, or we're going to return to the politics of competence. Those are our two choices, and in which case we would support what Elon Musk is doing, to be clear.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: So it's actually very reminiscent of the themes that Ayn Rand presents in, in Atlas Shrugged, where the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the financiers, the men and women of achievement, who are like Atlas's holding society aloft, are being vilified and demonized rather than, you know, being emulated and, if anything, thanked for their contributions. And I want to explore that a little bit more in the various examples that you lay out in your book. But I would love to just start for a little bit with your origin story. You were born in Cairo, lived in Yemen and Kuwait. How did that come about? And as someone who was born also overseas, myself in India. How do you think that shaped your worldview?
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Well, my father was doing research on this little known group called the Muslim Brotherhood in 1952 in Cairo, and met my mother, who was Midwestern farm girl. My father was American too, and my twin sister and I were born in Cairo in 1955. Now, at that point, none of the what came to be called area studies programs had opened up at the university. So my father was with the State Department for a number of years. We were the first family in Yemen. And then the Russians gave us 24 hours with the Russians, said we were CIA. They gave us, the Yemenis, gave us 24 hours to burn our documents and leave the country. We went to Yemen. So I grew up thoroughly immersed in Middle Eastern culture. I spoke in English, of course, but I spoke and dreamed in Arabic as well, and then got airdropped to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the Midwest when my dad got a job as a professor at University of Michigan in 1963, when I was 8 years old.
So I've lived in two worlds. Also, I've spent a lot of time in the Middle east in the last 20 years. I was on the startup team for Georgetown and Qatar, and then I left Georgetown for two years to leave and was the acting chancellor of the American University of Iraq in Sulaymaniyeh and Kurdistan. So I've never thought of myself as a straightforward academic. You can see bookcases behind me that we finally got around after five years to finishing up the restoration of a farmhouse. I was a carpenter, I was a musician on the road. My view is that intellectual life has to point towards something, toward building something, toward understanding something. I am a Tocqueville scholar. I think he's the great genius of the 19th century. And every time I've built a university, I've used his understanding of organizations to inform how I proceed. So my view is that ideas have to somehow touch the ground somewhere or else they're completely irrelevant. And the problem with the universities is that you now have several generations that have been involved in what I call secondary and tertiary literature review. They're not involved at all in the questions of what makes a civilization. Or rather insofar as they are, what's happened is they've been consumed, the university has now been consumed by activism.
And that's the reason why I think the Trump administration is going to go after all of these universities and should.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: Well, again, right out of the fountainhead, where these critics really kind of muddy the, the waters to make them appear deep. And they, they rail against the builders. And, and of course, Howard Work was a visionary artist and architect and also a builder who need needed to know exactly how the pieces fit together. So you just touched on Tocqueville. So you are. Your second book was the Fragility of Freedom. Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, Future. As one of the world's leading experts on Alexandre de Tocqueville, can you talk a little bit about him and why his democracy in America is Still relevant almost 200 years later?
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah. So I, I, I teach Plato to Nietzsche, and the question I've been occupied with for the last 35 years is who's left standing? I mean, I love Plato, I love Augustine, but if you ask me, who's left standing, it's Tocqueville. Toward the end of volume two, which he wrote five years after volume one, he gives us this picture of what could Be called the kinder and gentler Despotism at the End of History. And the picture is of a sedentary citizenry utterly dependent upon the state for entertainment and security. Think Covid.
And it's a. It's a. In my view, it's the most prophetic, dystopian vision for the future that was ever written. It's volume two, part four, chapter eight.
And that frightened me. So in 1990, when I finished up graduate school, I, like so many of us, did not have a job. And I was asked to stay on in graduate school and. And teach Tocqueville, who I'd read fragments of. And what happened was I sat down in the big library there and read, seriously, read the author's introduction, which was 11 pages long. Took me three and a half hours.
And I closed the book. This is 1990. And I said, you will spend the rest of your life with this author. And I have. And everything that he said or everything he worried about coming to pass, an infantilized citizenry incapable of reaching out. I will also say incapable of. Or frightened to make mistakes and unwilling to live with the consequences. I mean, I think we have a society now where people are just scared to death even to say the wrong thing. You cannot build a world without people who are courageous enough to say things, to make mistakes, to fail.
And I think what we've given up on, increasingly, is the failure culture. And the state, of course, is promising to give us security and to give security to those identity groups that probably otherwise could not exist without the state supporting them and spending vast sums of money on them. So we really have a choice. Are we going to be lonely, isolated citizens dependent upon the state, or are we going to return to, again, the politics of competence? And psychologically, that means we're willing to make mistakes, we're willing to fail. Failure is not the last word. It's okay. One should be proud. One learns from unfailures. I certainly have, and I encourage this with my students too.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that really resonates with me as well. The willingness to make mistakes also comes from a sense of self esteem, a sense of confidence that one can get through the mistakes, that one can be resilient. One learn from them. I often tell my staff, if you know, you haven't made any mistakes lately, you're not taking enough risks, you're not pushing hard enough. And within Objectivism, Part of the understanding of objectivism as an open system, rather as some kind of closed dogma, is that there is more to explore. There is more to develop. And we should be willing to take risks to make changes where they're merited because all progress ultimately comes from innovation and all innovation comes from taking a risk.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: So can I make two comments on that? First, contrast NASA to Elon Musk's space venture.
The reason why Musk is so successful is because he understands that failure is part of the operation. NASA has become so bloated, so risk averse that it, that it spends billions, tens of billions of dollars on craft, frankly, that aren't ever going to fly. So you've got the evidence right in front of your eyes. We have to be able to fail. We have to be able to be confronted by death, so to speak, in order for things to go well. And then just on a theoretical note, I don't use the term capitalism. Marx gave us the term capitalism. That term nowhere exists in Adam Smith. He never uses the word, he uses the word market, commerce. And to your point, either we're going to have an eruptive economy that moves in directions that we cannot foretell. And the way I describe commerce is it's a series of competing wagers about possible alternative futures. It's not a system, it's open ended and we must have that. That's what Musk is doing. And the use of the term capitalism, this is Marx, he claimed it was a closed system with a necessary logic. And I think this is, I think we all have to think very deeply whether we want to use Marx's term or Adam Smith's term. So I, when I use the term capitalism, I remind people this is Marx's term for closed system. And the last thing in the world we want to do if we want to build a real future is to have a closed system.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Well, I am definitely against closed systems, but I would actually have a different point of view. And this is what we need to do. We need to be able to debate and have a discussion. And I embrace the word capitalism not because it was once used by Marx when in fact it was first originated by a French socialist, always the French, because it has the same root as, as the head capital, capital of a building, a captain of a ship. And it reminds us that capitalism, the free market, productivity ultimately is, comes from thinking and the choice to think. And also I use the term in deference to capital, capital. And that is something, when we talk about, oh, we are in a market, well, you are exchanging goods and services for money. But where did those goods and services come from? They, they came ultimately from an investment in excess profit that became investment. So I like to remind our students that the strikers in Atlas Shrugged called their refuge Galt's Gulch. But John Galt called it something else. He called it Mulligan's Valley in deference to the financier that made all of that possible.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: So we don't, we don't disagree on, on, on the fundamental principles. My worry though is that what we're, when you, when we say things like there's systemic risk, what we're really saying is that the economy as we have constructed it is something we want to save. I don't know what your views are on 2008. My view is those banks should have failed. So my worry is that what's, and this is Tocqueville's worry too is that we were moving from a rather open ended world, which he's proposing, to a closed world. And the question is, why is that happening? And I think identity politics is one way in which we can close off the world. Because what you're basically saying is everybody has an intersectional score.
The whole of the moral economy can be understood in this way. There's nothing to develop, nothing to grow. So Tocqueville worried about what I call the Great Exhaustion. And my worry is that the way we think about economics, the way a lot of people think about economics is not as you describe it, and we can argue about the words, but that's what we have to recover is an open ended system that recognizes that the entrepreneurs are driving the whole thing.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yes. And that is why you need to. Not you professor, but you in the audience need to make sure that you read Atlas Shrugged and you discover what happens when not labor goes on strike, but when the inventors, the producers, the men and women of the mind, the Elon Musk's of the world, what happens when they go on strike and you find out what happens and Atlas Shrugged. So as my peeps in the audience can probably tell because I see many people who show up every week, I'm a little under the weather. So I appreciate you guys chiming in with a few questions. We'll get to them and then I will get back to the latest book by Professor. So Alan Turner says, I see you have several books mentioning Tocqueville and in fact Alan, he wrote most of them.
What do you think, professor, about his perception of the American identity and what do you define as American's identity?
[00:17:03] Speaker B: So consistent with what you and I have just been saying a couple minutes ago, I'm a little nervous about the term American identity because I'M always someone who believes in an emergent understanding. So let me just speak to one of the problems of the language of identity. Young people today are often saying things like, you must affirm my identity. Now, in American history, boy, this is something very, very new. If you think about Tocqueville's understanding of how we built a world, the 19th century, nobody said, here's my identity, affirm it, and then we'll work together. What happened was that we had to work together, notwithstanding tremendous differences in our background. And Tocqueville's view is that our understanding of ourselves and of the other person is emergent. That is to say, it's only through these face to face engagements where we build a world together that we discover who we are. So I try to jettison the term identity altogether because in my view, the only way you can even have the language of identity is if you have a strong state that citizens are dependent upon so that they can go around to their fellow citizens and say, it's up to me whether I'm going to engage with you or not, depending upon whether you affirm me. I don't need you. And Tocqueville's claim here is that we have to build a world more local, more emergent. And that's the way. And here I'll quote him, Democracy unleashes an energy never before seen in human civilization. And what he meant by that was, stop with the top down economic organization, stop with the top down political organization. Let things emerge from below and you will have a world that you cannot even imagine. Another of my favorite passages of his is the feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged and the mind expanded only by the reciprocal actions of citizens one upon another. These are verbs of growth and expansion, and they're beautiful verbs, and they're something we need to pay attention to because what's happening increasingly is that people are collapsing into their own little worlds. I call this the advent of selfie man. And Tocqueville's view is we have to have the courage, the competence, the confidence, all the language that you've been using to reach out to our neighbors, to compete with them, to exceed them, to build a world together with them.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Well, this idea of you need to affirm my identity again, it's like the antithesis of what Ayn Rand was expressing in the Fountainhead and her ideal man of Howard Rourke. And it's captured in that iconic scene where Howard Rourke sees this critic who Ellsworth Toohey, who's been trying to ruin his career And Touhy says, Mr. Rourke, we're finally alone. Now you can tell me what do you think of me? And Rourke says, I don't think of you. All right, one more audience question because it speaks to something which has been a perennial question of mine. And you are someone who has been in academia for a while and I'm sure it's going to have an interesting take on this. So my modern Gault says, Dr. Mitchell, have you read the coddling of the American Mind? Where do you think the coddling of citizens citizenry have come from? Government school or bad parenting? Right. So there's that one argument that says over protective parenting has created the safety ism and then another one that says no, that's hogwash. Parenting aside, it's the extreme activism of the university faculty who are seeking to indoctrinate young people. So where do you come down on this, on that debate?
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Well, I've been in the university, I mean if you count my father's life for 50, 60 years and there has been so my dad would tell me. My dad was, you know, 1960s. He wasn't a leftist, he was a liberal. But his view was that a terrible mistake was made in the 50s. The university was shut down in one direction. And so the way he told the story was a lot of there was goodwill toward the left.
Sure, we'll bring in these Marxists, but that'll be part of a broad conversation and they will believe in a university as well. But the problem is the left does not believe in free inquiry. The left believes in power. This is a terrible, terrible thing to see. And what's happened is I'll speak to Georgetown and when I got there 32 years ago was a little bit left of center, I think because of the 1960s Jesuits, which is a story I'm not going to talk about right now, but you can if you want. But, but still there was room for, for people who were not left, that is to say both liberal and conservative. I may be one of three or four anti leftists left at Georgetown, so there's definitely that. Let me add something. When, when I went through University of Michigan as an undergraduate, my tuition was $382 a semester and I was a carpenter making $10 an hour. Do the math. In two weeks I could pay for a year's tuition at the University of Michigan in the name of helping the government, then made more money available to students. And of course every president of every university in America thought to themselves, well great, we're going to Jack up tuition. And so you get this escalating cycle of more tuition, more federal funding. And so Georgetown tuition is now 75,000 or $80,000 a year. It's staggering. Now what that money has gone to has not been professorial positions. It's gone to administrators, student services, senior vice presidents who have made the university A, much more complicated. But B, you now have a whole cadre of, let's call them helpers who presume that these students are incapable of taking care of themselves whatsoever and they need help. So you have rooms where students can go cry if the speaker that they don't like is there. It is astounding how much money has gone into producing an administration that must suppose that these students are incapable of doing anything. I tell them there's a. There's a very simple test. The university says, you are the future. You're going to build the world. Go into the bathrooms. They don't even trust you to turn on or off the water. So they put electronic devices in there because they don't trust that you have the competence and the understanding that you don't let the hot water run. So part of the problem is the growing administrative burden in a university that's full of do gooders who depend, I should say depend on students being out of whack. They would be out of job if these students were healthy. On the other hand, as early as Rousseau, who I'm. Sometimes he gets things right in his book the Emile in 1761.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Did we lose his sound?
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yes, I believe so.
[00:24:48] Speaker C: Okay, Dr. Mitchell.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: All right, well, let's try to let him know that we have lost his sound because he was making a very fascinating point and one that I wanted to hear about. And also I wanted to just dig a little deeper to see if he had experienced the same kind of avalanche of mental illness that students were presenting at, at a certain point, and that whether it was the school administrators re reacting to this ME mental health crisis or if it was in fact the administrators who were seeking it out and really trying to accommodate it.
So.
Okay, yes, we still can't hear you there. We hear you now. Terrific.
[00:25:53] Speaker C: Now do you hear me now?
[00:25:55] Speaker A: We hear you.
[00:25:56] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:57] Speaker C: So my apologies. I'm not quite sure what's happened here, but. So part of the problem is the administration, but the other part of this is the fa. I don't, by the way, I don't use the term parents. I use the term fathers and mothers because I think one of the things that happened in the 80s, which I think is part of the reason why we have a declining birth rate is we've lost sight of the fact that they're not parents. There are fathers and mothers.
So one of the problems, I think, is that as we had fewer and fewer children in the family then, then I think especially mothers, but not only mothers. I'm speaking now of my generation of, of women.
Everything became fixed on having one or two children and having the. The perfect outcome for those children. So my father was one of 10 or 12. A few of them died. Of course, it's terrible and, and no one wants to sing the praises of children who die. But I think what happens when you move to fewer and fewer children, you end up making sure that the security apparatus is in place so that nothing will ever go wrong with them. There's a statement that's floating around, I think, everywhere, Yale or jail. And what that means is, what that captures is the profound fear young people have about failure. If they say the wrong thing, which is why of course, they're not going to talk about the difficult issues, then. Then they get completely thrown out into outer darkness. And my view is, well, outer darkness is actually the way more interesting place. I was a musician on the road in my 20s. For a few years I was a carpenter. I've done all sorts of things and, and it's because I did those, I think that I. That I have the courage. Courage to take leaps of the imagination. Because I think the world is so constituted that on the other side, while there's lots of failure, there's also tremendous success and upside. So I think it's both the parents and the administration.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Well, I think that you're probably right on that. So one question, another question that I've been asking myself frequently, ask our guests. It seems that young men, you know, late high school, early college, they now seem to be shifting away from. From the left, away from this progressive narrative.
So much so that only, I think 14% of 12th grade boys consider themselves progressive. Same time the female cohort is shifting the other way. What do you think is driving that? And do you see any chance of future reversal?
[00:28:54] Speaker C: I'll start by saying that I have two boys age 39 and 35, and only in the last few years did they pull me aside and tell me the horror stories of what happened to them in K through 12.
It was clear that the boys were not set out for excellence. The future is female, you might remember.
And, and I think what happened was the, the natural vibrancy and vitality, one could even say undirected violence. Of, of boys was, was drugged, was pushed aside.
And so you, you had a, my view, a kind of quivering mass of boys who didn't know what to do because there was no before school recess, there was no 10 o'clock recess, there was no noontime recess.
They were just told, in fact, that they carry an irredeemable stain, which is the stain of patriarchy. I mean, feminism has done immense damage, I think, to, to several generations of boys. And the way I, I describe this to people both on the left and the right is, you know, I don't think we were put on this world to feel guilt and then die.
But that's what boys have been told now for, for 40 or 50 years. It's gotten worse and worse and worse. And I think what's happened, and I don't know what's cause and effect, but I'll, I'll presume it's effect. I think Trump gave permission to a kind of masculinity that had been pushed aside by the feminists and by identity politics to re. Emerge. And a lot of boys have said, we are done.
I don't want to hear another word about the patriarchy, about my indelible stain.
They're really furious. And I think that energy is going to carry on for a long time. I don't think the left and, and, and I'll say especially I don't think left women understand what's just happened now. The way they're responding is by having cathartic rage toward Elon Musk and toward Trump. But what I don't think they understand, and you've identified it, is that a younger generation is done with, with what I call the hellscape of, of left wing empathy for the victims. They're just done so. That, I think, explains the boys.
I'm going to be somewhat biblical here with respect to the girls.
To be female is to be potentially very, very vulnerable when you have a child.
And I think what that does is it translates into, into a general worry about danger. And now I'm going to be completely politically incorrect.
I think that one of the reasons why the young women of the left, young women are oriented toward the left, is that they, they've made a choice. I mean, my view is men are supposed to protect and I think, I think the younger generation of women and think the life of Julia, which you probably remember during the Obama administration, I think a lot of women on the left have concluded that yes, they want protection, but it's not going to be by a man. It's going to be by the state. And so you've got this huge split, boys saying, we're done with feeling irredeemable guilt. We don't want to talk to you anymore about this, and we're going to crush the opposition. And a lot of girls who, and I think it's the equality culture, frankly, have been taught that the vulnerabilities that they feel as a female can be overcome by simply not having babies at all. Natality is a very big issue for our civilization right now. And so I think, I think women, younger women, are opting to be protected, but not by a man. I think a woman's vulnerability will always require some measure of protection, and marriage is one way to do it. But they've opted out because of the mean patriarchy. And so they're looking to the state to take care of them. It's a disaster. When we've gotten to the point where we're $34 trillion in debt, spending a trillion dollars more per year, all those programs are going to go. And I think there'll be a profound reckoning that will have to take place in women's hearts about where they're searching for protection.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Well, you don't have to worry about being politically incorrect on this podcast. Even Ayn Rand jokingly described herself as a male chauvinist. She lionized male competence and strength, but at the same time, she herself was a visionary woman who arrived here in the United States six years after women won the right to vote and of course, populated her novels with strong protagonists like Dagy Taggart. So, yeah, so tell us a little bit about your concept. You touched on it earlier. Selfie man.
Who is he and why is he problematic?
[00:34:16] Speaker C: So I put this in a larger context. So we, we all know that, that there's been this, let's call it neoliberalism or movement toward globalism or cosmopolitanism. And, and what that has involved is the deliberate attempt to shift sovereignty outside the nation to transnational organizations or the Davos man, or whatever. You didn't put it. So, so there's a shift in one direction above supra, national sovereignty. But, but what Tocqueville saw was this really interesting paradox, which is that in, in the democratic age, actually authority would move in two different directions.
One would be up in the direction of globalism and neoliberalism and that sort of thing. But the other would be that the self would collapse in. Upon itself.
And so I think Selfie man, by the way, is very linked to identity politics. Like, you can you imagine who you are and you defriend and dethrone anyone who dares to challenge your identity. So think about it this way. So here's the level of the nation, the level where you and I build a world together under the rule of law. So that's this level. But what Tocqueville saw was that sovereignty would go above and below. And so I think a lot of people have been attentive to supranational sovereignty and the desire to destroy the rule of law within nations, but they haven't seen that. Coterminous with it is the development of what I call self demand. And I think social media has helped this.
But to come to the point, you know what this, what does this mean? If you have this binodal sense of sovereignty?
This, this describes, I think, young people, so many young people today because they, they enthrone themselves on Instagram and the world is their background. That's what the philosophical significance of the selfie is. The world is the background background for me.
And so they feel this tremendous sense of empowerment when they're on their Internet, not doing anything. You know, they'll put on their we stand with Ukraine or Black Lives Matter. It's all performative. There's no action here. And then when asked to act, they say, well, no, these, all these problems are too big. You know, climate change, we're. The only way we're going to do this is at the transnational level. So what Tocqueville saw was that you would have this, this twin sovereignty and, and the psychological consequence, get this, was manic depression. So you're, you're absolutely high being selfie man with the world as your backdrop and your perfect Instagram page. And then you fall asleep feeling utterly impotent, anonymous and alone, because the world's problems are so big that you can't solve them. So what, what, what each of these nodal points share is I can't really do anything with my fellow human beings to make the world better. And so you end up with this manic depressive arrangement of feeling, to use Tocqueville's language. Listen carefully. Greater than kings and less than men. It's a beautiful phrase. So we oscillate back and forth between thinking that we're the most important thing in the world and thinking that we're nothing. You cannot build a world of competence on that. And so what Tocqueville thought, he saw this in 1840, by the way, so long before the problem emerged. And so his view was the way out is we have to look to our neighbor. We have to build a world together. Selfie man is not an answer, and nor is Cosmopolitan Man. And that's why he thought the neighborhood, the local community, even the nation, to be sure, grand industrial expansion. But his view of what would happen is the following.
You want economic growth. He's got mixed views, honestly, about what you and I have called capitalism here. But what he does understand is you've got to have commercial growth if you're going to have a democracy. But his view is if you have citizens that have collapsed in upon themselves and become Selfie man, you have to have a mechanism to get them out of themselves. And his view was local politics is actually the best starting point because you don't have to risk your capital and you come out of yourself, you do something together and the range of your imagination, the horizon of your thinking expands. And he thought, if you have this political vitality, that spills over into commercial vitality. So it's a complicated view here. But Selfie man for Tocqueville is the great threat of the future. And I look at my young students and so many of them are addicted. We have to be clear. They're addicted.
After the Civil War, we lost a generation of young men to morphine because so many young men had died, of course, but so many young men lost limbs. We lost a whole generation to morphine. We are losing a whole generation now to addiction to the Internet. And we have to get out of that digital world and step back into the analog world where there's friction, where things are messy and we have to build a world together. Selfieman can't do it.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: So in talking about the epidemic of addiction, you describe it as something that happens when supplements become substitutes. Can you unpack that for us a little bit and give us some examples?
[00:39:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:51] Speaker C: So this is the third, the last third of my book. And honestly, if you ask me what part will survive 100 years, it will be this part.
So remember, my concern is developing competence. And my worry is that all of these techno, the technologies that we have at our disposal invite us to turn supplements into substitutes. So here's an example.
There was a term that. Not so much in currency now, maybe it is. I'm not on Facebook, but the term was Facebook friends.
That's a very interesting concept because friendship, friendship is not digital. Friendship is analog. It's real, it's, it's local.
And let's ask the question, what does it take to develop friendship? Well, that's, that's connoisseurship that's high art. You can write books about it, but we all know or do not know what friendship is. It's this invisible reservoir of knowledge that we have. And the problem is you can go on zoom, and if you know the person, you can have a great zoom meeting, because all the tacit cues about who that person is, they're all there. So as a supplement, these technologies are fantastic. As a substitute, they're a disaster. Let me give you two other examples.
Google or drive. Google Maps is a good one.
My. My youngest son, who is really at the cusp of the. The Internet revolution.
If. If Google Maps went down, he could not get anywhere. He'd be locked in his house, millions of people the exact same way.
Reading a map is a competence.
Autonomous cars is another one, as a supplement to the competence of driving. I'm all for it, but what's happening is we're being driven toward autonomous cars as a way of not having to learn the competence of driving. This is a recipe for servitude. There's a vast reservoir of knowledge that we must develop competence in, and then we can use digital technology as a supplement to it, and it will empower us. One last example, because this is where this originates. And again, Rousseau, he says, ancient warriors had courage. Modern warriors have strength. What does he mean? This is his critique of modernity.
We need to develop these capacities, like courage, like friendship. And these are very hard to develop. They take a lifetime. And what he saw happening was, if you have a warrior who understands courage and then he picks up a weapon, God help you, because he has courage, and the weapons is a supplement to his courage. What he saw happening was that you and I, as technologies advance, would slowly but surely give up on doing the hard work of developing courage and think we could simply focus on the weapon. And his point was, you can have all the weapons in the world, but you have to be willing to die. You have to have courage. So his bet was we would turn supplements into substitutes. And I think that's one of the reasons why competence is eroding. We've got a society increasingly run by algorithms, which attempt to capture, again in algorithmic form, all the competencies that we must develop as citizens. So I see substitutism, as I would say, as great, if not a greater threat ultimately to identity politics. I think we'll get past identity politics, but. But what I call digital substitutism, I think is a very, very serious threat to the development of our competence.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: We've got an audience question here that speaks to your situation there at Georgetown. Elation asks, do you think the Office of Student Equity and Inclusion will survive at Georgetown after the recent executive orders by Trump? And if you're not comfortable talking about situation at Georgetown, just maybe generally all of these DEI type offices and administrations at other elite universities.
[00:43:59] Speaker C: I have been fighting Georgetown and every other university in America for 30 years and I'm not going to let up now. The day after Trump was elected, there was a university wide announcement of a new senior vice president for diversity, equity inclusion. We've received emails which are really euphemisms for anti Trump talking about Georgetown's mission and it, and you know how we're, how we're focused on the Jesuit mission. And I said this morning in a, in a meeting that Georgetown cannot decide and this is true of many other universities. So I'm not simply identifying Georgetown here. They, they can't decide if they have a religious mission or whether they are the academic arm of the Democratic National Committee. And I said, so long as you are un, as long as you are confused. This by the way, is lots of, let's call them Jesuit Catholic universities. I don't want to name them, but they're out there, all of whom have bought into really Democratic party talking points. And in my view, they've lost sense of their religious mission. Georgetown would not be on the list of 45 universities that are being investigated by the Trump administration and will probably lose funding if it simply was concerned with its Catholic mission. The problem has been that these religious schools, and here I will include the Protestant ones like Wheaton, they, they are confused about what a religious mission is and what an identity politics mission is. And, and that's of course the point of my book is that identity politics is a Christian heresy. And, and my view is that unless Christians wake up to that and, and, and do a kind of autocorrect, there's no way we're going to get back to the politics of competence because this, to use Tocqueville's language, these incomplete religions will succeed one another for hundreds and hundreds of years. And the first one he said was the French Revolution. The second one I will say is Marxism Communism. And I think the third one is identity politics with its, with its annex being post colonial studies, hence, you know, holding up Hamas as the latest innocent victim.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: So we talked about one of the positive results of young men essentially withdrawing the sanction of the victim, saying, I'm done with identity politics, I'm done with being the punching bag. But is there also a possible Danger that you know, so steeped in this hierarchy of victimhood that some young men might actually, having been victimized by this ideology, seek identity or status as victims.
[00:46:37] Speaker C: So we're in delicate territory here.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: But.
[00:46:41] Speaker C: But I want you to speculate with me. Imagine you're a young boy growing up, and as your conscience develops, you. You realize you're being bombarded with the message that if you are here, I'll use the language. If you're heteronormative, you are invisible.
If you want to be visible and human beings want to be recognized, if you want to be visible within identity politics, you cannot be heteronormative. You must identify yourself as some sort of innocent victim. That's the only way you get recognition. And that's diametrically opposed to the politics of competence, where you get recognition for the hard labors you have accomplished. So we're shifting the very grounds of recognition. And if you're a young boy, I can easily. Or a young girl, honestly. So called heteronormative, I don't like the term. But. But if you are a young boy, it is easy to imagine that you literally have to be gay or have to be transgender, or as I'm told, you have to. You cannot identify on the spectrum of one to five male. You can't say, yeah, I'm a five male. Well, today I'm a two or three. I know these things, these conversations happen. So you've got a whole bunch of young boys who are scrambling to find a way to be recognized within the intersectional universe of identity politics. And I think that's part of what's going on.
Peter Thiel talks about social contagion, and I think that's also what's going on here. But I can't imagine, or I can't imagine the challenges of growing up being, as it were, normal in today's world. So I think that's part of the reason why you've got a lot of boys younger than 18, younger than 25. They're off the scale in terms of their identification as, as bisexual or whatever. And I don't, I actually don't believe any of it. I think what they're really screaming for is recognition. And the only way they can get it is if they announce that they're not normal.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: So Jeffy Tucker is a friend of mine. He's the founder of the Brownstone Institute, friend of the Atlas Society, frequent guest on this show, and you know, given the religious metaphor that you use in American Awakening during the pandemic, he Described those advocating literal medieval authoritarian control, quarantines, mandates as, quote, the return of the flagellants. Do you see that period as one of the clerical class of experts choosing to punish the miscreants who failed to heed their expertise on a range of issues, including climate change?
[00:49:37] Speaker C: So I divide. Yes, so, but let me give you the, the how I look at this in a kind of the 40,000 foot level. So I divide American history into three stages. The first one, which is, I think the one you and I would, would love to return to, is you've got limited government. And the reason why you could even have limited government, as, by the way, as all the powers of Europe are concentrating powers in the hands of the states. You get this fantastic constitutional experiment.
You can only do this if you've got immense citizen competence. And then the second stage of American history is, in my view, well, not my view, it's the progressive movement which begins 1880s or so. And the wager, to use your word, is that citizens aren't up to it. We need to have expert competence. But it was competence. We have to be clear. And I think, I think that was discredited. And you, you identified it. It was discredited. One could argue it began to be discredited, I think in the 2008 financial crisis. But I think Covid finally and fully discredited the, the progressive expert class, because what it revealed was they weren't really thinking in terms of true human health. It was, it was punishment the churches get closed. It was clear that the expert class was more consumed with using this, this, I don't want to call it a crisis. It's not clear it ever was. Using this event as a way to separate the sheep from the goats, you know, the mask wearers from the deplorables. And I think that's finally what broke progressivism. Now, do the progressive, do the elites believe that's true? Do they understand that? No, I don't think they don't. They do. And a lot of people on the left call themselves progressives. I won't let them get away with this anymore. I say, no, no, no, you're not progressives. That phase of history has passed. You're not interested in expert competence with a view to making America better, because that's what the progressives were all about. Did they abuse it? Of course. But they really were still concerned with the greatness of America.
The book, the Promise of American Life, 1907.
Don't remember the author right now, but this was a grand view of continuing The American dream. The identitarians are not interested in that because America for them is poisoned. So whenever people on the left say I'm a progressive, I say, no, no, no, no, that's gone. You are now an identitarian. We have stepped into a third moment of American history. And I think Covid, the COVID catastrophe, was confirmation that the elites are no longer concerned with expert competence. They are concerned with grinding the noses of everyday people into the mud and reminding them that they're deplorables.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: Which brings me to this question. You argue for that identity politics lacks forgiveness and suggests that we might find an antidote in a return to Christian grace. Isn't there a secular case to be made against vengeance, against resentment, that benevolence and generosity of spirit ultimately advance one's long term rational self interest?
[00:52:49] Speaker C: You know, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I. Half of my training is in the divinity school and so I have my PhD in political theory. But, but I am, I'm highly attuned to these religious categories. And, and what happened, and I say this in the book, was that certainly in the second half of the 20th century and, and this happened, began to happen long before the churches abandoned the whole idea of judgment and indictment and sin.
And I think people need a way to think through the problem of guilt. And we can talk about this in a second. But what happened was the churches gave up on it. And so my view is identity politics is the emerging theological way of dealing with guilt because you have an intersectional score. You know how many debt points you have. You know that you have to practice the Jewish Passover ritual of painting the blood of an innocent lamb on the lintel of your door so that social death will pass you by. This is virtue signaling. I mean, so there's so much that looks theological to me, and I want to be clear.
I want our politics and our commerce to be free of this logic of guilt and debt. And my argument is, and we probably disagree, but, but my argument is that part of the reason why we were able to have this clearing called economics and politics and we were able to build a world was because the problem of guilt was addressed by the churches in their own domain. And when they ceased, my argument is that when they ceased to be able to address that in their own domain, or they gave up on it, then it migrated out into both politics and commerce, which is why you have woke corporations and why you have the democratic left right now. So my argument is the churches have to reawaken and do what they do, which is provide a way of thinking through guilt, forgiveness, atonement, and repentance. And when that whole domain of problems is returned to the churches, then we can have the commerce and the politics that America has historically had, which allows us to become an amazing power, an amazing country. But what's happened is that all those domains have now been utterly captured by identity politics. So I do think that Christianity is the answer. Do I think that you need to have national or whatever, Christian nationalism? No, that's a disaster. I don't want any of that. I'm only saying that the. The left is thinking through the. The problem of life in deeply distorted Christian categories, and that means the only way out is. Is for those categories to be undistorted again. Again. So that. I think that's the difference. I think what I hear you saying is, no, there is a pure secular world, and I'm saying the secular is possible only when you solve the problem of guilt within the theological domain.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: Yes, that.
[00:55:47] Speaker C: No doubt that that's a difference, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but, I mean, well, unless there is this religious return, that identity politics won't go away.
[00:55:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I think that we're both looking at it through different lenses, and I think it is possible to reject unearned guilt. And that was a very important theme to Ayn Rand in terms of reclaiming a identity or an understanding of oneself that is based on competence and not based on this unearned guilt. But we can leave that aside for another day, because we only have a few minutes, and I really want to close with one question, Mark. Andreessen recently made the case that academia cannot be reformed from within. He said that the only way forward is to pull out the government funding and end tax exemption and for the schools and their endowments, to let them fail and then to rebuild from that rubble. Kind of an Atlas Shrugged approach. How would you respond to that? Is that too harsh?
[00:57:00] Speaker C: You know, Jack, I. For the longest time, I didn't want to reach that conclusion. But.
[00:57:07] Speaker B: But.
[00:57:08] Speaker C: But after seeing how my university and other universities have responded to Trump's victory, I am. I'm deeply saddened to say I agree with Andreessen. I don't see any other way forward. For years, for decades, people like me have been saying to my colleagues on the left, you are trying to take over the university. It's a very bad thing. You will end up destroying it. And as I said to you at the outset, the left is a winner take all. We must never forget this. The winner, it's a winner take all mentality. They are not interested in compromise in other ideas. And I'm now convinced, and it agonizes me to conclude this, I'm now convinced that Andreessen and others are right. The funding has to be pulled. These universities have to fall into absolute chaos and catastrophe and then we will rebuild from the ashes. Tocqueville says in one place, after the war, comes the Lawgiver. And he recognizes there are moments in a nation's history where the whole thing has to come undone. It's an agonizing moment, but you cannot rebuild unless you let the rot be exposed to the sunlight. And then you begin plowing the fields.
[00:58:21] Speaker A: And now, well, I guess we agree on more than I would have believed because of course that is the theme and the denouement. Sorry for Eddie, people who haven't read it yet, but in terms of how Ayn Rand saw society's ultimate redemption, that it it you needed to withdraw the competence and then the inevitable collapse would come. And then the last scene is John Galt says the road is cleared, now we have time to rebuild. So speaking of building, what is next for you, professor, and how can we follow your work?
[00:59:00] Speaker C: Well, I'm actually, you know, I have an X account, but I don't post. It's. I, I just watch. I'm writing a book called the Gentle Seduction of Tyranny, which is a continuation of the identity politics theme and others. My worry is that the way, and this is Tocqueville's worry, is that the way we get to tyranny is through these habits of mind that we must fight. Just a quick example, we have to have face to face relations. I ask my students, and I will ask your audience, how many of you communicate with one another through text message first rather than spontaneous phone calls? Well, if we have that habit, there's no way we have the proper habits to build a world together. We have to be able to deal with spontaneous conversations and all the messes that that causes. But this habit of text messaging alone, in my view, is inviting the gentle tyranny. We have to have a deep dive into the habits that we have if we're going to reconstruct a society that's healthy and happy.
[01:00:04] Speaker A: Thank you, Professor. I couldn't agree with you more.
Great to talk with you and thanks to everyone. Thanks for your great questions, for your patience with our technical snafus and if you agree with professor that we do need to get out and we do need to get away from our screens and our computers and have more face to face interactions. Maybe you will join me and the entire Atlas Society team at Galt's Gulch, June 5th through 7th in Austin. I would love to see you there. And and then please be sure to tune in next week. I will be off, but Atlas Society senior fellow Rob Trinski and our founder, David Kelly will host a special webinar on free trade. So we'll see you then.
