Ep. 397: Federalist Papers LIVE (Part Two)

Federalist papers and current parallels

0:00Welcome back. This is Partially Examined Life, episode 397, part two, continuing our live show on the Federalist Papers, as well as Frederick Douglass' 4th of July speech. We've gotten all the summaries and initial discussion out. In this half, we have more discussion and then a Q&A. Now, the audience microphone we use for the Q&A did not actually make its way to the recording. So we had to source the audio for that from the various video cameras that

0:34were going in the room. So hopefully you can still understand what's being said. And I want to remind you that my fall online course, Key Ideas and the Philosophy of Mind, is open for enrollment. There are still spots left in all three sections, especially for the Wednesday evening one, which we created specifically for you, Western time zone people, for whom the class would take place at six o'clock. Come on, folks, check it out at partiallyexaminedlife.com slash class. So it seems like, right, if this is not just a history podcast, if we're talking about what is the relevance today, well, how do we talk about, how do we consider what the

1:08founders did, given that there was this design flaw that was being recognized here 70 some years later, whatever, by Douglass. Okay, well, that's been fixed, right? So we can acknowledge that. So there's that, you know, how do we think about the founders now, given that they did have this problem at the time. And relatedly, is there something going on now, say, some class of people living among us, human beings that don't have legal rights that could just be snatched up and sent to El Salvador?

1:39Yeah, there's a direct... Pray what you speak of, Mark. Like, so the... Yeah, what's going on with immigration courts and the suspension of habeas corpus, I mean, there's a very direct parallel between that and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, yeah. They're immigrants, so we can, you know, we can do what we want to them.

1:58Sorry, I thought I was teeing you up again. No, I was trying to get it. Yes, a discussion going on what now? We've sort of thrown out a few things. It seems like when they were designing this, the Federalist Papers arguing for the people putting the Constitution together, they were balancing competing interests. They were dealing with an imperfect human nature. They were trying to, right, there's a lot of mentions in the Federalist Papers, like, yeah, of course, if people have power, they will tend to want to get more power. How do we construct a system to lessen that? But as the quote that Dylan read, right,

2:32if there's rottenness all the way down, whether through criminality, human nature, or as Wes has brought up, these structures, these things that are happening such that, well, you thought that the courts should be checking the legislature and should be checking the executive, but there is some sort of common conspiracy to, well, if we don't get rid of all these people, we don't have a country, then that will, you know, make it so that they're not having the checks on each other as opposed to. So this exact kind of way of framing it is why I think it's really good to end our review

3:08on Douglass. Because, I mean, I can't think of a better example of saying, look, things can be really just bad, but there is a idea, a core idea that is the unifying, in fact, infusing and motivating notion about what it means to be in America, it means to be an American, that Douglass is holding on to. And to say that for someone who is not a citizen, who is subject to arguably some of the most

3:42egregious oversight in the founding of America, to say that there's still the notion, the idea, that is something to be grown into, and that arguably the country is strong enough to endure that. And I think, Wes, you're right, that in the end, he thought that it wasn't going to endure it except through violence, in that case. But that, I think, for me, is the salient question, right? The notion that it's corrupt all the way down is just not true. If that's true, then everything just has to get thrown

4:15away, and Douglass is completely wrong, okay? Well, corrupt, yeah. I mean, there's the institutions and the way the government is set up and the principles, but then there's the character of people, there's the character of the elite and the norms by which they're functioning. They don't have to observe any of these rules or principles or comply with the institutions. And if everyone conspires to do that, that becomes a big problem. So it's the character of people who are in the courts and the legislature and the executive, and it's also the character of the people of the nation

4:47as a whole. And that's something that Douglass, again, points to at the end. And it's an old philosophical problem. People were worried, like, Schiller was worried about this with respect to the French Revolution. You can have all these great principles, but then human nature takes over and suddenly you have a terror. Are the people ready for this? How do we educate them for this? Do we need people to be educated in a certain way before this government can even function, right? That's a very serious problem. Lincoln, we did an episode on his Lyceum speech, which was in 1838, so a bit

5:21before this. And that was the year when there were the most lynchings in the country, that was the peak. And Lincoln says, this is a mobocracy right now. This is lawlessness, and people have fallen in love with lawlessness. And people, what is the solution? They have to be educated to love the law more than they love these particular passions that they might have at any given time. And you're left with, it kind of, or I was left with mixed feelings that it's a great, it's another great speech.

5:51But really, are we going to really be able to do that? Can we really depend on making people love lawfulness when it's obvious that for the most part they don't? And then the other thought I had is like, well, Lincoln is such a great example. His character, it's a lawful ordered character. It's someone who's thoughtful and cares about the laws and cares about the principles. And it's an education just to be in contact with a person like that, even if it's just through the written word. That's another way of saying we might need role models. Well, and there is something inherently elitist

6:29in the way that the system was set up, right? That we've got the Electoral College. And some of this was having to do with just, you were talking about the state of literacy at the time, the state of communications at the time, the idea with the Electoral College. Hey, you know that wise person in your society, in your local community, you can, you know, their name. You don't know anything about the president who's way off there. We're going to just elect the elector, the elector you can trust and they will make the wise choice. Okay. Well, we know how that particular thing turned out. I don't even know the names of the electors. I, do you know that it was any electors and they, you know,

7:02they're supposed to be faithful electors. There's still some, I don't know. Is it legal right now for them to, I think they can still be unfaithful, right? That they were, I voted for Trump via these people, but these people. Yeah. Okay. So it depends on the state, but that was definitely built into like, if they found, right. Somebody, uh, was, was duly nominated and all the votes happened and the electors are there at the convention and you found out, Hey, actually somebody, uh, said some of this, this person you've elected said some really nasty stuff on this videotape

7:33that maybe, uh, the electors will want to consider in, you know, Oh, maybe they need to swap in somebody at the last minute. Maybe, you know, this would seem savage to us at this time. You know, that's, that's violating representative government. We, at least the vote should lead to the person, right. That was the objection to Kamala is like, well, whoever nominated her, whoever voted for her, for the nomination, it was some sort of machination in substituting her. Yeah. Yeah. It's a violation of direct democracy, but it is, it is represent how representative government works, but it's, you have to understand the motivations at the time, which is the balance

8:07between state and federal power. So the whole electoral college thing was about, and various other measures in the constitution was about preserving a federal system in which there is still a certain amount of power for the states as well. Beyond the whole right layer of representation between the people and the president being elected. Yes. The other federalist paper that we read 39 was on this federal versus the national system and arguing, Hey, you know, right. Direct democracy, you inevitably get a majority faction that says let's beat up on the minorities. Like you're just

8:42always going to get that. Whoever, whatever the majority religion is, it's going to persecute the other one. So we need the bill of rights. We need other things like this. And one of them is this breakdown between states. And as Dylan was saying about factionalism, right? If you have, the states have separate powers, we'll probably the mania that is going through Virginia is not going to be the same as the mania that's going through New York. So they're going to cancel each other out, or at least neither of them is going to be able to take hold and screw everything up. Yep. So are we, where are we at? Well, I, I was still just asking this general question of,

9:17we still feel like, I think whatever political party, your part, whatever, that there are some people whose vote should count for less. Like you hope they don't vote, right? The uneducated or the brainwashed, or, you know, there's some, do we not still retain some sense of elitism that you would like that, you know, people who know about climate science should make decisions about climate science, as opposed to the mania, you know, saying the, oh, those university trained elites,

9:47they're trying to hold us down. And so we're going to just decide things based on, you know, the whim of somebody who doesn't know anything that that's, that's, that's straight up majoritarian democracy. This is exactly what the founders were worried about. So aristocracy. So, well, it seems like we need, that's as part of checks and balances and maybe against going back to the unitary executive, right. That specifically we said, either the Supreme court just said like, well, you can't just replace the fed for no reason. Cause we really want somebody who knows what

10:17they're doing with the money, you know, not just, do what you want with all the other ones, but don't mess with the interest rates. All right. It's funny because what I'm hearing Mark say is the country was founded on the principle of elitism. Thank God.

10:36Because if you buy every philosopher that can criticize straight up because majoritarian democracy, yeah, because people haven't changed. They're the same today as they were then. And we need to, so that's not the problem. The problem, whatever's gone wrong with the country, it isn't because we have a Senate and a house of representatives and an electoral college and all that, because we, we got to continue to keep power out of people's hands. Um, I, on the other hand, I, on the other hand was arguing about putting in a popular referendum to be able to get rid of

11:08Supreme court justices. Right. Or something like that. So I must be on the, the other side of the coin. You're arguing for that. I thought you were arguing against it. I was saying that would be the only remedy as structured by the way that the anti-federalist was positioning it. I don't know whether that would be a good idea or not, to be honest with you. We're going to have the expense of a national referendum. It would be terribly expensive and painful who's going to die in within the decade anyway. So, well, it's also totally arbitrary. Like, yeah. So whoever happens to be the president at the time is the one who gets to nominate whoever happens to die. That seems

11:40pretty arbitrary to me, but whatever. So from my perspective, like anybody, those of you who haven't listened to the podcast, Wes called me a pessimist. Um, you call yourself a pessimist. I'm not, I'm, he's only quoting. I consider myself a realist as far as, of course you do. Every pessimist, every pessimist considers himself a realist as far as human history and human behavior is concerned. So I don't think people have changed. Like whatever the motivations were at the founding

12:11of this country, we're no different as human beings. And if those things were, the structures they put in place were designed to try to control those impulses or bullwark against them or whatever, I think. Great. However, I do think that technology has changed. And one of the things that really aggravates me about readings for particularly Supreme court decisions is when court decisions are based on the status of technology at the time, they're not, you know, it's like, well, the fetus is like

12:45only viable at this number of weeks. So that's the cutoff. Well, as soon as it's viable at another time, you just change the law. Right. And with respect to the way in which communication happens in the country and respect to the way commerce happens in the country, with respect to the way at this time we were in this mercantile economic system, the manufacturing wasn't taking place overseas. People weren't on the phones doing tech support in the Philippines and Panama. Right. That they had to worry about. And so I think taking a look at how those sorts of things have impacted

13:22the principles that drive the structure and the founding would be very beneficial because I think that we might change a number of the ways we think about the structure of the government. And you see this running up now when it comes against like crypto. Like, I mean, yes, there's going to be a debate in the late 19th century about the gold standard, whether, you know, we should have specie and do all that kind of thing. But the idea that a currency would not be tied to a nation. I mean, look, the fact that if I'm assuming everybody

13:55here is an American, if not, I apologize. The fact that you are an American is just total accident. You happen to be born to two people who happen to be in a particular physical place on this planet at a particular time. Nationality, government, nationhood is just, it's totally random and arbitrary. And the idea that somehow we can perfect that so that we can have, you know, like this is what Hegel, we weren't supposed to talk about Hegel, but I can't, I can't, I can't help it.

14:30I can't help it. You know, Hegel talked about this, these changes in evolution, and he thought that we were evolving towards a perfect society, if you will, like, you know, they're all going to be realized together in absolute spirit, which if everybody on the planet doesn't have mushrooms might actually happen. But the idea that a nation is supposed to persist, why? It's just an accident, folks. We might be done. Our time might be over. It might be time. Maybe if it's based on how we are

15:05as human beings and what we believe and the kind of conviction we have, maybe you need the upheaval. Maybe you need the revolutions to change the conviction so that we can lay a foundation for the next thing. There's nothing that says that America is supposed to go on for another 250 years. They tried to build a structure that would last and adapt, and maybe that's not possible. Do you prefer something else? Do I prefer something else? Are you coming out as an anarchist? No. You know, that's the thing. When I was, I grew up in the, my dad was in the military,

15:36and I grew up on Air Force bases. So when I was a kid, there was nobody more patriotic than I was, and I lived this idealized, you know, childhood of growing up on Air Force bases where everything was structured. Everybody had a rank, right? And we were there defending the country and playing golf. Did they call you Little Sarge? They didn't call me Little Sarge. No, no. And I really bought into it. I have bought into it for a long time. And then, you know, I visited Europe, and I was like, wow, people here just seem to live

16:07life a lot better. There's a lot less, just, they seem chiller, like everything, the food's better, like lots of things are better. So I was like, hmm, maybe the American thing isn't quite. And I got into it. Love it or leave it, Seth. Well, yeah. And then I got caught up in that. I mean, you know, there's Reagan years and all that. But ultimately, what I came to understand is what I said a little bit earlier is that the narrative, I really bought into the freedom and liberty narrative. And I'm an idealist, you know, like I like big ideals, and I like that kind of stuff. And then you find out that that's just the

16:41story that somebody's telling you. And there's lots of other stories, and they're not as pleasant. And... Well, you can love the principles without, you know, deluding yourself into thinking that the country perfectly exemplifies them. No, exactly. But the problem is, this is where the rubber hits the road, is you realize, if you love the principles, and you're not going to take action, then you're just me. You got to organize. So it's put a big burden on my conscience. So I think Seth has started us on some sort of conclusions before we pull out the audience mic

17:16and invite you all that you have been holding in these thoughts that you can't. I mean, there are a couple thrown tomatoes and things. I don't know if people remotely can see that. But for the most part, you've been very attentive and quiet. Do we have anything in terms of where we're at right now, Wes, Dylan, before we pull that mic out?

17:39I don't think so. You don't want to make a... give your anarchist screed right now?

17:45No, I will say since Seth said he grew up on Air Force basis. I mean, I grew up... I was born here, but I spent my childhood in England and Ireland. So I came here when I was nine, right? Nine or eight. And I remember the first time in an American classroom and having to do the Pledge of Allegiance. And I'm like, this is a weird place that I've come to.

18:07What is this? I mean, I was, you know, Ireland is no different in a way. You're just like... Your classes are about how great Ireland is and Irish culture and history and they make you learn Gaelic and all this stuff. But I'm just like, Pledge of Allegiance to the flag? I thought, this is weird. But I don't know why I'm telling that story, except to say that my... yeah, I never... right? I was never in love, so I never had a falling out. And I was more interested in these principles, I guess, than in the failings of the... I mean, I was always... I was very interested in the failings

18:41of the country, per se, too. I mean, I started watching, like, the, you know, party conventions as soon as I came. I started having opinions as soon as I came here about what, you know, what America should be. So, I don't know. Maybe I'm saying that your fall from patriotism is what makes you a realist. Not a pessimist, but a realist. A convert is always more strident, yeah. Well, I guess I just feel like with all, I guess, due respect to the notion that there are real challenges, the notion to me that nothing is meant to be permanent, so maybe we should

19:15just burn it all to the ground, is just so, so far away from a sensible reaction.

19:27And maybe I'll just put it this way, that I guess I'll just say, I am a true believer, and I don't have to believe as hard as Douglass did, but I'm a true believer that way, that we have the pieces in the founding ideas that still animate our country and animate the very notion of it. And I think that contrary to some that are talking about this question now, I think America is quite unique in this way of being found on an idea, and that makes it really

20:01powerful and also really accessible to everyone. And it also means that we individually, and as a community and group, have the power to shape and revise that idea. And that it also means that if it's built well enough, and I happen to think that overall, it has the pieces that make it robust enough, doesn't mean it doesn't get strained, it doesn't mean that there aren't things that have to, there isn't real work involved, particularly by the individuals along the way, that was what I said at the beginning, is that it's one of the, has the most power for being the

20:35most enlivening place you can be. At a minimum, reading the Federalist Papers, I always do get the feeling like, isn't it really cool that a bunch of people with these kinds of philosophical chops thought about how should the country be arranged? And they're influenced by Locke and Montesquieu and other people. So they, someone actually put thought into how it should all work, and then they did it. And these are people, I don't know, how old was Hamilton when he wrote the ones he read? He was a young guy. Yeah. And you know, this is just what he's doing in his, you know,

21:09part time when he's not dueling or something. He took a shot. Oh, there you go. And he had to go get himself killed at 49 by the vice president.

21:19Murdered by the vice president. I'm not saying that things aren't, there aren't for me. I think there are all kinds of things that are really problematic. And I also think there's some things we have to think about where our laws work. And there are real vulnerabilities that have been revealed, in my opinion, about what is necessary in our institutions. But it's also not, it's also the case, we don't have Secretary of Treasury or Secretary of State. What was Hamilton? Treasury. Yeah. Having, having a duel with the

21:50vice president and shooting him or getting shot by him. Getting shot by him. He fired into the air apparently. And yeah. Yeah. I saw the musical. I got, for my last thing, I'm always struck when I read these political philosophers, how precious they regarded government to be because, you know, we could collapse in anarchy and war at any point. And it's only sort of a spoiled, peaceful society like ours where, where young people could be, ah, burn it all down on the left or right. It's just so crazy.

22:26Are you saying I'm a young person? That it is ridiculous to think that way. So the system was designed to be flexible, to give expression to the steam before it explodes into something. But clearly with the case of slavery and the civil war, it didn't work. So right now, like, I feel like there, there's things in the constitution and in our past, right? The fact that amendments used to be a thing. And now it just seems like, oh, you're never going to, factualism is so set in that we're

22:57never going to get any new amendments passed. We're never going to, even just getting an age limit on elderly. We sort of, it seems like it's a majority view that if you're 90, maybe you shouldn't be in the Congress or, you know, have to have to do a competency test, the cognitive test or something. Yeah. So how can things that people actually agree on? So I'm very open to rank choice voting and just whatever we need to do to make sure that, you know, after Trump, someone says never again,

23:29you know, what can we do to, to reconstruct, to, to keep the very little bit of elitism that is harmless, that keeps us from the passions, the passions of the people.

23:43Right. It's, it's in there in the system. You know, if we just were to apply the system consistently, I have a lot of faith that we would not have another civil war, that we don't have something as serious and flawed and overpowering as slavery still, you know, whatever, whatever's lingering is pales in comparison to that. Yeah. I, I do want to make a comment about elitism, which is, it is, never ceases to amaze me for a country overall that's so much like sport and so much values the notion of somebody

24:13being really, really good at something, that there would be any argument at all about somebody being really good at, I don't know, running a government.

24:26That the solution, the solution is for something that matters as much as running a government well, is that what we want to do is have people who are, have, know nothing about such a thing or know nothing about doing anything. That's the reason why you'd want them. We should have an NFL combine for the president and for the... Yeah, what's your 40-yard dash? That's what I want to know.

24:50Hear ye, hear ye. We are starting the Q&A portion of the program. All right, who wants to start? You had mentioned earlier, he's directly, but I'm wrong, that the united factor between the factions was the assumption that everybody wanted to accumulate wealth and property, and that liberty, in part, is defined as ownership of private property. My question is, can you talk a little bit about the Reconstruction Amendments as the abolition of private property and the wiping out of the Southern aristocracy, and what we can learn from that to wipe out

25:25the Confederate-esque aristocracy? Sounds like a Seth question.

25:31So, Seth, you're the one who made the claim that none of this is about liberty, it's all about money and property. I think it is more than property, but it includes property. Part of the bane of being a realist is that optimists like Dylan always give the most extreme interpretation to everything you say. I mean, we can rewind the tape. I never said burn it all down. But you implied it. Nor did I say... You certainly implied it. We can rewind it later.

26:04Think about it in terms of scientific paradigms, right? My perspective is that as long as you cling to that idea, you're narrowing the frame of reference and the tool set and the way in which you want to approach a question. And I'm saying, what if you open that up? If you are pessimistic about things, you will take a look at assumptions and foundations and not just the mechanism. You're not going to keep trying to squeeze the Constitution to make it work if it's fundamentally flawed. You're not going to try to make America perfect if the concept of America is fundamentally

26:38flawed. You're going to come up with a new concept, right? Well, so what about Ben's question about... That's what I'm trying to... You're going to talk about the activity of the amendments and the Reconstruction amendments as a way of revising the Constitution so as to move it towards a more authentic version of the vision for America. That's what you're going to say?

27:05No, what I was going to say is that I thought Wes should say more about the three-fifths, you know, and talk a little bit more about the concept of person and property in the slavehood because that's kind of the origins. And then we could get further on that. But that was what I was going to ask Wes to do. Okay. You want me to give a little bit of a summary of this? Yeah, about why slaves were property and people at the same time. And because that's... Okay. So I'll just try to do this very quickly. But we begin with the fact that for the purposes of both representation and taxes, we count the number of people in the state and then slaves

27:40represent a special problem because in a way, right, the South wants more power. It says if you count the slaves, but then, right, there's a danger to that because it would give the South extra power for people who can't even vote and aren't represented. So the compromise is really about giving into the South a little bit. So they'll enter into the union, but also setting the stage for admitting the personhood of people who are slaves. So yeah, he puts this in the voice

28:10of a slaveholder and the slaveholder, he makes the slaveholder say, well, why should we count these slaves if they're only property? Well, they're not just property. Yes, they are property. There's forced labor. They can be sold. You know, we can tell them to do what we want them to do, but they are protected against violence. They're punishable for their own violence. So there is a mixed character, quote unquote. And this is the thing that I thought Madison was insightful to do. I called it a poison pill, but all right, do you want to count your slaves? We'll

28:44let you do that. But by doing that, you're admitting that they are not just property, but they're also people. So I think that's the sum and substance of this. Yes, I agree with that. But I take Ben's question to be really about commenting on how one of the most dramatic changes we have, the set of amendments that come after the Civil War, the Reconstruction amendments, as being at least an example of something about the dynamic or the

29:16plastic character of the Constitution and the ability to revise it and how that plays into the question of whether or not the whole question is about property and the protection of property as opposed to liberty and the protection of liberty in individuals. And I guess my own thought on it is that part of liberty is underpinned by the possession of property. There is also the part of liberty I think that maybe we most naturally think of first, which is being able to pursue our own happiness and

29:52our own flourishing in our own ways and our own terms with, you know, the caveats regarding sort of us being together in a community and so forth. And I think that you do see that with the Reconstruction amendments, because you have the individuals who were excluded from the rights of the Constitution being explicitly brought into that. And so there's an acknowledgement of their liberty and what it means to be a person and a citizen that is underpinned, even more than in some ways

30:23in the Bill of Rights. I mean, the Bill of Rights you have that, the Bill of Rights is our amendments, actually. It's a good thing to remember that. The Bill of Rights aren't part of the Constitution, well, aren't part of the original drafting of the Constitution. They are amendments that are added in that are about individual, often individual liberties and individual protections against the reach of the government. But I think you have that underlined with the Reconstruction amendments. And I want to just add one thing about factionalism. Madison doesn't say that it's just caused by

30:56class divisions and unequal division of wealth. He does say that that's one of the principal causes, but he also says it's just really part of human nature, tribalism, basically. He calls it self-love and vanity and all of that. And he looks at the difference in people's ownership of property. He looks at this in terms of people having different abilities. And there are social hierarchies in society. There are hierarchies of prestige. And I don't think he thinks you can do

31:28anything about that. And that's a real problem, right? So even if there were a purely socialist or communist society, which he kind of evokes here, and he says, this is one of the things he wants to avoid. Paper money is evil. Communism is evil. But even if that were the case, we'd have to deal with the problem of hierarchy and social hierarchy. And the right narcissism of minor differences that that can create, it creates a lot of conflict, it creates a lot of factionalism. You know, this is the kind of thing of Jonathan Swift parodies and Gulliver's Travels as the big Indians and the little Indians. People crack

32:02their eggs on different sides. If we ran out of big issues to fight about, we could certainly fight about trivial nonsense, and which we do. So it's, quote unquote, sewn into the nature of man. And then there's also cults of personality, zeals for different leaders, even zeals for celebrities, he thinks. There's, there's all sorts of causes within a society for factionalism. And so that's a prime problem for a constitution or for a system of government to solve. But sorry, I got us a little

32:32off track from the idea that, you know, you were on to the idea of the plasticity and the ability for reform. The way I would characterize it is that the ability for reform, plasticity is there. But that's not the drive. No, it's the opportunity. Rights aren't given. They're taken.

32:54Where's your shag with our t-shirt? Hey, this is he's wearing felt. I had, I had, I had many, many t-shirt options I could have worn today. But, you know, they always say like, well behaved women rarely make history, right? Nobody's going to give the vote to women or to black men or whatever, like all this stuff has to be taken. So credit to the structure of the constitution that we're set up in such a way where there's a pathway for that to happen. But it's a struggle. It's a fight. And to struggle and fight and revolt and put your life at risk, you have to have the motivation. Like I was

33:29talking about, maybe you need a revolution to get the motivation to go. So Mark said, we haven't had an amendment in however many years or whatever, right? Well, what's the motivating factor? What's driving us? What would drive us? I think the mechanism is still there. You think as a society, we aren't in a place where we come together to make an amendment, but maybe that's not the issue. Structurally, we still have the ability to do that, but we haven't, we're not faced with a crisis, an existential kind of crisis that would drive that kind of behavior. And after the war, we were. So there were all these,

34:02there was this flurry of activity and then it dies down because they were taking advantage of it. You're pointing to an important point that I think Frederick Douglass was making, which is that there's always violence, the potential for violence on the horizon. And we want to avoid that, but we can't avoid it at all costs, which is what the declaration is basically saying. You know, we tried to negotiate with you King, but you scorned us and we have no other choice. And it was the same thing for slavery, but we do want to not just tear it all down. We do,

34:32we do want to avoid it as much as possible, but that doesn't mean that in principle, we have to avoid it at all costs, at the cost of liberty.

Corporate power and constitutional limits

34:38So my name is Russell, it sort of builds on a bit of what you're talking about here, but one of the things that I wonder about, we talk about property and public property and stuff, but what about in the context of today where we have a lot of corporate power? And when do we get to the point where the constitution is such that you can no longer function because of these other power bases that were never conceived or understood when they first wrote the papers? Like, is that something

35:10that I guess maybe goes to Seth's point, gets to the point where it can no longer function? That was actually my thought with Ben's question is that when we have a fundamental philosophical change in the nature of personhood, say, that should cause some problems, right? These people were property and now they're people. Well, okay, so I guess we got to take them from the people that own, like, it's just unavoidable. We could, you know, okay, maybe we need some reparations. We need some softening. We need to do something to keep from civil war. But when the Supreme Court said that for the purposes of speech, corporations are people, no adjustment seemed to have been

35:44required. It sort of just happened without us nosing it, but that seems like just as significant a ontological event. Well, but Russell's talking about not the problem of corporations being understood as people for the sake of speech. He's talking about the problem of corporations have, I'm just putting words in your mouth, but the problem of corporations having power outside of the individuals or even individual communities. And that there's something unbalanced and maybe unforeseen about the level of power influence, you know, where you have some corporations that can be

36:21individually some enormous percentage of the GDP or something like that. And that kind of imbalance doesn't seem to be explicitly have a check on it necessarily. My answer to that would be, I think that that observation is basically right, but that means that we have to have a revision. So in that sense, again, I think it's pretty obvious. I'm a plastic constitution person. And so I think that that means that in the event that we have changing circumstances such that we have to

36:54adapt to them and they're real, we need to be making revisions to law first, and then if necessary to constitution to account for them. And this is something that I don't know, it's just, it's not American government, I think just government in general. It is a problem that our technology and I think our technology feeds our economics goes faster than our ability to address it. And I don't know exactly what to do about that problem. One thing might be to just decrease the average age of the Senate to something besides 80. It's worth saying that the founders were thinking about

37:29this. And this, I think is in the Madison Federals paper where he says it's him or Hamilton, but we want to prevent the powerful people, you know, rich people from having all the power and how we do that. So, right. They represent the election of legislators as one way to do that. Other checks and balances, of course, it's imperfect. And maybe we could think of corporations as especially powerful factions, but also factions that have a unified interest, right? If they all have the same interest, they can make government operate in a way that, right, favors the wealthy or favors the

38:03powerful or something like that. And they're doing that not just through lobbying, but essentially through the use of money and if not outright bribery, something akin to it. You're reminding me and Russell's question is reminding me of this too, is that it's not explicit in certainly what we read. And I just don't remember if it's explicit more in the federalist papers, but there is a capitalist founding of the country as well. It's not just the constitution. There's an enablement and Hamilton was a partisan of this. There was, you know,

38:33the generation of the treasury and the bank and stuff like that. Things that were the economic engine that was to be America went right along with the federal constitutional engine that was to be America. And part of the declaration was saying, we want to be our own engine. And part of that was economic as well as I'll call it political. I do think that the terms of how that economic engine works is in a kind of strain of influence. I'm not enough of a historian to know the parallels and

39:08exactly in the distinctions between, you know, the late 1800s and the robber baron age and stuff like that. But there's something like that that's going on. And I don't know exactly what it is. But we have not figured out what the laws were. I mean, the response to that was to break up Standard Oil and to break up monopolies and stuff like that. We have individuals that have more money than those companies ever did right now. And we haven't figured out how to deal with it.

Secularism, religion, and natural rights

39:31Hi. I'm kind of interested in that question about the national idea, right? And how to keep people bought in to that idea? I guess I'm a high school history teacher, right? So that's my job. Yeah. And I've been listening a lot to people who are arguing that the Enlightenment, it's inherently, I want to say Judeo-Christian, not just Christian, but it is like an inherently religiously motivated

40:03belief system, right? All men are created equal. There's this idea of the creator right there. And I know you weren't supposed to talk about Halo, so I'm assuming you're not supposed to do that either. But there is this idea that we've lost, we've lost that belief. I'm curious what you guys think about the loss of that belief, meaning that the thing that underpins these very secular ideas is losing its power as well. Just sort of that thought.

40:33Yeah, I think the notion of equality is very relevant here because part of the function of a creator or a god is to confer some sort of recognition that is not recognition for wealth or accomplishment or ambition. It's something that we all possess by virtue of being human beings. And so the conception of rights and liberty and recognizing those rights, that's sort of the secular version of that. So your question is, how do we do one without the other, without the religious

41:04underpinning? Yeah. There seems to be this new argument that the reason that we're losing that idea is because we're losing, because we are no longer a religious section. And I'm not religious, so I don't buy into that, but it's an interesting question. I feel like we're pretty good at taking things for granted, right? My initial thought of how we should open the show was let's read the beginning of the Declaration of Independence there and just look how problematic philosophically some of these things, right? We're endowed, even putting aside the creator part, but we have that there are natural

41:38rights. That is something that John Stuart Mill called nonsense on stilts, that there are legal rights. That is things that we've gotten together to agree. We don't want people to fall below this level, but to say, well, it's just natural, but it's a pretty handy or to say that there's this natural equality, but like per Nietzsche, we don't observe that. Well, this is like saying there's no such thing as morality, right? Because it's tricky to try to ground it. Right. So I think we do actually very well to talk about rights and good and evil and things like that without thinking so much about the

42:14meta-ethical foundations. And we're okay with that. You know, it could at least last centuries before it is seriously toppled. So I think you could, you know, have people of different faiths or no faith at all arguing about, should this be a natural right? What they're really arguing is, should this be a legal right? Right. I'm now going to name drop Rorty, right. Who is all morality is just sort of what we end up agreeing on, but with the idea that this can continually improve and it's an ongoing conversation. And if you think you can, well, but what is, what's the real thing? What does God really think about? Like that, that's just

42:48sort of childish thinking. But if you ask whether something should be a legal right, you have to appeal to some extra legal standard or the question of what it should be doesn't make any sense. So the fact that it, yeah, it's philosophically very difficult to say, how do we derive that standard right? And we can see that. All right, we're going to, we're going to get into a meta-ethical. That's all, that's all, that's all, that's all. You got us into it. I warned you again. I said, don't do it. But that's only if you think that should depends upon something extra legal.

43:20It requires some external standard. The rules of the game don't require an external standard to say that we were given the rules of the game from something outside of human beings. We have all can't say what the, what should the laws be by appealing to other positive law, human made laws, right? We have to, you can make, you can appeal to what you want the game to be like, right? Right. So, right. So there's an ethical view called non-cognitivism, which says when you say this thing is good, you're not actually raising it to a standard. You're not like saying your shoe

43:53is a size 10. You are saying, yay, that thing, yay, voting, yay, no suffering. And, you know, objectivists about morality don't like that. They don't want it just to be reduced to, I'm arguing one thing and you're arguing another, but folks like Rorty have argued that, well, that's kind of where we're at. It's just, you can say some people have thought about things more than that. It's not that everybody's opinion is equal. And so if somebody who's thought deeply about human nature and experienced all sorts of suffering and observed says, yay to no suffering, and some ignoramus says, boo, you know, maybe you should listen to the one who knows more.

44:29In the context of the question of, is there a way to talk about what we want to be as a country that is outside of a specific religious founding? My answer would be, is that yes, it is. And that's because there may be lots of ways into that. And there's certainly, I think, a Judeo-Christian way into that. But I think there are also lots of other ways into it. And that's part of what makes it powerful. Yeah. Like when I say external standard, it could be religion, but it could

45:01be Kant, right? We produce our own laws. It could be a version of Kant, like people should listen to our Korsgaard episode. But the question is, yeah, how do you ground normativity if it can be grounded? And Mark's bringing up an important objection, which is maybe it can't be grounded. But we need, if we think there is such a thing, we do need a grounding. And there's lots of clever, different ways to try to do that without religion. But you could also try to do it with religion.

45:31I guess I would say that there's the part where you say, well, what is it that we want to have? What is a... Well, I'm a serial killer, so I know what I want. How do you tell me that I can't have that? Well, good thing serial killers will remain a minority faction and will not cause... Any, we got one more? One more last comment from somebody? Question? Maybe if you could talk a bit more about the future. We've talked a lot about history. Based on where you see

46:02now, the challenges of today, how do you think in a few years' time, how are we going to be talking about the Constitution? Wow. Yeah, hard and really interesting. I feel like we could line ourselves up in terms of... Wes, I'm not sure about you in terms of your pessimism versus optimism versus, you know, this is a flexible system and that we could do something with, and so I'm going to be part of the solution. I never said I'd try to be part of the solution. I'm asking you where you fall in this line. Pessimism versus optimism? I don't really know. I think we have to try to do our best.

46:37I'm not optimistic about human nature. I used to want to write about politics, for instance, and try to make these fine-grained philosophies, and I'm like, this is absolutely pointless because it just ends up with someone in the comment section calling me a bigot. So I'm not going to do that anymore. I'd still want to write, but I don't fool myself into thinking that I'm going to persuade some large group of people. I think the comment I made about Lincoln, that's kind of the way I feel. We

47:09have to try to exemplify it and do it and be thoughtful about it and cultivate a certain type of character in ourselves in the hope that it will affect other people and do things that help others, like whether it's being a teacher, which is what I think we try to do with the podcast, or being a therapist, or doing something at that level. Now, I'm glad that there are people out there who engage in the political fighting and for the right cause and the arguments and all that stuff. I just don't personally want to be part of that anymore because it's not consistent with my well-being. So I

47:44don't know. When you're saying, Seth, you're just not active and you feel guilty about it, I'm not active and I don't feel guilty. I have the idea that I'm at least, like even the podcast, I think is a helpful thing to be putting into the ether, right? Yeah, I used to think that.

48:05Realism, not pessimism, realism. No, no, no. You know, I bought the model of there's the movement and the intellectuals behind the movement and whatever. It's like, I think politics is about organization and that's just not who I am. This is what I do. This is who I am. This is what I do. And if it helps contribute, great. But I've, I'm no longer deluding myself by saying that I feel this niche of, you know, the Trotsky to the whatever. But on the subject of... The way the podcast is organized, we have the delusion being balanced out by not being...

48:37Yeah. It's our checks and balances. We do have checks and balances. We certainly have personalities. We're all factions. It's true. There's four factions on this stage. You know, I think to be optimistic or pessimistic about the future in the way you asked the question, Russell. You have to believe that there's such a thing as a trend and have a strong belief in that kind of causality that I don't. So, like I said, I'm Hegelian, but without the end goal. It's just the constant shift and change.

49:09I mean, I'm old enough. You know, I saw the 200 when the country was 200 years old, and now I'm seeing it at 250 pre-internet, post-internet, pre-AI, pre-phones, post-posts, et cetera. There's been a long burn, long, slow burn from my perspective. And I feel like we're at an inflection point. So, I think there's going to be some pretty tumultuous change. You know, it's like waiting for the earthquake. Like, they're like, the pressure's building. We don't know. It could be

49:41this year. It could be 10 years from now. We don't know. But something's going to happen. And what's the outcome going to be? I think it could be tremendous. There could be a real awakening. Like, people could be like, man, we've just been doing this whole thing wrong, and we really need to, like, reset. Or it could descend into tyranny and despotism and all that sort of thing. I just don't know what the answer to it is, but I think the opportunity is there. And that's why, when I go back to talking about the United States, I used to buy into the story. I don't buy into the story anymore, but it doesn't mean that I think this

50:17is a terrible place or that the Constitution isn't a great function. Do you remember what we used to call it in school? The great experiment? This is an experiment in democracy. There's never been a country like the United States before. We're going to try it out. Let's see what flies, right? But then you get a hold of the thing, and you think that it's, you know, it's perfect, and you can't let it go. It's like, if this was a scientific experiment, and we were still testing the hypothesis, and we thought about it, that way, we'd have a very different attitude

50:50about what's going on. And it is true. It wasn't just propaganda. At the time, there really wasn't a country like this. It's a worthy experiment, but yeah, it's fragile. Well, as Hegel said, history is the butcher's block of nations. That's the real Hegel quote. Here's the fake Hegel quote. As Hegel also said, when a certain podcast reaches episode 400, then the gospel will go out and permeate every part of society, and all the subtleties will be picked up

51:22on everyone, because education will be so good at that point that all the political problems will be solved. You're welcome. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Dan. Thanks for Josh. Thanks for Glenn Luce Austin for doing the video.

51:44I want to meet all of you individually. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.