Changing the World with Civility and the Core of Stoicism | Alexandra Hudson

0:00You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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2:40Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:29Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Hopefully, you can tell my voice is a little bit back. The congestion has lifted, thankfully. I've had my septum operated on a couple of times from injuries when I was a kid, I guess. But I just get incredibly congested whenever I get sick and get these terrible, I guess, sinus infections. And then I basically can't record for a while or it sounds like I'm deeply sick, even though I'm feeling totally better. It's just this whole process afterwards. And my ankle's a little bit better. I got a new brace and then I am off to an orthopedist on Monday, trying to not go crazy, not being able to run, especially while I'm starting this book.

4:14but I did have a great conversation with Alexandra Hudson. She's a writer of a really interesting book called The Soul of Civility. Maybe what you need to know about this book is the Wall Street Journal said that it quotes Marcus Aurelius too much. I didn't know that was a thing that's possible. I'm not sure that it is a thing that's possible, but we had a great conversation. I think the original title of the book was something about politeness. We had a really great chat about that in our conversation about the difference between politeness, which is like your tone and your, you know, your manners and civility, which is, you know, about how we operate, how the, what we're trying to get to as a common good, our service of that common good.

5:04And I think this is a really interesting conversation that you're going to enjoy. uh alexander hudson is a novak journalism fellow she's contributed everywhere to fox news cbs the washington usa today time magazine politico and newsweek she has a master's degree in public policy from the london school of economics she's an adjunct professor at indiana university creator of a series for the teaching company called storytelling and the human condition she's got a great book called the soul of civility timeless principles to heal society and ourselves. You can grab signed copies of that from The Painted Porch.

5:41And she and I have an interesting sort of tie that goes way back in that we were both offered positions in 2006 in the Department of Education. I was offered a pretty high up position and turned it down. I wrote a piece about this for the New York Times, which you can check out. She was younger and took the job. and she opens the book with what that experience was like working in government. What happens when civility collapses? What happens when norms are shattered? What happens when people don't behave like philosophers? So I thought that was really interesting. You can follow her on Instagram at Alexandra Hudson.

6:26You can follow her on Twitter, Lexi O. Hudson, L-E-X-I Hudson. and I'll link to The Soul of Civility, Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. You can grab a few of those signed copies while we have them in the painted porch or get them anywhere books are sold.

6:58I thought you'd be morally opposed to books just as display. like you know like restoration hardware how they have those like that i feel like you'd have like a moral decision but these are these are all destroyed right none of this okay so i actually i was going back and forth like do i want to use books that i like and then also you don't want to pay like so so as a company it's called books by the foot and they just sell them that's what they do they do for like movie sets and stuff yeah so um if i was going to buy them to destroy them you know, you want to pay as little as possible per book.

7:30A friend of mine has her library like color coded. Oh, I hate that. It should be illegal. It's beautiful. It should be illegal. But it's like, you know, it's very aesthetically pleasing and calming. But yeah, it's like, I would, yeah. When we moved here, all my stuff had been at my house, all my books. I moved all my books here because I write here. So I need to have access to all the books. So we moved them and my assistant who was putting them out, she organized one whole shelf by color and it looks great but it's very frustrating i i it's very frustrating because it doesn't make any sense nothing is with you know like it's intuitive yeah yeah and so so finding stuff is is annoying but i i do like how it looks uh but i i like to do them by theme and then aesthetically i i like it when it's descending by height I don't like the random like if this was actually in my office it would drive me nuts because like how not aligned it is like some stick out further and some are bigger than others I like to eliminate needless hard lines I guess Brandon did a great job that's what it is yeah it's an art project yeah

8:49so how did you find the Stoics how did I find the Stoics Stoics found me. You know, have you heard of the teaching company, the great courses before? So every birthday, every Christmas, my father would go to his mystery closet. And, you know, while other girls were getting bikes and ponies, he would give me a new great courses lecture series. And so like that was like my true education. And, you know, Greek mythology, American history. Like I loved it. I just like vibed all of that. And so there was this one lecture series. I loved called Greco-Roman Moralists. There's like Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Diocrysostom, like all the faves, Marcus Aurelius.

9:34And so what I, yeah, I just, I always felt like it's like practical philosophy. Like I love ideas. I love intellectual history, but to the extent that they make our lives better. And I felt like that, that that's, I love it. And he kind of said in his opening, his name's Luke something. I'll find the professor for you because he could be a good guest for you sometime. But he said that this is kind of like an overlooked genre of philosophy because it's too practical. But it's like the one that kind of just touched my soul. Like I love Plato, who's like all ideas, but like I also just loved, you know, how do we live better and how do we live richer?

10:09It's like you can endlessly debate what does Plato mean? Is this practical? Is this possible? You know, did he mean it? You know, Socrates, should he have drank the poison? Should he not drink the poison? There's so much to go back and forth about it. I think what's interesting and then refreshing and then somehow works against stoicism is it's like, it's just what it is. It just says what he means. And a lot of the stuff is very practical, very simple, very straightforward. And so I do imagine that academically it suffers because you can't have as interesting a symposium about it. It's just like how to live and die well with nobility and dignity.

10:49As though that's simple and easy. That actually is the thing we should be endlessly discussing. And yet instead, because Mark Surrealist is like, here's how not to lose your temper. It counts against him because that's maybe not something that an academic is going to dedicate 80 years of study to or whatever. So how old would you have been when you got that book? So I actually came to that lecture series that would have been last five years or so, five, six years, maybe I can't remember that, but it's one I've returned to. Like, I think it's like a great book. Like I've listened to that lecture series many times at different seasons of my life.

11:31And it's like different ideas, different thinkers, and different books will hit you differently depending on what season of life you're in. And I feel like that's just, you know, I, I, I'm someone that likes to feel efficacious. I like to get things done. I like to feel like I'm in control. And it's just a great kind of refresher. It's what I do find myself returning to, just like timeless, timeless ideals, timeless ideas, permanent ideas about the good life. So you didn't find it when you were young? No, no, no. Just the great courses have been a part of my life growing up. And it felt like a career life goal that I didn't even know I had unlocked when they reached out to me two years ago about producing a series for them.

12:19So that came out last February called Storytelling of the Human Condition. It's about what great stories across history and culture tell us about what it means to be human and what it means to lead a meaningful life. And that was a lot of fun, a chance to consolidate knowledge that I had and also cover new intellectual territory as well. The reason I ask is I feel like I meet so many people who are interested now in Stoicism and almost to a person that go like, I wish I discovered this early or earlier. And I'm always trying to find someone that did find it early. Because, you know, I feel like one of the things that strikes you when you read the Stoics is you go, you think back to all the times when you didn't act that way.

13:07Do you know what I mean? When having those tools in your toolkit would have been really beneficial and you didn't have them. Do you know what I mean? There's almost kind of a bittersweetness to stoicism. You're like, why was I doing it the wrong way so long? And we can constantly do what we know is painful for us to do. I have had this massive home renovation thrust upon me against my will. And it's like the kind of renovation that people dream and say for forever, I'm like forced to do in one year because my home was destroyed in a flood. Yeah. Pipe burst in the third floor destroyed half my home last year.

13:44And it's been like a year of like in survival mode. And this morning, you know, I'm getting calls because from my floor guys, like our floors are getting ready. And finally, like it means like we're months away from being back in the home. It's exciting. Like walls are up. I never appreciated walls like I do like right now. Walls are amazing things. And floor guys were like, we don't have electricity and there's still stuff in the floors. like you're, we're quitting. And they just like walked off the job. And so I'm like calling my electrician. I'm calling my, my like, you know, general contractor type guy, like who promised me the floors would be, I'm like, you know, why isn't this happening?

14:17Why? Like, and I just spent so much emotional energy this morning, like yelling at people, like not living up to my ideals, like absolutely being a bad stoic and trying to control all the things that I cannot control. And it's exhausting. And it's like, you know, that's like life though. It's like falling short and picking yourself up again and trying to do better. Like, it's like, we can't have unrealistic expectations of ourselves or of others. This is one of my favorite maxims, kind of the wellspring of true civility. As I try to embody it, as one of my favorite thinkers, Erasmus of Rotterdam, embodies, like it says it in his book on civility for children, he ends his book, um, readily ignore the faults of others and avoid falling short yourself.

15:05And that's really the wellspring of, of true civility. And it's like a very stoical insight. Like, you know, we're so inclined as part of the human condition to point fingers and to blame and to be focusing on what other people should be doing differently. And, um, and yet he, he inverts that and he says, you know, only focus on you and forgive the shortcomings of others and avoid falling short yourself, which is a high standard, one that I fall short of all the time. So it's very stoic. In meditations, Mark's where this is, tolerant with others, strict with yourself.

15:37And that's the hard part, right? When you are strict with yourself or you have a certain set of standards or you have a view of how the world should be, it's hard not to want to hold other people to those standards, right? But they didn't sign up for it. They didn't agree to it. And almost certainly to expect it is to set yourself up for disappointment. The rule I heard, which I like, is imagine that you have free will, but then everyone else does not. Right. So like you have the ability to choose not to indulge in this or that or to, you know, you have agency over your life. And then everyone else is just sort of being controlled by forces.

16:16uh, you know, all their decisions are being made for them, that they're, they're hopeless or helpless against all of these things. And so the idea is that you, you're sort of, you're very, uh, uh, in command of oneself, and then you're very tolerant and accepting and understanding of other people. Cause it's, they don't know what they're doing. When, um, I think, I think, you know, human flourishing can be distilled to, um, um, like trying to overcome the fundamental attribution error, like where we're trying, we're assuming the worst about others. And we're constantly excusing ourselves for our own shortcomings, where we know our own motivations.

16:56We know why we're late. We know why we're in a bad mood, but when other people are late, when they're in a bad mood, it's like, no, like accountability and risk, personal responsibility. Right. And, you know, in my book, I talk about this idea. We're so quick today to talk about, to tell stories of condemnation, where we convict, we're judge, jury, and executioner for other people. And that's actually really bad for ourselves. Because we tell ourselves these stories where we're the victim, we're the heroes in our own story, but everyone's conspiring against us. And it's just a recipe for unhappiness, these stories of condemnation where everyone's to blame and everyone's out to get us.

17:34But how do we instead flip that and instead tell these stories of exoneration, you know, like the story about that person, you know, maybe they just got a bad diagnosis or their, or their child is like, is, um, uh, you know, struggling with mental health or, you know, that, that we can, these are stories like this is the power of stories. We live in stories, we breathe them. And just the power of switching that story is the recipe for a much more tranquil disposition where you're not like walking around life with a chip on your shoulder. Yeah. And for people who don't know the fundamental attribution there is like, you see something about someone or you get some piece of information about someone.

18:08And then in your mind, that forms your entire sense of their identity or who they are. So like when we make a mistake, when we're late, we're like, oh, I was late this one time because something happened. You're not a flaky person, but someone else is late or someone else, you know, does something that hurts you or upsets you. You extrapolate that out and then write them off as a human being. And so it takes work to go, how can I give other people the same benefit of the doubt that I give myself? And that we want others to give us. It's a great point. I have, I unpacked this idea in my book called unbundling people.

18:48Like how do we see the part of someone in light of the whole? Like we don't want to be defined by our worst moment. We don't want to be captured on video and have our worst moment, our mistakes spread all over the internet. But like as Alexander Pope said, to err is to be human, to forgive is divine. And yet we have this, we live in this era of strange perfectionism where we expect everyone to be fully formed and unerring and self-possessed and contained and never making a mistake, even if it's in their whole lives and never changing their mind even. And so we're quick to condemn and shame and cancel people and expel them from polite society based on, you know, one thing they've said or done, even if it's a, or having an opinion that with which we vehemently disagree and that we, the, that we've, and that's essentialized and that's reductive, that's dehumanizing to take the part and have it, as you mentioned, extrapolating, have that define the whole.

19:48And so my challenge is like, is, is, is unbundling people, this mental framework that allows us to see the mistake, To see the opinion that we hate, that we disagree with, that we think is deeply misguided. How do we see the part in light of the whole, the irreducible dignity and worth of the human being and not let the part define the whole? I tell the story of how I unbundled Socrates, for example. Socrates is a big intellectual influence on me. He taught me to love the true, the good, and the beautiful. He taught me the power of ideals and the power of detachment and to love the life of the mind, love the life of ideals and ideas.

20:30And yet, according to a student Plato, he had lots of ideas that I disagree with. I'm a parent of two kids. He wanted to abolish the family. He was a proponent of eugenics. Like, yeah, all these, he wanted to abolish art and poetry in society. And I'm a creator. I oppose eugenics. And these are all things I disagree with. But, you know, am I tainted because I was influenced by someone who has some bad ideas? And can I see the beauty of Socrates while also condemning the parts of his thought and his ideas that I disagree with? I think that we should. You know, I think that's what human progress depends on.

21:07That's what the good life depends on. Yeah, I mean, we do that all the time. You like some albums from a man and not other ones. That's right. You like some movies from a director. You're not a sellout if you like are not a full-fledged fan of, yeah. Well, and of course, also, I think it's even easier to do when they lived a long time ago and they're dead. Do you know what I mean? Like, like, I think sometimes people do this with stoicism weirdly. They like, they'll go, well, what about this? And what about this? And what about this? Or, you know, they'll say to me, like, I don't talk enough about these sort of more obscure parts of the stoics.

21:35And I go, yeah, I don't really give a shit. In the sense that I, just like they, were able to pick and choose from the influences of the past and the things they agreed with and they could discard the things they disagreed with. We get to do that today. I just don't care that much about pronunciations. I don't care that much about certain assumptions they made. Seneca's doing the best he can to talk about physics. Well, that's not who I'm going to get my physics from. And also, I'm not even really going to think that much about physics at all because it's not something that interests me and I'm not a physicist.

22:12And so I do think you can pick and choose more than maybe more sort of dogmatic people think that you should be able to. And there are people who are Aristotelians where Aristotle was the be all end all. Anything non-Aristotal, like I'm not interested. or even today in our era of how we view the past, which has become a forefront of the culture wars. There are some people who feel deeply they have to justify all things founding fathers in order to justify all things America. They're like, I love America and therefore I can't see anything wrong in America or the founders who created America in order to love this thing called America.

22:53But how do we actually say no? Don't put them on a pedestal as if they're perfect and you know, omnipotent and unchanging. Like, say, you know, they were people who are flawed, like just like us. They had mistakes. They made mistakes in their personal lives and in their public thought. And that's okay. That's what it means to be human. We can celebrate some of their achievements. Like I think America is a great place and democracy is a good thing. Who also made mistakes. Yeah. You can go look at all the things that, I don't know, Jefferson was right about and just take those and ignore the things he was so - Did you get to the story of Edward Coles in the book.

23:29This is one of my favorite stories that I don't get to tell often enough, if you don't mind. So Edward Coles is one of these unsung heroes of American history. No one's ever really heard of him. He's not in any of the textbooks. He was a generation after the founding fathers. And he was of the same class and status of the gentry in Virginia. He was a neighbor of Thomas Jefferson and was an aide to James Madison in the White House. And while he's an aide to James Madison, the White House, he does something kind of unthinkable. Early in his life, he had become utterly persuaded of the moral abhorrence of slavery.

24:08And he decided to dedicate his life to ending slavery. And he, in fact, waited until his father died, inherited the slaves, and immediately manumitted them. He then moved to Illinois. His slaves followed him as just like his friends and his family. And he ended up running for governor of Illinois on an abolitionist platform ended up inspiring Abraham Lincoln, who he met before he died. And Lincoln said, you know, thank you for what you did. Like, I remember you back in Illinois. So that's like, he's like the link between the founders and Lincoln. Sony, while he's an aide in James Madison's White House, he decides to write some letters to Thomas Jefferson, calling him out for his hypocrisy of being the architect of liberty while owning slaves.

24:54And he says, he says, Jefferson, we really need your help. Can you please join us in this fight to abolish slavery? You're the most respected statesman of the country. Your word, your gravitas would go a long way towards supporting this cause. Amazingly, Jefferson writes back. He says, Edward, great to hear from you. Thanks for your note. You're right. You're absolutely right. This is the direction history is going in. Look at the Haitian revolution, Jefferson says. This is what's happening. There's no question. Slavery is going to be abolished eventually, but I can't help you. I'm old. I'm tired.

25:35I have these other things going on. I wish you all the best. Thoughts and prayers, but I can't help you. Coles writes back again and just piece by piece, excuse by excuse, dismantles every single excuse that Jefferson proffered. He says, your friend, Benjamin Franklin just joined our abolitionist cause and he's no spring chicken. And just like every excuse Jefferson gave, he had a response and said, please, Jefferson, will you consider taking up your pen and joining our cause? And Jefferson never responded. And what's amazing about that, this is one of the few times that we know of where Jefferson was directly confronted with this founding, this hypocrisy.

26:17This is like the original set of America and the core tension hypocrisy of Jefferson's life. Like how did he pen life, liberty, pursuit of happiness for all and equality of all human beings while simultaneously owning slaves until he died? And there are several things that I draw from this story. One, I tell this story in my chapter on civil disobedience, how sometimes protest and speaking truth to power, as Edward Coles did, is a duty of citizenship. You can imagine Coles kind of like shaking. Jefferson could have ended his career just like that with a stroke of a pen. And yet he stood up to him and he said, Jefferson, I respect you enough to call you out with this core hypocrisy that I see in your life.

27:01That's dangerous. That's not polite. And that's a core idea from the book, difference between civility and politeness. And yet he did it anyways. He took that risk upon himself. And, you know, in my opinion, he's an unsung hero in American history because not only did he speak truth to power in that important way in opposing slavery, but we hear a lot today that, you know, the past was the past and we're more evolved now and we ought not judge the past by the standards of the present. And what's great about Coles' story is he's emblematic of many people of his day and even before him and after him who knew of the moral, understood the moral abhorrence of slavery, of subjugating an entire class of subhumans for personal gain.

27:47And they did something about it, right? He ran for governor on an abolitionist cause on the abolitionist platform. And I also think it gets this idea that we don't need to justify all things Jefferson to be like, Jefferson did bad things and he also did some good things, right? Like America is a great country that has also made some mistakes. Like that's what it means to be human. That's what, you know, that's what history is. That's what history teaches us. Like how can we, and this is like Plutarch, like this is the Plutarchian model of history, right? Like where is their virtue? Praise it. Where is their vice?

28:20Condemn it. It doesn't matter where it is, where it originate from. Like let's just be partisans of human dignity, partisans of the good life. and revive principles and ideas and stories that help us pursue that. And even stories that are cautionary tales and show us what to avoid in life as well.

28:42Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

29:27We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity, but it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

30:09Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck. That's the sound of no crowds. No alerts. No distractions. And no telling what you'll find next. You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota trucks.

30:48but what i think so timeless about jefferson is you know he he has this one passage in in notes uh what notes from a virginian or whatever he spoke about virginia where he's he's wrestling with the fact that having read epictetus and terence and puglia sirius that that he he knows that some of his intellectual heroes of the classical world were slaves. And then he himself is an owner of slaves. So this idea that there's lesser humans and higher humans, he's faced with this contradiction. And so he's staring directly in the face of the monstrosity of what he's doing. And then what is he goes, oh, no, no, these slaves were different because they were like black people, basically.

31:43Right. He's like, you know, it would be a sin to keep Epictetus in slavery because Epictetus is so smart or Terrence is such a great playwright. But he's like, that's different than these people that live in this shack behind my house. Right. But what he's missing, what's so obvious in retrospect, is that American slavery, chattel slavery is built around the idea that it's punishable by law, in some cases by death, to teach slaves to read like you're not allowed to do it. Right. And so he's he's going, well, you know, these slaves are smart. So that slave slavery is wrong. These slaves are not smart.

32:20So it's OK. But it's like he's sitting atop the system that's preventing them from being what they could be. And that's I don't know if you know who Phyllis Wheatley is. Yes. Yes. I was just going to mention her. She's this case that challenges the founders in so many ways. She's this great black poet around the time of the founders. And she meets all of them. They all read her poetry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson questioned her authorship. Right. Because he can't, he can't, again, this is a cognitive dissonance. He can't see her as a talented thinker, a talented writer, a creative person like the people from antiquity, or else you would have to challenge the system.

33:00And I think the other part of it that's so obvious is, you know, there's that Upton Sinclair quote about how you can't get someone to challenge something or to change your mind about something that their salary depends on them not understanding. And, you know, Jefferson is much more an Epicurean than a Stoic. Like he loves the high life. He has this idea of himself as this fit. He loves French stuff. You know, he basically lives outside his means his entire life. So Washington understands, has the same moral qualms about slavery, but he's really the only founder that's able to free their slaves because he runs such a tight ship.

33:40He can financially afford. I think that's the thing that a lot of people don't take into account. You're asking when someone just frees all their slaves, that would be like me just giving my house away, or signing over my stock portfolio to a charity. Even if it's the right thing to do, it's a very expensive thing to do. And so Jefferson lives so beyond his means that even if he had later in life gotten to a place where he said, this is wrong, I shouldn't participate in the system, he's having the cost of that moral decision is so overwhelming. Just like you have people who work in industries that they now feel are important or don't want to be a part of, but they're like, I still have to put my kids through college.

34:27I like my vacation house. My wife likes fancy things or whatever it is. When Jefferson is just sitting down and writing the ideas out on paper, he's eloquent and just and moral and good. But then when he looks at his balance books and the accounting of it, he can't afford to be the person that he aspires to be. And I just think it's so interesting how, of course, the dilemma of should you own or not own human beings feels hopelessly and thankfully very antiquated. But the idea of I'm faced with this uncomfortable conclusion, but to do something about it would make me have to make some hard decisions.

35:09And in this case, those hard decisions would be giving up the good life or a lot of money. She just can't do it. And it's so human in that sense. And we're not that much better than him. And can we appreciate that he's human in that sense, right? Instead of like making him this demigod. Thank you. I'm so glad you brought up Wheatley. There are several things I love about her story. One is, as you mentioned, like just her innate raw talent that was noticed by her the Wheatleys, right? Where the Wheatley children decided to educate her, taught her, you know, she was proficient in Greek and by like age five and all the love classics.

35:45Yeah, you're not allowed to do that. Right. Like they're breaking the law by doing that. And she flourished. And then all the, like, you know, Hancock and the governor of Massachusetts and the Wheatley, her owner, they write this letter to a publisher saying she's excellent. Like her work is great. Her poetry is wonderful. Like publish her. Like that's unheard of. they're championing a young black woman. Like that's, that's incredible. Like that doesn't fit neatly into the narrative today of good versus evil, like white men are bad and like, you know, oppressed and vulnerable are good. And that's so interesting, right?

36:17But like history is full of these, these beautiful exceptions. I also love how Wheatley, you know, she found advocates and constellation in the great conversation, right? She loved Pope. She loved Homer. She loved Virgil. She was, it was real to her, this iterative dialogue between the great minds across history that have thought deeply about questions of origin, purpose, and destiny. And that was real to her. And that helped her, thirdly, which I think is so powerful about her story, make sense of her tragedy, like her core tragedy in life. like this core injustice, right? Being ripped from her home, torn from her family, given a completely new identity and forced to just start afresh as a slave, like, you know, without anything in the way of freedoms or personal property.

37:08And her poem, Out of Slavery, sorry, From Africa to Slavery in America or something like that in her book of poems, like it's a powerful example of this, of how she used story to tell a story of agency, right? And of autonomy out of this core injustice, right? She says, you know, she finds a way to redeem it. She says, I'm grateful that actually being brought from Africa, like helped me find her faith. Like her Christian faith was really important to her. And she doesn't let, you know, her slave owners or slaveholders off the hook. She says, you know, you think you're part of this angelic train, you know, But look in the mirror, there's ugliness there as well.

37:55And she's just, it's an incredible story that does cross cut the narrative. It doesn't fit neatly into the stories that people tell today, but it's a story of agency. Like she said, I can only control myself. This is a lot I've been given. How do I make the most of it? And she had an amazing platform. She died all too early at the age of 30, but she used that platform for good, right? She talked about shattering glass ceilings, you know? It's weird too. I probably heard about her in my 30s. You know what I mean? Nobody taught me about her in school. I didn't learn about Frederick Douglass in school.

38:26There's so many people that, yeah, there are these sort of exceptions to the rule. So it's not like by learning about them, you go, oh, America wasn't that bad. In fact, when you read about Phyllis Wheatley or you learn about Frederick Douglass, you see just how evil slavery was and you see how pronounced the original sin at the core of the American project is. Yes. But you also can see the people who went against that. You can see, you know, it actually, I think, gives you a better lens on it than just talking about how awful it was. You go, oh, no, no. There were people trying to do the right thing.

39:03And there were people that understood this that saw outside the lens of their time. And then that should empower you to go, oh, there could be those people now or you could be those people now. as opposed to just, you know, whatever, like the 1619 project is where it's just like, it's been shitty since the beginning. Everything is bad. The whole thing is. These monolithic narratives. And that's not what humanity is. It's not what the story of human history is. Exactly. And that's what I love about. I, you know, you love books. I love books. Like there are people that love like the great books, right?

39:36Like the Mortimer Adler project at U Chicago, this attempt to define the body and wisdom of human, human knowledge that you need to know to be educated, you know? And my concern with projects, like there's this great biography of that project. It's called a great idea at the time. And he like, and he, this, I think his name is Alex being the author of it. And he reads through like all these dissertations on that project to, to kind of weave together this narrative of how it came to be. Cause it was, it was kind of this, you know, this is like nerdy guy, Mortimer Adler and, and, and Hutchins, the president of UChicago, this like charming, suave university president, single-handedly made the great books, this like middle-class phenomenon, this like consumption good, like never has there been such cultural diffusion of like Homer and maybe there never will again be, right?

40:22And yet my concern with like those attempts is that, you know, they're pretty static, right? They're mostly, they're all men. The first one was all men, all white men, you know, all books. Right. But I, I prefer the, the, the concept of like the great conversation that it's not just books, you know, like it's works of art. It's, it's, um, it's paintings. It's, it's a sculpture. It's, it's not just, you know, it's people like Phyllis Wheatley, like people who are overlooked from the canon. Right. Uh, and, and, and it's true. There are, have been marginalized communities that didn't have the ability or the time.

40:57They're too busy feeding themselves and their family surviving to sit back and create, right? Like the act of creation is what you do when your bare minimum needs are met. Like you're not just, you're out of survival mode and it's like what you do when you thrive. And yet there are these incredible contributions to the great conversation, like again, on questions of origin, purpose, and destiny that have been, that have been overlooked. That's still, and we cut ourselves off from it prematurely. Like it's not even, you know, when you go to sit down to read the Federalist paper, It's like we could literally read the words, but we don't get the allusions to like Greek mythology, Roman mythology.

41:33Like we're, it's a language. We don't have the underlying education to know all the things they're referred to. Yeah. That's right. Like, like even a bunch of the lines in the American revolution, you know, I regret I have one, but one life to give to my country. It could be liberty or it could be death. These are all allusions to the Addison play about Cato. Right. So people at the time would have understood in the way that if I made a Hamilton line or a line for the Godfather, people would understand what I'm talking about. All these centuries later, we think that they made up that line on the spot.

42:08But actually, they're referencing something in the same way that Cato is referencing the death of Socrates and the death of Cato in his own famous death. And then all the paintings ever since are making these same. And so, yeah, if you don't have, if you're not versed in the canon and you haven't read it, you don't realize how much is going over your head and how much of it is this kind of, even famously, Washington resigning his commission, resigning the presidency after two terms. This is a nod to Cincinnati. It's the myth of Cincinnati. It's the idea that you return to your farm after the emergency is over.

42:49And everyone at the time would have got that. And all we get all these years later is like, a president should serve like about eight years. You know what I mean? No, no. He's saying that you're supposed to be of service in the moment that you're needed. Right. And then you're supposed to return to civilian life. You know, I've thought about this a lot. like all great cultures have defining works of art. They have like an epic poem that kind of encapsulates their values, their norms, their cultural ideals. Like Solon said, tell me the poetry of a culture and then I'll give you, then I'll tell you their laws.

43:26Like art kind of precedes, bless you, are you okay? Art precedes laws, like culture and norms and values precedes positive law. And so for the Greeks, it was the Iliad and the Odyssey. For the Romans, it was the Aeneid. For the French, it was Chanson de Roland. For the Italians, it was maybe a Verdi opera. And I've thought about this a lot. What is the great American epic? When I've asked this on social media, I get literally 500 different answers. Some of the answers are Walt Whitman's blades of glass others are Moby Dick but it's like how many people so everyone in ancient Greek or Rhys or Rome would have was was conversant with with with Homer and with Virgil right like how many average Americans are conversant with Moby Dick or blades of glass there's no consensus answer that's really fast like maybe it's maybe it's Hamilton today I don't know like maybe it's um, uh, TV show Sorkin.

44:24I know Sorkin. What's it? I'm so sorry. The Aaron Sorkin show, the famous one. Oh, the West Wing. Yes. Maybe it's the West Wing. I don't know. Like what, maybe it's like some pop art like that. Like the, you know, Homer was like the pop art of the day. It was the, it was the public art, right? Like Shakespeare was like, so I think that's a really interesting question. There is not like a consensus answer. Like I think America is a great culture. We're great. One of the great civilizations in history. There's not. We don't have that. And the founders borrowed, right? We drew liberally. That's kind of like the English language.

44:55That's why the cocktail is this uniquely American art. We just kind of take the best a la carte from around the world and we make something better and more beautiful out of it. Have you read Tom Ricks' book, First Principle? No. I'll give it to you in the book for it. But even in the Federalist Papers, right? They're all signing with these pseudonyms. And all those pseudonyms are names from Asian history. Yes. Publius, Cato, yes. That like even like farmers, you know, in Georgia or Virginia or Massachusetts or whatever, as primitive as the education system was that they would have known what that was.

45:29So all these classical illusions only work because all of the people or most of the people are steeped in the same class. And they're getting it at church from the pulpit. They're getting it in their public orations. They're getting it at home. Right. They're getting it in translations of the King James Bible, which has allusions to Greek mythology. Yeah, or Lincoln's lines, so many of them come from the Bible. Or conversely, Shakespeare is pulling from Plutarch. Plutarch is pulling from Eastern. So you're getting, even if you're not consuming the original, the other things that you're consuming are teaching you about the references from the past things.

46:06So there's just a familiarity there that we probably lack. And I mean, this is what I think about a lot right now. And this is what I'm excited to explore in my next book. Like, what do we do about it? You know, given that there's this cultural gap, this deficit, like we can't read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and like, because every other word is an illusion, like a reference to something. Same with the founders. Like there's literally a comprehension gap because we have this cultural, what does that mean now? Like, I don't think it means, you know, I worked at the United States Department of Education and there's, I know there's no appetite in Congress to have like a Greek mythology, you know, common core, you know, but like, what is the role of creators, you know, to fill this culture?

46:52I think you have an important role in that, right? But like to, to give people the tools and the will to remedy these gaps themselves. Like this is like, I graduated from, you know, I, my, my professor's joke that I got a great books, kind of liberal arts degree, despite the institution I went to, I went to a, yeah, exactly. And, and, and yet I remember resenting my education. I was like, you know, I, I grant, I was about to graduate and I'm like, I don't know how the real world works. Like, and I was like, what did I just do for my whole life? And what I realized is that an education, it, it doesn't tell you everything you need to know.

47:29It gives you the skills and the will to keep growing and to keep, and to keep learning. And like what too often happens today, unfortunately, is that how we do school crushes a will to learn, right? It's like very formulaic, it's utilitarian. It's like, we have to have you minutes in a chair and go through this curriculum. And it's like, it crushes teachers and it crushes students. And so anyway, the second book is about autodidactism and lifelong learning, why you don't need to go to school to have a robust life of the mind and how to keep learning, you know, even after school. So I want to talk about civility because I heard about this case.

48:07I think it was in the UK. this guy uh he's uh he gets fired from his job and he you know like he didn't shower he was rude to his employees or to his fellow uh employees uh you know he didn't listen he was basically just like an anti-social animal at work right uh and and then when he gets fired he goes um uh actually you're persecuting me for my religion and they go oh what what religion is this and he says i'm a Stoic. And he was saying that Stoicism being descended from the cynic tradition of sort of, you know, rejecting, you know, his practices and superficialities and conventions sort of made him this way, which I think is, of course, a complete and profound misreading of Stoicism.

48:57But I do think it's interesting, right? Because I think there is a certain strain of thinking that says, hey, once you get to the truth, once you understand the really important things, then you don't care about all these silly things that the rest of society cares about. You think about Diogenes the Senate, right? I mean, like he lives in a barrel and he insults people to their faces and he doesn't wear clothes. Like, I mean, he's a disturbed individual, like, but he's saying, no, this is the height of wisdom to reject civility, politeness, manners, to care about how you dress or cut your hair or shower.

49:34This is all nonsense. This is a distraction from the pursuit of wisdom. But you're saying, I actually know these things are very important. Well, I mean, Socrates was the same way. He didn't bathe, he didn't wear shoes, he didn't eat, he would just get lost in thoughts, staring up into the clouds. And I have a lot of respect for people like that. And I'm not the only one. Diogenes the Cynic was the envy of Alexander the Great, who approached him at his barrel and said, Alexander, ask me anything and it's yours. And Diogenes says, stand a little out of my son. Yes. GTFO. Like, leave me alone. I'm more powerful than you.

50:08That's exactly right. And what did Alexander say? If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Like, there's something beautiful about these people that live their lives free and independent of social convention and other people's thoughts and opinions. Because so many of us live our lives in slavery to the other extreme, right? Where we're slaves to complete convention. And this is actually an opinion of others. And this is actually what John Stuart Mill is more concerned about than like legalism, like in the formal sense he's, he's concerned about in his on Liberty, John Stuart Mill is concerned about cultural conformity and cultural legal, like a social norm, social norms in his Victorian England that were so confining of the human spirit that he analogized them to the practice of Chinese foot binding.

50:59Just as a foot is maimed and deformed by and constrained, that's what happens to the human soul when it is confined and curbed in and meant to be shaped at every turn. And he was worried about that. He thought that was a greater threat to human flourishing and freedom than tyranny, than hegemony, than formal laws and institutions. So it's interesting to run. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle that, you know, we shouldn't be slaves to the opinions of others. but we are an inherently social species. Like we become fully human and relationship. We become our best selves in community. Um, and, and that require, and life together requires that we don't monomaniacally do what we say and want and think at all times.

51:48Right. Like, and this is the, an insight from, from, you know, classical, uh, philosophy and, and, and, and stoicism as well, that true freedom is found in restraints, right? And other people are restraints and self-imposed restraints. And that's where we become, that's ordering our gloves, ordering our path. That's where we become truly free and we become fully human and humane. And this is like the idea of the humanities, like this mode of education that cultivates our humanity, but also it's the liberating arts, the arts that liberate us from our baser desires, from being enslaved to just our passions.

52:22and do, you know, that, um, so it's, it's, it's, I think it's somewhere in between. Yeah. I think about this because at the core of stoicism is the idea that you should only focus on what you control. And so I control what I say. I don't control if you're offended. I don't control if you think I'm rude. I don't, I don't control how my things are interpreted by you. That's, that's a pretty basic interpretation of stoicism. Right. But does that mean that being a stoic gives you the excuse not to give a shit about how and how you act makes other people feel? So I got to feel like the amount of times they talk about kindness, they talk about compassion, they talk about decency, they talk about the virtue of justice, that can't be right.

52:59You know what I mean? So Epictetus has this line, he says, remember when you're offended that you are complicit in taking the offense. Yes. So I think that's true for me, right? Like to go back to what we're talking about. Like that's true for me. If somebody says something and I'm offended, I go, that's on me. They didn't mean to offend me. It doesn't matter what they meant. What matters is how I'm going to interpret that. And I'm going to choose to interpret that in a way that doesn't upset me. Right. At the same time, when I say something, I'm going to do my best to not be offensive, to not be hurtful, to not needlessly cause pain for another person to the extent that that is in my control.

53:38Yes. And so that tension, you would think that stoicism would let you off the hook. And in fact, I think it puts you more on the hook. So my grandmother who passed away right before my son was born four years ago, she's a hero of civility in my book. She's this zealous extrovert who had what I call the superpower of the 21st century, which is unoffendability. She just walked through life totally unflappable. I unpack her story and who she was in this section of my book called The Mellifluous Echo of the Magnanimous Soul. Aristotle's concept of the magnanimous soul was just a soul that was rightly proportioned and just a person that was so self-confident and self-possessed that they utterly forgot about themselves in the marketplace of life with others.

54:25And so my grandmother, she was, you know, beautiful Mary Kay saleswoman. My, my, my mother and my two, my two aunts, her sisters were also Mary Kay saleswomen. So there were, there was a time where there were three pink Cadillacs in my grandmother's driveway. And, and so she, you know, cared about how she looked. She would, you know, put her makeup on, do her hair in the morning and then completely forget about herself the rest of the day and just be totally other oriented and focused and present with others. And when, when she met people who were callous or rude and thoughtless and unkind, she would tell reflexively these stories of exoneration that we were talking about.

55:02Like this is, this is, that is a reflection of them and where they're at in life. And they are, and she was excellent at seeing the thing beneath the thing. You know, someone comes at you and they're aggressive and hostile or callous and thoughtless. She would say That person is not a callous and thoughtless person. That is a hurting person. And I wonder what's going on in their life that is causing that hurt. And I'm not going to be, I'm not going to exacerbate that. What can I do to make their lives a little bit better right now in that moment? And that's just so counter-cultural to our moment where we meet someone in the heat of the moment.

55:35We're like, you're a jerk. Like, I'm going to give you back what you put out of me. Like, that's the animalistic basic response, right? And she just had this amazing ability to rise above that really base instinct and act with charity and grace and compassion. And she was utterly unoffendable. Like you could not, you could not offend her. And that's something I, you know, I cannot say I'm as good at. And so I just so admire her. I so admire her for that. So what do you do, though? I think it's interesting, right? There is this, someone's rude to you, right? The impulse is to be rude back. And I think philosophically you go, okay, that's not how to do it, right?

56:08Like they're debasing themselves by being rude. I'm not going to be rude. Or, you know, other people are getting away with stuff. I'm not going to let myself get away with that. Right. But then like, let's say you move into the realm of the real world. Like we're in government, we're in business, we're in making things work. Like how the world works, which I think is so important for the Stoics. Because like the Stoics aren't just sitting. They're in the world. They're not on the sidelines. They're practitioners. And there's this thing they talk about in politics where if one side is ruthlessly breaking norms, the decision to adhere to and continue to stick to norms is a flawed strategy because the other side just does what they want, gets the system to work for them.

57:00And then you're sitting here going, and they're basically using your own standards against you. So how does this sort of, how do you think about that? Because like, I think it, I imagine you experience this with the book, you know, like, I don't know if civility is our problem right now, right? And in some ways it's not, right? Like we have a bunch of real problems and civility can sometimes feel like, you know, moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. What do you do? How do you, how do you maintain this sort of a sense of honor and civility and standards and norms, and then also operate in the pragmatic real world.

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59:58Right. So Machiavelli was kind of among the first people to say, nice guys finish last, right? He descriptively looked at history and was like, what is necessary to gain and maintain power? And he said, being bound by religion, by Christian morality, by decency, by respect for the other, by common courtesy, say like that is the stuff of losers you know like that you have to be willing to to appear to adhere to these values and morals and be a christian public but be willing at the moments at the moment moments notice to dispense it then when it suits you right and that's why cesare borgia this like lawless tyrant is his is his ideal hero so the end of my book i actually put Machiavelli in dialogue with Socrates.

1:00:47And Socrates said, virtue is its own reward. That virtue and treating others with justice is a healthy soul and that it's its own reward. Whereas a vicious person, someone that acts with viciousness and injustice towards others, that is a disorder that is a sick soul and that is its own punishment. So when people like Machiavelli come along and say, nice guys finish last and you're never going to, um, to, uh, to, to win if you're, if you're bound by, by decency and morality, um, Socrates would say like, there is no winning, you know, you've won this temporal election, but what costs, like you are dying and you are sick and you don't, even if you don't realize, and that is its own punishment.

1:01:32And, you know, we get this in Boethius as well. And Boethius is this guy who, um, you know, was at the pinnacle of temporal political success during the end of the Roman Empire. And then overnight loses everything and is cast in jail and spends a year in jail before being executed totally unjustly. And in his beautiful book, The Constellation of Philosophy, he's in dialogue about this profound injustice with lady philosophy, saying how, like, what do I make of this? I did everything right. I was good and I was virtuous and kind. like, how can I, how do I grapple with this? And, you know, what Lady Philosophy says is like, you're not seeing things from my perspective.

1:02:12And like, you know, you, you have gotten your reward. This is your reward. Like you, you, the healthy soul, like, you know, he was, he was very, he was very much influenced by, by, by Plato and Socrates. And, and, you know, Dr. King, who was also very much like Phyllis Wheatley, the great conversation was present to him. It was iterative living dialogue, right? Like he loved, you know, he quotes Boeber, he quotes Socrates, he quotes Aristotle, he quotes Augustine. Constantly, these people were his friends, they were his companions. And he makes the same argument in his letter from Birmingham jail.

1:02:49He says, he makes the same, a similar argument about segregation. He says, segregation hurts both parties. It hurts the segregated and the segregator. It hurts the segregated by giving them a false sense of inferiority. And it hurts the segregator by giving them a false sense of superiority. It deforms their soul, he says. And that's actually where the title of my book, The Soul of Civility, comes from. And I realized that the same is true about incivility in general, like acts of cruelty, malice, violence, dehumanizing conduct towards our fellow human beings. Of course, it hurts the other party, but it hurts us too.

1:03:29We are made to be less human and less humane by virtue of that. And the inverse is also true that just as incivility is mutually harmful, acts of civility, hospitality, charity, grace, kindness, compassion is mutually ennobling. Both parties are made more human and also more humane. So the answer is, read more Socrates, virtue is an unreward, vice is own punishment. Yeah, no, I get it. I think that makes sense on the individual level, But then how does it work in a system? So I'll give you an example. So Cato famously is approached by Pompey and he says, hey, I'm proposing an alliance, a marriage alliance.

1:04:08I should marry your daughter. They come up with some, he proposes some way to sort of mend or merge their political fates. And Cato, sort of above repute, above backroom deals, goes like, get out of here. I don't want, he says, I will not be purchased by way of women's apartments. He's saying basically that you can't buy me. I don't play like that. Politics should be purer than that. So what does Pompey do? He goes, well, I need an ally. If it can't be Cato, who I admire, I'm going to ally with Julius Caesar. So he allies with Julius Caesar and the Roman Republic falls not long after. Right. And Plutarch says, you know, here in this moment, this is the fatal flaw of Cato.

1:04:52Cato is so pure, so above things that he can't understand basic pragmatism. And by rejecting someone and by doing it rudely, but by rejecting someone, by observing the norm, by sort of rejecting that, he sends a potential ally to ally with his enemy. He brings about exactly the thing that he feels like he is selflessly dedicated to preserving. So I think the modern American equivalent is you have one side that breaks the rules, and then the other side goes, oh, well, we're not going to break the rules. And then, so the other side just keeps breaking the rules and breaking the rules and breaking the rules, and the other side says, we're going to be the good guy.

1:05:30But what happens is, okay, now the Supreme Court flips, and then this flips, and then this flips, and then this flips. And you're in an environment where by being civil or by following the norms in a one-sided series of exchanges, serious consequences result. So you can say, hey, as the individual, I did not solely myself, right? I was above things. Or we should say no one should ever take a job in a corrupt administration or no one should ever be a part of something that makes them even the slightest bit squeamish. But the reality is if you don't do it, someone else will do it. And that person may be worse.

1:06:02So you can, as the individual, feel good, but you are still, the consequences are borne by more than just the individual. So how do you think about that? It's a great point. So, you know, Plato said that the state is the individual, the soul writ large, right? He analogizes the rightly ordered individual soul, the just soul. That's what comprises a just society, right? So what is a just soul for Plato? It's one where reason rules the passions through courage, through thumos, right? That's a rightly ordered, well-proportioned soul that is a just, healthy soul, right? What is a just society? It is comprised of citizens who have those well-ordered souls and we're a philosopher king ruled by wisdom, right?

1:06:48Rules the vulgar many, the demos, through the praetorian class, through the military class, through courage, through thumos, right? That's the rightly ordered society mirrored on the rightly ordered individual soul. And in my mind, you can't take them apart. Like, especially in a democracy, if you want to bring it to modern day, the citizen is prior to the state and to the institution, to the regime. And this is exactly why in the wake of the Civil War, there was a debate about how and whether the South could be integrated into the North. And here's why. They thought, the North was very convinced that slavery had deformed the soul, the individual soul and the cultural soul of the South.

1:07:35Exactly what we were talking about, exactly what Dr. King said. And here's a funny array and story about the South. The South was defined by wealth and gentility, like an elite group that was very wealthy, lots of whites who were poor, but at least the whites could be poor because they had slaves to look down upon. There was a very stratified society that was not equal, not just. And the elites, the plantation owners, they consciously resurrected this entire culture of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. They loved the joust. They had their coats of arms and this whole veneer of gentility and civility.

1:08:19and it was a veneer on a very gross and unjust segregated system of slavery that subjugated was propagated on our fellow human beings. And there was a deep sentiment amongst northerners that that deformed, that made them suited to an oligarchy, not to a democracy, that they were ill suited to self-governance because they had become tyrants. When you hurt another human being, when you consistently habitually segregate, abuse another human being, that hurts you, right? They definitely. And so here's an amazing, so a lot of people in America know this famous story of the caning of Charles Sumner, right?

1:09:04People like to point this story, oh, you're like, you know, things are bad today in America, but at least we're not beating one another to death on the floors of Congress anymore, right? And that's like, people normally leave that story at that, but there's a lot more to that story. So Sumner was an abolitionist. He was vehemently a vocal opponent of slavery. And one day he had taken on a specific family and plantation owning class. And Preston Brooks, a congressman, comes over to the Senate floor and he approaches Sumner from behind. And do you know why that's important. Because how would two gentlemen settle a dispute with a duel?

1:09:45How is Alexander Hamilton, like many other famous duels in history? And so Preston Brooks did not see Sumner as an equal. He approached him and beat him from behind with an inch of his life like a slave. Well, someone held a gun on him, I believe. Like a slave. He did not see him as a pure. And that's exactly what the Northerners were worried about, that they did not see other human beings as their equals, which is what a democracy is premised on. And so a regime is only held together by a society that has cultural norms and values that supports the society. Yeah. I mean, the only reason the South secedes is because they lose an election, right?

1:10:27And having essentially rigged the system for the vast majority of American history up until that point. They lose a legitimate election. They go, oh, shit. All of a sudden, it may be a democracy for a second here. Right. And not going to be an oligarchy where this sort of ruling class, a permanent minority, has an illegitimate majority in the parliamentary system that we have. And so it's suddenly threatened. Right. And yeah, the tension after the Civil War is, OK, we beat you militarily, but you still haven't accepted the fundamental issue the war is about, which is like, you're not in charge.

1:11:09You know what I mean? You don't get to decide how things go, especially after you just did this. And it's funny how perennial that debate is, because right now in front of the Supreme Court is this 14th Amendment case, which is predicated on some language they put in at that time that says, Okay, the people who don't respect elections, who try to overthrow elections where they don't go their way, who are numerically not a majority, but want to rule like one, how do we come up with some protections so they can't abuse the systems, reject the civil understandings or assumptions of our government, and then use it against them?

1:11:50Like, should Jefferson Davis have been able to run for president after the Civil War and potentially win while the South is, you know, suppressing black people's right to vote in those elections? You know, that's what they're looking at. And then we're still looking at that now because you have a group of people that are like, well, I agree with America in theory, provided my religious beliefs are equally represented the way that I want them to be. I get to decide how things, like provided I get to control the culture and the levers of power. So it is fascinating how timeless all of that is. But this is exactly the point that there is only so much that institutions and regime can do.

1:12:32It comes back to the individual. It comes back to human nature. So what did they say? What did Hamilton J. say in the Federalist Papers? That if men were angels, there would be no government. And what did Churchill say about democracy? It's the worst of all regimes, except for all the others, that there is only so much a regime can do if there is not the habits, the norms, the rituals, the values that support it. And this is, you know, we're talking about civil war, slavery after the civil war, reconstruction. That was, there were literally Northern forces occupying the South, right? To enforce this regime change, this radical reorientation of values that said, no, no, no.

1:13:18Like all men are equal here, right? Slavery is no longer a thing. You are going to treat Blacks equal to whites, right? And the reality is that without a culture and norms and organic values that underpin that, it was not tenable, right? That's what the North decided. The North decided we can't be here forever. We can't occupy half our country forever. And that was kind of like a peak. There were black congressmen. It was a really beautiful, like, oh, is this happening? And then the moment the North withdraws, without this top-down enforcement of all men are equal under the law, immediately everything goes back and we're back into Jim Crow segregate.

1:13:59And we're set back like a hundred years, right until literally like a hundred years later during that until Martin Luther King and the civil rights protest, right? Like you need values and norms and culture to, to support, to support democracy, to support, to support these values and a free society. This is exactly what, you know, like Hergis and Solon thought about, about the Spartans and, and the, uh, and the, and the Athenians, like you give laws appropriate to the people, right? Like this is what, this is Solon's observation about art, right? Art cultivates and forms the values of a people.

1:14:32And then you suit positive law according to the values of a people. You can't airdrop laws that are ill-suited to the values of a people. It's not going to work. It's not going to be effectual. And we do this across. So the citizen is part of the state. We need, you know, if we care about human dignity, if we care about a free and flourishing society, we have to be custodians of human dignity in our everyday. And this is the core argument of our book. Like it means seeing the person in our, in the, in the everyday anonymous exchange, like our, our Uber driver, our cook at the grocery store. Like my grandmother again was excellent at elevating these everyday intersections.

1:15:12Like she said, this is a person and this is a gift. This is a profit. Like she treated every person she met with, this is a sacred privilege that she and she alone had. And too often we're so instrumental and utilitarian with how we go through lives. We're busy. We're focused on getting to point A to point B and we don't have time for that fluffy, nice stuff of courtesy. And the reality is the small things matter. The small things have consequences in our everyday. And this thing called democracy and civilization is held together by the extent to which we affirm and see and know and love the other in our everyday.

1:15:48Yeah, Seneca's line was every person you meet is an opportunity for kindness. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's great. It's beautiful. Although, yeah, I'm thinking as you're saying this, what's interesting is you're saying that sort of government or laws can be insufficient. You have to have the individual. But what's interesting, if you think about the United States, like from the beginning, all men are created equal. And then you have these laws after the Civil War. And then you have the Civil Rights Movement. But like, what's interesting is that, And that even now we have all these protections, we have all these laws.

1:16:18It's really not whether the government is sufficient to do it. The government, through trial and error, and I think by a lot of foresight of the founders, anticipates a lot of these contingencies, has come up against a lot of these problems and come up with solutions. What we fundamentally lack, the real problem, is the will to enforce them or use them, right? The whole premise of why reconstruction fails to me is we have the laws, we had the thing, we had the system, we had the understanding, but we lacked the political will to bring it into effect, right? And the South understood this. The South said, you can't do this forever.

1:16:56If we just make it super uncomfortable and super unpleasant and super expensive, eventually you'll give up. And this was, this is - Happened in the Middle East and Iraq too. No, people don't understand the resistance to civil rights during the civil rights movement because it worked. In retrospect, it's like, what were they doing? Did they see the writing on the wall? But actually, no, what they understood was if we just make this hard enough, if we go on long enough, eventually Kennedy will be out of office. Johnson will be out of office. A different breed of politician might come into office or Americans will just get tired and go on to other things.

1:17:35There'll be problems in the North and they won't care that much about the South. And so there's this perpetual problem in governments and life. And I think in American history, which is like people want to generally do the right thing. They want society to be fair and good and decent. They're also fucking busy. And so if the people who have a vested interest in it not getting better and it not changing, they know if we could just make it hard enough, if we could just make it expensive enough, if we could just make it unpleasant enough, you will give up, right? Or you will compromise halfway, right?

1:18:05And so that's the real problem with like a true civil society is there is a minority of people who don't want that vision of a civil society and you're up against that you're absolutely right and so here's why i think the civil rights movement a hundred years after reintroduction succeeded why reconstruct where reconstruction failed okay here's my conjecture um world war ii the holocaust right this this like catastrophic, unprecedented instance of like cavalier disregard for human life and systematic like annihilation of, of certain people, according to like a ethnic racial totem pole. Like I think that seared the world and seared like the 20th century in a way that galvanized people to be like, okay, like how do we make sure this never flipping happens again?

1:18:59I don't know.

1:19:29sentiment after the Holocaust. People with disabilities had been marginalized forever, right? And it was not great. It was horrible, but kids who were expensive to educate were just turned away at public school doors, right? And there were no accommodations and no resources for them. And all of a sudden there was this cultural consensus that no, we have an obligation to the weak and vulnerable in a society. And again, this is after we had been confronted with an incredibly sophisticated, highly educated, incredibly civilized society, the Germans, who had euthanized people with disabilities, euthanized social undesirables, like gay people, and anyone who else, anyone who, you know, political dissidents, like, right, just this cavalier disregard for human life.

1:20:18Another example of this is drunk driving laws. You know, Like that's an example of government action causing cultural change, you know? Like another example, of course, is the civil rights movement, right? Like this, I think the global like conscience was seared and sensitized simultaneously where we thought, you know, this is like an atrocity that can never be allowed to happen again. And just like a heightened appreciation for human life. My understanding of it is a bit different. I think World War II influences the civil rights movement in that World War I also, a bunch of black men are drafted.

1:20:57They're sent overseas where they're treated like human beings. They learn skills and they come to see themselves with a certain amount of dignity and strength that they had been deprived of systematically. So they come back and they're like, who the fuck are you to tell me to go to the back of the bus? I think that was part of it. But I think the other thing that happened, and this is where I think King is not appreciated as the genius that he was fully. And even there's a case for gay rights and disability rights, they do it really well, which is the advent of television and photography, like mass photography in the form of newspapers.

1:21:30What it allows activists to do is to show the world the suffering they are complicit in. Right. So King doesn't go, hey, we're good people. You should treat us well. He says, I'm going to show you what you do to children. Yes. And and he ruthlessly, like I think you could argue, you know, puts, you know, children in the play, you know, at the front of the parade. So the police dogs are sicked on them. The fire hoses are sicked on them. I think I don't know if you see that famous footage of the crawl in where they had these disability, all these people with various disabilities who are protesting for or pushing for legislation for the Americans with Disabilities Act.

1:22:14They all throw their wheelchairs and crutches and canes aside and they crawl up the steps of the Capitol. And it's fucking haunting. You're going, oh, wow. Like the people's house is inaccessible to all of these people. Right. And so I think what they do in a very uncivilized way is show the brutality and the awfulness of the status quo, which so shames large swaths of the population, or in some cases, people in a position of power, that they are forced into doing something that otherwise they would have loved not to do anything about. Do you know what I mean? Or is that the epitome of civility?

1:22:58So in my book, I argue that there's an essential distinction between civility and politeness. So politeness is manners, it's etiquette, it's tone policing, it's technique, it's external. Where civility is internal, it's a disposition of the heart, a way of seeing others as our moral equals, worthy of a bare minimum of respect by virtue of our shared dignity as human beings, that sometimes requires being impolite. It means breaking the rules of propriety and etiquette in order to confront a society or a person with an ugly, uncomfortable truth, in order to tell a robust debate. I had the privilege just a week and a half ago, I was invited to the Alabama Supreme Court.

1:23:34I was in Montgomery to give a book talk to a group of educators and jurists and lawyers. And I was a stone's throw away from Dr. King's Church. And I was right next door to Dr. King's Church, a stone's throw away from the street corner where Rosa Parks was kicked off the bus for failing to sit at the back of the bus, refusing to sit at the back of the bus, and subsequently arrested. She broke a specific law, Section 11 of Montgomery's Code, of the Jim Crow, to illuminate the way in which that violated the rule of law, the fundamental law of American democracy. and that I tell their stories in my book in my chapter on civil disobedience.

1:24:21This is also the chapter where I tell the Edward Cole story, but sometimes it's a duty of citizenship to speak truth to power. Absolutely, absolutely. And I love etymology. The story of our language and our words is throughout my book and it's just often very illuminating. And ever since Samuel Johnson's dictionary in 1755, he defined civility in terms of politeness, politeness in terms of civility. and we've been doing it ever since. But the etymology supports this distinction. The etymology of politeness is polarity, which means to smooth or to polish. So it's external and that's what superficial, that's what politeness does.

1:24:55Sweeps difference under the rug as opposed to giving us the tools to grapple with difference head on. The etymology of civility is kiwitas, which is the Latin root of civilization, citizen, city, citizenship. And that's what civility is. It's the conduct, mores, values, habits, duties befitting a citizen in the city, especially in a democracy that requires robust conversation, truth telling, even protest. I mean, our country was founded on protest. Well, I would agree with that. I think it's very important. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Ryan. You want to go check out some books? I'd love to.

1:25:43Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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