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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.387)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm here today with Dr. MacAleer, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, Maryland, and Dr. Rosenthal Pueble, Director of the Petrarch Institute, which focuses on humanities learning online. And we're talking about their co-written book, The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition. Gentlemen, wonderful to have you on today.
Graham (00:24.866)
Thanks so much.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (00:25.465)
Thank you very much for hosting us. It's a real pleasure to be here.
PJ (00:29.899)
So, general first question I ask is, why this book? And how did this come about? I see it's not attributed. It's dedicated to your shared teacher. So how did you write this together, and why did you feel that this book was necessary?
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (00:47.589)
Who do you, who should go first? I mean, one of them.
PJ (00:48.983)
Yeah
Graham (00:49.335)
Well, yeah, we'll probably say somewhat different things, but it arose from Alex's suggestion during COVID actually, during the lockdowns that we write a book together, we've known each other for years, and we have some similar interests in the sort of the history of philosophy, political philosophy, conservativism, sort of the political philosophy of conservativism.
rather than sort of being activists ourselves or something like that. And around a bit before COVID, Sir Roger Scruton had died, who was a very famous English conservative philosopher. And he had kind of posed a very, I think kind of a particular problem to conservative thinking, which was on the one hand, he had a great love of England.
but he also wrote operas and had a great love of sort of European civilization. So he was trying to kind of articulate a political philosophy that was both sensitive to sort of populism, but also taking the establishment seriously, right? This sort of high art, high civilization. And we thought it would be kind of interesting to kind of reflect on that idea, not only because, you know, of his passing, but because at the time, of course.
during COVID there was quite a lot about like not taking science seriously, not taking, sort of downplaying the universities, which are kind of a part of high civilization. And of course we've gone through the Trump years, right? Who he had really emphasized the sort of populist.
and the DC insiders, the swamp, right? He kind of really downplayed the establishment position. And we kind of want it to find like, well, is there some kind of balance there? Is there something that you can take seriously in both the populist dynamic and in the more aristocratic, but not in the sense of ladies and lords, but just in the sense of sort of high civilization. And I don't know, Alex, if you want to.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (02:59.469)
Yeah, so I mean, yeah, so the original inspiration, as Graham had mentioned, was the death of Roger Scruton, who I think was, we could say, in the world of philosophy, was a kind of leader of the traditional conservative movement.
And I think another aspect, if you recall 2020, was there was, I felt a kind of, we were in a kind of historical inflection point in certain ways. So I don't know if you remember the summer of 2020, but there was a lot of what we could call iconoclasm, right? Against where you had all of these statues vandalized of sort of traditional heroes of the West, like Columbus and the American founding father.
and Winston Churchill and all kinds of figures like that.
And the idea in Scruton that came to mind was his idea of a culture of repudiation, right? So that there's been growing probably for decades but coming to To a head, you know around 2020 was this idea I think of sort of viewing the heritage of Western civilization as a kind of burden of sin, right?
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (04:22.736)
that we need to sort of cast off, right?
Now the other aspect is that it seems to me, and I think to Graham as well, that sort of the world of the post-Cold War, right? Which was built around a consensus around things like globalization, right? Which was characterized by American unipolarity, and so forth was in many respects
coming to an end as well. Right? So there was, I mean, part of Trump's, as well as European nationalism, was this sort of backlash against globalization, right? This idea that, you know, outsourcing of jobs and so forth was somehow threatening, as well as, of course, you know, cultural fears and so forth was triggering in Europe around the
things, nationalistic backlashes. So what I noticed was that among conservatives, we had this question now, what is conservatism in the 21st century? It seemed clear in the age of Ronald Reagan. Conservatism had to do with belief in limited government, ideas of classical liberalism, individual rights and freedoms, anti-communism. But what does it mean today? And it seemed to me that the answers were a bit confused. There was confusion on this topic.
is conservatism and it tended to split, divide into these two camps of liberalism, right? Conservatism is about capitalism, free trade, individual rights and freedoms, which is basically classical liberalism. Or is conservatism around, you know, loyalty to the nation, sovereignty, you know, the bounded state and so forth. And what we noticed was that the conservative
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (06:27.899)
these lines. So we wanted to look at is there something specifically conservative? Is there a specifically conservative philosophy which is not reducible without necessarily entirely critiquing the contributions of either liberalism or nationalism? But is there something specifically conservative which can't conservative philosophy, which is not reducible either to classical
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (06:57.899)
get into it but both those when pushed to extreme have their dangers and are also I think sort of move away from conservatism so that's I hope in a nutshell what our concerns were.
PJ (07:09.055)
Yeah. And I think that leads me to a question I really wanted to ask. I got to, you know, as I was reading, what is the purpose of this book? Who is this book for? You know, you're talking about defining this. Who are you defining it for? Because, and this is not a knock on the book itself, it's just the nature of the beast.
It's very high level. You cover a lot of ground very quickly, and there is some argumentation, but like I'm like That's definitely disputable right like I mean you're talking about interpretations of Nietzsche Heidegger and Plato and I'm like I understand the interpretations you're doing But like if you're really gonna make that claim you'd have to like this would be like you know like the wealth of nations or like you know Das Kapital like three volumes long and
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (07:37.571)
Yes.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (07:48.045)
Yes.
Of course.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (08:02.893)
Yeah, I mean, there's...
PJ (08:03.595)
Those of you listening, yeah, I was gonna say, for those of you listening, this is 200 pages. So it's very readable, but, so it's high level, it kind of gives the story of it, and there is some argumentation. Who's the audience for this, and what is that kind of sharper goal? Like, who are you defining conservative humanism for?
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (08:09.381)
Hehehe
Graham (08:24.79)
Well, maybe I could tell you a bit about the background to the origin of the book, and in a sense, right? Because when we first wrote it, and this is really, I think, what you're picking up on. When we first wrote it, we wanted it to be kind of a popular book.
You know, we wanted it to be kind of mass market, to kind of, you know, not kind of like red meat conservativism or something like that, but like, okay, a political philosophy conservative is kind of, you know, where are they at? But when we first sent it out to be reviewed by presses, they were like, oh no, it needs to be more high level. It needs to be more academic. It needs to be more conceptually driven. It's too, it's too seat of the pants kind of thing, right? So.
It has a kind of both an effort to be readable, but we also wanted to kind of develop a kind of a conceptual story. And of course, right, it's a conversation opener as you point out, right? Well, hey, you could say all sorts of things about these different figures and maybe this doesn't, you know, coalesce around the sort of the driving thesis you're trying to make, absolutely.
And that's a little bit the origin story of the book. And so there's... So we always wanted it to have a kind of a light touch, to be kind of a teachable book. But maybe it was too light of a touch at the end of the day.
PJ (09:50.855)
No, I didn't think that. It almost felt like something you would give to freshmen or juniors in college, right? Like, you'll have some people read this popularly, but it has almost like a textbook feel. And so I was wondering exactly where you're aiming for. But I think the actual, go ahead.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (10:07.141)
Yeah, well, I think Graham kind of summarized it. I mean, we had originally considered, thought of it as, you know, maybe something like for an educated lay public, you know, not necessarily an academic. See, because what happens, I mean, I find in academia, having spent many years there, is what happens is, the more you get into it, the more specialized you get, right? So what you're picking up is, we're not doing at all like a specialized study of Nietzsche or a Plato or of Aristotle, where you really get into the weeds
PJ (10:27.52)
Right.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (10:37.315)
focused analysis. It's a very broad book and that was the original conception but as Graham pointed out as we got feedback from the publishers they wanted a little more of the sort of intellectual heft. So I hope that we've produced something that the educated reader interested in conservatism and how it differs for
like liberalism and nationalism, and how it relates to the broad Western tradition, that has to do with the breadth of the book. We go from the classics, we discuss medieval world, the modern world and so forth, how it relates. And I think also the title of the book, The Wisdom of Our Ancestors is significant, right? It has something to do with looking back with a certain amount of reverence, rather than repudiation, toward the great thoughts
cultural contributions of Western civilization as an accumulated body of wisdom through the centuries.
PJ (11:46.151)
Absolutely. I don't want to take too much time on this just because there's a lot to unpack in the book. But what's a red meat conservative? I've never heard that term before.
Graham (11:59.346)
Well, all I meant by that was, we weren't trying to write a book that movement conservatives would get like, oh brilliant, you know, they're slamming Joe Biden, they're denouncing the vaccine. You know, it wasn't meant, it was neither meant to be a sort of...
PJ (12:14.787)
Ha ha!
Graham (12:21.594)
celebration of the Brexit movement in England or a kind of a raw Americanism. It was meant to be always a bit more, you know, in the spirit of Scruton, right, you know, who wrote operas and stuff like that. It was always meant to be a bit sort of like both not broad strokes, but, but like a kind of a survey, but then with some
kind of elaborations of some fairly sort of, we thought kind of potent concepts that could be used in conservative thinking. And I think both Alex and I, we could well imagine actually conservative readers, not...
buying the thesis, right? That they could be like, wait a minute. I mean, I thought American, I thought conservatism was sort of American ideas about what it means to be right wing or something like that. We kind of wanted to have this more of a kind of Englishy, European, kind of just kind of show there were lots of, there was a kind of a conservative sensibility beyond the shores of America that American readers would be interested in.
but which wasn't directly applicable to the conventional American experience, which is, as Alex pointed out, more kind of Reagan-esque, classical liberal, maybe verging on a libertarianism, something like that.
PJ (13:45.419)
Even as you I want let me say this as I was reading it You talk about potent concepts and maybe even like this inspirational like ground Something I really appreciated reading it. I There are things about What people called conservatism before I read this book that I was like I believe that and then there are other things like I don't Believe that and what I really appreciate it. Like I think you very much have articulated
something very valuable for the space. So at least from my view, you have succeeded in these potent concepts and in this inspiration. So thank you for providing it. It's really, really good. Even coming, I still need to digest and think through. I don't want to go like, I believe everything you said. I think you would actually be kind of disturbed if I said I agreed with every single point you made. But I...
coming from a philosophical hermeneutic background, one, saying that conservatism should use phenomenology more, I was like, yes, thank you. But also, I think there's a lot of, even mentioning Freud and stuff like that, there's a lot of work there that actually is unexplored in terms of how that's useful. But the other side to it too, is a lot of my work was done in Gadamer.
And so when you talk about your own critique of Cartesianism, one that I've always taken very seriously is what Gadamer pulls out of Jean-Baptiste Vico, which is that Descartes' system does not work for educating children. And if it doesn't work for educating children, it doesn't work, period. It can be specialized, but you have to be able to raise kids in order to keep the whole civilization going. And so if you can't do it,
This is not a complete system. And so a lot of your comments, especially at the beginning about family, education, religion, as this way of outside the, just what the state can do, but like raising up the next generation and passing this on because civilization is actually fragile, really resonated with me. So I, you know, there's my little review in a nutshell, but I really appreciated it. If you could speak to the, go ahead.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (15:55.697)
Mm-hmm.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (16:03.142)
Hehehehehehe
Well, yeah, well, I mean, that's, I mean, I mean, you're kind of getting, I think, to the essence there, right, because we write at the beginning of the, in the first chapter, pretty much define conservatism. And basically what we understand it as in a way we wanted to define conservatism in a way that a conservative in any culture could agree with. Right. And our basic understanding is that conservatism has to do with the defense of an ancestral tradition, right.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (16:36.075)
In fact, the phrase, the wisdom of our ancestors comes directly from Burke. So once you understand a civilization or a culture as a continuity through time, then the question is, what are the crucial institutions that conservatives basically everywhere?
are fundamentally concerned with that conserve, right? That conserve values through time that replicate the culture generation after generation and that when threatened or disrupted, create crises. And we basically came out with the Trinity as it were. One is religion, right? So every world civilization, right? Whether it's Christianity in the West
Israel, Islam in the Middle East, Hinduism in India, right? Every world civilization has some religious foundation, right? Which is the basis of its mores, I mean art, I mean it's basically an all-embracing kind of influence. Of course in the West there's been a secularization process recently, which is something we can get to, but conservatives have generally, even when they're not personally religious, have understood the value of religious
The second is maybe the most obvious is the family. Without procreation and the education that goes on within a family, there's no future for the society, right? So conservatives have always had a fundamental concern for the well-being of the family and grave concern about, we have today all this discussion of family values, right? I mean, that's a very American debate. Radical changes and attacks on the traditional family are something that rile conservatives.
pretty much everywhere. And the third would be education, right? Because education is what intellectually transmits a cultural tradition through time, right? So in the case of the West, we refer to like the origins of the Western educational tradition in Greece and Rome, and how it's been continuous through the Middle Ages into the modern era. And of course, now we see conservatives very concerned with, you know, the rejection of the Western Catholic
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (18:52.055)
for example, in universities. So, and now, fourth thing I can say that kind of follows from this, that touches on what you had just mentioned, PJ, is that we see each of these things are neither statist nor really individualist. In other words, not liberal in the sense of focusing all on the individual.
nor statist and totalitarian, but focused on intermediary institutions. So, the family, the church, private educational institutions, you know, homeschooling, all these kinds of things, homeschooling support networks, economic professional associations of different kinds. So, this idea of being communal, but not necessarily statist and totalitarian,
status while seeing the state is having a proper function is something I think that distinguishes conservatism, the conservative tradition, from both liberal radical individualism, if you go in that direction, and any kind of sort of status socialist or fascist ideology. So I hope that summary helps.
PJ (20:02.611)
Yeah, yeah, it helps quite a bit.
Even as you talked about, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the dropping of the Western Civ requirement, and obviously some of that is the—you mentioned the oppressive—that it's an oppressive system, that's the common critique. And, of course, you're doing something high level here. Another interesting thing to me is that there's a multitude of reasons why stuff gets dropped in the university.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (20:33.198)
Yes.
PJ (20:36.777)
you talk about like this rampant capitalism. It's because you're not like your conservatism is not directly tied to capitalism. Like it can work with it but it's not tied to it. A similar story to the dropping of the Western Civ requirement is, I'm not sure if you heard about this, I'd be shocked if you hadn't, just because of what your interest, but Princeton for their classical department just dropped the language requirement.
Right? Which to me is not a, that's not an oppressive system thing. That has more to do with the sale of the, of the degree. Right? Can you talk a little bit about the issues you see in academia, both of this kind of relentless critique and maybe that's the culture of repudiation of, you know, and I'm, I'm not going to deny that there are oppressive systems that are baked into our, you know, but, and
Can you talk a little bit about this commodification?
Graham (21:41.518)
Well, I'll only be stuck with the commodification idea because one of the chapters the fifth chapter is about conservativism and markets Since of course, it's been the legacy from Thatcher and Reagan that there's a very kind of strong
market driven aspect to sort of conservative classical liberalism. You know, so Margaret Thatcher's think tank was literally the Adam Smith Institute, right? So what we wanted to do, and so it's really something you hear a lot in conservative circles, the kind of return to a craft civilization, the idea of intimate villages, maybe the family farm.
talk about Tolkien a good bit, right? So the Shia, the return to the Shia, right? The return to a kind of pastoral ideal of life, right? Versus the kind of Scuzzy City kind of idea where the...
people who are sort of playing fast and loose with values, that's where they live in the cities, right? So we actually wanted to, so part of the ancestral tradition is, or in the way we think of ancestral conservatism, was to find continuity from the ancients through the medieval and into the enlightenment, right? So we're not sort of post-liberals in that, so it's another really common aspect to contemporary intellectual conservatism at any rate, is this sort of post-liberalism, right? This idea that you sort of,
ditch the enlightenment tradition. And so we wanted to sort of argue, well, there's gotta be something in this tradition, right? And so we even ultimately, as you point out, talk about psychoanalysis, that it could have a role, because it's often associated with leftism in intellectual circles, but we think it could have a role in conservativeism as well. So we wanted a chapter that dealt with a kind of value-driven economics.
Graham (23:46.53)
And we came up with this idea of using a very interesting American German thinker, Eric Vogelin. And he has this idea that to be sort of politically and spiritually whole.
communities need both what he calls cosmos and something called differentiation. So we came up with the idea of the luxury watch that's got a moon phase, right? So this is something that if people make good money in business they might purchase one of these moon phase watches they're about ten thousand dollars and on the face of the watch it's got a moon and the moon moves and in fact if you look up at the sky to look at the moon and you look down at your watch you should see the same amount of moon.
So these things, they're not computers, right? They're done through wheels and springs, but they're programmed for about 99 years that the face of the watch moves in the way in which it does up in the sky. So we thought, okay, here's a cool image, right? Of both a kind of a object of the luxury world of doing well in business, but it's also cosmological, right? You look down and you kind of look up, right? So you center yourself.
in a broader accepted reality. Whereas a lot of commodification, a lot of capitalism, kind of a libertarian position tends to be the world doesn't really matter. There is no order. We are just self-creators, right? So you get this kind of Anrand, even a kind of a Nietzschean kind of the capitalist as Ubermensch, kind of recreating the world. And of course, that's not conservatism.
So we wanted to find a way that you could have both the conservative idea of having a sort of an anchor in the universe, in the cosmos, but also allow for this thing that Voglen calls differentiation, namely, I mean, I might choose a luxury watch that's got the moon phase and somebody might choose like a Submariner that's a diving watch, right? I mean, we still want freedom, right? I mean, you know, so I mean, a kind of classic leftist critique of conservatism is it's not interested in freedom.
Graham (26:00.374)
Right? So we wanted to retain, no, yeah, we're really into liberty. We're really into a kind of enlightenment liberty. Right? We're not looking to return to the Middle Ages or the ancients. Right? Where some had liberty, but most did not. Right? We don't want that. So I think business, commerce, capitalism is an important part of that driver of liberty.
but we do want it to be sort of hedged around, embedded in something sort of cosmological as well, right? So that one has a sense of a world of business that nonetheless has a home, right? Because if you think about Tolkien's Shire, Tolkien's Shire is very interesting, but it's not really a business. I mean, it's a bunch of farmers, but there's no real strong sense. There is more in The Hobbit than in The Lord of the Rings, but there's not a real strong sense of...
a trading community, a commercial, international trade or anything like that, right? But that is kind of our reality and we don't think that's going anywhere. And we don't think it should go anywhere. So what you need to do then is somehow find a way to embed that in this more enduring ancestral permanence, right? So I mean to your point, right? That if you can have a classics department.
that no longer requires classical languages, then what they're really doing is somehow ripping up the permanent standards by which the ancient world has been received into the modern world, right? And we would have a problem with that. But at the same time, you know, we do recognize the importance of history, the importance of change. And so we wanted to take seriously the...
enlightenment just as much as we were taking seriously the legacies that were coming out of the ancient and the medieval worlds. And then Alex actually specifically spoke I think about the whole question of classics in the modern university.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (28:04.361)
Oh yeah, absolutely. So, you know, basically, as Christopher Dawson noted in his work, The Crisis of Western Education, from let's say the fifth century BC or so, through the Romans, the Roman grammarians, through the monks of the Middle Ages, through certainly the Renaissance, which revived also the knowledge of Greek, through the modern university up until the 20th century,
PJ (28:06.851)
Yeah.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (28:34.475)
1920 and 1950 classics requirements were removed across many Western universities, right? The classical tradition had been historically at the core of the Western educational tradition, right? And there was clearly a disruption that occurred in the 20th century. And we can speak, I think, also more broadly of what's been added in terms of what we call the Western canon.
what's been added to the Greco-Roman foundations and the study of the Bible and so forth. And so it seems to me that there's two elements, one particularly strong now, which is what we mentioned in terms of the culture of repudiation, you know, the NAS, National Association of Scholars, did a survey of how Western cultural civilization requirements have been disappearing
in the United States. So that has to do with what we were discussing, I think, in terms of this sort of one dimensional view of the past as being benighted and having nothing, no real wisdom to contribute. So there's on the one hand repudiation. On the other hand, and I think this might go to what you might were touching on, PJ, there has been a kind of professionalization of the university, right? A move toward making economic utility
the driver, right? And so people ask, well, so what does reading Ovid and Shakespeare, how does that help me get a job in a corporation or whatever it is, right? So there's been, so that would be the economic driver. So I think now we don't want to simply repudiate the capitalism, right? Because one thing that's very clear is that there's been an immense gains in terms of prosperity, right? If we compare
what the average wealth of the average middle-class person in the West is to what it was in the ancient and medieval world, it's clear there's no comparison. In many respects, a middle-class Westerner lives better than kings did in earlier epochs. So we obviously don't want to jettison the idea of material improvement, right? And that has been one of the things that's been a magnet, for example, for people wanting to come to the West.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (31:04.835)
I don't think one wants, we want to preserve the high cultural values that came with classical and liberal arts education and that also have provided the West with its continuity through time, right? And that in a sense is being disrupted. So part of what conservatives want to conserve is the tradition of education and culture that has formed our civilization.
PJ (31:32.588)
So there's two questions that come to mind, or rather two ideas that I'd love to explore with you. The first one is, I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Lewis Gordon, I've had him on a couple times.
But so he's the head of the philosophy department at UConn. And he did a book called Fear of Black Consciousness. And he does an analysis of white privilege. And he said, it's very poorly named. And he said, really, we've used it as an umbrella term for two different things. And one is our social goods.
And he's like, this idea that, and he's like, and you could list a whole bunch of things under here, what are exactly human rights are, like access to education, food, shelter, there's a lot of other things like security, like, I mean, it's debatable, but no one would actually want to take those away from people. And like, so you actually get.
Graham (32:21.198)
Thank you.
PJ (32:30.923)
He said, it's odd to watch people be like, oh no, I have privilege, right? When they, if they go up the social ladder. And so we don't want to take that kind of privilege away. On the other hand, he talks about, there is no statute of limitation on, on murder charges. And we have people who like, who participated in lynchings and then had their picture in the newspaper as part of the lynching. And they're now in retirement homes. And he's like,
Literally, they've been given a license to kill, and that's a different form. And, you know, so like the reason I bring that up is because you have a defense of privilege here, and I think it's useful, right, to, like people are like, they're defending privilege, and they think white privilege, but it's useful to break it down into, okay, there are social goods, and then there's like this license to kill, which I, like, obviously, like, yeah, I-
I've only talked to you for about 30 minutes here, but I don't believe that you're at least not going to say it out loud, right? I don't think that you don't strike me as men who are interested in that. So can you talk a little bit about that defense of privilege? Because that seems to be kind of a core to this hierarchical, just kind of continuing tradition.
Graham (33:49.102)
Yeah, no, so this is just such a great question, right? So the privilege that we're interested in is what we would maybe now call establishment, right? So we wanna take seriously the Foreign Service, the State Department in America, right? So, you know, we don't...
I mean, one might have reservations about a lot of American policy and maybe adventurism abroad, but we don't think those people are chumps, right? Which was kind of the rhetoric that was starting to emerge, especially during the Trump years, right? No, because these area specialists, you know, they've read books, they've traveled, they've dedicated lives to trying to understand really complex environments. Now, maybe sometimes their analysis is not good.
vaccines. And even the public policy people at the big universities who were like, wait, I mean, how does a modern economy function amidst a pandemic? Like, how do we think about this, right? So our idea of establishment or privilege was just that there are these sort of tone setting institutions.
And this would include the ballet, the opera, the universities, the churches, the state department, and against a sort of populism, against a kind of maybe...
common sense knows best, we were wanting to sort of say, look, there's a strong element of conservatism, there's always supported privilege. Now that has mutated, as you point out, right? I mean, originally, of course, the great bastions of conservatism were the great landed estates, the aristocratic order, right? And so we're not against that, right? But really our idea of what privilege means is something like these sort of tone setting institutions. And it's right,
Graham (35:47.696)
So the classic criticism of like, let's say the State Department in the US is that it's the sort of Beltway people who are completely out of touch, right? they've lost contact with the center and the true core of the country kind of idea but So that idea of privilege we want to kind of push back on right? Is all privilege good? No
So you can even go back into people like, you know, Adam Smith who argued, well, you know, that aristocracy was a kind of a monopoly structure that kept the people poor, right? And so he was always about, you know, abandoning monopoly structures. So, you know, there's so much you could say about this, but it just, just shorthand and sort of define our sense of privilege. It just means that we should pay attention to, and even in some senses, defer to...
tone setting institutions and we think that these often do carry a sort of a legacy of both education and a certain orientation in the West, right, which has always been both sort of, you know, Western but also cosmopolitan, right, and
The problem with a lot of populism is that it becomes overly fascinated with the homeland, the home country, right, and it doesn't have that cosmopolitan toleration element that we still think is a very important part of conservatism.
PJ (37:27.863)
And that actually takes me perfectly into that second question, the second idea I wanted to ask you about is, there's a lot of reference to culture or this idea of this enduring substrate that everything grows out of. Can you give me a definition of what you think culture is? Even as you're talking about
these tone setting institutions, right? Like what a populace doesn't have is, like they often lack education, which means they lack history. And so what does it look like to have this enduring, it sounds like almost like family, church, religion, even the state are kind of bound inside of culture. And so what is culture? What do you see it as?
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (38:13.798)
Yeah.
First of all, it's a great question, and not necessarily a simple one. In the history of thought, there have been various definitions of culture. If we go to the root, if you look, for example, at Cicero, Kultura, it was a kind of analogy of when you plant a field, you cultivate things. And so the original idea was connected to this classical ideal of education, of, let's say, cultivating what it is to be human.
And that's the humanism, which is a very central part of our book.
This idea of cultivating what's particular to human beings, what's particular to man as a rational, the rational and moral and our capacity to appreciate beauty. So there's culture in that sense, as sort of a conscious ideal of forming human beings to an ideal. The way Werner Jaeger put it, the great classes, was the education of man to his true form, right? This idea of realizing something which is fundamentally human. But there's also, of course,
PJ (39:07.522)
Mm.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (39:20.007)
culture in the sense of
the particular folkways, right? I mean, here in Galicia, Spain, for example, we have our own forms of music, you know, we have bagpipes, dances, there are dances particular to the region. And I'm sure Graham can, you know, discuss all kinds of things in Tolkien about the particularities in his works and so forth, right? So I think both of those things are things that conservatives tend to be attached to, I would say, without negating the...
universal concern for all human beings, but there is on the one hand a concern for that kind of high culture of the cultivation of what is best, the cultivation of human excellence at its highest, which maybe is connected a bit with that theme of privilege, because if you look historically, who was behind Leonardo da Vinci and Mozart, and it was often people in the aristocracy, the high figures of the Church.
and so forth. But at the same time there's also an attachment I think to the culture at that folkloric level of the particular ways of life and habits of particular peoples to which I think conservatives are almost universally attached to.
PJ (40:41.271)
And so as we have this culture and this continual ideal, it's changed over time, right? And you would, I think, argue for the most part for the better, right? We have seen this growth of liberty for more people, that sort of thing. What are the—I don't like using the term mechanisms because even as I said substrate, you said cultura. How do we make sure that there is proper pruning?
at each generation, if that makes sense.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (41:11.085)
This proper one, I didn't hear.
PJ (41:13.379)
Proper pruning.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (41:15.632)
Alright.
Well, what do you exactly do you mean by the pruning?
PJ (41:22.781)
How do we receive this wisdom and still but are able to keep it enduring and keep continuity, but also get rid of the parts where we're like, yeah, actually, that's not so good?
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (41:37.453)
Sure, sure. Well, I mean, conservatives have always, I mean, since Burke, right? He liked this idea, for example, of the British constitution as a plant, right?
that grows kind of organically and accumulates through time, as opposed to the sort of Lockean liberal contractarianism. He thought of it as a contract across time between the answers. But that doesn't mean, but a plant grows, it changes through time, it adapts to its environment. And I think in our treatment, for example, of the Enlightenment, I think it comes through very clearly that we want to try to read the Enlightenment into the tradition.
So, against the view, let's say Fukuyama, who kind of sees all of history, the whole classical and Christian inheritance has value to the degree it leads to modern liberalism and the enlightenment. And then we can more or less jettison that ship. The positive values in the enlightenment, such as a growth, for example, in religious toleration, more humanitarian legal codes, the first movements to end slavery,
These are all very positive things, and I think can be seen as continuous with the humanist emphasis in the classical and Christian world. So, but what we, I think, want to avoid are radical discontinuities and disruptions of sort of cutting those roots, which Burke saw in the French Revolution, which basically said, okay, year zero, you know, year one, you know, all that came before is bunk,
just going to begin history again. And this impulse, by the way, seems to recur with a certain frequency, this idea of just jettisoning all that came before. So I think it's the idea of bringing the present into continuity with what's great in the past. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are very dark elements that can occur in more. I think we would reject a facile modernism. The 20th century was the bloodiest century on record.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (43:47.583)
It wasn't necessarily, you know, progressive in every respect. So, you know, some of that sort of facile progressivism, that things are just getting better and better and better in a sort of automatic linear way, I think is something that we could take issue with. But I don't know if Graham had something he wanted.
Graham (44:08.334)
I think a benefit of thinking about something like, as we call it, ancestral conservatism is that if you think about the Romans and the Greeks, well, you get this sort of hyper aristocratic, self-mastery, prowess, celebration of beauty kind of a model, right? And then with Christianity, you actually get a kind of a really strong egalitarianism.
You know, one reason that Christianity spread like wildfire through the ancient world was because it promised, instead of having just these sort of regional gods, it promised a universal God that was caring for everybody, right? And so, you know, the slave populations, which were massive in the period, had all been detached from their ancestral gods, and then they could now claim to be having under sort of a divine protection. So...
Now the tradition has these two sort of dynamisms in it, right? And both of which have certain values, right? This is kind of the Nietzschean point that you don't want to jettison the Greeks exactly, but the Christian point respecting Nietzsche would be, but you just totally celebrate them either, right? You need this egalitarian. So this idea that, so it seems to us that a sophisticated conservativism is gonna look very seriously at
what you might call progressive social movements. It's gonna like wonder about those and like, hey, wait, there could be some value there, right? Because they're really stressing an element of the West, which has been this egalitarianism. I mean, so you don't wanna be sort of just like straightforwardly reactionary, right? I would hope there's nothing like reactionary in the book, right? The book is meant to be like, wait a minute. These things are gonna be this sort of aristocratic.
the tone setting, the privilege, is going to be in tension with this more egalitarian, and I would even say commerce has this certain egalitarian, at least in Adam Smith, you know, the driver of say the wealth of nations was towards an egalitarianism, right, against privilege, against monopolies, which took absurd profits out of the people. But there's not going to be a straightforward
Graham (46:24.686)
easy formula for those tensions, right? And then that goes to Alex's point, right? That some of the versions of modernity that we saw in the 20th century were just straightforwardly catastrophic and no conservative should welcome those kind of apocalyptic, right? So, you know, if you had to say, look, what is a conservative fundamentally interested in? Well, order, right? That
Right and then what's the downside of that? Well, sometimes we don't look closely enough at the prophetic traditions Right which you can see in a lot of social movements. So you have to it seems to me Try to kind of work to a balance. You don't want the repudiation But you don't want to turn a blind eye to the more Prophetic aspects of Social movements
PJ (47:19.687)
And
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (47:20.245)
One of the aspects in our sort of critical engagement, let's say with the enlightenment tradition that I think is worth mentioning is the way in which in certain ways, its premises, certain of its premises tend to undermine its highest aspirations and ideals. So for example, we talk about Nicholas Berdyaev in this idea of humanism. The enlightenment was clearly very humanistic, focused on the rights of man and so forth. But at the same time, it embraced
materialistic view of what human beings are, right? And a materialistic view, basically it's philosophy, veered at least strongly in the direction of materialism. So what Bordyayev noted was Christianity, for example, proclaimed the transcendent dignity of every human being, but it grounded it in the idea of every human being, for example, being created in the image of God,
being and therefore every human being has a kind of infinite value. But you know the Enlightenment turned in a very secular materialist direction and I think part of the dark, dark aspect of what we're seeing now is this post-humanism, right? You know you look at Harari, you know, freedom, rights, all these things are just so many fictions, they're just made up stuff by human beings. All that's real is what science, empirical science can measure and empirical
measure the dignity of every human being. It can't measure what a human right is. You know, you're not going to find that in a laboratory. So this is the, I think, the effect of what happens when you cut off the past, right? I mean, let's say you cut off ideals like human rights that ultimately have a Christian root. In fact, we know historically that was the case, you know, in the school of Salamanca and other Christian thinkers, that human rights had this, were originally anchored in this sort of spiritual vision.
But then when you jettison that and you have this pure materialism, well, I mean, you start moving in the direction of this is all bunk, there's no fundamental difference, let's say, between humans and animals. You know, one person, you know, every culture has its own, you know, morality and who's to say which one is true or false, regardless of how much it tramples on human beings, you know. These types of ideas, you know, what Nietzsche described as nihilism.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (49:49.399)
become more of a threat, right? Let's say once you cut the roots, you know? So this affirmation of the human being, which we see in both the classical and the Christian worlds in different ways, as Graham had explained, is sort of fundamental. We see conservatism as a defense of the human. And so that's why humanism is even in the title, conservative humanism. It's not humanism in the common sense of a secular vision. You know, in fact, we are concerned
is that a kind of radical secularism and materialism ultimately undermines human dignity.
PJ (50:28.039)
Yeah, one of the things that struck me and part of this is because I did my undergrad in history and we had a class on contemporary history where we read Fukuyama. And so I had read the End of Man and then as a further in another class I did, I read our post human future. And it was pretty funny to see you talk about how...
pretty naive the way he's just like, no really this is like the best thing ever. And then when I read our post-human future, which was him saying, I took the critiques to heart, his answer is not that we have ideologically anywhere else to go. He still thinks there's nowhere else to go. His answer is, we are not gonna see the end until after we're bio-engineered and we'll see new with that. Which is, I was like, I think you missed the critiques, but okay.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (51:19.217)
Hehehehe
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (51:24.41)
Right.
PJ (51:28.088)
Something that even as we talk about parts in the whole, we're looking at this culturally, but this is one of those things where phenomenologically and
psychologically, if we look at individuals, we can see when we try to be revolutionary. I'm reminded of this quote by Oscar Wilde, children begin by loving their parents. As they grow older, they judge them. Sometimes they forgive them. And that's what we really see a lot is like, to be a functioning adult is to, in many ways, move past like, of course, children adore their parents when they're younger, but then there comes like, how could they make these mistakes? And then they get older and they're like, oh, that's how they make those mistakes.
Graham (52:11.406)
Thank you.
PJ (52:11.879)
And you really can only mature when you move past that, when you can forgive them and not to say you cannot critique your parents, and I think you have to go through that phase. But to me it seems like there is some correlation to the health of the individual and the health of a culture, that you are able not just to remain angry, but also to move past that and to understand. Because if you can't, you know, I came from, well, you know, we don't have to get into all that. Sorry, I'll go move.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (52:12.452)
Hehehehe
PJ (52:41.259)
But what is your answer? I think you talk about this with Alexander Dugan, if that's how you say it. Was not familiar with him before this. Couple people I was either familiar with or learned from, but you did convince me to buy a Vogel and book and a Edmund Burke book, so congratulations. Oh, but there's, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Terry Pratchett, but.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (52:47.93)
Yes.
PJ (53:10.407)
He has a book about Christmas. He writes a parody of Christmas called Hog's Watch. And the end of the book is...
that why do we kids need to believe in the hog father, his version of Santa Claus? It's like, because people need to practice believing the little lies before they can believe the big lies like truth, justice, and mercy. And what is your answer to kind of like this, like we need these myths, and you know, there is myths in a sense where they can still be factual, but there's also this idea of like believing in things because we have to, like I'm referencing your point here.
about the, these are just made up things. And some people say, well, we just need them. What is your answer to that? I think some of that's in your metaphysics chapter. I could be wrong.
Graham (54:03.246)
Well, I mean I think So you know you mentioned buying Vogelin and I'm so thrilled to hear that He's just a fascinating and a really is a kind of a model for us in a way, right? He's very capacious in his in his thinking and but he mean he thinks right that you and I at least sort of
were wedded to myth, right? And so you can see that, right? You only see, you know, not to keep going on about Tolkien, right? So let's just talk about Game of Thrones, right? And think about all the hipster bars across America, where, you know, when that would be showing, they'd all go to the bar together and it'll be like following, you know, you can sometimes see these things on YouTube, right? Where you can see the reaction videos as different things happen, right? And this is, you know, these are fictional, you know, characters, right? And obviously Harry Potter is another one.
Katniss Everdeen is one, James Bond is another one, right? So we do have a proclivity to enjoy a really good story and to understand that at some level it's a fiction, but.
I think Voglen would argue, well, it's because it's latching onto this sort of mythic underground sort of idea, right? And so it's not exactly fiction, it's sort of oriances in a kind of insecure world, right? So you know, we have, so Voglen's starting point is that we're very anxious creatures, right? Because we live amidst all of these insecurities and we have to find, because I don't know that he was a, I don't know that he was a believer in God.
exactly right so he thinks look to overcome this sort of anxieties you've got to find some sort of anchorage and we do that by these sort of myths and he thinks that every civilization has had some core idea of myth or as Alex was pointing out right all great civilizations have had this kind of
Graham (56:07.822)
And I think a conservative is probably pretty reconciled to that. It's, I think, okay with the idea, or maybe even thinks it kind of really important normatively to take bearings from something bigger than ourselves, something outside of ourselves, something to which we defer, something which we obey, whereas I think it's probably part of a more sort of...
enlightenment liberal progressive position right to be this idea of the self creator and I think that that's often kind of at the kind of um level of a mood you know that's what conservatism has a real problem with right it's this sort of self-creation idea and then by the same token right this is what the progressive really finds quite irksome about conservatism
forms of obedience or you know and then this maybe even goes to the development stages of a child right where the child's initially very obedient and then there's always this great moment right of self-assertion and then as later on right one starts to see the importance of something like an enduring order right so you probably could do some kind of interesting parallel between sort of psychological development and
sort of civilizational political development. And I think actually kind of Voglen is in that space actually.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (57:31.917)
Yeah, I mean it seems to me there's kind of two levels here, right? So one is the question of truth, right? And, you know, we think of these religious ideas like, for example, the existence of God, the existence of a moral law, the existence of the soul. First of all, I would say that at the level of philosophy, we should not be too quick to declare them myths in the negative sense of simply untrue.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (58:01.811)
Aristotle and Kant and Husserl, right? I mean, all of these resisted a reductive materialism, right? I mean, these are great thinkers. So the first question we have to ask is, you know, some of the critics, let's say of religion, as religious conceptions as myth, simply make a bunch of assumptions about the only things that are real are the physical world, which are simply declared as dogmas. And then of course, everything which is not physical is declared a myth.
I would recommend to people first wrestle with Leibniz, you know, wrestle with Plato, wrestle with Kant. What are their arguments for the existence of God or the existence of a moral law and all these things that you're declaring simply don't exist. The other level I think is more the utility level, which maybe at points we focus on more that, you know, even bracketing the
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (59:01.813)
Burke.
emphasized the fact that they did not believe that without that society would prosper without religion. For example, Burke declares that by the French revolutionaries, by getting rid of Christianity, were opening the way to other superstitions. And I think you could argue he was prophetic in that respect, because what happened when Christianity was replaced, people went to ideologies such as communism, such as, you know, Nazism and fascism and
PJ (59:19.393)
Hmm.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (59:32.787)
because there is a human need for meaning, right? So Burke was saying, let's not jettison, you know, let's not jettison what we have, assuming that, you know, you'll simply get something better after it. I think, you know, a lot of the course of modern history has really vindicated Burke. There haven't really been a lot of examples of civilizations which entirely excluded the religious dimension, which have, you know, prospered morally.
You just look at Stalin and Mao Tse Tung and all these figures who sought to get rid of religion and replace them with ideologies of human creation. Very problematic. So I think that would be another point.
PJ (01:00:16.831)
Yeah, well, I'd love to, if you don't mind if I jump in here, I've actually visited Cambodia. So when you talk about the Pol Pot regime, I got to see the killing fields. And there's the religious question, like, it seems like that matter going through these societies. But in all these societies too, there is a, there's definitely an attitude towards history that is like, disjunctive, right? I mean, especially like...
The Pol Pot regime was famous for, like if people mentioned what happened before the Pol Pot regime, they were brought and killed. And that's like, it targeted religion, but it targeted just history in general. I mean, I was told stories of, go ahead.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (01:00:58.713)
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, in Maoist China, there was the war against the olds, what they called the war against the olds. The Maoist revolution, the Chinese tradition was Confucianism, which is one of the most conservative traditions actually in the world. One of the traditions that gives the most emphasis to things like filial piety and tradition and hierarchy and all these kinds of ideas. And the tomb of Confucius was sacked and there was an effort to literally rip it out of the mind
the habituations of thousands of years of Chinese history. And what was the result? I mean, the estimates I've read have been at least 32 million dead in China under Mao Tse-tung. So the examples of erasure, historical erasure, should serve us, I think, as warnings.
That doesn't mean don't reform, that doesn't mean that if there are oppressive structures and practices they shouldn't be reformed, but as Burke would say, try to maintain the fundamental structures and traditions of the society.
PJ (01:02:06.635)
I want to be respectful of your time. I really appreciate you gentlemen coming on today. Actually, I'm bummed because I wanted to ask you about how climate change, like what would be your conservative reaction to climate change, but I don't know if we have time for that. But as we kind of close out today, what is something you would give to our listeners to really just think about through the week after listening to this episode? Something to chew on or maybe something to do?
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (01:02:20.527)
Okay.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (01:02:39.033)
I mean, if you ask me, I mean, one of the things that we didn't get too much into is just the importance of humanism as the great theme of Western civilization, right? So we call it the master idea of Western civilization, right? So it's an idea that, you know, appears in one form in the Greco-Roman world as this idea of cultivating what it is to be human, cultivating what is best, cultivating human excellence in terms of the life of reason and culture.
PJ (01:02:49.005)
Hmm
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (01:03:08.947)
then it appears in another form in Christianity with this idea of the absolute and transcendent value of every human being. And then it appears in the Enlightenment with this idea of the rights of man.
and the idea of using technology to better the human condition and so forth. I think these are inspiring ideas, right, that we should cherish and value and be very wary of people who tell us that these ideas should be erased or that we might reduce these
figures in history to their faults, which you know, being human can be done with any epic and almost any figure in history, you know. So that would be my... read deeply, you know, these figures before you throw them out. So, I don't know if Graeme had something he wanted to say.
PJ (01:04:07.063)
Thank you.
Graham (01:04:10.67)
No, I think my version would be very similar, right? I mean, I can imagine there could be people watching this, you know, who don't like conservatives and not interested in conservatism, and I would say, well, you know, give it a shot, right? I mean, it's a long and an interesting and a sophisticated tradition of thinking, and it has, I think, you know, many attractive points, you know, and especially on this question of belonging, right?
being situated and I mean, you know, you mentioned and not to go off now onto environmentalism, right? But I mean, one of the anxieties about environmentalism, right, and if one, I think your question's a really interesting one, right, because that's probably most associated with the kind of a leftist, right? But what animates it is, well, where's our home? Where's our home gone? What are we doing to our home? And those, I think, are very conservative anxieties, right?
So the... That I think there's a little bit more connect perhaps between the...
in this humanistic tradition between this sort of the conservative spirit of belonging and then this more progressive idea, you know, environmentalism that we've somehow, you know, trashed our home, right? So to end on again with Roger Scruton, you know, he wrote many books on environmentalism. He was really kind of militant that conservatives should never shy away from the environmental debate because it's primarily at its heart, it's a conservative concern.
PJ (01:05:44.051)
Gentlemen, one, thank you Dr. McLeer. Thank you Dr. Rosenthal-Pobel. It has been an honor having you on today. Great summaries, great way to end. Thank you.
Graham (01:05:53.614)
Thanks, PJ. Appreciate it.
Alexander Rosenthal Pubul (01:05:53.785)
Great discussion, thank you for having us PJ.