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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 Wehry (00:02.048)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Graham McLeer, professor of philosophy at Loyola University, Marymount. And we're talking about his book, Security Ethics, Commerce and Crime in a Polycentric World. Dr. McLeer, wonderful to have you on today.
Graham McAleer (00:21.27)
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me back. It's great.
PJ Wehry (00:24.321)
So first question, Dr. McLeer, why this book?
Graham McAleer (00:28.494)
So, know, Loyola has a quite a well-appreciated, nationally-appreciated forensic science program. And because we're a liberal arts college, they always want to, even when they're doing something like, you know, a science program, they want it to be embedded in the humanities in some way. So I was approached to offer some electives for the forensic studies science people.
And so I thought, OK, well, let me do something on philosophy and crime. And then you got to think, well, wait a minute, you know, given given the competition with real crime podcasts and stuff like that's a pretty tall ask, right. And then I thought, well, you know, we live in a commercial civilization. And so maybe we could look at the role of sort of organized crime. Then when you look at the role of organized crime.
PJ Wehry (01:05.631)
haha
PJ Wehry (01:16.938)
Mm.
Graham McAleer (01:21.134)
You you start to see it has all these sort of geopolitical implications. know, organized crime is not merely people in, you know, on the margins of societies trying to make a bit of money. I mean, there are major players. They infiltrate governments. They collaborate and cooperate with governments. They engage in joint project. You know, it's a, there's a lot.
quite a lot to this, right? So I thought, you know, this could be quite an interesting way of sort of helping the students to think about the place of crime. And then the idea was to link up with some philosophers who could speak to certain critical issues in the sort of the criminal world, right? And primarily, you then want to think about, well, what is the crime doing?
to the of the populace, right? And so sometimes, you you have problems of self-defense leagues, fighting cartels, sometimes big institutional players like, you know, big oil fighting back, sort of like environmental, some call it terrorism, some kind of environmental liberation. But, you know, there are different ways of looking at this. And it's a really like,
PJ Wehry (02:44.672)
So it's a really, like, super expensive view. It's not hard to ride in the future, I think, so much of it. Yeah. And that's, I was surprised. It's a world that I haven't seen a lot of philosophical literature on, which is something you talk about. And yet it's such a big and broad, fertile world. Like, there's so much. I love, like, really, you go through just lots of, lots of topics that could all be their own book. And I actually, I love that approach. I love giving people that.
Graham McAleer (02:46.287)
super expansive. You know, it's not hard to write about actually, right, because there's so much material.
PJ Wehry (03:14.462)
that kind of expansive vista. And I want to ask you about the dead hand of competence. I love that phrase. that this book is a starting point, not like a final word on the subject in any way.
Graham McAleer (03:28.408)
So I think one reason it's not especially dealt with is because we have such a state centric bias, especially look, mean, most academic scholarship is done in the United States, right? The United States university system is huge. is the sort of the Godzilla of the intellectual world, right? And of course for Americans, well, Uncle Sam is in charge.
And lest you doubt that, well, you just try and grow up against it you will find out, yeah, Uncle Sam is in charge. But actually throughout much of the world, the state isn't in charge. There are people who live in all sorts of marginal self-regulating communities, right? You have only to look at places, obviously, somewhere like contemporary Syria.
PJ Wehry (04:01.344)
You
Graham McAleer (04:23.938)
You know, is a really graphic example of what happens when the central state collapses. You know, not not to over, you know, but if you think about, well, under what government did the Garzans live like, what's that exactly? Right. I mean, you can just go through the world and find all sorts of places where the state is not a principal operator of order. then what is well, sometimes it's.
corporations and sometimes it's organized crime. So I think there hasn't been a lot of sort of philosophical reflection on this, I think, quite an interesting avenue into the problem of order, just because we are so state centric. We are so used to the presence of the state.
So that's kind of one thing I would say about it. And then the other thing is that there is, and I tried to do that at the start of the book, right? There is this sort of an area in the academic world of security studies. And sometimes this deals indeed with the relationship between states. But very often there are quite a lot of people working on things like, how is it that borders figure in the imagination? What is the role of a border?
was the role of a wall. Right? It's been a huge issue in American politics of recent years. So there are ways of thinking aesthetically, ethically, poetically about various things that we would think of as security that actually are sort of more peculiar. Right? So just think about the way in which like a lot of computer games
PJ Wehry (06:07.836)
Hmm.
Graham McAleer (06:19.098)
would have security motifs that actually, think about for example, contemporary airports, right? An airport is this really interesting thing, right? Because air travel, either for business or maybe for pleasure, family vacations, right? But actually what you do is of course you step inside a rigorously controlled security zone where much of the modern world begins to cohere, right?
PJ Wehry (06:39.328)
...ruggerously control security zones where much of the modern world wants to compute, right? Digitization.
Graham McAleer (06:48.226)
digitization, hard armor of the military, militar-esque police forces, surveillance, everyone having sort of coded numbers on their passports. When I come back to America, and I'm not a citizen, right? So, you know, they do my biometric, you know, they have me look in the camera and they do a scan of the eye, you know, yeah, it's you, right?
PJ Wehry (06:58.839)
I
Graham McAleer (07:18.122)
So just to say, that we...
many ordinary encounters that we have with security can actually lead to these really deep and rich inquiries into things like play, right? So the, you know, the coordination say between sort of computer games and computer imaging and military exercises, military training, right? Where...
We think about whether this is in the movies, right? You see these sort of people with GoPro cameras and, or even now drone operators, you know, who were essentially almost like computer games. So just to say, right, there's a whole design structure to this. There's an aesthetic structure, there's a moral structure, there's a dramatic structure. So the book is on the one hand,
PJ Wehry (08:05.291)
almost like a computer game. just to say that there's a whole design structure to this. There's an aesthetic structure, there's a model structure, there's a dramatic structure. So the book is, on the one hand, yeah, it's a little bit different because no one can get focused on the same actors and security. I don't think that's possible. They are the actors and security. And on the other hand, actually, it dovetails really well with a whole bunch of disciplines that we can get together.
Graham McAleer (08:18.798)
Yeah, it's little bit different because not a lot of people are focused on these sort of non-state actors in security, even though in many parts of the world they are the actors in security. And on the other hand, actually it dovetails really well with a whole bunch of disciplines within the academy.
PJ Wehry (08:34.174)
Yeah. A lot of different threads that I can pull on there. I think the first one is you have three aims really with the book you have. You aim for. This is a book for leaders, for teachers and for researchers, and you talked about forensic science, but also for leaders. I believe that you teach a large part of your teaching is business ethics and of course dealing with.
You you said you started this for forensic science, but also this seems to have a lot of implications for business ethics as well.
Graham McAleer (09:07.534)
Yeah, yeah. So when I used to teach in the Loyola's MBA program, we used to have a lot of military officers who were coming out of, well, either coming out of the services and transitioning into business or they themselves were sort of wanting business degrees by way of helping with the administration, even within the military or huge in Maryland defense contracting is huge. Okay.
PJ Wehry (09:35.744)
Makes sense? Yeah.
Graham McAleer (09:37.614)
So some of it came from that, you know, these characters were really quite interested in this, like, like, yeah, wait a minute, how does national security, the national security forces dovetail with the private sector providers? And you see this, especially now with various kinds of big data gathering, you know, the
You know, there's been a lot of stuff about this company called Palantire, which is one of the sort of Peter Thiel operations, and they're very involved in tracking populations, and that all feeds into what it is that the modern military wants to know about, right? So the book begins with looking at just some of the ways that
private industry fits with national security services, but then the book transitions to wait, what happens when the national security services aren't involved at all? And private industry is in fact the people providing the order and security. So I give some examples of where local populations and NGOs twin with businesses.
PJ Wehry (10:48.202)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (11:06.476)
Because the business provides a center of stability, right? Businesses, whether you like big business or not, sort of analytically, right? Big businesses, super organized. It can control the space. It can afford its own security apparatus. It has the sort of intelligent means by which to deploy its influence. And so a lot of like local communities.
PJ Wehry (11:22.027)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (11:36.322)
where there is very marginal national government turned to business, turned to these corporations for law and order. And for NGOs and various nonprofits, having a backstop of a big like mining corporation in a country acts as a kind of a force multiplier for the activity that they do.
PJ Wehry (11:57.825)
Thank
Graham McAleer (12:00.802)
They can have their logistic services partly supplied by the corporation and corporations are often quite happy to do this, right? Because it's always in the interest of business to have stability. And so if they can force multiply their own stability by working with the NGOs to control the lands and peoples in and around their business, that's good for the business. So you find these.
So one thing I wanted to look at was just what is this level of cooperation? We tend to think of business as super predatory, super rapacious, but actually what are the levels of what Adam Smith would call like sympathy, right? These sort of like connections of sort of mutual interest and mutual feeling that where you scratch my back, I scratch your back, where we can kind of all develop positively together here. That was sort of one of the things I wanted to look at.
PJ Wehry (12:46.752)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think to give our audience a clue into just how big this is, is it the fourth largest company? Is it GS4? get, if you don't mind, like, don't, unless you've watched, you know, and even then it just gives you a piece of the puzzle.
unless you watch a lot of war stuff and you hear about private military contracts, contractors, I don't think people realize how big it is and how powerful, know, even as we talk about organized crime, even the way you talk about it in here, crime, we automatically think organized crime, that's negative. But in some cases, it can almost be positive because it's just order in an unordered space, right? And it's, it's, we just have no idea. I mean, we talk about the cultural blindness.
I do think of the state as having the monopoly on force. Like if something bad's happening at my house, I'm going to call the police, right? Like it's like, and that's because I live in an ordered space, but for most of the world, like the global south is not like that. And that's the polycentric right in, in the, in the subtitle. can you talk a little bit? And I want to make sure I'm getting, I think it's, GS four is the fourth largest company.
Graham McAleer (13:51.864)
Sure, right, right, right, right.
Graham McAleer (14:06.136)
Thanks
Graham McAleer (14:09.41)
Yeah, exactly.
PJ Wehry (14:16.04)
Am I, am I good?
Graham McAleer (14:16.398)
with the third largest private employer in the world.
PJ Wehry (14:21.386)
Third largest private employer, yeah.
Graham McAleer (14:23.308)
Yeah, right. So you've got people like Walmart. Then you've got the various like Foxconn that makes our iPhones and what have you. And then it's and then it's this security provider, private security provider. And they provide everything from collecting money from banks, staffing prisons, providing
hospitals with security to as they love to euphemistically, you know, kind of addressing complex situations, you know, right. And that's when you. Right, right, right. And that's when you're bringing in, right, your retired special forces guys to come and do, you know, not off books work, but certainly be at the sort of the sharp end of certain.
PJ Wehry (15:03.114)
Like police actions, right?
Graham McAleer (15:20.28)
you know, very compromised situations, right? And these companies, they do it all. And some of them you see are quite interesting, right? Like I talk a little bit about this one that works at the great kind of safari camps of Africa, you know, because poaching, so like again, people in the West, we would think, my gosh, if someone shoots an elephant, I don't much care what happens to those people. They need to go down.
Right? Well, there are guys who you can pay, who will more than happily join the local police forces as mercenaries, essentially, and until people like the wildlife fund and people like this that we often give our charity to, right? Because we love animals and we think of the safari and all, right? But the fact is, you know, there's a grim...
grim militaristic reality to controlling talk about a space that's unguarded. And we were talking just thousands of square miles where there are poachers. And because although the ivory trade is not big in the West, it's enormous in the East. So there is a huge market for the poaching of these great animals. And
environmental conservation companies have found that they need to supplement the local state with these kind of special forces characters. And you just go on the websites, nothing's nothing's particularly hidden, right? You just go on the websites and see, like, yeah, well, our guys come from here, there and everywhere. And here's what we do. and we really do care about the environment as well. We're just the equal warrior, right?
PJ Wehry (17:13.536)
Yeah, I and something that's interesting to me about this You know, you mentioned liminal spaces with borders, but then you also have these kind of cultural Liminal spaces and that's kind of what we're talking about a lot of times in the global south. You don't have a large controlled space because that takes infrastructure and money and power But also it's interesting how it shows up in the West with things like hospitals
So what made me think of this, you're talking about the ivory trade being big in the East and you got me reading the red market by, is it Carney? I was expecting you, you talked about with hospitals and he goes to find skeletons being used for hospitals. And instead he finds a different set of bone traders that he wasn't looking for who were selling tibias for bone flutes to Buddhist monks.
And this is where like the the clash between cultures and it's fascinating because they're so happy to live on the border of things. Right. Like like literally they're they're working on the side where making bone flutes is legal and then they throw it over the fence at the border and someone comes and picks it up. It's almost impossible to stop literally like it's illegal on this side of the fence and it's legal on this side of the fence and the police officers sitting there watching them work on the boats. It's
Graham McAleer (18:22.604)
Yeah, right.
PJ Wehry (18:43.808)
In America, just doesn't even, I mean, even in Britain, really doesn't, know, you look at a lot of like what we talk about, like first world countries, that's not, know, Western Europe, that hasn't been the case for a long time.
Graham McAleer (18:59.65)
Right, right. Well, I give this one example, right, where this was a recent case in England where someone wanted a transplant and they brought the donor with them. But the doctors are like, you know, something off about that. I just don't know if this donor is really doing this freely. And of course they weren't, you know. So there is this whole sort of like new version of slavery.
PJ Wehry (19:10.753)
Yes.
Graham McAleer (19:26.954)
that's connected with the transplant world. And again, super difficult to get that through a kind of a Western hospital because of all the protocols. But, you know, you go a little beyond the West and everything is so much more fluid. So, you know, things like, you know, the kind of the red markets, right? And then there's even these really gory stories about
you know, the Russian Ukraine war and the kind of a harvesting of organs from the recently killed soldiers and stuff like that. Now, whether this is a kind of a myth that's often created, you know, I don't know, right? But certainly these markets exist. There's just so many court cases, you know, when the sort of the sharks sort of...
the tip of the shot comes above the water and it gets into the court case record and you see what's going on. But so much of this stuff is underground. And again, this comes to organized crime, right? I mean, something like the kind of the red market, right? There is such a desire for eternal life that if one is able to get your hands on some
PJ Wehry (20:23.091)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (20:33.204)
Yes.
Graham McAleer (20:51.104)
younger person's flesh that would extend your life, then there's going to be a business person who's ready to supply that desire that you have, right? Because that's the nature of the business world. They are all about supplying desires. And if that comes to red market stuff, bones, blood, organs,
they'll supply it as well.
PJ Wehry (21:15.71)
And I think this is, you I mentioned it in passing kind of the liminal space idea, but that's what's so fascinating. You make that, kind of, give a charge to hospitals because instead of being, in a geographical liminal space, they're at this liminal space between profit and the common good. And so they have to, I don't, I'd never really thought of hospitals as like something I had to function as a guardian in that sense. Right.
Graham McAleer (21:42.478)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (21:43.009)
You know, there's always that problem like profit but also healing people and it's like no no, there's like there's You're going to always be the target of a certain kind of criminal just by virtue of where you're sitting at You know, you call it the crossroads. I mean you could think of that as like a border to between Can you talk can you talk a little bit more about that or?
Graham McAleer (22:03.832)
Sure, sure. Well, I think actually it's kind of interesting that in a lot of American hospital dramas, the problem between the profit motive, you always have these, you always have the classic, right? It's always a trope, right? The heroic resident intern doctor fighting for the common good against the sleazy hospital manager who is like, no, we can't do without patient because it's going to cost down the road $3 million.
occupying that bed, we can't do that. Right. And then so you always have this sort of like angel and demon structure to these TV shows. So so it's right there, that part of it, right. But then, you know, as I gave this case, right, where the head of mortuary services at Harvard's medical school was just arrested for selling body parts. So this is Harvard.
their mortuary manager is busted by the feds for selling donated bodies to the market. You know, so it's right there, right? Excuse the word, but the bleed into the criminal world, right? It's right there. Yeah, yeah. So the so you know, it's like the moral,
PJ Wehry (23:23.338)
Props for that pun. Okay.
Graham McAleer (23:33.038)
The sort of the three moments here, right? The common good, resident fighting for the common good, the profit motive of the company, and then, you know, people literally selling into the black market. So these are all great ethical domains about, you know, exactly what's going on here. And then, you know, what is the character of, you know, the hospital manager? Right. I mean, it's so easy. We often think of sort of manager, manager jobs are really boring and
But actually, you know, there's something really quite noble about hospitals, right? They're very much at the front line of human dignity, or they ought to be. And I think a lot of complaints people have about the medical system is precisely that, right? Like, man, I was treated, my family was treated horribly here, right? I mean, this is a real black mark against the hospital. So I wanted to unpack that a little bit about...
What do these because these hospitals tend to be parts of huge conglomerations. And although in America or the West, again, the hospital systems are very regulated. These companies are often investing in global south environments. But that's not the case at all. And that's when you're likely to rub shoulders against these other principles of order.
Which, so again, to your point, right, of course, we are going to think of something like the Mexican cartels as just straightforwardly bad and evil, right? But actually, in a kind of a godfather system where they control, people find better accommodation within the cartel rule. And they look after their own, right? Because they're trying to be essentially sovereigns.
PJ Wehry (25:07.744)
It's not something on the Mexican cartel. Just to straight-forward that. In a country where don't follow their system, where they control, people find their own occupation within the cartel here. And they look after their own life because they're trying to essentially solve things.
Graham McAleer (25:30.35)
and it's a brutal kind of a rule, but it can be efficacious and people, you know, Albert Camus has this phrase, right? And we say humans get used to anything. Right. And so, you know, if you're living under a cartel, well, you know, you're going to doff the cap, you know, you are, you're going to obey, and they would deliver a order and it wouldn't be the worst. You don't want to cross them, cross them. And it's going to be horrible.
PJ Wehry (25:32.608)
So, you know, you're under a hotel, you're go for camp. You're gonna for a band.
PJ Wehry (25:57.215)
Thank you.
Graham McAleer (25:59.662)
But just to say, right, that the reality of power, right, again, we just so think of power as witty to the kind of the public state, but the reality of power is quite varied. And then the interesting question is, what happens when these things kind of come into connection? And especially what happens when companies
PJ Wehry (26:06.56)
So we have a powerful state, but the reality of power is quite varied. the interesting question is, what have the political systems come into play?
Graham McAleer (26:29.198)
Right? Because companies are often the place where, because again, right, the Western world has most of the companies and yet the Western world companies are out in all these different environments. Right? So they're kind of the main ground zero about where this interesting link is going to happen. And so I wanted on the question of the leaders, I wanted both military leaders and corporate leaders just to be thinking about, wait a minute, you how do we finesse some of these issues?
That was the leadership component.
PJ Wehry (27:01.387)
Yeah Yes, yeah As a quick aside and it made me think of this growing up American and You know first off the way that you're taught about justice I I had a very naive sense of justice, right? I went on a mission trip to Cambodia And I'm talking to the missionary there. He was the first westerner to go into Cambodia after the Pol Pot regime fell and
He was talking to me about bribing police officers because that's just what you do. And so they'll pull you over for speeding, whether you're speeding or not. And if they see you're a Westerner, the first thing they do is they like, I think it's like $5 at the time. was like $5 American and it'd be like $60 American. And he said, no, no, no, I'm from here. I'm not paying that much. And so they would argue.
about the size of the bribe and bring it down to $20, $30. And there was part of me that was like, I couldn't see a way out where you shouldn't pay the bribe. But there was also part of me that's like, it's wrong. You shouldn't pay bribes, right? But there was no, I mean, what's he gonna do? He's gonna take on the whole police force, dirty Harry style, like, you know, like that American fantasy of like corrupt cops taken out by one lone hero, right? And you just start to realize like, oh, you just, you have to accommodate, right? Like you don't have the, like the corruption above you is not something you have control over.
And that this was really helpful to think about this kind of techno feudal, like return to like multiple centers of power was really helped me reinterpret even that. You know, I mean, I, I made my piece of that and I didn't, it didn't bother me at the time. It was just one of those things where I had to like sit and think. was like, what, what, do you do if you don't pay the bribe? It's like, I guess you just pay the bribe and you argue with police officers about how much extra you're going to pay in the speeding ticket, right? Cause cause you're a westerner.
Graham McAleer (28:38.445)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (28:59.392)
but, forgive me. That was just like, that was something that I found really helpful, going through your book. But I did want to ask you a follow-up question on the hospital. The, you talk a lot about, Locke's conception of the body as a defense. And you kind of compare and contrast that with a, think Aquinas is, I think you're talking about Aquinas being talking about natural law and Locke talking about natural right.
And you say that the contrast is the subtle distinction between those two. Can you talk about, and this is where I think for our audience, as they're thinking about your book, we don't have time to go through, I think it's 14 different examples or something like maybe 10 different examples. And each time you take an example and then you introduce with it a theorist. And so for embodiment, you talk about Locke, but you compare and contrast him with Aquinas. Can you talk about that distinction between natural right and natural law?
Graham McAleer (29:58.606)
Yeah, so the structure of the book is that each chapter deals with one classic kind of crime. So pirates, counterfeiters, espionage, right? So, and then I plug in a plug in a philosopher. And so the lock chapter dealt with hospitals and red markets. So, you know, the trading body parts, which can be quite legitimate.
Right, so I give this example, right, that when surgeons meet at these enormous conventions, know, orthopedic surgeons, I don't know how many there are in America, right, but I don't know, I don't know, let's say 20,000. And that might be understating it. Well, they need body parts to talk to each other about, hey, look at this bone, and here's what we wanna do with this one, right? Well, there are companies that are all about how do you get body parts to hotels when the orthopedic surgeons are turning up.
Right. People whose job that is. Right. So so Locke Locke comes to mind. Right. Because Locke famously made this argument that the personal rights begins with your control of your body. And Red Markets goes to this question, a lot of the great questions of bioethics goes to well, wait,
who's actually in control of this body, right? So this is when you get those great sort of ethical problems of the state takes over the parental rights of a particular patient, maybe a child, right? Because the hospital has reported the parents, you've been going through this in a sense, right? the adopter, right? That your parents get reported that look, the child's interest not being served here, right? So.
PJ Wehry (31:46.299)
Yes.
Graham McAleer (31:54.954)
Locke is really kind of ground zero for philosophical reflection on this problem about how do how do rights sort of flow from from the body. But in a but Locke stands at the sort of the threshold of modernity. But in an older tradition, the Thomistic Thomas Aquinas tradition coming out of the Middle Ages, you have less of a
less of the body as the sort of centre of right. And you've got this more sort of cosmic account where everything has its place in a kind of global understanding. we all of us are so very modern in that we immediately also sort of think of individual rights and...
And that's a lot to do with this character, John Locke, right, writing the 17th century. So one of the points I just wanted to make was that.
once you're inside of modernity, the anxieties about what happens to the individual body just go through the roof, right? Because the individual body has become so, as it were, almost sacrosanct, right? Whereas in the Thomistic model, the natural law model, it's more the sort of the cosmos is the bearer of fundamental value.
By the time you get to someone like John Locke, it's part of that sort of liberal individual tradition that it's the discrete individual that's the bearer of value. So I just want to sort of point out that, well, that's going to lead to this sort of super anxiety around the fate of body parts and how we think about that. And, you know, that was the kind of the broad
PJ Wehry (33:50.815)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (34:03.746)
the broad point, and just by way of setting up hospitals have to hospital management has to understand that they really are in charge of managing this kind of the ground zero of our sense of dignity, which is to do with the body, and then talk about the liminal space of the body, possibility of bodily pollution, the idea of illegalities entering into how the body is.
PJ Wehry (34:04.842)
Yes. Yes.
PJ Wehry (34:20.128)
Mm-hmm.
Graham McAleer (34:32.234)
rebuilt or even disposed of and so on.
PJ Wehry (34:40.254)
And so it's where, yeah, that's it. I don't, I don't take the whole time on the one on the one case that there's so much there. It's so good. Thank you for that answer. one, one, chapter I really wanted to ask you about as well. and I believe it's, and I'm going to say his name wrong.
Graham McAleer (34:57.678)
Yeah, Hosinga. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (34:59.2)
Hudson go and the robbers is that the that's the section on play, right? Yes, and that one was particularly that in and I'm Bakunin. Am I how do you say? Banakunin anarchist let's talk about and forgive me for enjoying enjoying this a little bit, but you're the guy Representing conservative philosophy, right? You wrote the wisdom of our ancestors and I was I love that you're like, you know, we're gonna have a chapter You know, these are all
Graham McAleer (35:03.17)
Yes, yeah.
Graham McAleer (35:09.311)
Makunin the anarchist. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (35:28.778)
philosophers of the establishment, we're gonna have a chapter on Bakunin and the anarchist. And I was like, tell me a little bit about why you included him and what insights you see from a company gun running. Like talking about organized crime, being the good guys. Yeah.
Graham McAleer (35:44.718)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you see, wanted I wanted a kind of a foil, right, which is we all we all of us. Personally, I think this is probably true, right, that the state is is good. It functions, I think. I think better to live in no matter the problems in America, better to live in America than Syria, right, where there's no government.
But the anarchist, of course, their absolute axiom is governments are horrible. They do shocking things. And the worst of it is that we relinquish our own personal power. And so we make this Leviathan ever so powerful, we actually feed the beast that is actually here to corrupt us and abuse us.
So you certainly have this, I would think, in a kind of a lot of both leftist politics, but also libertarian politics, right? mean, there's a, so anarchism has two wings, right? It's got the left wing version. That's this Russian guy Bakunin, he's probably the most famous. And then you've got the right wing version, the libertarian version, which is very popular in America.
So, but they both of them think the state is not your friend. So I wanted to look at a case where we just assume that the state knows what it's doing, namely controlling the arms market. Who gets to make weapons? Who gets to sell them? Sell them to make judgments about who these enormously powerful things should be given to? And we say, the government. Well, the anarchist is like, what?
You think the government has the interest of the common good when it's thinking about arms sales? Come on, right? I so I wanted that represented, right? Because it's at least plausible, it's at least plausible that either the government is not very competent, we all of us make jokes about the incompetence of government and politicians, or we think government's nefarious. And the whole...
Graham McAleer (38:08.013)
western political tradition would mock you and I if we said, oh no, the government's never nefarious. From Plato onwards, the western philosophical reflection has been power is real. Those who take it tend to want to do stuff with it to others, right? So that's kind of where the anarchist is coming from, right? That governments are not to be trusted.
PJ Wehry (38:15.668)
Yeah
Graham McAleer (38:36.618)
And then in that case, you get into sort of an interesting cases like, well, could you have a company run on anarchist principles, right? So anarchism, tend to think of isolated individuals, but leftist anarchism is all about the collective. It's all about syndicates. So the idea of someone like Bakunin who was writing in the 19th century,
was the idea to have anarchist revolutions where the anarchists would be in charge of the businesses. So you could have an anarchist gun company, and then the question would be, who do they sell their weapons to, right? Because it's not that, the anarchist position is not like, we never make stuff, we never sell stuff, we don't engage in trade. No, no, no, no. The idea is, of course we do, but then who owns it?
PJ Wehry (39:21.022)
haha
Graham McAleer (39:33.62)
the workers own it. So I then, there was an interesting case, again, connected with Syria, about some private persons wanting to send guns into the Syrian environment. It's very tribalistic, it's very ethnic.
PJ Wehry (39:36.35)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (40:00.846)
And so the philosophical question is what would somebody like Bakunin say about an anarchist company that wanted to sort of, because there are some, in Syria, there are some sort of anarchist collective type ethnic that have these long standing traditions of kind of collective action and collective living. And so what would they, what would an anarchist want to do about that?
So they would be gun runners essentially, right? Because the governments would be against this, right? Because the governments want to control what's going on. But of course, the anarchist is just not going to accept the premise. So the premise of the book was that coming out of the Middle Ages, and this goes back to the earlier question about sort of the cosmic, right? So in Aquinas, you've got a kind of a cosmology and you've got God, a kind of a king, and then, well, the state,
PJ Wehry (40:51.669)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (41:01.442)
the terrestrial king is sort of in charge of the common good, right? So the state deals with the common good and the anarchist rejects that, right? That's the thing they go for. And so I just wanted that, actually the midpoint of the book, I wanted that debate explosive. Because you're always, when you write a book, you're always thinking about, well, who might read it?
would they even accept the operating assumptions? I'd to have some sort of representation of people who'd be like, yeah, I just, I, so for example, right, you can even just think of a classical American libertarian. Why should the government tell a company how to conduct its business? What's wrong with the markets? If somebody wants to make a trade of their organs with me? Why not? Right? I mean, that's it, right?
So you don't have to scratch the surface before you'll encounter philosophical positions, very cogent philosophical positions that are like there should be no restrictions on markets. If there are going to be restrictions, it should definitely not be the government that's restricting. So that raises then this question about what does it mean for corporations to provide security? Normally the default position would be no, no, that's for the government to do.
But you don't have to go very far before you're like meeting philosophers who are, well, autonomous institution and provide security. Of course they can.
PJ Wehry (42:38.452)
Yeah. Well, and a lot of human history has operated that way. You know, when you look at like, that, that returned to, know, I love that idea. I'd heard techno feudalism before, but I hadn't really looked into it. And it made so much sense when you're talking about polycentric. of this is probably because I've been reading German history and I was like, this is exactly, I hadn't seen the parallels until you started talking about it about like, you have a city state here and you have a little.
Graham McAleer (42:42.412)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (43:07.454)
duchy here that lasts for 50 years gets taken over, it's erased, and then it comes back with a slightly different name, slightly different borders. And it's like, how does how does the average person navigate this? It's
Graham McAleer (43:19.16)
Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Germany pre 1870, 1870 is not that long ago, right? Was a polycentric order. You had literally hundreds of principalities, dukedoms. Actually, you go back even just a little bit further, and then you have principalities and dukedoms that were things like cardinals and bishops were in charge, you know?
PJ Wehry (43:23.744)
Yeah. Right, right. Yeah.
Graham McAleer (43:49.806)
You know, there's a reason, right, that Roman Catholic cardinals are called the princes of the church, right? Because they were once princes, right? So, of course, we've inherited a kind of a post-World War II kind of model where, oh yeah, it's national governments in charge, right? But yeah, no, your point about Germany, pre-1870s, a fine example.
PJ Wehry (44:09.908)
Right.
Graham McAleer (44:18.208)
where you had all manner of small players generating security and stability. And of course, in the German model, these were all aristocrats of a certain kind, right? And we can romanticize that. And in today's world, it's, yeah, kind of...
Maybe not aristocrats, would be aristocrats in a sense, right? mean, power players who were angling for more and more territory, you know, because of course that's what these German princelings were back in the day. They were the strong men of their day. And then ultimately they get given titles and they sponsor Mozart and what have you. And they take on a patina of respectability. this is the point that David Hume makes, David Hume says you should never...
PJ Wehry (45:05.546)
Yeah
Graham McAleer (45:16.226)
do too much history. Because when you do, you will discover the dark reality of what you take to be good. And this is his point then about how it is that we sort of subscribe, how it is that we give allegiance to our nations. It's not because of the good, because
a brief encounter with the history of our nations, which show they're not good. Right. So so this is the same with, you know, aristocratic order pre 1870 in Germany versus the sort of emerging techno feudalism aristocratic orders today, organized crime cartels. You know, this stuff is this is is rough business. But if we
think about the long history, you you read Thucydides and you know, the Peloponnesian Wars, it's always been a rough business. And then the question is, and the question of the book was, well, are there any any ethical limits to that? Right? Because so some people who read the book when thinking about whether it should be published or not said, look, I don't kind of get the book, because if governments aren't kind of telling us what to do, then there are no rules.
PJ Wehry (46:20.436)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (46:42.134)
It's just do whatever you want to do. It's just brute power. It's just,
you know, justice scare quotes at the end of a barrel of a gun. So I try to give some examples early on that I just don't know if that's really true. I don't know if, and again, maybe goes back to your point about natural law in Aquinas, I don't know if it's true that in the absence of government, there are no rules. So Aristotle makes this point that politics is secondary to morals.
We first think in terms of good and evil. Then we think in terms of, well, OK, what kind of regime is going to deliver the good and evil? So his point would be, well, in the absence of the regime, the state or the government or whatever. We still got the problem of good and evil. Right. And I try to show there's a number of films that I think play on this idea. Right. People. So, you know, I love the example I gave of The Walking Dead. Right. Very cool.
PJ Wehry (47:46.598)
That's the, I was, yes. You really did a good job explaining this. I knew exactly where you're going by the way. So yeah.
Graham McAleer (47:51.998)
Right, right, right. Well, I mean, I'll assume most people kind of, if they don't know The Walking Dead, they certainly know about zombie movies and apocalypses and, you know,
PJ Wehry (47:59.721)
Yeah. I meant the moral. I meant the value of the moral language. Not that not your example. The Walking Dead example was good, too. But I really I just want you to know they came through loud and clear that morality precedes the regime.
Graham McAleer (48:06.062)
PJ Wehry (48:23.07)
Yeah. Yes.
Graham McAleer (48:35.722)
organized crime in and around governments, you know, it's not, it's not an either or right, it's that these, these contending polycentric orders, they rub shoulders with one another. But I still think the ethical questions remain dominant. Because I just think people, that's not to discount the utter barbarity that humans are capable of. But I do think that even
cartels or whatever have their codes, you know, this maybe goes back to her Zinger, right? I give this one example. know, her Zinger has this argument, right? Where he says, look, civilization is fundamentally about playing games. And I gave this example of this one cartel boss killing his brother. And, but he kills him, he invites him to the local cock fight.
And while the cockfight is happening, the one brother kills the other brother.
Well, why? I mean, why not just go to his house and kill him? No, no, it's to be done at the cock ring, right? Because there's a whole symbolic play, power is being reestablished, and I need to be able to communicate to the people watching the cock fight that I have just killed my brother, so now I'm the cock of the walk, right? So this is a very Herzinger idea, right? That...
All social organization follows the structure of games. And then what's important about that games always have rules. There are things you do. There are things you can't do. There are penalties that are going to be paid. So I wanted to use her Zinger to say that even in the absence of something like a formal legal or moral order, so even maybe inside a gang culture.
PJ Wehry (50:24.458)
Yes.
Graham McAleer (50:40.066)
there would actually still be something like a rudimentary structure of rules, do's and don'ts. So that was the role of the chapter on Hürzinger where he goes in, he was a Dutch writer writing in the 1930s and he wrote this classic work called Homo Ludens, The Playing Man. It's my favorite book. I mean, it's a brilliant book, it's relatively short.
He's just full of, he goes through opera,
anthropological studies is a really brilliant piece of work. And he just kind of lays out the ways in which order is played out. We always has a game structure. And it's a super convincing book, I think. So that's that's that section.
PJ Wehry (51:38.848)
Yeah, and I think too of When we look at sports, right there's different layers my dad works with college level and even NBA level basketball players and so one of the things we talked about and he didn't he wasn't judging this at all, but You know when you first teach your kids you're like, oh don't lie to the refs if the ball goes out You know teaching them to be honest and he's like
Graham McAleer (51:45.326)
So, yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:05.856)
When I talk to NBA players, it's like, have a lot of respect for this guy, but he lies to the refs every single time. He's always like, it's off this guy and he's playing a different game. Really? Right. Right. But, but then you have, but then you have the death of sport, which is, I'm going to go hit my rival in the shin with a crowbar. You know, I can't remember her name, but the, the ice skater, right? You're like, right. And then it's like, okay, that's.
Graham McAleer (52:13.966)
Right, right, right.
Graham McAleer (52:30.67)
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:33.504)
It's so interesting to see the levels. And then it's like, okay, we're playing a totally different game. It almost doesn't feel like a game anymore now when we're like, oh, it's okay to do steroids, right? For one group of people, wasn't okay. For pretty much all of pro baseball for 10, 15 years, it seems that was okay, right? But then that's very different from, oh, I'm going to like...
Graham McAleer (52:40.963)
Why?
Graham McAleer (52:56.354)
Right. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (53:01.354)
hire someone to actually sabotage the other team, right? And so anyways, it's interesting to see those. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Graham McAleer (53:07.436)
Yeah, so, right. Yeah, so the Hursinger base, the base of the Hursinger would be pre-governments, we play games, games have rules that brings us to the ethical world. And these rules are often also aesthetic. So that goes to the point that, you know, my pushback against those who would say, look, in the absence of government, there is no law, are no...
rules, companies can do whatever they want. No, no, companies have all got to play games. What they can't do, says Hursinger, is be the spoil sport. Because we all hate spoil sports. So yeah, you could be a spoil sport. But Hursinger says, trust me, people are going to hate on you bad. you don't want to, you don't, right? So this is it, right? So professional sports people, they'll cheat, right? But they cheat within the context of the game.
PJ Wehry (53:46.624)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (53:55.263)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (54:03.718)
Yes.
Graham McAleer (54:04.974)
And they'll take the penalty, right? A classic example, right, is in soccer, right, where sometimes players will simply grab the ball. They think the ball's gonna go in the net. They grab the ball. So that's a penalty. They get sent off, but maybe their side still wins. Because maybe the person who take the penalty is gonna miss. And there've been some cases even in the World Cup where that has happened, right? So I consciously cheated.
PJ Wehry (54:23.348)
Yeah. Yeah.
Graham McAleer (54:34.766)
We paid the penalty and we got away with it. And that's part of the nature of games as well.
PJ Wehry (54:42.538)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Graham McAleer (54:43.934)
It's all super kind of control.
PJ Wehry (54:46.752)
Yes, by the culture of it rather than even, mean, eventually we developed these kind of governing bodies, but really there's so much power in the cultural side of it, right? And if a government ignores that for too long, and I think you kind of get into that with, is it Petraeus? Yes, know, like the perception of legitimacy is important.
Graham McAleer (54:50.252)
Yes, exactly.
Yep.
Graham McAleer (55:07.342)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (55:13.836)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (55:14.506)
But I want to be respectful of your time. the last kind of, before I kind of ask that, like, what's some, what's, should someone take away from this besides reading your excellent book? I wanted to ask you, you switch from polycentric to polyhedral. And what does it mean that we should look at the world as polyhedral rather than polycentric?
Graham McAleer (55:28.834)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Well, the end of the book, I just wanted to try to maybe provide a kind of an overarching way that we could think about. So that I think it would be a mistake, especially for people in the West, to say, you know, it's our way or the highway. Right. So more or less, this is more or less, this is the moment geopolitically that we're in at the moment. Right. The Western world has sort of been in charge for quite a while now. And that's starting to
breakdown for a whole bunch of very complicated reasons. And we could be nostalgic about that, we could regret that, but we might also sort of welcome the move towards a kind of a polycentric world, as you point out, until 1870 in Germany, that was the way of the world, right? So it's, you know, this moment that we lived where the state was in charge, you know, was a kind of a moment in history.
And then the question would be, well, how can we think about this positively? And I kind of then draw upon this polyhedral idea. You find this in Pope Francis, who recently died, but he kind of gets it from this French philosopher, Michel Foucault, you know, who was no friend of the religious orders or anything like that. know, it's quite interesting. know, this way, right? Concepts often have histories, right? And they can switch sides sort of thing, right?
Graham McAleer (56:58.754)
But the polyhedral is just this idea that we could have a sort of, well, look, this could be a really big issue for America, right? I mean, what is America really gonna do about the cartels? I mean, there's some fantasies about going to war against the cartels. Maybe there's another way to think about it, which is you make some concessions. Are these people good people? Are they nice people? No, no?
but you make some concessions, you rub shoulders with them, you don't like rubbing shoulders with them, you hold your nose a bit, you're on your guard, you're a bit, you know, but you find a way to get along. And that was the idea at the end, this polyhedral idea. And then I point out that there actually been some examples, like for example, the Republic of Venice, which lasted a thousand years, was a, right.
Because what's important about Venice, right, it's the height of aesthetics and music and art. But they had a very sort of say polyhedral understanding of the world that principles of order come in all shapes and sizes. We're going to make do, we're going to be willing to make deals with multiple actors. don't particularly admire them or we certainly don't want them in our cities, but you know.
PJ Wehry (58:23.838)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (58:26.252)
we'll make deals, right. So that was the idea, right, that the just to provide a certain maybe theoretical image of a way to, to, to morally make do. the point would be that you would grant that order generating
institutions, companies, cartels, or whatever.
kind of in line with Herzinger, they are generating order and there are rules and those rules can benefit many. The point I think about playing games would be that they're not tyrannical. There's a kind of a place and you maybe don't get to play, maybe you're just one of the spectators, but you're still participating. You're not one of the stars.
but you're still participating. And then of course, of course, sports fans do, right? They take that into their own lives, right? And they're friends and they talk about it. so there's, I just wanted to kind of end with an image where living with this polycentric order might still have a moral validity to it, even though our intuition in the West would be, well,
PJ Wehry (59:34.592)
Mm.
Graham McAleer (59:55.788)
moral is the state in charge of the common good. Right. And the whole book was kind of wanting to play with that idea and to say, well, you know, is that even the realities even philosophically justifiable? And if it isn't, what are the what's the upshot of that morally? So the book's not like, well, it's engaging moral nihilism. It's not that right. It needs to provide a moral frame for thinking about
PJ Wehry (59:59.969)
So it's just kind of fun.
PJ Wehry (01:00:14.02)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:00:19.187)
Hahaha!
Graham McAleer (01:00:26.316)
if you like events at the margins or what we would think of as the margins of respectability.
PJ Wehry (01:00:33.87)
Yeah.
No, it's really good. I think you've already given a pretty good answer to this, but maybe you could narrow it down besides reading your book. And I really did enjoy digging into it. I enjoyed all the different ways that we can look at, mean, and just bringing to light so many issues. What was it? 2.3, 2.4 billion dollars of drugs seized in Antwerp. You know, it's like it's just mind boggling, right? You're like, I'm like, I don't live in this world. I don't think about this stuff.
Graham McAleer (01:01:01.516)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:01:07.092)
and then, and then thinking about the, the ethics of living somewhere where your security services are provided by a company, right? All this stuff is so helpful. but besides reading the book, what is something that you would tell our audience after listening to us for about now or now, something you should think about or something you should do over the course of the next week after listening.
Graham McAleer (01:01:08.002)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Graham McAleer (01:01:30.99)
Well, I think...
It's a really interesting question, actually, right? Because it's sort of like, it's often what pastors do in sermons, right? They say, well, we can think about this, right? So I suppose what I would suggest to people is, if you think it's the government that's constantly delivering good order, just in your own life for one week, just ponder all the occasions where you see good order happening without the state.
One example in the American context might be a four way stop. Where the persons, know, especially those ambiguous moments when like four cars all arrive at the same time and then everyone's like, wait a minute, what's the rule? Who goes first, right? Or where you've got a stream of traffic and you, think the American rule is more or less you let one person in, you've done your civic duty, but you don't let three in because the people behind you will get enraged.
PJ Wehry (01:02:30.176)
Ha!
Graham McAleer (01:02:33.442)
Right? There all of these subtle ways in which order is constituted and the government's not actually involved. And then maybe you could be thinking about examples where
that you might read about whether, you know, a company being involved in delivering order, and then you can sort of ponder like, oh, well, wait a minute, I mean, that'd be so bad, or if it is, like, what would be my expectations about how they would behave? You know, so that'd maybe a kind of a grassroots version of the book would be, how do I observe order being constituted in my own community?
PJ Wehry (01:03:16.137)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:03:22.314)
Yeah, yeah, what are the different, because we do kind of think of it in this like singular surface of authority and order and it's multiple polyhedral, you like you have so many ways that good order is made in your life. I love it, Dr. McLeer, it's always a joy to have you on, thank you.
Graham McAleer (01:03:27.596)
Yeah, yeah.
Graham McAleer (01:03:35.372)
Yeah.
Graham McAleer (01:03:40.536)
Thanks, P.J. I really, really appreciate your questions. Thanks. And the opportunity. Thank you.