Episode #050 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

The year is 1789, and the citizens of France are deeply entrenched in the battle for human rights that would forever change the course of history known as the French Revolution. See, because before there was ever a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, before France became what it would eventually become, a war needed to be fought. But it wasn’t a war on a battlefield with muskets and cavalry and all kinds of glorious stuff like that. It was a war of ideas in a place called the National Assembly. It’s kind of ironic. I mean, despite how revolutionary its production was, the National Assembly that brought these ideas to pass really only existed for a short period of time. Between the dates of June 13, 1789, and July 9, 1789, less than a month when it was all said and done, a group of people gathered together.

And I could talk about the different estates of government in France during this time and the systematic political castration of the bourgeoisie. But out of respect to your time, the interesting part when it comes to our episode today is how this battlefield was laid out physically in the room. Because just like on the battlefield with muskets and a cavalry charging—you know, where the soldiers would position themselves on opposite sides of a room or a field and fight—the people fighting in this war of ideas in the National Assembly about to what extent this French Revolution is justified, they also positioned themselves on opposite sides of that battlefield. There was a president of this National Assembly. He’d be in the middle of the room. The people that supported the king and the way that things currently were in France sat on the right-hand side of the president. And the people that supported the revolution sat on the left-hand side of the president.

There was a clear divide between the two sides of the room. I mean, you can hear it in the testimony of the people that were there are the time. You’ve got all kinds of—here we go. “Those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free reign in the opposing camp.” Well, eventually, the people on the right-hand side of the room became known as the Party of Order, and the people on the left-hand side of the room became known as the Party of Movement. This story of the National Assembly and the war of ideas that took place in 1789, this is the origin of the terms right wing and left wing in our modern political lexicon. This is where the terms came from, the French Revolution.

Now, why are we talking about this? Well, the reason why we’re talking about it is because I got about three or four days into writing what I thought was going to be the next episode of the show. And I had all this great stuff on Adam Smith. You guys should have seen it. I had stuff on the free market system, specialization, how all this stuff applies to us in our island civilization that we’ve been building. And then I realized I was making a giant assumption. Like, why am I just assuming that you guys wanted Adam Smith’s free market system implemented on our island? It really was very inconsiderate of me. I’m going to come clean. On behalf of myself and the rest of the Philosophize This! island, I’d like to apologize for what I’ve done.

Because you really don’t got to look very far—look to the comment section of any YouTube video you could possibly find. It doesn’t even matter what the video’s about. You’re going to find someone railing against the failures of the free market system. They’ll say that an unregulated free market system is a recipe for disaster. And even in today’s world when we do have regulations in place, all that does is open up another can of worms. The richest and most powerful people and the companies that stand to gain from being not regulated the most are the only ones with the resources to lobby congress and pay money to influence legislation in their favor. These people would say, the game is rigged.

And since we know now by experience that that’s the case, if we’re starting a new society on the island, why would we ever willingly cannonball ourselves into that pool again? Why not address the problems that arose in the free market system, come up with a brand-new system that works better, and use that one? Let’s have a powwow on our island together, alright? Let’s all sit around in a circle and toss some ideas around. Let’s theorize and strategize and hypothetical example after hypothetical example until we arrive at what seems like a new, perfect system on our island. Nobody’s arguing that Adam Smith’s system is worthless. But it could be better. And why would we ever sit around idly when a better system could exist out there, just waiting to be scooped up, one that reaches our economic goals better than the old system does? Let’s say that we all sat around on our island; we arrived at a brand-new, abstract theory that our projections show is going to be way better than Adam Smith’s system. Why wouldn’t we use it if we had it?

Let me just pose the question to you guys real quick. What would you rather do? Would you rather use Adam Smith’s system that we know works right now? Yes, it has its flaws, but at least we know it works. And we can make gradual adjustments to try to make it better. Or would you rather revolutionize economics entirely and try a brand-new system that, you know, admittedly, we’ve never tried it before, but we have no reason to expect that it wouldn’t work? It seems way better than the other system. And yes, we might run into problems along the way. But as we do, let’s just correct course and keep moving forward. What you have here are two very different methods of approaching any task, any task you may assign yourself whether you’re a government, an individual, a team, anything. We’re going to come back to these two methods in detail later on in this show. But first let’s talk about a couple of very important people from the Age of Enlightenment that embody these two methods of approaching any task.

Look, there’s a common misconception thrown around a lot today about a couple of political thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment. Look, I’ve heard this theory dozens of times all throughout my life. The idea is that when it comes down to modern-day political thought, there’s two kinds of people in the world. Whether you consider yourself on the left or on the right, your thinking, if you traced it back far enough, is ultimately derived from one of these two guys back in the Age of Enlightenment: Thomas Paine if you’re on the left or Edmund Burke if you’re on the right. They’re two guys that agreed on a lot of things but disagreed on a lot of things. Their most notable disagreement, as we’ll come to find out, was the French Revolution. Their ideas, needless to say, definitely would have put them on opposite sides of the National Assembly in this war of ideas that we started this show out with.

But can we really say, honestly, that when you consider yourself to be left or right in today’s world that really what you’re doing is making a decision between the thinking of one of these two guys? This is going to sound like one of those classic Stephen West-isms. I mean, I already know it. I already know you guys are probably rolling your eyes during this portion of the show. But look, this show has to stand for something, or else it just becomes incredibly boring very quickly. No matter how much someone wants it to be true, no matter how convenient it would be if it were true, the world is not that simple—angry radio talk show hosts and cable news commentators. The thinking of human beings is not that simple.

Just imagine a modern-day political disagreement between two coworkers at their job. And they both consider themselves to be left and right, respectively. Saying that their disagreement is ultimately just—you know, that’s just the age-old disagreement between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, that’s like saying, like, when a husband and wife are in the grocery store and they’re arguing about which light bulbs to get, oh, well, that’s just the age-old disagreement between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. I honestly can’t tell whether that example is really genius or absolutely horrible. I’m just not going to think about it anymore.

What I’m saying is, forget all the history between the Age of Enlightenment and today. Forget all the specifics that they’re arguing about. Forget the statistics and facts and talking points that they disagree on. To say that in modern times all we have are tens of millions of Thomas Paines arguing against tens of millions of Edmund Burkes is just a shameful oversimplification of what is actually happening. By the way, you knew they were oversimplifying things from the very beginning when they started talking about the left and right as though they’re things that are easily definable by one guy’s thinking anyway.

Like, how do these people think we define the terms “left” and “right” when we’re talking about them in today’s world? I get that they have their own definitions of what these terms mean in their heads. I get that everybody has their own definition. But you have to acknowledge that there’s far from a consensus on what they are. I mean, it highly depends on who’s talking about it and when. Some people say that the further left you get on the spectrum, the more government influence you think there should be in people’s lives. The further right you get on the spectrum, the more individual freedom you think there should be. Some people say the further left you get, the more you believe in communal property. The further right you get, the more you believe in private property. Some people say the further left you get, the more you believe in a planned economy. The further right you get, the more you believe in free enterprise.

The point is, left to right is just a spectrum. And depending on what particular issue you’re using as the basis for that spectrum, it might drastically change where your views fall on it. Like, on some spectrums, anarchists are all the way to the right. On others, they’re all the way to the left. We’ve all heard from both sides that if only the other side got complete control of the country and were left to their own devices, it would be Nazi Germany within a month.

Alright, I’m not going to ramble about this all day, trust me. But this does raise a very interesting question for us to ask ourselves. And it goes like this: if this is untrue, if this is just an oversimplification, then why do so many people trumpet this common misconception that we’re all ultimately either Thomas Paine or Edmund Burke in our political thinking? I mean, if it was completely unfounded, it never would have gotten off the ground to begin with, right? I mean, after all, the reason stereotypes even catch on in the first place, the reason they have enough people repeating them to gain any sort of traction, is because there’s at least some small, miniscule element of truth associated with them.

And personally, I’ve noticed the exact same pattern when it comes to oversimplified worldviews from people. Like, if you were walking around and you were saying that, you know, leprechauns were using witchcraft to control all of our political thinking, I’m pretty sure everybody would look at you like you’re crazy. Like, nobody’s going to be repeating that. So, the question we need to ask is, what is the small, miniscule element of truth associated with us all being descendent from Thomas Paine or Edmund Burke?

Well, let’s talk a little bit about these two guys. But first let me just say that as a podcaster, I didn’t even want to talk about these two people, honestly. They just lend themselves so much to people that like to cherry-pick scripture, people that like to take their works and just treat them like it’s the Bible and put a ton of emphasis on certain passages that they pick out of it that reinforce their interpretation of them. But then they completely ignore all the other things that go against their interpretation of them. I mean, I’ve read a lot of commentary on philosophy over the years, and there’s very few people I can even think of off the top of my head that have the same kind of revisionist-history cult followings that these people do. But anyway, just a word of warning.

I’m not claiming that this episode encompasses every possible interpretation you could ever have of these two gentlemen. In fact, I’m going to shy away from trying to define them at all during this show. As listeners of this show, rather than me using your time up droning on about the myriad of different interpretations of their work and then speculating about who these guys really were when you get down to it, what I’m going to do is a much more productive usage of your time, I think, which is to ask ourselves the questions that these guys were asking about the government during their time. Because I think by asking them, we’ll understand more about ourselves and, well, more about a lot of different things, really.

Edmund Burke was an Irish political philosopher. He was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland in the year 1729, and he died in 1797. He was a huge advocate of the revolutionary changes in India during his lifetime. He was a huge advocate of the American Revolution in 1776. But he didn’t agree with the things that went on in the French Revolution. He would have been sitting on the right side of the president of the National Assembly. And it’s not like Edmund Burke just hated French people or something. He thought for various reasons that we’ll talk about now that the French Revolution and the American Revolution were completely different beasts.

One of the main pillars of Edmund Burke’s thinking that nobody’s going to argue with is the importance of tradition. Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, they all talked about this state of nature that we’re all originally in. And it was through a social contract with either each other or the sovereign that we escape from the state of nature, much to our chagrin if you’re Rousseau. Burke didn’t see it this way. He didn’t think that whatever this thing called society is, it shouldn’t just be relegated to whoever is alive now and whatever material things they want the government to guarantee for them. No, society is something much deeper than that to Burke. It’s something that’s roots extend deep throughout the entire history of that culture that you’re a part of. And that any contract we have, if it’s going to be reasonable, not only needs to consider and be respectful of the people that are alive today, but it also has to consider everybody who’s come before us and also everyone who’s yet to be born.

Now, on that same note—just to mark another contrast between Burke and these other political thinkers—by this time in Europe, it’s a really common idea that human beings have certain natural rights, rights that no matter what time period or society or culture we live in, we have those rights simply by virtue of being a human being. Life, liberty, the fruits of our labor, natural law, these sorts of themes pervade the work of Locke and Hobbes. But Burke didn’t agree with this either. There is no baseline of rights that humans deserve inherently as is suggested by natural law. No, you are entitled only to the rights that have been traditionally given to you in your given society.

And if this seems weird to you, just consider for a second Burke’s intentions here: to preserve the wisdom from previous generations. The thinking was, if something had been a long-running institution throughout a society’s history and they had been successful with it for a really long time, it must work. The true test of an idea’s legitimacy to Edmund Burke was whether something was rooted in tradition, not whether it sounded reasonable or not. This was a welcome change for some people during a time like the Age of Enlightenment when so many new ideas were being arrived at and no one truly knew whether they were going to work or not.

This is what Burke is trying to circumvent, the implementation of these sweeping, revolutionary changes based on abstract theories to a given society when that concept, that abstract theory, might not even work that well given the tradition of that society. He’s not just worried about this Age of Reason arriving at a theory that just generally doesn’t work. But he’s even more worried about the possibility of one of these abstract theories that we’re arriving at being so incredibly foreign to the history of a given society that it ends up failing miserably or not running smoothly or inefficiently, and therefore doing more damage to a society than good, to hurt more people than it helps. This is why he was for the American Revolution and against the French Revolution.

See, the American colonies were colonies of England. The idea that was central to why they were revolting against England in the Revolutionary War was taxation without representation, England abusing their dominion over the American colonies. We’ve all heard the story before. Well, to Burke, taxation without representation being a bad thing was something that was well-founded in the tradition and history of England. So, starting a revolution in the name of going against it was perfectly justifiable. But in the case of France, aside from the bloodshed and brutality that came along with the French Revolution—basically any reasonable person completely denounces that—Burke claimed that the ideas central to the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—weren’t based in the tradition of the people of France. In fact, the whole system of government that the revolution supported was in many ways completely alien to the people of France. And even if it wasn’t alien, Burke said, he claimed that it doesn’t adequately address man’s nature. That’s a whole other section of his thought, very interesting.

But again, it’s not that Burke thinks that the people of France don’t deserve freedom as much as the people of America. That’d be ridiculous. In fact, one of the most common misconceptions of Burke is that he’s against all change and that a society should only be what it used to be. No, on the contrary, Burke completely endorses positive change. This was about preserving that positive change. His disagreement comes down to the nature of that change. How should change be implemented? Should it be one sweeping, revolutionary, fast, or fundamental change? Or should it be many focused, ordered, gradual, and small changes?

Enter Thomas Paine into the equation. Born in England in 1737. Died in 1809. Spent a lot of time in America writing pamphlets, helping the cause of the American Revolution. And then when his work was done there, he moved to France to support the French Revolution. Needless to say, he was a fan of revolution all around. But maybe the more accurate way of presenting his thinking would be, he was a fan of reason, and he believed that what is right has nothing to do with tradition, necessarily, and that every generation of people, if they deem it to be correct during their time, should have the ability to make fundamental, revolutionary changes to their society whether it corresponds with tradition or not.

Thomas Paine thought that when the people of France wanted these rights of liberty, equality, and fraternity, despite was Burke says, these things are not abstract speculations. They’re what humans have always wanted. They’ve just been oppressed by government since the dawn of man. The French Revolution is just an attempt, to Paine, to end centuries of wrongdoing perpetrated on these people. Paine would say, what kind of logic are you using, using tradition to justify behavior? You could just as easily look to the past and see that your culture has a longstanding tradition of slavery and then use that tradition to justify perpetuating it. What, just because something has been around for a long time you should preserve it? That doesn’t apply to every case.

The problem to Thomas Paine with Burke’s views on the nature and speed of change—you know, the gradual, slow process versus revolutionary—is that when you do it in Burke’s way, the solutions to any problem that a society faces are either not enough or they come way too late if they even come at all. It’s too slow. Paine would say that, look, the world is constantly changing. People’s opinions about what is good and what we should do are constantly changing. How could you ever say that it’s okay to sentence the people of today to the decisions made by other people that lived in a completely different world than them?

Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I tend to think they both have really good points. What we’re talking about here at the most basic level are two different approaches to solving problems. But which one is better? Which one do you think is better? Well, it can be kind of confusing to know which one is better when you’re thinking about it in terms of what the government should be doing. I mean, after all, you’re not a government. You’re a person, right? How’s that for a genius insight? That’s why you guys listen to this show. My point is, let’s think about these two options in the context of solving a problem in our personal lives.

A long time ago on this show I talked about making scrambled eggs. Remember Aristotle part one? My point in that episode was that I had been making scrambled eggs for years, and I had always used the exact same system, right? Well, do me a favor for a second, just real quick. Think back to the very first time you ever made scrambled eggs. If you’ve never made scrambled eggs before, think back to the first time you ever did any sort of rudimentary task. When you were in that moment, you were faced with a problem. You may not have realized it, but that problem that you were faced with was how the heck do you make scrambled eggs, right? Well, I looked at how my parents did it. I put the butter in the pan. I cracked the egg in the pan. I scrambled the egg, and I was done! Over the years, I developed systems, and I made small, gradual changes to my egg-making process much in the style of Edmund Burke. After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Refine, temper, strengthen the process. But why start some egg revolution in my household if I don’t need to?

Then that fateful day when I watched Gordon Ramsey cook his scrambled eggs on YouTube. Ah! These concepts that he was throwing out, they were completely alien to me. Like, put the butter in after you crack the egg. What? Continuously take the eggs on the heat and off the heat to prevent it from cooking too quickly. Season it after you cook the eggs. It was mind-blowing. And to top it off, his eggs looked way better than my eggs, like, way better. To me, at the time, this was like some egg philosopher coming at me with one of those abstract theories that Edmund Burke was worrying about. And look, if I cared enough about improving my egg-making abilities, I could have arrived at these conclusions myself, maybe even better ones. If I cared enough to research the chemistry and logistics of making scrambled eggs to the point of mastery, why would I even need this intervention from the philosopher Gordon Ramsicles?

Ask yourself this question. What do you do in your normal life when it comes to improving your methods of doing things, anything? Did you arrive at a way of doing things a long time ago, and day by day you try to refine the process and make gradual changes? Or do you watch videos, read books, and revolutionize the process every now and then with some new, abstract theory that you’ve run across? Here’s a better question. Do you really need to be one or the other exclusively?

This is the miniscule kernel of truth that’s at the heart of this point that people make in today’s world that modern, political thought is ultimately just a bunch of Thomas Paines versus a bunch of Edmund Burkes. Whenever we’re faced with a problem as a society, what method do you typically want the government to use when solving that problem? Do you tend to side with innovation and change and revolutionizing the area that we have a problem in? Or do you tend to look to what we already know works and try to gradual make things better? You can see examples of this divide all around you in politics.

For example, Obamacare. Now, hold on, I’d just like to say, I’m not naïve. I fully understand the arguments on either side that would say that this disagreement that’s taking place has nothing to do with the fundamental principles of how a government should solve problems, but that one side would say the only thing the other side doesn’t like is the Obama part of Obamacare. And those people would say the only reason the other side likes it so much is that it attaches one person’s decision-making to everyone else’s tax dollars. Look, I get it. But either way, isn’t it interesting how the divide still exists even in something as politicized as Obamacare?

We have a problem with our healthcare system, alright? That’s the baseline. One side says that what we already have is good. It just needs a few adjustments. They say, why would we risk a complete overhaul of the system that may completely fail in this country or end up being worse off than what we already have when we have something that works? Again, here’s Burke’s adherence to tradition: gradual, slow changes. The other side says that the problems are systematic and epidemic and there’s no amount of knob-turning that’s going to fix the fundamental issues that we have with the healthcare system. We need revolutionary change in the healthcare sector—Thomas Paine.

Let me hit you with the same arguments in metaphor form. When you’re on the South Pole, any movement in any direction is going to be north, right? When you’re at rock bottom as a society, any movement is forward progress. But one side says, look, we’re not at rock bottom as a society. In fact, in modern America, we have a lot of things pretty great. And there’s way too much at stake to implement sweeping, revolutionary changes across the board based on only abstract theories that have never been tried here before. The other side says, sometimes if you want to reach a target you just need to get moving. Let’s say we’re taking a road trip from San Diego to New York City. It’s much better to just start moving in the direction of New York City, and if you find out you’re going the wrong way, check the GPS, correct course, fixing things as you go, than to just sit in San Diego agonizing about what the perfect way to arrive at New York City is.

This was the major disagreement between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. And I know there’s not much room for my two cents on the podcast.  But it almost seems like we need both. Sometimes we need the broad, sweeping changes. Then at other times we need the other side to preserve and improve those broad, sweeping changes after they’re implemented. Look, I understand, it’s terrible looking at the bipartisan gridlock in modern politics. Nothing ever gets done. And if you feel so strongly on one side or the other, it’s very easy to look at the system and just wish that for two weeks we could have a dictatorship, because then at least something could actually get done. Things do get done in a dictatorship. But for the sake of our island, where we’d, no doubt among us, have a strong divide between these two different ways of solving problems as a government, I think these two ways of thinking may need each other.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.