Responsible Elites Podcast Transcript

I recently recorded a podcast with the show Catholic Culture. Instead of dropping the transcript in the previous post talking a little bit about the show a week later, I thought it would be easier to just make another post for clarity’s sake.

0:01:42 S1: Jonah Bennett, welcome to the Catholic Culture podcast.

0:01:45 Jonah Bennett: I’m a huge fan of engaging with a lot of different communities that I think are important, so, I’m really glad to be on the show.

0:01:52 S1: We’re here to talk about Palladium Magazine, www.palladium... P-A-L-L-A-D-I-U-M mag.com, is that right? When I first started reading a few articles on this site, the thing that kinda jumped out at me is that I couldn’t really detect an ideology, which is kinda rare for any publication. I would describe the tone as, if not… Not pragmatist necessarily, but kind of realist. And it’s not that there’s no sort of theory, but it’s more looking at real states of affairs and kind of trying to allow that to generate a theory. And you described the magazine as being about governance futurism, which is a phrase that I’ve used to tell people about the magazine a few different times and it’s always met with complete incomprehension. [chuckle] And I have to think that that’s sort of deliberate, because you’re trying to not sort of signal to people that you’re any particular ideology, you want the magazine to be more about just the reality rather than a sort of theoretical superstructure. Am I onto something there?

0:03:04 JB: Yeah, I guess I would say part of the impetus at least for me behind the label of governance futurism is that it gets at a couple of things. First, it connotes the importance of actually governing, that is making responsible clear-headed decisions in whatever station you find yourself in, in life and also bringing about a more positive future for everyone. And additionally, I think, the necessity of the label is just that in 2019 and in general the past maybe 10 years, labels have been changing so fast, because we’re in a deep moment of political flux. And so, what these labels mean, what they’re associated with, who wants control of them, it’s all completely up in the air and even traditional left-right spectrums often don’t fit a lot of the way that people think anymore. And so, having a unique label I think, helps to avoid various unhelpful social dynamics that I think detract from spending time on just producing good responsible work.

0:04:16 S1: Yeah, that certainly makes sense. And I came away with, basically, this magazine publishes a wide range of high quality pieces, usually lengthy essays on various political and social issues of the day, from an international perspective with no particular ideology. And also a mix of kind of research and personal experience, and that’s kind of interesting too. A lot of the articles do have, especially the ones that have caught on, do have kind of a personal angle to them. How do you find the people to write these?

0:04:55 JB: It helps to have a lot of good friends and friends who like to travel and friends who are interested in writing. Sometimes a lot of these people are first-time authors, but they get excited because they see some of their other friends are writing, they wanna join as well. And then a lot of the time, the role of the editors is kind of coaching them in how to do basic narrative journalism, how to do interviews, what to look for when they get into a new location and then we’ll kind of help them structure the piece, because often they’re highly intelligent people who have interesting things to say, but they’re not necessarily full-time professional writers. And so, that’s kind of the synthesis there and how and why Palladium is the way that it is.

0:05:47 S1: So, before getting more into the magazine why don’t we just talk a little bit about the genesis of this project. How did this come about, how did you and the other editors, Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton get together on this? What were you looking for?

0:06:02 JB: I guess, it’s sort of partly a reaction to the situation we find ourselves in. Which is a situation of political flux and especially if you look at Generation Z kids, in the course of a year, they’ll bounce from one esoteric ideology to another to another to another, or they’ll have a lot of different lifestyle changes, and this causes a lot of, I guess, instability in the system. And in general political conflict seems to be rising and trust in public institutions is simultaneously decreasing, and of course, the media landscape due to various incentive structures of current for-profit models in the industry, kind of escalates that dynamic. It kind of floors the gas on that dynamic. And so, what I really wanted to do is something super high quality, non-polemical, extremely ecumenical. I mean, this works with me personally, because I’m pretty ecumenical in general. I attempt at least to see the best in everyone, and try and find commonalities where I can and am very open to dialogue and interaction with just about anyone. Because, I guess, I’m aware, very aware of the frailty of human reason to go off in the wrong direction or for ontological hijacking to take place, or for there to be purity spiralings or scapegoating or social attacks.

0:07:38 JB: The world is a bit of a crazy place right now. And we see this is primarily an issue of governance of people who hold power, not using that power morally or responsibly or even using it well at all. And so, I guess the project overall is a bit of an attempt to encourage the people who have power to look at these issues responsibly and sanely and clearly, and then to use their positions wherever they might end up, wherever they might be currently to move the world to some better state.

0:08:15 S1: A very notable aspect of power in the liberal order, whether you wanna call it power or authority and the two aren’t necessarily exactly synonymous, but I’d say it’s true of both is that, at least when it comes to sort of social power all across the ideological spectrum, whether you’re a kind of classical liberal conservative, or a modern progressive, there’s not a lot of admission about wielding power. There’s a squeamish-ness in admitting that you hold power or if you hold it and using it, or at least, there is a pretense at that, because of course people do exercise power all the time, often in very forceful ways. But there’s this kind of neurosis around power. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I have been attacking the question of authority and where it comes from. I recently read this book by Yves Simon, The General Theory of Authority, which I’m about to have someone on to talk about, and it’s always struck me that democracy may be legitimate, but one of the pretenses I hear when I hear people talk about our democracy is that we aren’t ruled at the end of the day by others, if that makes sense. There’s different meanings which the term self-government can have, but when you’re looking at reality, one meaning it can have is that ultimately we don’t have to submit to people other than ourselves.

0:09:51 JB: I mean, in one way or another… I mean, you can go the sovereign citizen route and try and drive without a driver’s license, but I think in short order, you’re going to figure out that you’re going to have to submit to someone and that someone is probably going to be the local police.

[chuckle]

0:10:08 S1: Right, right.

0:10:10 JB: And so, I’m not sure how seriously to take that. Certainly, there are levels of abstraction, I guess, or rungs on a ladder of government and self-government all the way from the individual to the family, to the company, to the civic organization, to the state to the Federal government. And I think a lot of the lessons we talk about can be applied on all levels through the emphasis of good judgment and virtue, and doing well with what you have currently.

0:10:43 S1: Yeah, that makes sense, because if you just look at say, the question of feminism and the father who does not want to accept his power and authority as the father in a family for various reasons, or if parents over their children, both the mother and the father, there’s again, this reluctance to take up one’s authority in a responsible manner. There’s all these efforts made, kind of like a false humility to side step it, but really you can’t escape it at the end of the day.

0:11:16 JB: Yeah, and in the case of family, sometimes it is the case that one parent or the other is… They’ve dropped the ball in some serious respect. And so, regardless of your ideological conceptions on what the family should be, it generally seems to be the case that one ends up having to take more responsibility if the other has dropped it. And that is a better outcome than no one taking any responsibility. But if the parents don’t take any responsibility that often ends up falling on to the kids, you see this actually often. And then in that case, de facto, the kids are running the family. And maybe that’s not the best case scenario, but it’s better than complete anarchy.

0:12:05 S1: It’s kind of interesting, you had this… One of your big pieces so far has been, I forget the exact title, but it’s a piece by Natalia Dashan. I think it’s, The Real Problem at Yale is not Free Speech, is that the title of it?

0:12:20 JB: That’s right.

0:12:21 S1: So, she is a recent Yale graduate, and she’s talking about her experience as one of the few truly lower class, you know, four people who ended up attending Yale, I think she says, it’s about 2% of the student body and this experience of going around and all these social circles and everybody at Yale pretends to be broke. That’s how the article sort of begins. And she is looking at that and the student protests and kinda the chaos in these high level college campuses and saying, it’s not really about free speech, that’s been sort of the right’s take on it a lot of the time. It’s more about that these students are elites, they have tremendous power and they are unwilling or don’t know how to assume the responsibility that comes with it. So you find them… I think, she gives an example of sort of super red Singaporean students who have been in the country for a few years marching around campus sort of protesting, declaring themselves people of color, as though that carries with it the same historical connotations as a black person whose family has been in America for the past 200 years or something like that. There’s all these bizarre sort of contortions in which people try to position themselves as the underdog. And usually the right just responds by mocking kind of like the obvious ridiculousness of it, but not looking at the deeper kind of elite pathology that is behind it.

0:14:12 JB: Yeah, I think one of the reasons I really don’t like mocking and I don’t like polemics, because with both of those routes the actual function is, kind of, to get clicks and rally your own side. But in terms of trying to increase consensus across groups, it doesn’t tend to work very well, and in fact, may submit the other side’s position simply because they don’t want to submit to mocking, right? Now if you come at this issue of these protests at Yale and you come at it from the ideology of… The ideological perspective that power is necessarily evil, and if you find yourself coming to the conclusion that you may have some power, first, you’re going to want to obscure power relations. You’re going to want to try and hide the fact that you have power. You’re going to want to spend all of your time attacking other people with power and saying they’re actually the ones with power, thereby sort of distorting the actual empirical landscape of who has power and who does not.

0:15:20 JB: And then while all these battles are taking place, the actual institutions are completely crumbling, because no one wants to kind of assume proper charge of them and say, “Yes, I have some power, I don’t have a ton of power, but I’m in charge of this institution and it’s my responsibility to lead it in a right and good and correct direction. And it’s not appropriate to attack me, simply because of the fact that I have power. I can be criticized for misusing this power, but these social attacks are encouraging me to completely shirk responsibility.” And essentially what happens is, well, at least currently, the trend is to not want to pick this fight of the individual in power versus the angry mob in sort of this sort of like game setup is almost individually rational every time for the single person in power to simply resign or to pretend that they don’t have power and I think this leads actually to a lot of dysfunction.

0:16:29 S1: Yeah, that makes sense, and it’s something that you can see in the church certainly. You see that happening where the underling, whether it’s a priest or lay person gets thrown under the bus or at least left without support from the Bishop and often the bishop will kind of act as though he doesn’t have power in order to allow that… The blame of the world to sorta devolve upon the person when the bishop should have stepped in and helped out or taken the responsibility upon himself by making a decision that the priest shouldn’t… The individual priest shouldn’t even be tasked with, if that makes sense.

0:17:14 JB: Yeah. Now to be fair, I wanna give a brief counter-argument here, which is, okay, suppose an elite comes and talks to me and says, I really like this idea. It makes complete sense, actually, but the reality is is that the social contract is broken down so much so that no one understands various elite topologies or different roles. And so, if I just announce myself as an elite say that, I don’t know, maybe you are in charge of a church, or maybe you are in charge of a company or something, you risk then being scapegoated for things that you have zero control over. Because in a society that doesn’t really know how to grapple with the concept of power very well. Power is in fact very widely distributed, and so, someone in some sense, can be an elite in some respects, but it’s not like they have control over interest rates of the Federal Reserve or something, right? And so, I kind of understand where they’re coming from, where maybe they understand the problem, but they don’t want to assume this responsibility, because people don’t have a good understanding of different elite roles, and so, they have a tendency to lump everything together and scapegoat any particular elite for the things that other elites have done.

0:18:38 JB: Let’s take the example of, I don’t know, Epstein, right, Jeffrey Epstein, where there will be this kind of general hatred directed at elites such that you don’t really want to announce yourself as a member of that class, because people are gonna say, “Oh, you must have hung out with Epstein, or maybe you do stuff like that, and we just don’t know about it.” And I guess part of this scapegoating mechanism is coming already, because there’s a real lack of trust between various classes in society. And so, you have to ask someone to make the first move in one direction or another. And I’m not going to say that I have the perfect solution to this, because I absolutely don’t, but it is an active topic of theory that we’re working on, how to sort of kickstart this social construct that’s kind of decayed for decades now, and that is something we spend a lot of time thinking about.

0:19:41 S1: Yeah, so this sort of power positivity, let’s cultivate the perspective of our responsible elite, as you describe it is an important theme in your publications, but let’s look at the broader situation. In your opening article for the magazine, you outline this crisis in the liberal order, the collapse of liberal ideologies and institutions, at the very least, the institutions, if not the ideologies yet or fully. And you describe your goal as coming to some kind of post-liberal synthesis. So first, why don’t you outline why it is that… I mean, I’m sure a lot of people listening will have their ideas about this, but why is it that you see a crisis in liberalism today?

0:20:37 JB: I think part of it is that it’s very difficult to separate liberalism from American and western institutions. And so, to the extent that American hegemony is declining on the world stage, I think you’re going to see a corresponding decline in liberalism, both domestically and internationally. And so, whether we like it or not, this sort of like attachment of the institutions and of liberalism has broad implications for the rest of the world, especially because a lot of the traditional predictions that have been sort of posited by liberalism have not come to pass. We’ve seen the rise of China and other countries growing in increasing ideological confidence and structural confidence and those countries are not liberalizing as they become wealthy, they are not becoming more democratic. And additionally, as you’re seeing the US continue to make more and more blunders, what we previously understood the international community to be, which is a broad coalition of Western countries and their allies and with the hope that it would keep expanding, that now seems to be actually shrinking pretty rapidly. One example I like to give is, a chart of a worldwide map of countries who are in support of China’s policy towards Muslim Uyghurs in the western part of its country, as opposed to the world map of countries who support countries who don’t, and increasingly countries are coming to support China instead of the “international community.”

0:22:29 JB: And so, I think this crisis is in part ideological, but the ideological crisis is partly being forced by the fact that international power relations are dramatically shifting. And as far as I can see, will continue to dramatically shift in the next five, 10 years in ways that we can’t even currently anticipate. And so, a crisis in liberalism if it’s purely philosophical can in fact last a really long time if the institutions are good, if the foreign policy is good, if the economy is good, but if you have failings on all three of those levels, then the philosophical components that didn’t quite fit together, or maybe don’t provide a good model of society in the individual or the community, it presents a real opportunity for a kind of upgrade of liberalism, not necessarily a full breaking from the tradition, because I’m not entirely sure that anyone knows what that would mean. But certainly this moment sort of suggests a period of deep self-reflection about how we need to upgrade our own ideology and how we need to upgrade our own structures, that our institutions can be revitalized and kept competitive and cutting edge. Because at the end of the day, I would like to see… I live in America, I would like to see America and the west do well.

0:24:03 JB: And so, that’s also part of my motivation in thinking about these topics period. Because, let’s just for example, throw in a concept that is not necessarily shared in rising non-liberal countries, which is human rights. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, but I should probably kick it back to you first, so, I don’t go on too long myself here.

0:24:28 S1: So, how are different groups of people responding to this crisis? I mean, from the people who are still like, solidly pro-liberal to the people who are rejecting it entirely, to the people who are favoring some sort of middle course?

0:24:46 JB: I think, I guess, one of the reasons we focused on China a bunch at the publication is that a lot of groups that might have traditionally been quite antagonistic together, if you talk to them individually, there are very few people who are genuinely interested in seeing America being ruled from Beijing. And so, that kind of looming threat and the very realistic possibility of continued sort of like Chinese soft power being projected into the US. And we saw this recently with the NBA scandal. This is causing a lot of groups, when you talk to them individually to come around to the idea that whatever we need to do structurally and ideologically to revitalize our institutions, this is a good path to go down, especially because at least from my perspective, I don’t see a lot of reason why we should adopt the position that we ought to be ruled from Beijing. And I think some of the people who do have that position are primarily motivated by spite, because they would like to see the existing system crash and burn, and they would like to see whatever comes next out of that. But I would say that number one, spite is not a great motivation for healthy change. And then second, we don’t know what rule from Beijing looks like, and we also don’t know what collapse looks like, except for the fact that it’s going to be really, really, really bad.

0:26:26 S1: Right. Yeah. Well, it’s never a response… It just goes to the point that revolution is not a responsible sort of approach, I mean, total revolution and much less just desire for a collapse simply out of hatred for the status quo with no particular desire to do the work to have something to replace the status quo.

0:26:52 JB: And this does worry me about the political situation in America, because you have a lot of groups both on the left and the right who are perhaps interested in seizing control of the state to punish their enemies or trying to tear it all down. But I would say the thing about revolutions is that the revolutions that are successful are because… Well, without going too detailed into the social science, I’ll just talk about the character of the revolutionaries themselves. Revolutionaries themselves don’t tend to be a responsible governing class. This is almost never the case. In fact, what follows revolutions is the governments is in shambles, and then everyone looks around at each other and says, “Alright, what are you good at?” And the guy to your right says, “I’m good at revolution.” And the guy to your left also says, “I’m good at revolution,” and then you say, “Well, we need a finance minister, does anyone [chuckle] here know anything about finance?” And the other guy says, “No, I only know how to do revolution, and actually I don’t like these questions, and so, since I’m good at revolution, I’m gonna overthrow you right now or tomorrow or next week, and we’re going to descend into a bloody state of affairs all over again.” And so, this is kind of the dynamic that drives a lot of the blood shed post-revolutions is that you’ve got a cadre of people in charge of the state now, and the only thing that they’re good at is more revolutions and more purity spiraling.

0:28:26 S1: What does post-liberal mean to you?

0:28:29 JB: I actually try not to invest too much into the label, because part of I think the job I see myself as doing at Palladium is opening up the conversation to a lot of different view points of whoever would like to contribute under that general project. I don’t myself see it as a particular ideology, but more as sort of like a meta framework for upgrading liberalism. I know that other people have wanted to attach more specific ideologies to the term post-liberal, in which case, I’d say that’s fine. Again, I’m not overly invested in labels, which is why I often now just say governance futurist, ’cause I don’t think that fighting over labels is particularly productive. But in order to say what I’m trying to communicate by that concept is just that, I would like a lot of different perspectives on how we can take the various good parts of liberalism and maybe graft on things… Maybe see different parts of that were incorrect and we can supplement it with new parts that are more functional, better social technologies. But I’m pretty open to just about anything around the liberal, post-liberal conversation.

0:29:54 S1: Sure, one of the things that you said in your opening piece was that it doesn’t mean illiberal. So a lot of people I suppose on the left too, but I know less about that. A lot of people on the right… Well, okay, it’s probably small groups of people to be honest, but more traditionally-minded people on the right are increasingly at least in Catholicism are rejecting liberalism wholesale. Some of them will qualify what they mean by liberalism a bit more, but a lot of them will just say, it’s essentially heresy. Modernity was a mistake and we need to revert to the Catholic monarchy or something. Why is that illiberalism not very productive?

0:30:36 JB: I mean, it’s nice to have really good goals, I guess, and I’m happy to talk to everyone who at least has as far as I can see, good intentions about the thing. But in terms of our political traditions, I tend to think that liberalism is pretty baked into the mythos of the West for something like the last 400 years at least. And so, it’s very difficult to imagine…

0:31:05 JB: You snap your fingers and you say would it necessarily look like to transition to an idealized illiberal state, especially when you’re governing a polity that is very ethnically diverse, very religiously diverse and that has certain fundamental assumptions about the way the state should be run, about power, about individuals. I’m not saying that they’re even necessarily wrong. Of course, I would publish their perspectives, absolutely. I think they have very interesting things to say. But I would say that there are certain concepts that perhaps liberalism has done a decent job at, namely allowing a certain amount of individualism to allow experimentation. And maybe this increases entropy in the system, increases some amount of disorder, as a result of maybe very strong standards of free speech, or something for example. But wholesale replacements very quickly, I am kind of skeptical on it. And this is almost less a pure philosophical objection and more a matter of there’s no such thing as philosophy without grounding it in the current realities that we live in. And so I would say I would not floor the gas too much on ‘error has no rights,’ this concept that error has no rights, because we don’t exactly know…

0:32:32 JB: It’s actually very easy to say ‘error has no rights,’ but it’s very difficult to imagine then how we would run a functioning United States of America tomorrow under that philosophy and how we could do it in a sane and responsible way. Obviously, it’s possible that it could be done, and I’m not condemning necessarily wholesale regimes from beyond 400 years ago. I’m saying that extreme caution is warranted because we don’t really know what it means yet to fully overturn the liberal order, and we should do… We shouldn’t race ourselves into it.

0:33:17 S1: Sure. Well Chesterton’s fence applies to liberalism as sort of revolutionary as liberalism itself was. And maybe it doesn’t have any right to claim Chesterton’s fence for itself, but it’s still there at this point after 400 years. When you talk about ‘error has no rights,’ yes, it is easy to say that. But you also have to take into account, what are the predominant social and moral and spiritual trends in our society right now? And sort of increasing intolerance in a way is not necessarily going to have the best outcome for the truth at this point in time.

0:33:55 JB: Yeah, and I think also one of the concepts to come out of the 20th century liberalism in particular is important not to jettison without too much thought and that’s the concept of human rights. And without getting into too much of a debate about the strong existence of human rights or just rights in general prior to liberalism, you kind of see the merger of and redevelopment of human rights in the post-World War II era. This is for a good reason, given the horrors of mechanized warfare and atrocities inflicted on European populations, Jews, other minorities, etcetera. And so basically you have this kind of institutional consensus about how states ought to treat their citizens and under what conditions can that sovereignty be abrogated or alienated if there are egregious human rights violations. And so a lot of people in the sort of like post-liberal illiberal political philosophy scene like to just throw out the concept completely, and maybe that’s philosophically correct. But I tend to think of these issues as a matter of social technology more so than philosophy. And so if you’re to totally jettison human rights tomorrow, in fact what is the replacement social technology to make sure that we avoid the horrors of the 20th century?

0:35:30 JB: And I want it to be fully worked out, and I would like it to be done in such a way that institutional transitions could be fairly seamless then, because you don’t want to come to the conclusion that human rights actually don’t exist because even what could those things possibly be. Are they abstract objects? How could they possibly impose moral obligation if they’re abstract entities like the number three. Does the number three impose moral obligations? You could dissolve human rights in a number of acid-baths, and that’s just one of them. But again, my experience over the past five years in particular has caused me to be very skeptical of very sudden moves on the state level and on these crucial social technologies that people have really come to depend on. And so I think, yes, there’s room for innovation. We should push towards innovation, but we should be cautious and responsible about it as much as possible.

0:36:33 S1: Yeah. That makes sense to me. So you’ve talked about the geopolitical things a little bit already, but there is this kind of broad debate about nationalism and globalism. I don’t know if there’s anybody who actually identifies themselves as a globalist. I could be wrong. You hear the nationalists.

0:36:53 JB: There are.

0:36:55 S1: There are? Okay.

0:36:56 JB: Yep. Oh yeah, for sure.

0:36:57 S1: So yeah, I’m more used to hearing it used by nationalists to describe others. But maybe we can talk in a little bit more detail about something you referenced before with these other types of regimes and other types of societies becoming more powerful or in some cases such as Hungary and maybe Poland, previously more liberal democratic regimes transitioning to something that we would consider more illiberal.

0:37:30 JB: Right, so I think the basic cosmopolitan nationalist divide is something like this. On some cosmopolitan views, you would posit that borders are essentially arbitrary, morally speaking. And so there’s no distinction in moral worth between persons in different states. And so when making decisions in one state or another… In no sense is it permissible to prioritize your own citizens or your own group over the concerns of everyone in the world. So you end up with various utilitarian calculuses or just a sort of… Not even necessarily utilitarian, but your moral community is the entire world. And so, from that perspective, you can see why people would be very concerned with, there are many reasons for it, but many different reasons for it, why they might be concerned with spreading liberalism, spreading democracy, open borders.

0:38:34 JB: And of course, there are good economic arguments for open borders that I’ve heard as well, that people have made. And to contrast that, in some cases, the nationalist position would be that in fact because we are not beings in a vat, the very fact of our material circumstances and the existence of different groups with different political objectives, necessitates a series of concentric moral circles of concern. So from the lowest, you might have individual and then family and then you have different sets of obligations there. Maybe you have primary obligations to family over community or community over state or… There are various different ways of stacking these circles or modifying or changing them.

0:39:28 JB: But generally, this kind of position entails that you hold that the citizens in your polity have a certain priority over the citizens in other polities. And this is not necessarily extremely radical. You can find this in the thought of John Rawls, for example. He is not in favor of open borders, for example. He’s not a complete moral cosmopolitan. And so I know there are, in fact, many different ways to conceive of cosmopolitanism, many different ways to conceive of nationalism and that set of concentric circles I talked about. The ordering can be very different, depending on the particular thinker. But it does tend to have a concept of rootedness. So instead of pure abstract moral principles, it’s says, “No. We have these principles and we have concrete circumstances that we apply them to, like a programming function, which produces moral outputs.” And without getting too much more into this monologue that’s kind of the basic difference that you tend to see.

0:40:39 S1: In his book that I mentioned earlier, Yves Simon talks about how modernity has kind of wanted to do away with authority and replace it with a perfectly scientific kind of administration. So if every decision, if the best possible decision can always be known scientifically, even if we don’t have the technology or the research done to know it yet, if in theory, it can be known, then there’s no need for authority, sort of qua authority. The experts would be the authority, but it’s not… Supposedly it would not be they that have the authority, it would be simply the science that they bear witness to. So the reason I mentioned that is that he talks about how we want to sort of dismiss anything that is arbitrary to some degree or contingent or not rationally determined like a set of borders, like the capital of a state or a country, these things that may have great meaning that are embedded in history and contingency, but are not abstractly scientifically determinable. That does not mean that they don’t have importance.

0:41:52 JB: Yeah, so there are two ways to approach this. Number one, you can be a logical positivist and you can say that in fact, these values have no truth content, no cognitive content whatsoever. And that they are simply reducible to Yay X or Boo X. On the other hand, you can say, in fact there is a real objective way to understand these values and these values do have deep ontological meaning. They actually have a firm truth content and basis somewhere in reality. And then from that, you can say, “Well then, we should have states governed by pure reason. And we should have statesmen who basically assemble something like Plato’s Republic, where we sit in a room and… I’m not necessarily saying that this is maybe Plato’s Republic isn’t the greatest example here to be technically precise. But let’s say we have these statesmen in a room and we say, “These moral values, they’re objective, they’re knowable, and we specifically are capable of knowing them through pure reason. And so, we’re gonna derive them. They’re universally applicable, and we’re going to impose them on everyone else without exception.” I think that’s kind of the wrong way to view moral decision-making in some sense.

0:43:22 JB: Morality is just not as mathematically precise. It’s a lot more fuzzy. And I would be very suspicious of any particular elite class coming to the table with the hubris that they have epistemic access to these values and other people don’t. And other people may protest, but of course they’re wrong and we won’t listen to them. And we’ll keep imposing them. But let’s say that morality in the state is about promoting human flourishing. Is there a mathematical way to to determine what human flourishing means exactly or what flourishing in a particular polity looks like?

0:44:05 JB: No, again, it’s not something… The methodology of trying to, again, derive these answers from pure reason is not correct. It is incredibly contextual, and it’s about balancing the different concerns of different groups. Because if you don’t have in a society complete 100% homogeneity, and you’ll never have that no matter what, even if it’s the same religion, even if it’s the same ethnic group, you will have different competing conceptions of flourishing. And it is the job of the statesman to be less a philosopher and be more a judge. A judge is the one, at the end of the day, that is forced to make decisions and employs philosophy as part of this practical reasoning exercise. But it’s done through considering local circumstances and balancing harms to community. And that’s not something that can be produced by a robot. You can’t have an AI kind of replace the role of a judge in this respect. Human judgment is not… I don’t consider it to be reducible. And so when I think about statesmen and stateswomen making these decisions, I think about it much more from the perspective of the judge as opposed to the pure philosopher king.

0:45:34 S1: Yeah, that certainly makes sense. And I’m now going to try to wean myself from that response to an interviewees statement when I have nothing else to say. But there was a great article that you had in Palladium about Viktor Orban’s Hungary. And granted that Viktor Orban’s government, perhaps, does certain things that we wouldn’t approve of. Maybe, its border controls are too strict. They’re entitled to be strict. Maybe, they’re too strict. I don’t know. The government control of sectors of the media, certainly something to be concerned about. But there’s a lot more to it than that, and why do you think that it is that western elites and media are so eager to apply the word fascist to a country like Hungary and a regime like Orban’s?

0:46:28 JB: I mean, that might be partly because it works, and people tend to use power words that work. And I think we mostly have consensus that fascism was bad in the 20th century and produced a lot of bodies. And so no one really wants a repeat of that. And so, when you’re calling a regime fascist, it suggests that they ought to take that seriously and get their act together. Of course, from their perspective, maybe from the perspective of the Hungarians and Orban’s ruling party, in fact, these distinctions of regimes actually seriously matter. And so as far as I can tell, they prefer to think of themselves as somewhat an illiberal democracy or a non-liberal democracy or a Christian democracy or something like this. And so, if you can… For some people calling them an illiberal democracy is bad enough. But if we can genuinely think that that’s a better descriptor, I’m in favor of using that over just fascist or something because that’s kind of a word that you use when you’re being a political soldier. And those aren’t really the conversations we have at Palladium. They’re different kinds of conversations where we’re not doing political soldiering. And so we try not to be overly inflammatory when describing regimes. And sometimes this inevitably will upset one side over the other, and that often switches which side is upset.

0:48:05 JB: But I think it’s important that at least somewhere we not be over the top with just soldiering so that we can actually get to the truth of the matter as much as possible. But in Hungary in some sense they do have a spirit of reactionary traditionalism there. There’s no doubt. But again as the article notes, depending on who you ask, it’s “Christian Europe’s last hope.” But you ask other people and they say, “Well, look. [chuckle] If you look at a map of Europe, actually Hungary has the highest per capita amount of porn stars. So, not to mention the fact that Budapest is full of people with tattoos and exotic piercing and mini skirts. So what are we to say about Hungary? How do we make sense of it?” I think it’s something like as the article notes, it’s a bit of a reversion to it’s, I don’t wanna say, natural state, but it’s more historically rooted state. And so maybe we call it like a transitional democracy or I wouldn’t quite call it a competitive autocracy. We can, again, disagree on the names. But I think in general what’s happening in Hungary is pretty interesting, which is that they’re doing what they always kind of wanted to do to a certain extent, especially because there’s a lot of popular support for the reigning party, currently.

0:49:35 JB: And the European Union is experiencing its own crisis of legitimacy. And so you’re seeing these countries on the periphery, who were never fully included in the liberal democratic order in the way that maybe like England and France and Germany were, you’re seeing these reversions on the periphery. And I think that, at least as far as that’s concerned, it’s difficult for people to disagree with that.

0:50:01 S1: Yeah, whether it’s Hungary… You could give a list of countries. Some of them are more powerful than others. Hungary, Russia, Poland, China, all of these nations have different approaches to being different than us, let’s say, which tends to rub us the wrong way. So, in Hungary one of the big things is that Christianity as necessary to the flourishing of the nation is written into the Constitution, prohibition of gay marriage and abortion are I believe both written into their constitution. In Poland, the situation is also complex. There’s a lot of different movements in different directions as I understand it. And it may not be a flat victory for the traditionalists there at this time, but they recently made working on Sunday illegal, I believe. These are things that when William Barr the Attorney General makes his speech, talking about the importance of Christianity to many of the founding fathers, that itself is treated almost as fascism. So much less writing it into the constitution, that’s something that produces a great deal of alarm in our mainstream society. China is another nation that has received a bit of attention in your pieces. There was an interesting article on house churches in China, which kind of… That certainly touches on some of the less desirable aspects of living in China.

0:51:36 S1: But you also had a more recent piece on how China seems to be now beating out the United States in certain ways as to quality of life, not universally, not in every part of China. And certainly, there’s human rights problems. Certainly, there’s problems with the Communist government. There’s problems with freedom of religion. There’s a lot of problems. There’s a lot of abuses, and yet this author talks about this striking upward trend in Chinese quality of life and Chinese morale. And it’s simply trying to kind of say that we should pay attention to that. And she’s simultaneously kind of trying to defuse the immediate objections that that will meet, given the US’s attitude towards China historically and its increasingly threatened posture towards China now. What can we learn from a place like China? What are they doing differently, broadly speaking, that we could emulate in certain ways, if not imitating their mistakes?

0:52:43 JB: So first, I guess I want to talk a little bit about what the point of this piece was, because people tended to interpret it differently. Some people thought it was sort of like a Walter Durant style justification of the Communist regime of China. And in fact, “Hey, everything’s great, and there’s nothing wrong. And America sucks, and China is really the best. You should think about moving there. You should all think about moving there.” That was not really the point of the piece from my perspective. What I wanted to capture is that people don’t understand the extent to which China is really rapidly rising. And people are using moral reactions to what I agree are morally noxious events in China. They’re using those moral reactions as a substitute for thinking about, why is it the case that China is rising the way that it is? And so I did not want to spend most of the piece dwelling on oppression of Uyghurs, for example. We, in fact, already covered that. We were some of the first people to have writers on the ground in this most recent news cycle of Xinjiang over the past year. We had people writing about that there as well.

0:54:05 JB: And yes, the surveillance state there is absolutely brutal and absolutely aggressive. If we end the story there, we sort of sit back on our laurels and enjoy our ego thinking that, “Isn’t it great to be morally superior.” And in a sense, it is important to feel that you’re doing the right thing and that your country is doing the right thing. But I don’t want that to be a substitute in any way for ignoring the things that, perhaps, China is doing better than us at, like for instance, espionage. China is incredibly good at espionage, particularly industrial espionage. And that is one of the key reasons behind their success, is that they end up stealing a lot of our intellectual property. And then they’re really good at reproducing that research and manufacturing it on a mass scale. And they’ve got a great industrial policy. They’re doing quite well on foreign policy. Obviously, the Belt and Road has serious problems and no one would deny this. But again, it’s not really a matter of, “X program of the Chinese government is dysfunctional.” What matters is sort of like the macro level game of is China-broadly eating our lunch in foreign policy, in industrial policy, in economic growth, in the number of people brought out of poverty, in the innovation, in the amount of time that they can deliver food to your door, certainly faster than what I can do here in San Francisco.

0:55:56 JB: And then the fact that the Chinese have a level of trust in their public institutions and government that, in fact, is quite enviable here. And given the scale of rapid improvements in China in many areas, there is a sense of optimism in the population and excitement about what comes next. Whereas in America, its democracy is over. We live under a terrible regime. One way or another, no matter who gets in, we don’t trust the government. In fact, we don’t trust almost any public institution now, except for maybe the military. And this broader sense of optimism is kind of not really there in the way that it might have been there during say Apollo for example, the space race and the rise of the American Dream in the post-World War II American landscape. And so this piece was sort of like a nuking of the American ego and saying, “Come on. If we really do not take these problems seriously, we’re going to wake up faster than you think in five, in 10 years. And the world is going to look very, very different.” And these complaints about human rights, if there is no fundamental institutional higher power on the world stage behind them, will in fact become totally meaningless. And it won’t matter, even in the slightest because those other regimes will kowtow to China in the same way that the NBA did domestically as a corporation.

0:57:46 S1: Yeah, the point is not that America is such a miserable place to live in terms of material well-being. Even what we call poor people in America are still a lot better off than a great deal of the rest of the world. So I’ve never been one to… Not that there aren’t problems or injustices, but I’ve never been one to sort of buy into the idea that it’s like horrible now and we have this vast permanent underclass. But the point about the optimism certainly strikes me, and the relationship with authority. Now, I’m sure there’s a lot of things you can get into. I’m sure that many Chinese people distrust the government in certain areas. But yeah, it does seem to be, based on this article, that at least with regards to quality of life type issues for a large part of the population there is a sort of a trust and optimism and a sort of a sense of working together as a society towards a certain goal. I certainly don’t think that we have that in America. It’s not something that I grew up with, having a strong sense of sort of national identity or common good or anything like that.

0:59:00 S1: It’s a concept that has seemed meaningless to me for most of my life. The common good, that sounds like a weasel word if I ever heard one. I’ve only just started really dealing with that. So I think yeah, it does seem to be more, in some ways, more philosophical. I don’t mean in an abstract sense, but in the sense of these different relationships and uses of state power produce at least in certain areas, a different way of thinking.

0:59:30 JB: That’s right, and I think it’s really important to understand the different ways in which China is developing and how it governs itself, and what the structure of the party looks like, and what their influence in America looks like, and how the elites of both countries can come to some kind of understanding about what the future looks like. And if the American elites demand that we are going to live in a unipolar American-led world, I am not sure that that’s going to work out very well. I think it’s almost too late for that, barring some potentially, absolutely, terrible world war between China and the US that could result in untold destruction. It seems that we’re moving into a multi-polar world, no matter what. And so whatever we need to do to adjust ourselves to that or to at least improve our position, that would seem like a good thing to do. And certainly there are in a multipolar world… That kind of entails the necessity of cooperation on issues that concern states, between states, like issues of AI, environmental issues, technological issues, economic issues, humanitarian issues. I think often about how hard we are on ourselves about taking care of the environment and being good stewards of it.

1:01:07 JB: And I think that is generally the correct approach. But in fact, if we do not take seriously the environmental… The fact that ecology does not correspond to closed borders… That’s not how ecological systems work. We realize that in fact, obviously… And everyone knows this, pollution is a massive global problem. Cooperation is absolutely necessary, barring a world state. And a lot of the pollution and a lot of the plastic flowing down the rivers for example is coming from China. Like the amount of waste generated, so much of it is coming from China. And so we have no choice at this point, we can’t just simply dictate to them. We don’t have a viceroy who’s running China to clamp down on this pollution, maybe, the way we would like. And so, it’s up to their ruling elite to take care of that. And they actually are trying to take care of it and both of our elites to work together on global issues relating to environmental problems.

1:02:15 S1: There’s a lot more. I mean that there’s a really interesting range of topics you deal with in the magazine. I mean, there was a pretty interesting article about video game addiction, and how maybe we should consider that this is a social problem that the state may have some role in addressing. This is something that sort of the conventional conservative classical liberal wisdom is sort of averse to. So some of the pieces offer more concrete attempts at solutions. Others of them are just sort of opening gestures. And of course the magazine is pretty new. Some of them are just sort of opening statements like, “Well, let’s look at some problems where… And try to clear away the assumptions that the state has no role to play here, or that we couldn’t do this better than we’re doing and we just kind of have to address it on an individualistic level.” I would like to ask about where you see the role of subsidiarity in this. There’s a lot of positive attitude towards the responsible use of power in the state in the magazine. Where do you kind of draw limits? Is there any intention that you have to have some pieces exploring the limits of the use of this power, or is it more that you see the need to push in the other direction?

1:03:35 JB: I partly see the need to push in the other direction. But as far as subsidiarity is concerned, which is the idea that decisions as much as possible should be made on the local level because you want decisions to be as close as possible to the people who are affected by them. In fact, all well-functioning organizations that are complex and that are at scale have a subsidiarity, right? You cannot run an organization with one person at the top who’s an all-seeing mind, who’s… We haven’t gotten to the point where we have AI gods who are running our corporations, and I frankly hope we don’t get there but… So in every well-functioning complex organization, you do have subsidiarity. It can be either granted or taken. And if there’s harmony among the levels of power or the classes in the organization, then of course it makes sense to delegate power because then you’re able to have local-level decisions that are more attuned to local knowledge. If subsidiarity needs to be seized or taken, this is kind of already indicative of some level of deep disunity and dysfunction. And in that case, one of the most important tasks is to try and repair this divide if possible because it is the more fundamental necessary pre-condition of subsidiarity functioning well in the first place.

1:05:10 JB: And the application of this, again, as I always emphasize, depends on concretes. How subsidiarity looks will look different in every organization, even if the principle’s operating similarly. If a local group is incompetent, if that’s your judgment, maybe it doesn’t deserve downward delegation. If the local group is morally questionable, again, it may not deserve that delegation. How exactly this relationship looks is something that has to be assessed, based on the performance of the higher authorities in that organization and the lower authorities in that organization. So I guess I would say subsidiarity… I don’t know that many people, who would actually disagree with the concept. It’s a pretty commonsensical concept. And I would say I definitely myself take it very seriously, but I look at the pre-conditions first to see how that modulates subsidiarity in an organization. And it’s those pre-conditions that end up consuming a lot of my thoughts to see how we can improve those. And basically, I integrate this into my understanding of role-based morality, which has been a little bit lost, I think.

1:06:37 JB: And so, in organizations, in societies, your fundamental moral duty… Maybe not the fundamental, obviously, but a fundamental moral duty is to figure out explicitly what your current place and role in society is? To figure out what the privileges and obligations of that role are? And to fulfill that role to the best of your ability because we are all occupying a station and we need to execute that station faithfully and to the best of our ability. And I find that in fact this view of what you owe to society, for a lot of people, when I’ve talked to them about this, it’s caused them to relax and be more at ease, psychologically because current Utopian political ideologies posit this unattainable society. And if you rig up your psychology to that ideology, the end result is actually one of complete psychological torment because you can’t be happy or satisfied until you get there. And then I think that’s a situation of an ideology just using and discarding you. I think it’s, to put rough numbers on it, maybe it’s much more of an 80–20 situation where of course it’s important and even necessary to have beautiful visions of a bright future for everyone.

1:08:10 JB: But if you put 80% in fulfilling your station and deriving satisfaction from that and 20% in working towards a brighter future on a societal level, obviously, I’m not sure on the exact correct ratio, but I definitely think that that’s a move in the right direction. It strikes me as taking a lot of the good things from Confucianism and patching them over our current maybe more, I don’t even know if I would call it the liberalism of political ideologies and activism, but I think this Confucian update is actually really important.

1:08:48 S1: So speaking of religion, to make a transition, you told me earlier the wonderful news that you are in the process of becoming Catholic. And so that would make you the second out of… Two out of three of the editors will be Catholic once you’re in the church. How has that journey overlapped with and interacted with your thinking on the matters that we’ve been discussing.

1:09:15 JB: Deeply influential, I would say. I think to give some more context. I finally pushed the button to start the process of becoming Catholic earlier this summer after about four to five years of wrestling with the question of… Reading the books, thinking about the arguments, grappling with them seriously, pushing back and forth philosophically, coming up with counter-thought experiments and abandoning those counter-thought experiments later, and obviously also a whole lot of moral development. And that kind of culminated in my satisfaction with my understanding of what I was getting into and the thoughts, which led me to develop I think morally in the right direction. And philosophically, I’ve kind of been deeply influential on the magazine itself, although obviously it’s not a Catholic magazine simply because we have a broader message and broader base of writers and readers and so on. But that is kind of where I come from, personally. And it’s been quite the process, lots of reading of Aquinas, lots of reading of the Church Fathers, attendance of The Mass itself. And without naming any names, I’d like to credit the people, who had those years-long conversations with me about the process until I finally got there. So that’s currently where I’m at now.

1:10:58 S1: What is it that you do as a day job?

1:11:01 JB: Well, I’m currently a graduate student. And so a lot of my time goes into my graduate studies. And then some of that time on the side when I’m not doing sports or playing music or various other activities, I’ll do podcasts. I’ll do Palladium and other sorts of things.

1:11:22 S1: Gotcha. And you’re based in San Francisco, right?

1:11:25 JB: That’s correct, yes. Yeah, it’s [chuckle] quite the city to be discussing problems of governance in. A lot of people locally have taken to our message pretty seriously, especially given the fact that we’ve recently had statewide power outages and it seems that as far as the utility company is concerned, we’ll probably have to have rolling blackouts for the next 10 years in order to contain the fires.

1:11:57 S1: Okay, so I wanted to ask about your readership. Do you have a sense of who’s reading Palladium at this time?

1:12:06 JB: I mean, a lot of it is… We get a lot of Ivy League students reading our work. A lot of our traffic comes from San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, sometimes Washington, DC, as well. And they tend to be people who are interested in serious analysis that’s charitable and ecumenical and not overly hysterical or polemical and who recognize that intellectual exploration can be messy. Sometimes we get the wrong answers. That’s what I really like about Palladium is that it’s not so much as a particularly correct answer or line that we enforce, but that it’s a meta framework under which a lot of different conversations can be had. And to a certain extent, that is a “line,” but the amount of material that can fit within that framework covers a lot of different competing and interesting perspectives that I really like to see. We have readership among neo-Liberals, among secular people, among Catholics, a lot among Muslims, a lot among innovators, entrepreneurs, philosophers, people who are interested in grappling seriously with questions of the future of liberalism, where it is we’re going, international relations, revitalizing institutions, optimism and good quality journalism.

1:13:50 S1: You told me in an email that you have a lot of Sunni Islam readers.

1:13:54 JB: Yeah, that’s right. I love my Sunni Islam readers. And I would actually really enjoy to get some more content from them as well, specifically their conceptions on what a post-Liberal system without “human rights” looks like, that still respects the flourishing of various ethnic minorities in a country and their religious rights as well, and also kind of their perspective on Western individualism, maybe from a sort of narrative perspective as well and what it is for this to become embodied in a battle between, let’s say, Muslim-diaspora populations in the US and institutions that are trying to liberalize them. There is this battle that’s going on. I would love to hear more about that because, to a certain extent, a lot of them don’t want to assimilate to Liberalism because they’re concerned that, in fact, Liberalism is not best for their flourishing. They’re convinced that various folk ways or an emphasis on the authority of the community is much more important than individualism and the right of the individual to express whatever it is that they want to express and choose their own morality and come to their own beliefs on that. It’s a difficult question. And I would love them to submit some content on that, so we can have a further discussion on the topic.

1:15:37 S1: Well, yeah, it’s an interesting problem because I think about the problem of assimilation. And I want, I think, I want immigrants to assimilate. And then I’m like, “Wait, but what are they assimilating to? American post-modern nihilism? What? So it’s really a difficult problem.

1:15:58 JB: Yeah, it’s not so simple to say that you want assimilation. I’m not… Again…

1:16:06 JB: There are a lot of debates currently about assimilation and who’s supposed to be in this country and who’s not and what even is this country. Put aside from that, if you take one step up the ladder of abstraction, you ask yourself, “What does it even mean to assimilate? What exactly are they assimilating to? Is it good for them to assimilate to that?” And in some cases, I would say, “Probably not,” because I’ve talked about this previously on other podcasts. Liberalism has a very small box for the world historical religions to fit in. And it might tell all of them that being in the box is the same thing as the fullest expression of that religion, and I think that’s not even close to being true. And so it’s a question of, “Who is going to win the battle of convincing members of this community that the box either comports or does not comport with the fullest expression of that religion.” Again, this is… The topics we’ve covered on this podcasts are incredibly difficult topics. And I’ve tried to shed some light on my current thinking in the different areas.

1:17:32 JB: But again, I could get a piece, and I often do, submitted to me. And I read it, and I say, “This has totally updated my thinking on the issue,” because the problems that we’re grappling with are not problems that a single person can have a full grasp on. And it’s important to approach these issues with the right intentions, tolerance for philosophical exploration and mistakes, honest, level-headed conversations and a commitment to truth and goodness. And then you follow that path and you see where it leads.

1:18:07 S1: How do these Sunni readers find you?

1:18:09 JB: I actually don’t know. [chuckle] Basically, I think it might be, if you use the term like post-liberal or illiberal or something like this or if people see you being charitable or taking seriously different conceptions of traditionalism, well, they wanna hear more of what you have to say and kind of wanna be in dialogue with you. And that’s probably kind of the impetus for that, but of course I have a lot of love for the Shia Muslims as well. [laughter] It’s not just the Sunni. That just tends to be more of what our fan base is currently. But I’d like to see it diversified even more.

1:18:54 S1: Okay, Jonah, it was a really interesting conversation. And I definitely wish you and your magazine’s project the best and certainly you, personally, in your journey into the Catholic church.

1:19:07 JB: Thank you so much, it’s been an absolute pleasure to be on the podcast.