I recently wrote a piece for Erraticus on the more granular-level dynamics of precisely how technology is destroying communities and social life.

As always, given space constraints and the necessity of cutting tangents, I wanted to add a little bit of extra rambling detail because I had to make do with a self-imposed limit of around 2,000 words, and 2,000 words isn’t enough, but it’s a start. In fact, there are many more books to be written on the subject that take the problem more seriously than some combination of “isn’t tech bad,” and “just grayscale your phone.” You probably have to throw out most of the ones published on this subject over the last ten years because, as I noted in the piece itself, they don’t understand how liberalism enables the concentration of human capital for the specific purpose of undermining individual agency to generate a profit. They also don’t understand that the solution to this new frame of the situation is not going to be handled on the individual level in any kind of effective way that scales. That means the solution has to be communal, not individual, for two reasons: 1) individuals have limited ability to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and 2) even if an individual manages to free himself, no one else has, so this does not solve the problem of cratered social fabric.

It’s even worse than trying to switch out from using cars. Smartphones are far more ubiquitous than cars and even more necessary to life than cars. I’ve never even owned a car, and I’m now in my late 20s. Between public transit, uber, and planes, I can get to where I want, though it does noticeably limit my radius.

But it’s worse than that. One angle I did not explore in the piece is the geopolitical angle. In competition for hegemony in the international arena, it is simply not possible to remain in the ring while simultaneously rolling back the car and the smartphone and other technological advances that have become essential to modernity. To do so is to automatically forfeit hegemony, since collective tech disarmament is even more improbable than nuclear disarmament or collective agreements on emissions targets.

It’s possible that states can engage in half-measures, but it’s not clear what those look like, and current Western states don’t have the capacity to address the problem at all.

Another possible solution, pioneered by an infamous former math professor now sitting in ADX Florence, is violence. Ted Kaczynski tried to usher in the end of the industrial-technological system through adopting revolutionary violence and sending bombs to targets he thought were key to the system’s maintenance.

As he argued:

“In a general way, I think what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they’re going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions?”

But Kaczynski was deeply wrong, just like so many other radicals taken in by political violence in America have been, like the Weather Underground or the Manson Family. These groups tend to believe that American society is on the brink of collapse and merely needs a slight push, in order to provoke a complete reset that couldn’t be achieved through mere reform. But American society as a whole is remarkably robust, and the intense phenomenology of societal breakdown and collapse is a product of particular social circles epistemically closed off and cloistered from the rest of society.

In addition, the industrial-technological system can fight back, and it did in Kaczynski’s case.

Moreover, this kind of violence seems obviously immoral.

So, what’s the solution? I listed some of my thoughts on what the form of solution will take, or rather some prerequisites for the solution to come about, but I don’t think there can be a single one, and both moving past context-dependent freedom from technology and scaling will be major challenges. I look forward to seeing what people engineer, but no doubt, new attempts in this area will be seen as very extremist and hated by much of the rest of society which is now so thoroughly integrated in the industrial-technological system that to separate oneself is like severing a limb.

That’s all for now.

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.

I recently went on the podcast Catholic Culture to discuss Palladium Magazine and some of my stream of consciousness thoughts on political theory, liberalism, geopolitics, right/moral intentionality, Confucianism, and much more. I decided to go on a Catholic podcast because it’s important to me to have pluralistic participation in as many communities as possible.

Podcasts are a good format for thinking out loud. I need to listen to the audio again, as I’m sure in the process I uncovered some belief in some background mental structure in my mind somewhere that I’m not actually sure about. It’s this process of excavation, which often only takes place through extended, stream of consciousness discussion, that is useful for refining one’s thoughts. To me, that’s what podcasts are for — not definitive statements, since the format is too extemporaneous, but rather for musings right in the moment that should later be refined, adapted, rejected, or updated.

I’ll probably post transcript excerpts here when I have some time. In the meantime, have a listen.

Human rights have functioned as an important social technology in the 20th century — as an attempt to constrain the behavior of states with respect to their citizens. But the concept of human rights, as I’ve previously noted, suggests a post-Westphalian international order, and according to strict standards of human rights, every modern state is guilty. This leads inevitably to the problem that if every state is guilty, there always exists some pretext for military intervention and abrogation of sovereignty, and it frequently is the case that military interventions on articulated humanitarian grounds often suspiciously line up with the intervening state’s geopolitical interests. In this way, human rights provide a legitimating cover for what the state wanted to do in the first place.

This is natural and unsurprising behavior from states.

One helpful test in this area might be called the intervener’s test: since every modern state is guilty of human rights violations, why is it that intervention takes place in one state X over the other state Y?

As I showed in my last post, it’s not hard to sit down and sketch out a plausible moral case for humanitarian intervention, even for something like the Iraq War. Many public intellectuals across the political spectrum did so in the early 2000s, and they convinced a lot of people.

But was the intervention fundamentally about the moral case for humanitarianism? Was it really about stopping genocide of Marsh Arabs and Kurds? Or was it about more primary geopolitical interests, and humanitarian considerations were sort of just tacked on ex-post-facto to add some persuasive power?

The U.S. invasion and subsequent post-war reconstruction of Iraq from March 2003 to the present is now widely considered to be a failure. Post-mortems on the decision-making landscape prior to the war number in the tens of thousands of pages, and blame for the invasion is often placed on the intelligence community (IC). According to this particular conception of the Iraq War, the IC did not abide by “good social science practices,” succumbed to confirmation bias, and ignored negative evidence, among other traditional reasoning errors, which led the Bush administration to make decisions based on faulty intelligence. Such a view is not necessarily wrong, but ignores the much larger picture on why the U.S. went to war, which consists of a confluence of factors that came together at an opportune historical moment.

It seems clear that neither intelligence, nor primary concern for humanitarianism, played a decisive role in the decision to go to war against Iraq. Rather, the evidence indicates that officials occupying key positions in the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, who were responsible for moving the war effort forward, had already articulated the desire to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein for a variety of motivations, namely democracy promotion, reversing the perception of American weakness in the Middle East, and reassuring regional allies, among others. These officials intended to invade Iraq with or without persuasive intelligence. The 9/11 al-Qaida attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were crucial in moving the process along for these pre-existing policy objectives, as public preferences shifted in favor of aggressive responses and war skeptics in the Bush administration lost credibility.

After 9/11, the administration was immediately on board with military-driven regime change and aggressively promoted the case for war in a less than scrupulous manner by inflating threats out of proportion, steering around the IC by creating its own intelligence apparatus, repeatedly relying on discredited intelligence, and exerting pressure on the IC to come to preferred conclusions. Intelligence reports, in contrast, offered no new information on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) after 9/11 that could contribute to the war decision, and the existing intelligence available was outdated and lacking high-quality human intelligence (HUMINT) from Saddam’s closed regime. Intelligence reports alone did not suggest any necessity for military intervention. Moreover, the IC did not exercise any theoretical veto power it might have had over the war decision via leaks to the media or major resignations, instead complaining privately about the administration’s insertion of bogus claims in public speeches and at other times compromising with the administration’s goals.

There is evidence to suggest that even prior to 9/11, the administration was gradually updating in favor of more aggressive responses against Iraq. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, who served in President George W. Bush’s “War Cabinet,” stated that the administration began to make plans for a possible Iraq invasion days after Bush’s inauguration speech. According to O’Neill, “From the beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.” As one member of the Clinton administration who also sat in with O’Neill on Bush administration National Security Council meetings noted, “In the Clinton administration, there was an enormous reluctance to use American forces on the ground…That prohibition was clearly gone, and that opened options, options that hadn’t been opened before.”

The Bush administration’s early consideration of an invasion reflected the growing influence of a small group of neoconservatives, who had been promoting regime change in Iraq at least since the late 1990s primarily through the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think tank founded in 1997. In 1998, 18 signatories on a PNAC letter to President Bill Clinton called for regime change in Iraq, arguing that the policy to contain Saddam Hussein had failed, as Saddam had successfully thwarted UN weapons inspections. The signatories warned about the illusion of peace after the Cold War and the threat Saddam posed in the Middle East to U.S. interests, namely U.S. troops in the region, Israel and other Arab states, and access to oil. In 2002, ten out of the 18 signatories of the letter were occupying senior positions in the administration, among them Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

However, the broader argument does not rely solely on possible plans for war formed prior to 9/11, but rather the direct intentions and actions for an Iraq invasion present in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — despite no new intelligence on WMD and before there was sufficient time for the IC to come to any firm conclusions regarding Iraq’s culpability for — or links to — the attacks. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee shortly after the war had begun, Rumsfeld accurately summarized the role 9/11 played in terms of activating old intelligence: “The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light — through the prism of our experience on 9/11.”

The principal effect of 9/11 on the administration was to (in the minds of many) vindicate neoconservative analyses of the Middle East and create a permissive environment among foreign policy stakeholders for steadily growing interest in regime change to culminate in an actual invasion. A 2003 report in The Washington Post states that just six days after 9/11, Bush signed a top secret document that called for the Pentagon to develop Iraq invasion plans. Richard Clarke, who served as counterterrorism advisor in the Bush administration, notes: “At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized…that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.”

Both privately and publicly, top Bush administration officials acknowledged that 9/11 decisively changed their analysis of Iraq. As National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated in October 2002, “9/11 crystallized our vulnerability…after 9/11, there is no longer any doubt that today America faces an existential threat to our security.” The view Rice articulated in 2002 was quite different from the one she held in January 2000, when she argued that WMD production in Iraq was not cause for panic, as any attempt to use WMD against U.S. interests would be met with a devastating response. At the beginning of the Bush administration, the war skeptic faction, which included Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared to be winning out over the war hawk faction, which included Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and others. Before 9/11, Powell’s proposal for responding to Saddam’s evasion of WMD inspections was the development of a smart sanctions regime. Wolfowitz, on the other hand, referred to containment policy as “standing by and trying to contain Hitler’s Germany.”

After 9/11, containment was regarded as a failure. The ascendant war hawk faction successfully persuaded others in the administration that military intervention in Iraq was an absolute necessity to counter the threat Saddam posed to U.S. interests. Bush himself told journalist Bob Woodward that 9/11 was the pivotal event that transformed his thinking on Saddam, saying “all [Saddam’s] terrible features became much more threatening” and arguing that containment was no longer possible because Saddam was a “madman.” At Camp David on September 15, 2001, Bush informed Richard Perle, who was serving on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee and had previously signed the 1998 PNAC letter, that once Afghanistan had been taken care of, Iraq was next on the list. It is unlikely that military intervention would have proceeded in the absence of 9/11. Assisting regime change attempts and restructuring sanctions were on the table as viable and even likely options, but prior to 9/11, all-out military invasion was not.

The post-9/11 administration, geared for war with Iraq, was next to articulate its vision to the public. The administration internally settled on WMD as the issue that could persuade the bureaucracy, even though officials admitted that there were multiple reasons other than WMD for invading Iraq. According to one of Cheney’s aides, “The imminence of the threat from Iraq’s WMD was never the real issue [for us]…they weren’t the key thing. What was really driving us was our overall view of terrorism, and the strategic conditions of the Middle East.” As stated by Wolfowitz in a 2003 interview with Vanity Fair, “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Rice also articulated a similar view, namely that Iraq possessing WMD was the only position that seemed to have “legs.”

Most revealing was the 2006 admission from Douglas Feith, who served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. As Feith put it, “My basic view is, the rationale for the war didn’t hinge on the details of this intelligence even though the details of the intelligence at times became elements of the public presentation.” This raises a key question: do these claims from administration officials mean that since WMD was the only position that had “legs” that the IC bureaucracy therefore had real veto power over the decision to go to war? It is unlikely the bureaucracy had that kind of power. First, the administration was dead-set on war. As Richard Dearlove, head of British intelligence, told British Prime Minister Tony Blair in July 2002, “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action…But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” And as noted in a 2004 Vanity Fair retrospective, among both CIA analysts and diplomats, the pervading view was that “nothing they said, no fact they could present, could possibly dissuade Bush from war.” Second, top Pentagon officials, who had key responsibilities over moving the war effort forward, had signed off on war plans and were some of the most enthusiastic proponents of war, particularly Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith. Third, as will be shown below, the IC lost the overall battle with the administration’s unscrupulous use of intelligence. Fourth, for any state that has a mixed relationship with the U.S. and possesses a basic weapons industry and technical capacity, sufficient base-level intelligence reports can be produced to indicate a potential threat to U.S. interests, which suggests that even if the intelligence were less flawed or the IC attempted a potential veto of the war decision, there is little reason to think that those two factors would have won out over White House motivation and recklessness with regard to intelligence, backing from key administration figures, the permissive environment of 9/11, a cowed IC, and Saddam’s past use of chemical weapons and potential abilities.

The administration’s public persuasion campaign put itself in conflict with the IC, as in early 2002, the IC did not even put Iraq on its list of top five concerns, concluding that Saddam had been successfully contained. The IC also mostly refused, despite pressure, to endorse the unfounded claim that there were links between al-Qaida and Iraq. However, the IC’s findings in this area had little impact on the administration’s bold public statements on that topic, and neither did it prevent CIA Director George Tenet from softening under pressure and telling the Senate that Iraq “had contacts with Al Qaeda.”

The reason for the battle in the first place was because the administration was absolutely committed to its course of action in Iraq. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld were conscious of this battle; they believed the CIA was the major obstacle to war. The intelligence available often was not sufficient to support the unequivocal claims the administration made publicly, and so the administration employed various strategies to press the IC for favorable conclusions, or to work-around the IC entirely, which makes it doubtful that the administration was duped by the IC into supporting war. However, it did not help that the IC’s understanding of Iraq in the build-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003 was severely hampered by lingering suspicion about Saddam’s weapons programs in the 1990s, his refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, and lack of HUMINT. Since the CIA relied on UN inspectors, once they had been expelled from Iraq, the agency had to focus on “satellite photographs, the occasional defector, and extrapolation from past experience.”

The intelligence on WMD in Iraq was based on suspicion, as opposed to hard evidence. But public statements from the administration indicated the exact opposite conclusion. A study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity found that the administration made 935 confident, yet false statements in the lead-up to the war on Saddam’s apparent possession of WMD and alleged links to al-Qaida. When the IC refused to adopt the administration’s desired — though highly questionable — methodology of developing assumptions and then looking for data to match those assumptions, the administration created its own intelligence agency, the Office of Special Plans, to do just that. The OSP also relied heavily on biased accounts from defectors, which the IC was extremely skeptical of. In one example of the administration’s abuse of intelligence, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) failed to discover any of the alleged biological and nuclear weapons laps in Baghdad described by regime-change promoter and Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who had ingratiated himself with the administration, but that did not stop the administration from continuing to loudly promote the allegations. In another case, Chalabi forwarded the idea of a secret meeting in Prague between al-Qaida and Saddam. The administration continued to claim the existence of this meeting long after the FBI and CIA concluded the story was fake. When another defector claimed the existence of a terrorist training camp close to Baghdad and the CIA again struck down that defector’s claims, the White House still made sure they featured in public statements. The administration also claimed that Iraq’s procurement of aluminum tubes were meant for centrifuges, despite both the Department of Energy and the State Department explicitly contradicting that analysis. Under pressure from the administration, however, Tenet repeated the claim in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The administration further claimed that Saddam was attempting to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, which was based on fabricated documents. The IC repeatedly advised the administration not to use the documents because they were of dubious authenticity, but the claim nevertheless made its way into the 2003 State of the Union Address after a compromise was struck between the White House and the CIA.

Vice President Dick Cheney publicly asserted the existence of a “long-standing” relationship between Saddam an al-Qaida on NBC News’ “Meet The Press”, explicitly contradicting CIA analysis. Cheney had previously met with the CIA to discuss the agency’s assessment of the issue. Some CIA veterans interpreted the repeated visits and aggressive questioning by Cheney and Cheney aide Scooter Libby as constituting political pressure to come to the ‘correct’ conclusions. Moreover, CIA analysts believed their poor treatment by the Pentagon, particularly Wolfowitz, was because they were not coming to the conclusions the administration wanted about WMD in Iraq and links between al-Qaida and Saddam. In James Pfiffner’s assessment, the administration strongly suggested a connection between al-Qaida and Saddam almost immediately after 9/11 through the summer of 2003, despite likely knowing the evidence was fairly weak.

While there are more examples, the administration’s aggressive behavior indicated a willingness to publicly play fast and loose with intelligence and apply pressure when necessary to achieve policy objectives. The IC failed to decisively counter the administration’s abuse of intelligence and at times compromised its integrity by lending public support to questionable statements. If the IC did have substantial veto power, through aggressively leaking to the media, major public resignations, and other potential tactics, it refused to make use of this power, despite the administration’s rampant abuse of intelligence and the high stakes inherent to war. Given the events of 9/11, a hawkish Pentagon, the administration’s strong commitment to intervention in Iraq, unscrupulous public statements from the administration based on evidence that was far beyond what the available intelligence suggested (and often in direct contradiction), and a cowed IC, the war decision was an all but foregone conclusion. The base-level reports on WMD, which could be produced on numerous other countries with a basic weapons industry, were more than sufficient for the administration’s objectives in Iraq when coupled with this confluence of factors.

In this light, the moral case for humanitarianism, such as it was occasionally articulated in public speeches by the administration, seems clearly besides the point.

In my last post, I suggested a perspective on human rights as a form of social technology designed to prevent the moral catastrophes of World War II from reoccurring.

But I also briefly noted that human rights can function as a way for a hegemon to push the world order towards a post-Westphalian one, in order to abrogate another state’s sovereignty when doing so lines up with its interests. In certain cases of intervention, invoking the powerful, legitimizing language of human rights serves as a way to mask cold statecraft. In some ways, then, human rights are a great gift to the hegemon, since it’s immediately clear that every modern state violates strict human rights standards in some way — even the hegemon itself.

Sitting down today, I’ve drafted a sketch of some moral theory in support of the Iraq War — not because I actually support it (I was against), but to illustrate this claim in more detail. This illustration isn’t purely an academic exercise. If you look back at some of the archives in the early 2000s, you’ll see public intellectuals and academics articulating similar views about the legitimacy of the Iraq War. This is just my quick and dirty steelmanned version of a wide range of thinkers from around that era. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a stretch, but that didn’t stop the war, did it?

Just War Theory (JWT) is a common moral framework used in the context of justifying offensive and defensive wars, so I’ll start from there.

Although there is a single heading for JWT, it by no means is monolithic. A cursory survey of classic JWT manuals pre-Vatican II reveals that the just cause criterion for war is much more expansive than modern accounts, i.e., offensive war comes off as a clearly permissible category. Fagothey’s seminal text states that “offensive war is just when fought to vindicate seriously violated rights.” Heribert Jone argues that “both offensive and defensive war are lawful for a just cause.” This doesn’t entail that just any offensive war is lawful, or that rigorous standards are irrelevant, but it does establish considerable tension not only within the Catholic JWT tradition pre- and post-Vatican II, but also as compared to more modern writers on the subject, e.g., Michael Walzer, C.A.J. Coady, and Michael Ignatieff.

The offensive case argued here is based on (1) humanitarian intervention (divided into (a) the general, violent character of the Baathist regime directed against its citizens in general and against ethnic groups, and (b) the pre-war threat of WMDs), supplemented by (2) legal justifications, as well as (3) the security threat Saddam posed to U.S. allies in the Middle East. If each of these elements is considered in isolation, the case for the war is harder to make. Rather, if the plausibility of each cause ‘going through’ is assessed on a 0 to 1 scale with 0.6 being the justification requirement, then the three causes scoring 0.25 each (just to provide a number), while individually falling short, collectively provide sufficient justification. It isn’t (1) OR (2) OR (3). Instead, it’s (1) + (2) + (3) — all three considered in conjunction.

As part of an offensive endeavor, the humanitarian case for intervention does not pass muster with Michael Walzer’s take on JWT (although it is potentially permissible), since he writes, “The [Iraq] war was not a response to aggression or a humanitarian intervention.” He thinks it plain that since there was no direct and ongoing massacre, the case for humanitarian intervention is too weak to be further considered. To forestall the inevitable counter-argument, he writes “I do not believe that regime change, by itself, can be a just cause of war.” An unsteady relationship between intentions and capabilities for massacre does not qualify. Only concrete massacre does.

On humanitarian intervention, Ignatieff has somewhat of a different take than Walzer. Based on humanitarian considerations, Ignatieff originally argued that regime change was prima facie justified, due to the apparent consensus in the intelligence community about the presence of WMDs. The key question, then, is “whether it is prudent to do so, whether the risks are worth running.” It is not that the notion of war is in principle morally unjustified. Rather, at the time, he justified intervention based on consequentialist considerations, namely that intervention for regime change was right to the extent that the “gains in human freedom are large and the human costs are low.” The empirical facts, while not indicative of a full-scale, ongoing genocide in 2003, demonstrated that the “Saddam regime was one of the most morally objectionable among current states, highly arbitrary and…genocidal toward ethnic groups deemed enemies (Kurds, Shiites, Marsh Arabs), and with a record of attack without provocation against at least four neighboring states.”

By adopting a post-Westphalian conception of sovereignty, a much stronger case can be made that a state’s sovereignty is contingent upon acceptance of certain minimal standards of international behavior. In the event these standards are violated, a state’s sovereignty can be abrogated or alienated, although the central question is the extent of alienation. The question in the JWT tradition, then, is not whether humanitarian intervention is justifiable per se (since JWT assumes it clearly is), but whether the empirical facts regarding the odious nature and actions of Saddam’s regime are sufficient to justify humanitarian intervention. While critics rightly point to the fact that the Kurdish genocide took place in 1986–1989, Saddam’s regime had continued to systematically violate human rights, which included killing, gassing, rape, torture, displacement, etc. Specific groups had been continually targeted right up until 2003, e.g. the campaign to entirely eliminate the Marsh Arabs. According to Human Rights Watch, “Numbering some 250,000 people as recently as 1991, the Marsh Arabs today are believed to number fewer than 40,000…The population and culture of the Marsh Arabs, who have resided continuously in the marshlands for more than 5,000 years, are being eradicated.” Limitation of intervention to a formal and declared criterion of genocide seems to be arbitrary. As David Mellow argues, “if stopping a genocide represents a sufficient just cause, then there are massive cases of systematic oppression, killing, and terror that, while not quite a genocide, also ground a sufficient just cause.” Only considering the category of murder from 1991 to 2003, the number is at a minimum of 400,000.

When self-defense is considered, it seems clear that Saddam posed no direct danger to the U.S., and it seems there was little chance that WMD would have had any sort of impact on the U.S., even based on intelligence reports prior to the war. A more plausible view is that the aggressive history of the Baathist regime presented a significant security threat to the Middle East, including U.S. allies in the region. Moreover, the stability (or lack thereof) in the Middle East has a significant and immediate impact on the political, social, and economic realities of geo-political actors, unlike the majority of affected regions in Africa. In addition, the purely legal justification for war — based on a decade of U.N. resolution violations — while by no means conclusive, decreases the relevance of the preemptive versus preventative distinction, since the prima facie justification for military action stems from the violations, although the merits of the legal justification is heavily contested. But the central objection to the legal argument is that the U.N. resolutions after the Gulf War were made solely between Iraq and the U.N. (and hence only the U.N. can declare whether military action is acceptable), but I address this issue in the section on competent authority. Neither the legal nor ‘security threat’ justifications can stand on their own, but my point is that when the two are considered in conjunction with the case for humanitarian intervention, it contributes to the cumulative case.

Regardless of the actual cumulative causes listed, actual right intention surrounding the war is hotly contested. David Fisher argues that a mixture of concerns were present, although he crucially concedes that “both governments genuinely believed that Saddam had a WMD capability and were concerned over the consequent threat to peace and security in the region and more widely.” In addition, Enemark and Michaelsen also admit that “The Coalition appears to have had Right Intention in invading Iraq…This is evident in the post-war establishment of WMD search teams and the drafting of an interim constitution envisaging Iraqi self-rule.”

Although these authors are by no means representative in conceding right intentions, I grant, for the sake of argument, that the Coalition had morally wrong intentions. However, I exclude right intention as a necessary condition of JWT, since although it has bearing on the moral character of the actor(s), it does not affect the rightness/wrongness of the action itself. As Fagothey explains, “a wrong intention will make the war subjectively immoral, but not necessarily unjust.” C.A.J. Coady’s account views right intention as necessary condition of JWT. However, as a concept, it seems fraught with difficulties of relevance, group intentionality, absence of bad intentions, etc. In considering the inevitability of mixed motives in humanitarian interventions, for instance, Walzer confirms: “the moral significance of mixed motives…is not necessarily an argument against humanitarian intervention…but it is a reason to be skeptical.” Coady, on the other hand, argues that if humanitarian intervention is cited as a just cause, then “humanitarian reasons…should at least be necessary and prominent.” They must, in a sense, be primary. But for the account here, right intention is not thought of as a necessary condition of JWT, although it has bearing on the subjective moral culpability of political actors.

The central dispute in this section concerns which entity possessed lawful authority to initiate the Iraq War. Under just cause, the legal argument offered was based on the systematic violations of resolutions adopted by the United Nations after the Gulf War. Here, the counterargument is that the United Nations is clearly the only competent authority capable of resolving the ambiguities in the language of these resolutions. Moreover, unless self-defense is the clear just cause, all military interventions require the approval of the Security Council.

For Coady, unless a particular military action has incredibly strong warrant, deference should be made to the United Nations. He transitions from arguing that there exists a weak presumption against unilateral action to the claim that “all interventions that bypass the United Nations at least need a very strong case to rebut the presumption that they are ethically dubious.” However, considering that the Security Council is populated with France, Russia and China, a cession of power instead seems to be playing into the same realpolitik that led to the destabilization of the containment regime in Iraq. While impartiality is a laudable goal, it is unlikely to be obtained from such partial circumstances. As he notes, “powerful states are in a position to block humanitarian interventions that do not serve their interests.” He offers surprisingly little support for the presumption against unilateral action other than to argue for hypothetical practical reform in the future. If the other criteria are met (especially last resort — i.e., the failure of the United Nations to produce cooperation in the twelve-year span between the Gulf War and Iraq War), then appeals to patience cannot be successful. Unless there is a heavy reliance on legal arguments relating to U.N. resolutions 678, 687, and 1441 (entered into between the U.N. and Iraq), then the United Nation’s claim to exclusive competent authority is considerably weakened. For domestic authority in this case, while not directly declared by Congress, Congress did indeed pass a resolution authorizing it. On pain of inconsistency, one cannot appeal to the moral and legal authority of the Security Council here, while simultaneously criticizing it for its inaction in Rwanda — to name one of a host of other examples. Walzer’s discussion on Indian intervention in Bengali is particularly apt, in that he finds U.N. approval of humanitarian intervention to be largely irrelevant. So if critics agree that the Bengali intervention was just (I am focusing solely on the absence of U.N. approval, here), then criticisms of the Iraq War for lacking competent authority are similarly moot.

Considered by direct appeal to the JWT tradition, it is unclear whether competent authority necessarily requires appeal to the United Nations. JWT is principally concerned with states (as only states have the right to wage war), and so the argument that the U.S. failed to obtain U.N. approval is not in and of itself a knock-down argument. If the cumulative case were reduced down to the legal argument, then there may be a more substantive case for the U.N, since legally it is the aggrieved party as a result of Iraq’s consistent breach of the resolutions. This would render it prima facie the competent authority. However, this illicitly assumes that the cumulative case can be reduced to the legal argument.

The criterion of last resort cannot be thought of in mathematical terms, in the sense that war represents the last, yet virtually unreachable point on a line. The tradition that argues against last resort in a similar manner is represented by skeptical pacifism, which is based largely on epistemic concerns, namely how is it that we know “we ever reach the stage of last resort, when violence becomes necessary[?]” If skeptical pacifism is taken as shedding doubt on even the possibility of fulfilling last resort, then my account rejects it. However, it can fit under JWT, in the sense that it urges caution regarding ideology and propaganda, both of which lead to hasty decisions regarding war. On the contrary, last resort is best conceived of prudentially, for otherwise there is a near endless series of initiatives one could try and retry, ad infinitum. To support the prudence account is to say that there are no viable options left, except a military endeavor.

When applied to Iraq, this requires a careful understanding of the lead up to the invasion in 2003. The conflict with Iraq did not cease after the Gulf War, but was continuous up to the declaration of war in 2003 through the enforcement of a regime of sanctions and no-fly zones. On humanitarian intervention, even Walzer readily admits that not only were the sanctions costly in terms of human suffering, but that cooperation for a more multilateral approach was not at all forthcoming. Instigation of internal uprisings was hardly an option, given (1) the abysmal conditions imposed by the sanctions, and (2) the oppressive and brutal nature of Saddam’s regime.

In a follow up from his original article, Ignatieff argued that the fulfillment of last resort was typified by a box that had sprung a series of leaks, owing again to failed sanctions. The reason the case for humanitarian intervention was so potent from his perspective was the fact that at the time the use of WMD on civilians seemed likely, based on Hussein’s continued refusal to comply with U.N. inspectors. Given Saddam’s use of chemical weapons on Kurds in March 1988, it was only a matter of time before he was able to “match [his] intentions with capabilities.” But of course, there were other reasons for humanitarian intervention besides a pure reliance on the WMD threat. Saddam hardly needed WMDs to carry out a regime of violence and terror — again, the 400,000 number, referring solely to regime-instigated murders from 1991 to 2003. Note that Ignatieff’s account does not seem to place much emphasis on imminence. As well, Enemark and Michaelsen mischaracterize the pro-war position as having made the argument that the “Coalition faced only two choices — to invade or to do nothing.” There were a host of alternatives; however, the question is not the bare existence of these alternatives. The question is of viability. Based on the twelve year history of failed containment and a dramatic increase in the suffering of the civilian population, military intervention was the only realistic way to ensure regime change. Attempting to reinforce the regime of sanctions further — whether unilateral or multilateral — would have only propounded the catastrophic effects. Focusing merely on tougher inspection programs to dismantle WMD does little to address the humanitarian hazard. So given the history of the conflict and the good faith efforts made to avoid moral hazard and contain the Baathist regime, the criterion of last resort had, I think, been satisfied.

The central question under the criterion of proportionality is whether or not the relevant good effects outweigh the relevant bad effects. The humanitarian cause focused on putting an end to systematic human rights abuses, and allowing liberty, stability, and some measure of democratic collective self-determination. Since most contemporary theorists consider World War II a paradigmatic just war, it is important to note that the casualties sustained far surpass the war in Iraq. Nigel Biggar points out that “Europe’s liberation from Nazi domination cost the lives of 70,000 French civilians and 500,000 German ones through bombing…[M]ost Iraqi civilians were killed by foreign or native insurgents.” To argue that Baathists and other insurgents were justified in acting in such a manner begs the question, since it presupposes the unjustness of the war, which is precisely what is under question. Civilian deaths as a result of invasion must be balanced against the fact that had there been no intervention, Saddam would have continued to violate human rights on a systematic scale. Moreover, supposing Saddam had died, the Baathist regime would have been taken over and furthered by one of his sons. Mellow argues that “Even if the numbers only amounted to a fraction of those killed, tortured or terrorized in Saddam Hussein’s first twenty years, this would eventually surpass all the civilian and military deaths that have occurred both in the war and in post-war attacks.”

So far, I’ve argued that an application of JWT leads to the conclusion that the Iraq War was morally justifiable based on a cumulative case. I argued that humanitarian intervention was the principal just cause, although for it to be effective, it had to be supplemented with (a) the general, violent character of the Baathist regime directed against its citizens in general, internal ethnic groups, and (b) the pre-war threat of WMDs affecting U.S. allies in the region, as well as flagrant violations of U.N. resolutions.

I chose the Iraq War specifically because (1) arguments like these were taken as quite persuasive at the time of the invasion in 2003, and (2) the Iraq War is a good case of human rights as pretext, as deep cynicism, because of the differences in public and private justifications given for sovereignty abrogation. Not every state is or was as bad as Iraq under Saddam. There is always a sliding scale. But it seems clear that similar cases for intervention could in principle be made for states that feel the need to bypass due process and increase state coercion and violence because of precarious security conditions.

I’ll explore those differences in justification further in my next post.

The modern concept of human rights is historically anomalous and the product of conscious, philosophical and institutional effort.

Human rights emerged prominently in the post-World War II era — and for good reason, given the horrors of mechanized warfare and atrocities inflicted on European populations, Jews, and other minorities. This set of rights, often articulated in the international arena, is said to apply universally, impose moral obligation, and possess real ontological grounding, which carries the suggestion that state sovereignty might be abrogated by egregious human rights violations. If atrocities appear banal under a Westphalian system, human rights constitute a philosophical innovation towards a post-Westphalian system under the aegis of dominant world power(s).

But human rights have been criticized for positing metaphysical specters that immutably and inalienably hover over rights-bearers in a way that is reliably accessible by careful observers. For comparison, there’s something strange about the idea that the number three, as similarly abstract, imposes moral rights and moral obligations. So, what is it about one kind of abstract object that imposes obligations and another that is morally inert? Moreover, if human rights are based on natural law, and new human rights are continually brought into existence, the ontological solidity of natural law comes under question.

These are just some of the objections leveled against accounts of human rights based on natural law and natural rights, which Jacques Maritain aimed to address in his seminal 1943 work The Rights of Man and Natural Law. Although Maritain maintains that human rights require rigorous philosophical justification, he nevertheless holds that even if his ontology of human rights is rejected, such rejection is still inconsequential to the consensus that can be reached over basic rights that deserve positivistic enforcement. In his account, Maritain embraces the tradition of natural law, but distances himself from a host of natural law philosophers in an effort to avoids many of the well-known objections offered by Marx and “Nonsense upon stilts” Bentham.

Maritain primarily has in his mind Locke and Hobbes when he critiques past traditions of natural law, which for him display an excessive desire for rationalism and systematic deduction. While Maritain maintains that natural law is ontologically immutable, he claims it is epistemologically incomplete, that is, it is discovered gradually. As a result, he’s able to carve out space for the addition of new human rights in response to moral developments. Since Maritain is no longer troubled by the addition or removal of human rights, he is able to affirm — without being accused of cultural subjectivity — that human rights can be legislated and enforced as discovered through reflection on the human condition. Moreover, Maritain sidesteps the criticism of ‘human rights as abstract objects,’ as his theory is grounded specifically in human ends.

Maritain’s political philosophy begins with the proposal that the “politics of rights” and the “politics of the common good,” though seemingly contradictory notions, are actually central to the existence of human rights. “The idea of political rights,” Henkin states, “is a political idea with moral foundations. It is an expression of the political relationships that should prevail between individual and society.” Henkin’s acknowledgement of the moral basis for human rights set the stage for Maritain’s principle of the common good and synthesis of communitarianism and individualism.

Maritain is convinced that the collectivist model of human rights fails to respect the dignity of persons. While he is not a radical individualist, he holds strongly to individual autonomy, though he believes that man by nature is a political animal and so cannot fully realize his humanity absent social and political relations. This provides a strong basis for the recognition of the value of society and the common good. Maritain is able to justify his appeal to individualism when he discusses the concept of dignity and its application to humanity, and assumes it as obvious that man, being endowed with intelligence, is capable of formulating ends and pursuing them through means. But while the majority of means and ends are subjective to the individual, Maritain remarks that “…man obviously possesses ends which correspond to his natural constitution and which are the same for all…” He compares these ends to the natural ends of a piano, which is directed towards the production of music, and if it does not full its end, then “[the piano] must be tuned, or discarded as worthless.” However, humans are unique in the sense that he possesses a conscious ability to evaluate means and ends that a piano cannot. Humans alone have the responsibility to come into alignment with the natural ends that exist as a consequence of their nature. Maritain sums up the whole of his natural law philosophy by stating:

“This means that there is, by very virtue of human nature, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, is nothing more than that.”

The common good, being the codification of such ends, represents the sine qua non for the maximization of human flourishing, just as the polis exists as a necessary condition for man’s political nature to be realized. Humankind is uniquely capable of having his natural ends recognized because of his capacity for dignity; he is “more than an individual element in nature, such as is an atom, a blade of grass, a fly or an elephant.”

Maritain borrows heavily from Aristotle in his emphasis on the naturalness of political life, and how the political community is simply the inevitable result of men in association with one another, which without Maritain says we could hardly be human. In his philosophy of the common good, Maritain sharply divides between rights-theory today; he ardently rejects a strict autonomy-based model for human rights, as it enables the oppression of the weak by the strong, and furthermore, ignores many of the other values essential for human flourishing. But he also opposes the sort of despotic collectivism that degrades personhood and robs it of dignity in the same way that bees are sacrificed for the good of the hive, being nothing more than means to the common good or end of society. Maritain’s principle of the common good offers a third way: “The common good of society is [humanity’s] communion in the good life.”

The very ideas of dignity, ability to empathize, human worth, and so on, are inherently committed to the affirmation of a nature that is capable of possessing these qualities. While it is clear that the positing of human nature is controversial, there is nothing particularly controversial in the analysis of human ends integral to almost every modern theory of human rights. Beyond basic biological needs that are far from a developed doctrine of political, civil, and social rights, can it be said that these ends posited by Maritain are universal? The idea that humans possess certain ends that are natural to them has significant empirical support, as Michael Perry argues:

“Just as some needs (and wants) are human — just as there are significant needs common to all human beings — there are, correspondingly, some things of value to every human being: whatever satisfies, or somehow conduces to the satisfaction of, a common, human need…Some goods are universal and not merely local in character…those states of affairs…[are] congenial to the flourishing of any human being.”

As the common good is a significant factor in bridging the gap between moral principles and laws, the autonomous model offers a particular conception of the common good that specifies how human rights and the practice encouraged by these rights should relate to individuals. The autonomous model of human rights as proceeding from rationality and ability for self-determination is a valuable endeavor, but according to Maritain, fails through incompleteness. It invokes the problem of conflicting goods, that is, why should we end our analysis of human ends with rationality and from that deduce a theory of human rights that is purely negative, rather than positive? Why should we reject the plurality of other values that, after further analysis, do in fact seem to contribute to the proper fulfillment of human ends? Why is autonomy valued at the expense of other ideals? Jaunius Gumbis, et al. in noticing the inherent limitations of autonomy, distinguish between two often equivocated definitions:

“The conditions necessary for autonomy can be divided into two categories: internal and external. An autonomous individual must know what he/she wants to achieve, but he/she must also live in a favourable environment that provides means and resources to facilitate the realization of one’s potential.”

Maritain’s formulation of natural rights pays little attention to the idea of a state of nature, in which one possesses natural rights prior to the existence of the state. In fact, he rejects the artificiality of the separate existences of individuals in relation to the community and conceives of the relationship as symbiotic, rather than artificially and voluntarily created. But this is not to say that he holds the community ontologically superior to the individual because of the individual’s inability to consent to the state or his inability to exist apart from it. Natural rights cannot exist prior to the state, since there is no state of affairs where there is no state, according to Maritain. His justification relies instead on autonomy being one of man’s central ends, and so Maritain is able to affirm (all other things being equal), that natural rights ought to exist and ought to be provided by the state as necessitated by natural law and the principle of the common good.

The individualist account, while recognizing freedom and autonomy, does not properly account for the rights necessary to promote human flourishing as a whole; it has nothing to say about economic, social, education, and other rights that tend to be viewed by individualists as wrongful encroachments on personal liberty and private property. But Peter Jones argues that the rights present in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights challenge the dichotomy between negative and positive rights — the rights traditionally thought to be negative actually impose very strenuous positive obligations on others (the duty not to trespass these rights) as well as an obligation on government to provide protection services and a robust judiciary. Article 3 of the UDHR, for instance, states that everyone has the right to life, which Peter Jones maintains “implies not only a right not to be murdered but also a right, typically held against a government, to be protected from murder and other forms of personal injury.”

Moreover, the right to life seems to be inadequate without the appropriate material goods and services necessary for human flourishing. Marx recognizes the poverty of a strict adherence to the individualistic perspective of rights as protecting and providing security only for persons and their property. This egotistic idea of human rights, according to Marx, benefits only those who control the means of production, leaving the rest who live in abject poverty free from physical violence, but unable to participate in a fulfilling life. Maritain holds that pre-social conditions are incoherent, and therefore, unless natural rights doctrines are further developed by their proponents, the existence of positive obligations (human rights) in a state of nature is perplexing. Maritain also denies the absolute nature of natural rights, which has characterized the thought of numerous natural rights theorists; these rights are not non-negotiable, and neither are they absolute claims on the community.

Maritain’s explicit rejection of strict individualist views on political society does not commit him to a form of collectivist totalitarianism, however. The community is not in any way absolute, but neither is the individual, nor the individual’s natural rights. The constant struggle between individuality and communitarian ideals is readily admitted by Maritain, since “the person as such is a root of independence — there will always exist a certain tension between the person and society. This paradox [and] this tension…are…natural and inevitable.” Though he admits a robust conception of the common good, he favors Aquinas’ approach which holds that even if a law is in fact ordered to the common good, it is unjust if the burdens are unfairly distributed. Second, and more fundamentally, the lawmaker’s enactments do not warrant obedience if they advance his own personal interests — there is no mention in Maritain of the sort of the absolute supremacy of the community to which Socrates subscribed.

Maritain even allows exceptions out of necessity to avoid the predictable abuse of the common good — the unjustness of a law and an individual’s refusal to submit takes precedence over the common good. This seems sufficient to satisfy the concerns of the individualists, for the “Thomistic perspective [sees] no inherent conflict between a theory of individual rights and a theory of law which rests on the common good, but it supports the much stronger argument that individual rights derive from the common good and participate in it.” This essentially shows that natural rights are incapable of being called natural rights apart from the existence of a body that is capable of enforcement. It certainly sounds attractive to posit natural rights as flowing necessarily out of one’s own value as an individual (absent the enactment of rights by the state), but the fact that rights take the form of a demand or claim makes natural rights seem superfluous in the absence of a valid authority with the ability to enforce them.

The practical application of human rights is based on Maritain’s argument for a human nature endowed with ends that man is obligated to pursue and ends, for which society is obligated to provide. Maritain’s doctrine of the transcendence of the individual places the individual above the community. However, as previously noted, the relationship between the two entities is complex under Maritain’s view. The symbiotic and necessary relationship prefers the individual, but the individual is unlike the sort postulated by autonomists like Kant, and so the superiority of the individual must be viewed in light of this relationship; otherwise, Maritain will be mistaken as purely individualistic.

Maritain argues that the proper function of man is to specific ends like universal truths and the participation in an intellectual and spiritual community that surpass the body politic. Individual autonomy is preserved, since “the human person transcends all temporal societies and is superior to them…society exists for each person and is subordinate thereto.” The consequence of this is to preserve the right of all persons from intervention into matters of conscience that necessarily belong outside the sphere of the political realm. These ends acknowledge the autonomy of the intellect and so cannot be constrained by the obligations of the community. Moreover, he argues that the natural ends of man are not known through artificial axiomatic deductions. They are known through introspection and gradually discovered, thus lending credence to the right of the individual to choose their personal destiny and to come into alignment with it autonomously.

Maritain therefore repudiates paternalistic attempts of the state to impose its will on individuals for the purpose of forwarding the state’s conception of the common good. As Westberg properly notes, “The theory of natural law points to the existence of some body of moral norms which can be used as a standard in assessing the positive laws of a state.” This body of norms is readily acknowledged by Maritain, and so acts as a check and balance on the community. Moreover, this also lends itself to the presence of political rights. Maritain thinks of man not only as naturally existing in the community, but as properly fulfilled only by active participation in political life. As the state exists for the purpose of promoting the common good, it must grant the political liberties necessary to enable individuals to designate those who hold authority.

When thinking of the just political society, Maritain concludes (controversially) that it must be a true political democracy governed by a constitution. Only a political democracy can satisfy the ends of individuals, including participation in the public sphere. Since he holds all humans naturally equal in nature, this guarantees a robust political equality. The right of association, freedom of expression, equality, and civil liberties are also essential to the common good, fulfilling man’s nature that tends toward association with other men, intellectual discourse, and the security of the person.

But even Maritain recognizes the limitations of such rights. Their expression may sometimes be limited if they jeopardize the common good. But Maritain also advocates for a robust notion of social rights in conjunction with political rights, in order to remedy the follies of strict individualism. These social rights include: “The right to a just wage. The right to work…The right to relief, unemployment insurance, sick benefits and social security. — The right to have a part…in the elementary goods, both material and spiritual, of civilization.” Once present, these rights guarantee the ability of all citizens regardless of economic or social circumstances to be able to fulfill their ends to the fullest.

The gap between natural law and rights is a problem that has plagued natural law theorists. The reason for this plague is the lack of a cogent philosophy of the common good. In developing this philosophy, Maritain rejects the various other meta-ethical foundations for human rights because of their inability to adequately recognize human dignity and the human condition. They fail to develop a notion of the common good conducive to both society and the individual in a way that is both just and promotes human flourishing. The relativity allowed in the codification of such rights recognizes that the fulfillment of human ends is interpreted differently by each culture, and so he affirms the coherence of natural law as capable of moving to natural rights in such a way as to avoid the charge of moral imperialism or relativism.

It cannot be emphasized enough that Maritain, like Hannah Arendt, rejects natural rights as having any force outside codification, though Maritain would claim that the state is bound and unquestioningly obligated to provide these rights. Natural rights, as entailed by natural law, are not properly fulfilled absent the community, and thus do not exist outside the community, but of course as noted, Maritain denies the possibility of man as existing autonomously from the community in the first place. Although Maritain does not accept Arendt’s conclusions, namely that there are no such things as rights absent legal positivism, he would agree with her assessment of the status of human rights after World War II: “[T]he world fond nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” and that human rights, being “supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable.”

Maritain offers a compromise between two views that seem to have unacceptable conclusions. His principle of the common good, by codifying human ends as posited through his theory of natural law, attempts to provide a basis that strikes the middle ground between collectivism and individualism. On the one hand, radical individualism, though it means to respect individual liberty and dignity, only does so at the expense of other clearly legitimate values that contribute to human flourishing. Collectivism, however, in pursuing the common good inevitably violates individual autonomy in an arbitrary manner that is not cognizant of the essential nature of liberty.

Maritain also offers appropriate answers to the difficult problems that have plagued natural rights proponents, such as the pre-social nature of natural rights, the inability to handle moral progress, and the difficulty of understanding natural rights as making sense outside of a positivist framework. Finally, the empirical support afforded to the existence of human ends allows Maritain to avoid a natural law that has been severely criticized for positing an imperceptible realm of abstract objects that are separate from reality, unintelligible, ineffective, and unable to solve the most basic of conflicts.

There are obvious leaps and semantic fuzziness in Maritain’s account. Is it real? Does it mean anything? Is democracy the only legitimate form of state? Does Maritain successfully bypass the problem of human nature by focusing on human ends? Are these even relevant questions? Asking too many questions sometimes has the effect of dissolving importantly sacred objects. And sometimes you don’t know what function these objects served until they’re gone.

Maritain’s account is, at the end of the day, about social technology in engineering states and institutions. It’s about solving the problems produced by the horrors of the 20th century. Realness or philosophical correctness in this endeavor is sometimes about being good enough. Does this account provide a good patch of social technology? It’s not a bad framework — with some adjustments. I can think of worse.

The final death of God in 19th century Europe shook the world. The world recovered through hegemony, and hegemony insisted on human rights as the solution, and it has worked, to a certain real extent, though as a side-effect, hegemony used human rights to selectively justify military intervention and regime change. But as the memories of the 20th century fade and U.S. hegemony declines, countries stand to jettison the concept of rights along with liberalism as they fumble around in the dark for what a sane post-liberal state and order look like. We may have been too quick to kill God, and we should be wary of attempts to bury human rights — at least without a powerful, morally sane social technology in its place.

As a new journalist in my early twenties at the time, I was looking for scoops and newsworthy information, so I was hanging around on a mailing list that I had been introduced to, since it was topical. I was young and impulsive, and got caught up in posting vulgar memes. I posted bad jokes, weighed in with some ideas, and traded talking points. Talk occasionally turned to how to influence broader conservative thought. To read this as a vast conspiracy is ridiculous, though I understand the motivation to do so.

I eventually came to the conclusion that the list, the DC journalism scene — and a lot of DC culture in general — isn’t good for the world. I didn’t care for the broader environment of gossip, clickbait, extremism, and low-quality work.

I wasn’t interested in continued participation, so two years ago, I left an upward career trajectory of my own volition to get away from a morally repugnant environment and find something better to work on. I had no idea what I was going to do next, but I took the leap anyway. At the time, a lot of people thought I was dumb for doing it and said that I should just forget my criticisms and go along with the flow. But that wasn’t how I wanted to do things. So I left.

Now, some years later, some former friends from this scene have decided to publish the emails and make it into a big conspiracy theory. They knew I was never a white nationalist. As far as actual intellectual interests go, at the time I was more sympathetic to neoreactionary thought, which is a very different set of ideas, not focused on race or other far-right mainstays.

I’m not proud of the emails, or that period of time. It wasn’t good for me or anyone else. But since then, I’ve moved on and developed in a much different direction — leaving the old stuff behind.

My process of constantly striving to challenge and improve my own worldview, which led me away from this stuff and the DC scene, has recently led me to begin the process of joining the Catholic Church as of several months ago. The Church condemns the views I espoused, and so do I.

The project I’m currently working on, Palladium Magazine, is something I am very proud of. It speaks for itself. It’s rigorous, theoretically innovative, and features on-the-ground journalism from places all over the world. This will continue.

Palladium is the clear and honest expression of what I want to see in the world. The editors and contributors put a lot of work into making sure it’s the most high quality and responsible perspective we can produce.