The art of the possible

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, welcome back to the Western Hemisphere.

Chris Yeah, I mean, we're practically neighbors again. I know. I'm only a few thousand kilometers... In fact, I'm not sure that I'm any closer to you now. But there is no longer an Atlantic Ocean between us, at least for a couple of days. I'm back in Canada, just keeping an eye on this country, starting to fly apart. It's a bit concerning.

Scott There's an episode of The West Wing where Donna figures out she's Canadian because she was born in Minnesota, but a part where the border was readjusted. And somebody says, do you feel any funnier? And she says, no, but I'm definitely already developing an inferiority complex.

Chris Well, Donna's great. That explains why she was so attractive on the show. Although they really dragged out the whole romance with Josh about, you know, as long as a viewer could possibly tolerate it. I mean, please let something happen. Yeah. And something finally did in like the last few episodes of the final season.

Scott Yeah, it was interesting because it was awkward chemistry. Yeah. I enjoyed it. It was a great show. So we are, this week I want to start off talking about, I've never really even formally announced something like that. This week we're going to start, no. But we are both game, I didn't know you were a Game of Thrones fan. I knew you were a Billions fan, but I did not know you were a Game of Thrones fan.

Chris Hey, you know, so we've got to be careful about, you know. Well, I don't know. Yeah, I'm a fan. I don't feel like I'm as good a fan as many other people are. I mean, you know, life's busy and it's been forever since Game of Thrones started and so I rely upon other people to tell me, oh, you know why that was significant? Because she said that or he said that three seasons ago. Okay, right. That is clever. But I'm never going to be the one to spot those things. However, you know, in the same breath, it's interesting how, you know, when I was a kid growing up playing Dungeons & Dragons, that was very, like, geeky and unpopular to do. And it seems somehow that now that's, like, you know, that's the cool thing to do.

Scott What's interesting about Dungeons & Dragons is that, right, your armor class or how easy you were to hit depended on the kind of armor you had and also how agile, like, dexterity level of your character. Such that, like, some, like, demigod-like characters who just basically could almost never hit them. And in the Battle of Winterfell, there's a few people like that. It's like, their armor class in Dungeons & Dragons would be, like, so off the charts because they're in the middle of the Battle of the Dead, like Ser Jorah, and everybody's getting hacked, and you just can't hit them until the end. Like, some people could just be right in the middle of the dead, and there are Jon Snow at the end when the Night King rises all those... And John Snow, he can't be hit. He's got like a ring of invisibility or something where they just cannot see him.

Chris I mean, you can always take a shot and if you roll a 20, then maybe the Dungeon Master will record it as an exceptional hit.

Scott Remember coloring in the die with crayon and wiping it off so you could see the... Did you ever have dice that had the beveled sort of numbers and you could rub it with a crayon and then wipe the crayon off and you could read the die easier?

Chris I never did that. I never really had difficulty reading the... What class would you be? Well, like, my first ever character was a cleric, and I think I'd play a cleric again, even though, you know... Look, I play one in real life, dude.

Scott You do better.

Chris Yeah, that's right. You do better. Fantasy, you try to escape that, okay? So you'd play a thief or something.

Scott A ranger. I think a ranger. Although, you know what's interesting? In... In Dungeons & Dragons, clerics can't use blades or sharp-edged weapons. You can only use a mace. Now, in Donald Trump's America, I'm sure a cleric could use a sword, an AK-47. A gun, yeah. Clerics, you know, there would be no weapon restrictions for clerics in America.

Chris It'd be interesting to, I wonder if anybody's done the study of, now we're getting way off topic, but I wonder if anybody's done the study of sort of, you know, almost like your Myers-Briggs personality score and the character types that you choose to play, because it is quite odd to choose to play a cleric. I mean, your offensive capabilities are far more... But at the higher levels of the game, the other character classes could kind of find their ways to do that too. They find a Ring of Regeneration, or they've got wizards that have some sort of blood magic spells or something. And so the distinctive powers of the cleric class in Dungeons & Dragons seem to kind of fall away at the higher levels, and you're sort of left looking around wondering, why did I choose this as my fantasy? To something deep and profound about the world we live in today.

Scott So spoiler alert, if you haven't tuned in yet, or if you haven't watched it, don't pay attention to what we're saying, but I thought the way Arya killed the Night King was amazing. I didn't see it coming. I didn't see the Night King's demise like that. I thought there was going to be so much more to the mythology. I mean, I feel like the way they closed that chapter of the story was great. I felt like the touching moments, like with...

Chris Let me pause you there for a moment because that's interesting you say that because for me I felt like that was my disappointment about the episode. I felt like there was so much more mythology there about who is this Night King and why on this quest and who are all these other White Walkers who are following him and why do they arrange body parts in a spiral and this seems to be something they've been doing back for thousands of years. And are the children of the forest going to be involved in this battle somehow? And suddenly... Subtitles by the Amara.org community

Scott The other thing, I thought the touching moments with Tyrion and, oh, Sansa, Tyrion and Sansa, that touching moment was lovely, you know, where they're talking and appreciating each other's virtues, which is... What was that?

Chris It was like the best line of the episode where, you know, they're somehow talking about her... Thanks for watching! Have they never seen The Walking Dead? Do they not know anything about how to fight the zombie hordes?

Scott Calvary works best psychologically, right? Like disorienting, like you come in from the flank or something and you break the discipline lines. You can't play psyops Thanks for watching! Thanks for watching! And there was the critique, too, about the lighting, and the director actually said that the reason it was so dark is because HBO, the compression is really bad, and if you looked at it on Amazon Video, the streaming service, it looked better, because it's not, you know, so I don't know about, I haven't checked that out. But, so this, here's my point, right? Subtitles by the Amara.org community Now, it was still a 77, which is, as ranks go, like, a lot of shows would be happy with a 77, but still. So, it's this, it makes me think, like, our expectations in the golden age of television are too high. Like, the fact that people look at an episode like that and do so much picking apart, and I'm all for criticism, like, I'm not, like, anti...

Right. You know, critic, and I think, you know, A.O. Scott says in his great book on criticism that there's this weird thing between the subjective and objective poles on aesthetics, and what criticism does is you can't ever have an objective aesthetic, but we can have a more shared aesthetic, like it... Thanks for watching! God bless you. If I were a Dungeons & Dragons cleric, I would cast a healing spell right now.

Chris Thank you.

Scott And our expectations for entertainment is so high, and our expectations for public life are so cynical, low bar, and we just like really kind of don't have any passion for the tension between is and ought. It's just we accept that is is ought, right? And that... Politics and public life are things which we ought to be cynical about. You can't expect... For instance, I was looking at some commentary yesterday in the United States around the William Barr AG committee meeting with the Senate, I guess the Judiciary Committee, which Lindsey Graham chairs. And people just like, once somebody said, well, if you liked Trump, you thought this way. If you didn't like Trump... This cynical view of the world and sort of accepting it as things have been so they shall be. You really can't change anything. And any advantage for someone is a loss for me. You know, there's not a creative destruction and new birth kind of things in unforeseen imaginative ways in our public discourse and life together. That this kind of, this is, it really is...

So it's interesting. We have such high expectations for our entertainment and such low expectations for our shared life together, which strikes me as a sign that the barbarians are at the gates or maybe we're the barbarians or something.

Chris Lots of thoughts in response to that. I suppose one is, how is this related to individualism? If modernity is becoming increasingly individualistic, and there are technologies that are enabling that, and there are all sorts of Thank you very much. And the interesting thing about film and TV in particular is it is a very individual form of entertainment in the sense that, I mean, we go to the movies together, but we all just sit silently and don't communicate with one another at all, and we stare at a screen, and then we kind of step out and talk about it. So it's a profoundly individual experience to undergo, and it only becomes social to the extent that we then have...

Scott He was talking about this scene with Arya and the Night King. He said, I was watching it on an iPhone in a hotel in Southern California, and I gasped when it happened. And many people, I'm sure, had those kind of, and it's so much different when you're in a theater, and there's like 400 human beings, and you all kind of, you feel it. It's a different experience.

Chris That's interesting, but it's also so right. And at the same time, it can, I can sometimes, Feel a certain sadness in a movie theater when you sort of have those moments where you step out of your own space and you sort of look at yourself in the theater and think, my goodness, is there something richer here that we are failing to enjoy or create together because we have decided to come together in this odd ritual where we are Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. It's probably very alien to say ancient Athenians, where I'm sure, or maybe I'm not, let me retract that. I fantasize that the experience of getting together to talk about the business of the people, It was kind of a thrilling thing. It wasn't boring. It wasn't, oh, you know, that was the most depressing part of my week. That was probably the height of it, where we got together and got to treat these issues.

And there was also in that culture a sense of a shared understanding that my own life's meaning So it seems to me that there's this whole kind of like almost missing cultural framework of getting deep satisfaction out of shared experiences.

Scott Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is part of that book we talked about before. This guy I've interviewed, Ed Watts, The Mortar Republic. He talks about how part of, in the 3rd and 2nd century, he looks at, like, the golden age of what he thinks is the early Roman Republic and its decline, I guess, in the, you know, in the 2nd century, the late sort of 2nd century. And he thinks that, like, in the best days of the Republic, there was a real incentive to be a good citizen. These families, like, there was an honor system, and you didn't make a ton of money by being a good Roman family. You know, you weren't Terrible, terrible, you know, you weren't terribly, you weren't... Like, in dire straits financially, but it wasn't a place where you're going to get colossal wealth or anything. But there was a real social capital in being a good citizen of the republic in your family's name. And that incentivized citizenship and participation. Then eventually that just declined. That became something that wasn't a currency that was spendable anymore.

And yeah, I think that we... It's interesting you think about what it used to mean to be a celebrity, right? It meant everybody knew your name. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. Even the standards of celebrity change and become more individualistic and more siloed.

Chris I think it was Victor Hugo who said that popularity is the crumbs of greatness. I don't know if that was him, but I feel like those words have never been truer. The difference between celebrity and, what word to use? Problematic, but significance. It seems to be greater than probably it's ever been in human history. Whereas you roll back 2,000 years, the only celebrities were doing something significant for the people or something significant among the people. It had to somehow relate to the catalog of virtues.

Scott You're saying Paris Hilton doesn't do something significant for the polis.

Chris Is that what you're saying? Pausing on that word significant because there are many examples.

Scott She's not a paragon of some civic virtue is what you're saying?

Chris Or the Kardashians or something like that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I guess that is what I'm saying.

Scott Yes, yes. I want to read from this piece in the Hedgehog Review. This guy's talking about his article and his frustration with the zero-sum politics and how everything is treated as an existential crisis. He says, the above is mostly an attempt to articulate, albeit in an abstract way, something that's nagging at me as I watch one political battle after another take place. I take most of the issues at... ...is only ever ugly. Strange. But then he talks elsewhere in the piece about Leibniz, the philosopher, early modern philosopher, and how Leibniz's view of we're in the best of all possible worlds, and somehow all of our struggles and failures all somehow contribute to a whole that's better, even if you can't see the goodness that's developing. And he just finds that more... He finds that more imaginative. I mean, he's not a utopian, but he thinks that, you know, if we had a more imaginative ability to see our context and our culture, we might have a, you know, a public life that is not so cynical.

Chris And I guess, you know, that's really interesting, you know, Leibniz, who you're sort of trying to make the case that, you know, the ups and downs of our individual lives are meaningful. Because the shared project that we are helping to do is to make sense of life, make sense of the world, to endure hardship, to recover from loss, to create and adapt. And all of these experiences that we have in our individual lives To some extent, we are all sort of picking up a shovel and mining the universe together. And there's a lot of ways to think about how that is important, right? And the ways you tend to think about how that is important is by getting out of your own head, right? Sort of the impact of the full disk of Earth seen from space. Or seen from the moon, or seen from farther away, where you get the sense that this is some, you know, this rare and precious world, this oasis of life and consciousness. And surely there is significance just at that level, and we are all part of it. But, you know, that whole story, and one can weave, you know, Thank you very much.

And come out the other end of that trial with a renewed sense of self and purpose and contribution and way of earning for myself. Either I'm just fantasizing that is all somehow part of a greater thing, or it's real. But for it to be real, I kind of need, I think, help from the culture around me to look at you and say, this is important. You're doing what you're going through. This is important to all of us. And I think that there is... That idea is, especially in the modernity of the advanced democracies, rarely expressed.

Scott Yeah, yeah, and this is, I want to beat the Hegel drum again, which I've done several times, but this... That's what we're going to have.

Chris We're going to have a drum, and we'll call it the Hegel drum.

Scott And a Hegel's picture on it.

Chris Exactly. And I'll beat it whenever you say Hegel.

Scott Yeah, this whole idea in the intro, I think it's in the intro to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he says, you know, the truth is the whole. And there, I mean, it... It's a whole that is in contradiction. And the way that I feel like Hegel is sort of mistaught to undergrads is like, well, you have thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and sort of the contradiction makes a truth that takes the best and results. It's not that. There are contradictions, but when there's a new synthesis, it creates new contradictions. But the truth is still in those evolving contradictions, and he does think that that's meaningful. And so you have to see that your political adversaries are people that... That are not advocating the same thing you are, are not only fellows or not only part of a shared public, but part of the public good is that they're opposing you.

There's something in the opposition that the truth is in some of these contradictions, right? And that the apparent irreconcilable I like what you said there, that some of the public good is in the opposition. And I think that as we sort of watch congressional hearings taking place in D.C.

Chris these days, like Bill Barr in front of the The Senate Judiciary Committee that you mentioned earlier, I think that that sentence that you just stated seems to contrast sharply with the politics of the present. How much recognition is there in these committee rooms that some of the public good is in the opposition? I think that much more it has become, you know, that that position is... Thank you very much. Yeah, I mean – And that that's the unreflective feeling that we have about the world is that it is this zero-sum game.

Scott Bill Clinton said something once that conservatives are there to remind liberals what lines shouldn't be crossed and liberals are there to tell conservatives what lines shouldn't have been drawn in the first place. And that's simple but it's – and even if it's political rhetoric, at least the grain of truth behind it or sentiment, if it's sincere, is that – In a sort of two-party polarity kind of discourse that there's a need for each other, that there are blind spots, and that a zero-sum game is not a helpful way to frame things. It's interesting, too, that there was one senator Thanks for watching! Can you just do that as an avocation? I thought, wow, this guy's asking really good questions, like an actual search for the truth here. Is it this easy to infiltrate our national campaigns that people can just come over and get connected? I thought, wow, he's actually not trying to score political points. He's actually asking a question with the public good in mind.

Chris Wow! But what's interesting about that example, brilliant example, because I submit that why Barr was hesitating is that on the spot he had a hard time knowing Which is the right answer to give to maintain his narrative? Because he's trying to think, like, that was just such a question I wasn't expecting, that if I answer obviously that, no, it shouldn't be that easy, then I'm going to get caught in a logic trap.

Scott Is this Team Republican or Team Democrat?

Chris Yeah, it was really remarkable. You could just tell on the spot, like, oh my goodness, you're trying to play a different game, and I'm not quite sure if I should pass this puck or hit it. Yeah, that was quite interesting.

Scott Yeah, and I wonder, you know, part of what... I mean, maybe we need lower expectations. Although, wait, I don't want worse productions. I want the worst Game of Thrones rating to be a 77. But, I mean, maybe we ought to have more imaginative... Yeah, it's interesting. GK Chesterton says, you know, he talks about wonder and the differences with wonder. Look at a four-year-old versus a 14-year-old at the zoo, right? Four-year-old, a cheetah looks like might as well be a dragon. You know, like everything is amazing, right? They just don't think there ought to be cheetahs or there ought to be baboons or sharks. When you're a 14-year-old, you're just on your phone now because you're cynical. And wonder, I think, is at the heart of the capacity to engage the world with imagination and vigor, right? When you're cynical, just take things for granted. And I wonder how we cultivate a sort of non-cynical culture. I mean, maybe just start small. I don't know.

Chris That's a really great question. How do you cultivate a less cynical culture? And I think that starting small is probably a good idea. And I also think that maybe the most impactful and low-tech example is meaningful talk with one another. Which sort of goes full circle back to the inkling of sadness that I sometimes have in a movie theater when I think that we are all together and yet complete atoms from one another in this way of coming together, which must be a quite novel thing, I think. Maybe not. But given how we consume information, given how the algorithms are segmenting the information based on what is most likely to get us to click through, rather than what... We might find difficult to hear, but probably should hear. Just common knowledge is broken. It's remarkable that there isn't common knowledge about vaccines anymore.

Scott And it seems to me that... That is the second best modern societal bang for your buck, behind probably clean water, right? Like, if you're trying to establish a modern thriving... The best bang for your buck is vaccination, right? I mean, again, after clean water. In fact, my wife was... I was talking about my wife, talking about this with my wife, and she's a medical professional, and she said, absolutely, that's like what all, like, world relief organizations try to do. It's like water and vaccines. I mean, just what you can do there is just amazing, right? I mean, it is unbelievable. The power of vaccination.

Chris So that even that can be demoted from the status of... It's the bat phone.

Scott Two rings. That person was not persistent. It's Canadians. They're polite. After two rings, the person must not want to be called.

Chris I was going to say that even something like the value of vaccination can be demoted from the status of common knowledge, which is something that everybody obviously knows, to a debate, to a contest, to me suggests that, you know, what can we do? I think we do need to start to figure out how can we... How can we then assert our identity as social beings against this technology that's bifurcating us and these politics that are bifurcating us? I go back to our get-together in Toronto, at Basecamp Toronto, and some of the other ones you're going to be doing, where we say, We do have some common challenges, so let's start there and let's get a few people together in a kind of structured way and talk about what is our understanding of this problem and meaningfully talk about why it's important and what it means to us. Thank you for your time.

I actually think that in terms of, you know, like the highest form of sort of satisfaction and entertainment and pleasure that we can get, those kind of, you know, like free human encounters can be enormously transforming for us individually. But also, you know, you start to add those up. And just once we sort of recover the capacity to just, you know, strike up conversations with one another, I think that it At the most fundamental level, that's for some of the ability to reintroduce shared concepts of civics and virtues and be a little less cynical about our world. I think that's where it actually begins.

Scott Yeah, and this is why Aristotle can say, and people today, this sounds like complete insanity, right? But he'd say, you know, political science is, in a sense, the highest science because he thinks that, you know, what's the most rational animal we know?

For him, politics isn't merely, you know, the science of competing egoisms, you know, struggling for finite resources and motivated by scarcity. It's actually coming together to reason to seek the good we have in common in the group. And so for him, yeah, that's done well. It's some of the highest human achievement, you know, because we are capable of a lot of meaning and common welfare. I mean, that's, you know, again, today... That kind of Aristotelian statement is just looked at as political science, the highest. But in the classical sense, Aristotle is saying it makes sense when you kind of take on his assumptions for a moment.

Chris And I think that talking about political divisions in society, it seems to me that where the opportunity lies for, take the US example, Democrats and Republicans, To recover a little more optimism about a shared project and push back a bit against the cynicism of the zero-sum game is to talk about tradition. Tradition should be something that conservatives can get on board with. Yeah, let's talk traditions. I love talking about traditions. And I think Democrats can as well. And I feel like there almost has to be like a rediscovery project of like, why did we do this to ourselves? We obviously don't agree with one another on a whole bunch of things. Why did we ever decide that we wanted to do something together? What was that? And kind of go back in time to the point where, oh, this is what we shared. And we say we share this, we disagree on those things, but we really share this. And so we're going to set things up. In a way where, you know, part of the public good is being in the opposition.

And maybe recover some of that understanding. I didn't have a chance yet to tell you about it, but a few weeks ago I was in New Zealand talking at this conference. Wait, before you go there, can we just pause?

Scott I just want to say one thing before we go to sustainability in New Zealand about what your comment about tradition. Do you know the book Democracy and Tradition by Jeff Stout? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, Stout really thinks that, and he is trying to lay out a sort of appreciation of democratic tradition that I think you could be right or left. And, yeah, so I think, I just want to second your point and say you're in the great constellation with Jeff Stout.

Chris I must reread my stout. I don't think that he considered me in his consolation. Anyway, so something really interesting. So it was a conference. It was sort of indigenous world leaders and some very sort of like Western corporate bigwigs talking about sustainability. And in sort of indigenous worldview on the economy and let's say like more enlightened contemporary mainstream worldview that kind of recognized that we've got environmental limits and stuff like that. And what I didn't realize until afterwards is that actually there was quite a political tension in that room because you basically have sort of an indigenous perspective, which is to say like, well, we've always been sustainable. We've always been doing this right. And you guys kind of need to abandon your way of looking at the world and come back to origins. And, you know, the big corporate world is sort of like, well, you know, we've built the modern world that we all value. And that required a very different worldview. And yeah, you know, we want to learn from you.

But we don't want to abandon all the great things that we've achieved. And so there's this tension there. And I gave a talk sort of about the history of the mainstream economic worldview we live in today. And along the lines, what I did is I went to the beginning, sort of in primordial human times, when the indigenous worldview was the only worldview. And I demonstrated with some linguistic analysis, sort of old language roots, how, to some extent, that indigenous worldview is in every modern language still today. Like, we haven't completely lost our roots.

Scott Buddy, this is like such a Nietzschean way to approach it. I love this. This is like Nietzschean.

Chris I love it. I love it. I'll give you one example. This is really interesting. So take... Take word pairs like clamor, which is make a big sound, and clam up, which is to be silent. So they have the same archaic language root in English, which is clam. And the question is, why would we use the same word root to express opposite ideas? And the answer is that some of our word roots... They predate the time where we learn to differentiate sound into like, you know, noise and silence. It was just part of our auditory experience. Others, examples like, like, word pairs like light and lie, right? So one is illuminating and the other is the darkness of knowledge. But there was a time before which we distinguished between the truth and the lie. And it was just awareness of the world around us. And that, that root, word root, It comes from that ancient time in human consciousness when we hadn't differentiated a lot of things in our experience. And what was another good example? Oh, so for the clerics in the room, devil and God, although it's easier to make the point if you take the Latin word for God or say like the French word Dieu. Dieu and devil have the same Sanskrit root deva because before we divided it into good and evil, it was all just spirit.

So you get oohs and aahs in the room. But the point that I was trying to make is that even in our language, in an unreflective way, we are speaking with a kind of indigenous worldview in a lot of ways. So that was really helpful for people on sort of one side of the aisle who are trying to make this point that this traditional way of looking at the world really matters. And then the other point that I made is that, well, you know, about sort of 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece, you know, you had these philosophers who really discovered the power of the mind, right? The power of purposefulness and consciously directed thought to create understanding in the real world. Thank you very much. There was a lot of knowledge.

Scott – Hierophonic religious consciousness.

Chris – Hierophonic? Is that the word for it?

Scott – Yeah, it's like when your sort of mythical imagination is around repetitive cycles, right?

Chris – Sure. And so there was all sorts of very useful practical knowledge upon which whole civilizations, like agrarian civilizations, were built. That were about understanding nature's balances and polarities and dualities and the harmony, to be in harmony with nature and stuff like that. You know, you think of some of the greatest civilizations in history like, you know, sort of the ancient imperial China. The whole role of the emperor, the power of the emperor... But the Greeks, they discovered this whole new power of breaking those cycles into the triangle of perception, where my two eyes are the subject and I focus on an object and I create knowledge of that specific object. And wow, how powerful a capacity that has proven to be in all the things that we've done with it. And so this is sort of a longer story than I intended to tell, but in the aftermath when people came up to me and talked about how this had been a really helpful common story that situated and recognized as important both sort of the enduring indigenous worldview and the power of perception and purposeful thinking.

Which, you know, today has sort of reached its apex and maybe some would say has gone too far in our modern economics and modern society. But that it's not a bad thing. It's not a thing that needs to be purged. It's a power that we need to respect and figure out how can we synthesize these different worldviews. And just... Or even just see them in constant creative tension.

Scott That the contradictions and tensions are not things that need to be – that there's fruit in this tension.

Chris Right, and you don't need to sort of destroy that opposite.

Scott Yeah, yeah.

Chris In fact, you can't destroy it because in every – in each of your words and actions you are, whether you recognize it or not, you are employing the perspective of the opposite. And so you're far less distinctive as opponents as you even imagine. And I wonder if there is just so much opportunity in modernity, you know, and I think that the headline example right now is in the politics of Democrats and Republicans in the US to embark on somehow a similar project. And it's almost to say, like, it's not like we need to somehow, you know, suddenly be friends and brothers, but let's just keep going after each other's throats, but let's just take another day. And just explore our tradition a bit and not try to come out of it with a changed politics, but just to at least to spend today and remind ourselves and explore together why did we choose to get in bed with our opponents?

Scott Arthur Brooks from the American Enterprise Institute, I think he has a new book out on contempt and basically how he thinks the problem in our culture isn't anger or dispute or anything. It's contempt. It's when you view your opponent with, you roll your eyes. You don't think they're, you don't think they have any value. And this is how marriages end. The next intractable situation you're in with like your spouse or partner or sitting at a conference table or, you know, or when you're watching cable news and you're just like this, no one ever goes, like, how could you re-imagine, like, what, if you widen the lens or what possibilities aren't we seeing because we're locked into the way the debate's framed, right? Like you, there's this old, there's this old myth or old, you know, anecdote about These two monks, right? And the one monk sees the other monk smoking. He says, how can you be smoking? I asked the abbot if I could pray, if I could smoke while I'm praying. And he said, no.

And he said, aha, I asked the abbot, can I pray while I'm smoking? The power, the prejudicial way. A power of framing the question. And so, I mean, what sort of emotional myths and prejudicial lenses do we have that lock us into this kind of cynical view? And are they expandable?

Chris And I think, you know, to add one more practical step. So I think it's one thing to kind of do that exercise in the silence between our own ears. You know, I'm in this debate with someone and I can feel my anger, my outrage. I had that just a few days ago. I had such a horrible customer service experience on Air Canada getting back to Canada. And it was such a good argument. And so in that moment, yeah, part of it would be to kind of try to flip the perspective, think about how that agent must feel when this customer comes on and they've got their issues and they're also full of anger and rage. But I feel like the harder but also more important next step is to then try to talk about it. Not to just sort of do a reframe in my head, but to try to talk about the frame with someone else. In this case, Eric had this customer service experience. So I was supposed to fly back to... I live in a small town, so it's a couple of flights to get there. And the first flight was delayed so far that they rerouted me through another city, and then I'm stranded in Toronto for a night, and then carried on my travel the next day, which is fine. I visited friends in Toronto. But I said to them, like, surely you stranded me here. You're responsible for putting me up for the night.

And I've got a bit of time to kill, and I see there's a customer service desk, and there's no one in line. There's a woman standing there. So I actually went up to her and said, you know, look, I'm not asking for anything. It's sort of all water under the bridge, but I would really like to just talk with you. Thank you for having me. And it was interesting that what we discovered was, so my first flight out of London had been delayed by about eight hours and I knew that I wasn't going to make my connection past that. So I called Air Canada Service to sort this out. And we did, and they rerouted me because like, yeah, good that you called us because had you taken that first flight, you would have been stranded for a couple of days, you know, in Calgary with no onward flight. So good that you contacted us before you left London. We put you on a flight through Toronto and we'll work it all out.

But for the people in Toronto, what that meant is that I never got on a flight that left me stranded. Had I taken the original flight, there would have been a crew in Calgary that would have seen that, uh-oh, we've got a person here who's supposed to travel onward to a flight that they've now missed. So they're now our problem. We've got to put them up for a night and sort it. But because I had sorted out that problem in advance with the airline, that team in Calgary never got the flag. And a team in Toronto never got a flag because as far as they were concerned, I was scheduled to fly off the next morning. Maybe I had intended to stay the night in Toronto. They had no clue, no information. So by solving the issue proactively, I had prevented the flag from going up in their systems that then activates their customer service team and says, okay, this is our problem. So, you know, it's not clear who was right or wrong. I still feel like I was right.

Scott It sounds like... I feel like you were right, but... Yeah, yeah.

Chris But at least I understood how the humans that were connected to their systems were confused and weren't being dicks about it, but actually were saying, like, well, we don't understand why this is our problem because it seems like you're here voluntarily and... This is like Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.

Scott It's the banality of... Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for watching!

Chris No, but in sort of more the Leibniz way of, you know, let's seize this opportunity to add something more to the world and something more to our relationship. I think that that's the right expectation to have forward. And yeah, and conflicts are great opportunities to add something more.

Scott Well, let's go forth today, my friend, and, you know, engage hopefully with modest expectations.

Chris So what I've learned from this is I should get into a fight with somebody and then ask them, can we talk about it? Exactly.

Scott Although it's harder, maybe it's easier when you get to London. I'll be in downtown Philadelphia in a few minutes, in Center City, so it's easy. I could pick a fight down there.

Chris It is harder in Canada, I admit.

Scott Well, I will talk to you next week, my friend. My friend.

Chris Yeah, look forward to it.