The king’s two bodies

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, happy Thursday, my friend.

Chris Happy Thursday. Hey, when do you and all my American cousins celebrate Thanksgiving? That must be coming up pretty quick.

Scott A week from today.

Chris You know what? Like so many things, you Americans, you do Thanksgiving right.

Scott We do, dude. And my wife makes a great turkey. She uses a brine, like this wrap, so it makes it really moist. That's the thing about turkey.

Chris Well, no, that's the thing about American Thanksgiving, is that this becomes the national conversation, right? Oh, yeah. So your wife's secret is some wrap brine kind of thing.

Scott Yeah, because turkey and lamb both, I think if they're dry, they're great dishes, but if they're dry, they're ruined.

Chris Well, that's true.

Scott That's true. You know, I mean, and so I feel like that she's really perfected the sort of moist turkey, which, I mean, it's like in Christmas Vacation when they had the dry turkey, they're just pouring gravy on it. I told you we left it in too long! Oh, it's fine. Dude, I have a game for you. I want to ask if you can identify a singer, okay? Okay, well, I can already tell you I'm going to fail at this game. Okay, so I'm going to play this for you. This is two singers, alright? Let's see if you can identify who they are. They're famous people.

Chris Yeah, that doesn't help me.

Scott This is singer one.

Chris Here comes singer two. Okay, well the first one is clearly Jay Leno.

Scott Okay, so you think the first one was Jay Leno?

Chris No, so the problem with this game is you presume that I know the names. I'm pretty sure I know Tom Hanks and what he looks like, and that's about as deep as my celebrity knowledge goes. I thought, okay, so... When I was in L.A., I mean, I barely recognized Alex Trebek, and I was in his house. Wow. Did we talk about that story?

Scott We talked about the picture you sent me, but... Oh, no, but so... You gave the Trebek lecture.

Chris When I was in L.A., then, yeah, I gave this... So I gave the annual Alex Trebek lecture, and the last time I was in L.A., we met up at his house and had a great conversation. Fascinating.

Scott Did you frame everything in the form of a question?

Chris So I walk up the front gate... And along a long driveway, which is clearly meant to be driven, not walked, but I had taken a taxi there. And then literally I reached the end of the driveway and I looked to the left and the right and I don't know which way to go. It's just this estate in Studio City. Nice house. I would have designed it a bit differently, but you know.

Scott Well, L.A., L.A. So let me tell you who those two singers were. This blew me away. The first voice was Joe Pesci. No way! Yes, he's coming out with a new album. And the second one, he was doing a duet with Adam Levine.

Chris Okay, so this was an entirely impossible test.

Scott I heard it on the Howard Stern Show, and I wanted to play it for you, and I was blown away. Like, Robin Quivers guessed Whoopi Goldberg for the first time. Oh, I thought too that it was a woman. Are we being paid to promote their album? Nah, I'm not, but I just thought it was so interesting because I didn't even think it was a man at first.

Chris No, well I was thinking, is that Nancy Pelosi?

Scott Yeah, it's Joe Pesci. That's great.

Chris I love it.

Scott I'm going to buy the album because I liked his voice in that. I thought it was kind of cool.

Chris That's impressive.

Scott So you gave, not just have you given the Trebek lecture, you gave a TED Talk, and it was in Mumbai, and I watched it. I'm going to tweet it out today. I was very impressed.

Chris Oh, I'm so nervous about you watching my TED Talk.

Scott It was great. I thought you crushed it.

Chris No, I'm like, Scott Kent Jones, that's a high bar.

Scott I thought you crushed it.

Chris Oh, well then. Dude, then that's my definition of happiness. That's success. If you got something out of it. Like, if you found it thought-provoking, then holy shit, man.

Scott Yeah, it was good. I thought it's a lot of stuff, too, we've been wrestling with for a while, and I feel like you articulate some things that are, you know, asking, like... Offering more description than prescription. This is the lay of the land. Now how do we navigate it?

Chris So interesting, right? Because there's a whole David and Goliath story behind that TED talk. So TED is so prescriptive about this is what a successful talk needs to be, right? You got to answer a question. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know the answer. I think I know the question, but I don't know the answer. Like, no, you got to give us, like, I am not going to dumb it down. This is a talk about how the great ill of our society is that over a century of mass media, we've become addicted to simple truths. And you want me to dumb that down? Do you not understand how contradictory that is? And then they're like, you know, here's a time limit. I'm like, you know, I'm going to take as long as I need to take. And we want you to end with three takeaways. I said, I'm not going to do that.

And then even in the post-production, the war with the curators to get it up, to get the cut that I wanted. And then the other thing I found fascinating is that they put it up, but they also plastered it with disclaimers.

Scott Wait, I wasn't noticing the disclaimers. What were the disclaimers?

Chris Oh, it's like editorial note, like this was in Mumbai. I think two things might have thrown. I don't know who made the final curating decisions to add the disclaimers and stuff. But I think that one thing that might have thrown them was the first line. Let social media run amok. And I think that just concerned them. Oh, my God, we're going to get way too much flack for this.

Scott I love that.

Chris I love it, too.

Scott I think you were so right on that. From the first time I read it in your book, we've talked to The Age of Discovery. I've thought about that. We've talked about it on the podcast. The more we talk about it, the more right I think that is.

Chris Yeah, and I guess the more you and I talk about it, the more I realize that the way that the whole questions around social media and fake news, mainstream media, and all of that have been

Scott We're users of it. We help it succeed. And so it's on us to adapt to how it is used. There's no panacea. For every anxiety-filled moment, There's a panacea that's absolutely wrong and bullshit.

Chris Wait, wait, wait, I gotta write that down. For every anxiety-filled moment, there's a panacea that is wrong and bullshit. That's good.

Scott Yeah, but people, you know, it's like, what we'll do is we'll get Mark Zuckerberg and give him a tongue lashing, like dressing, like Nanny's gonna dress him down. It's all, I mean, it's, the stuff is like, yeah, I just think we're not, it's all scratching the surface.

Chris Totally, totally, and... As you say, it comes to us as citizens. The real questions aren't about the technology and the abuses of it. The real questions are about things like what relationship do we want to have with one another? And how can we leverage these technologies to put ourselves in that relationship with one another? But there's such a rush to solve the problem. Yeah, to blame people and to solve the problem without appreciating that things are happening because it's revealing things about our culture. And I think one of the big reveals, and I got back. So, you know, you put out a TED talk and you start to get all sorts of things firing back at you. And so one was like, you've missed all these things. I'm like, dude, yeah, I didn't try to solve the whole terrain. Yeah, I had 15 minutes, dude. Oh, I didn't even have 15. I had 13 and I went one over. I think one of the big things that social media should be helping us get in tune with is that we went through a century of the mass media age and

And that's one of the bigger cultural questions that we need to identify and sit with and work through. Like, yeah, we've created a culture of truth. That prefers certainty to doubt, that admits a lot more cynicism about our institutions than faith in projects like journalism or science to actually give us complexity that we have to deal with. And now we're struggling with the consequences of that. There's such an exciting and transforming project of just how will we be as a culture of information and dialogue and just relationship with one another. And it's clearly got to be something very different than it was in the mass media age. And there's so much opportunity and responsibility on us to reflect on that, to think about that and to... Thank you for your time. I don't know. I find that whole direction limiting. I think there's something better that lies beyond. I mean, not naively. So this is the difference, you know, my argument versus, say, Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, I think, has kind of the naive argument. Free expression is a good thing, and it will just automatically produce a better society. Well, I think that's too naive, but I think that if we're kind of consciously... He should have not dropped out of Harvard and taken some philosophy. Oh, my God.

Well, did you see his Georgetown speech? I actually watched it. And so my thought was, dude, you have so much money. Could you not hire a philosopher for a couple of days to have written you a better speech?

Scott It's interesting because I feel like this segues nicely into this piece I sent you yesterday.

Chris Oh, amazing piece.

Scott This is, again, from the Hedgehog Review. I just got the new issue. And this is this guy, Isaac Ariel Reid, who is a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at UVA and co-director of its Hannah Arendt Working Group on critical theories of modernity. And he also teaches sociology at UVA. It's interesting because his essay is sort of, I guess, an excerpt, summary of his forthcoming book from the University of Chicago Press, The King's Two Bodies. The essay is called The King's Two Bodies and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity. And I thought this is, it's another interesting thing, right? Because it's not unrelated to what we're talking about. He's thinking about political theory and how he's looking at sort of the transition to modernity, which... Again, he's thinking a lot of the struggles that we're having with demagogues and kind of unruly populism, things like this. These are not new realities, but these are things that are built into the development of the modern project itself. And especially, you know, he looks at Weber and Weber's understanding of Disenchantment differentiation, right? That in modernity, things are disenchanted. The world's not sacred anymore. It's not mystical.

It's sort of, it's all cause and effect. And we sort of have a certain materialistic conception of things and then differentiation where there's all these different spheres and you sort of don't know which. A unique change in political theory, which I found interesting.

Chris Okay, so can we do this? Can I try to summarize for you in my own words what I took away from this piece?

Scott Yes, that would be fantastic.

Chris And the reason I want to do that is because, and everybody who's listening to this knows, it's already apparent, you operate at a higher intellectual level. Not true.

Scott We operated it. I think we both think differently.

Chris Or at least if we... Yeah, we definitely... But I mean, if we counted syllables, I feel like you use more syllables than I do. And that's impressive because... Polysyllabic. Like you think of my TED Talk, I definitely used more syllables than most other people who were on the stage. How did you decide what to wear for the TED Talk? Well, you didn't get to see it, but the T-shirt that I wore on the back of it reads, Art is Truth. Okay. And I wanted the audience to see it. So something that happened on stage on the day that didn't make it to the cut is I actually paused. I mean, I'm a T-shirt, jeans kind of guy.

Scott And I was like, well, how did he... It's just very interesting because you could have worn anything.

Chris I could have worn anything. Very simple. I could have worn anything. But then if you look at my closet, my wardrobe, you would see that it's likely going to be T-shirt and jeans. Yeah. I mean, there's not much else. Okay. Yeah. And I think a lot of that other stuff was lost on me, but kind of the political theory stuff, I thought, oh, okay. I've got something. So let me try to give you my simple summary of what I took away. So the king's two bodies. A clear anchor for me in the piece was when he, you know, he gives that line of what happens when a monarch dies in the UK or, you know, you see it in the movies. A king is dead. Long live the king. Long live the king! Yeah, right. And so the idea being that the king has two bodies, which is there's the actual person and then there is the kind of institution. And in that moment, like the person dies, the king is dead, but the institution is ongoing.

It's permanent. And so it just transfers from one person to the other. And it seems to me that what he's saying is that, so that idea of the kind of the bigger institution is really important to kind of the political culture of a society. It's like, okay, that's what we are all a part of. I love this phrase, too. He says the body is not eternal because it exists in history, but it's... Yeah, he gave a new word there.

Scott Sempiternal. Sempiternal. It exists ongoing throughout time with the idea that it'll be basically indefinite. Is that a Latin prefix? You must know. Sempiternal. I'm guessing. Are you a Latin guy? I'm going to look it up to see if it's actually a word if you made it up. Sempiternal. It is a word, eternal, everlasting. It means everlasting.

Chris Dude, I'm trying to provide a little scaffolding so that all of our listeners can kind of hang on this article that you made. By the way, it's like a 25-page article. Thanks for picking something easy this week. It's not short. Okay, so the king's two bodies is referring to that idea that the king is dead, the individual, but long live the king, the institution is ongoing. What I understood him to be saying is that that idea of kind of the ongoing institution, the thing that we can all be a part of, is really important to political culture, political community. And at some point, part of modernity is that idea transferred from the institution of the king, of the monarchy, to sort of the institution of the people, of democracy. Okay, fair enough. But we still gotta have that sense that there is something bigger, something permanent, of which I am a part. That that's really key.

Scott Yeah, because he has that term, right? Authoritative delegation, where like... Yeah, I didn't understand that term. Second body is like, so the sheriff of Nottingham or the archbishop, all these figures who run the kingdom, who run the realm, right? They all, in some sense, share in the king's body, the wider body, that second body. So there's this sense that this offense is an offense against the crown. So it gives this sort of sacredness or this sort of... Yeah. It gives it gives a reason why these people have the dignity and authority that they do when they act in wider society. So they're an extension of that body and it gives them legitimacy. It legitimizes their action.

Chris Right. OK, so let me Thank you very much. And so the kind of second body of the king is kind of disappearing. And that's, I think he's arguing, that's the root of the crisis.

Scott Along with the disenchantment, there's the differentiation because the relationship between this institution and this institution all makes sense under the king's body. The church, the university, the market, all has this sense in which it all exists under this authority. This place in the larger whole. Yeah.

Chris But when the larger whole is gone, Then like, you know, well, the Academy is off over there and journalism is here and capital is over there and there's nothing really to hold it together anymore. And so it seems to be what he's saying that, okay, so we're going through this process of disenchantment. We're going, and because we kind of lost a big story to hold us together, we're kind of drifting apart, differentiation as he calls it. And so this is where the authoritarian tendency, where the hunger for kind of the strong person of the leader to provide, you know, a unifying force. It's sort of the sense that everything is just dissolving. And if we can't have sort of The two bodies of the king, then the first body damn well better be firm and strong and authoritative. And we're going to kind of put our faith into that thing, into that person.

And so it's the collapse of the magical aspect of our community. It's the collapse of the sacred aspect. of the eternal or permanent or sempiternal aspect of our community that leaves us wanting and creates the conditions for the strong leader to be wanted.

Scott Yeah, here's this great quote.

Chris So did I roughly get it?

Scott Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.

Chris And then so the question he's saying is basically is how do we restore that second body of the king?

Scott Yeah, is there a way to sort of get in modernity where we look at the people as sovereign, where we look at people as individuals, where we are a little skeptical of these sort of divine right of kings and these pre-modern things that give broader meaning. How do we replace this? How do we have something that is... And here's this great line. He said, presidents have become increasingly culturally sovereign, though never as an aspect of consensus, but as a flashpoint of polarization. So he's saying there, it's really interesting that we project all this onto the presidency, right? So they become this, it's funny in the American constitution, there's no right to vote for president. There's only a right to vote for your house member. There's not a right to vote for the Senate. But we take this as our most sacred vote, this presidency, and then he's saying they become these cultural figures, but not by consensus.

It's like the cowboy George Bush, and people get behind that, or the cosmopolitan Obama, or the sort of populist Trump, the fighter Trump. They get behind all these things, but it's always polarizing. It's one group of people that love it at the expense of an alienation of another group.

Chris So I think it's really interesting, you know, that you kind of assigned us as reading this week this article. And this idea of modernity is disenchantment, modernity is differentiation, and the kind of modernity is the collapse of the magic, of the myth. He uses the phrase sacred canopy, which I think is a really great phrase. And thinking about that in the context of the impeachment hearings underway in the House Intelligence Committee in the United States, where you can kind of see that as the kind of talking stick switches from Democrat to Republican, what seems glaringly missing is any shared sense of mission. A sacred canopy toward which like, yeah, right. There's some framework. And I'm not trying to take sides. There's some framework that we can both understand that we're part of the same project. And it just seems to be so glaringly absent.

Scott It's just team sports. It's tribal sports. It's our team versus your team. There's not the sense, we're these officeholders that have a duty, a responsibility towards a runaway executive power. There's none of that.

Chris Yeah, I mean, and in my TED talk, I kind of said the same thing differently. I said, you know, I think we've got this choice to confront, which is, do we want to declare that truth is dead? Truth, which is, you know, maybe another word for the sacred canopy, that there is something larger than ourselves. Something bigger than what I myself can comprehend or that might be aligned with my personal interests, but of which I am a part, a bigger reality. And I think that a lot of the tribal team sport of politics today is just a refutation of that. It's saying that, no, truth is dead. And instead of finding some kind of sincerity in the search for truth, sincerity for us is going to be whatever comes out of our groups. I buy what my group is buying. I believe what my group believes.

Scott It's so funny you can see this. Before Trump got elected, generally Republicans had a more unfavorable view of Russia than Democrats. Now Democrats have a more unfavorable view, Republicans have a more positive view. The NFL, before Trump, Republicans generally had a more favorable view of the NFL. Democrats had a more unfavorable view. That's fascinating. Now, Democrats have a higher view of the NFL, Republicans a lower view. It's just my tribe says it, so that's it. It settles it. I believe it.

Chris That's fascinating.

Scott It's disturbing. He has this other insight, too.

Chris Oh, go ahead. Well, like you, I was just sort of reading through the article, and I scratched many notes. You know, I think where he goes, and I think kind of like my TED talk, I mean, he's raising more questions than he has answers to, but he's kind of saying, I think this is the question that we need to grapple with. And he phrases it in different ways throughout, but one of the ways he phrases it is, you know, in a pluralistic society, what are the bases of solidarity, social support, social control, and the pursuit of a meaningful life? And I think, you know, that that is the, you know, kind of the big question, which is, you know, again, like sort of what is true?

Scott Is there anything that holds us together other than function? Like other than, you know, is the Liberal Democratic Project anything more than a set of procedures to stop things like the 30 Years War so we can get along with each other in pluralism and not kill each other? Is it anything more than that?

Chris Right. And I don't know if I circled it, but there's one point where he says, you know, kind of We haven't been at the current liberal democratic experiment for all that long, and we've never really run it in a society where no ethnicity is in the majority, where the plurality of our values is really kind of put to the test. And I think that's really interesting. I mean, there is so much happening, you know, in our social conflicts across the liberal democratic world that has to do, you know, in one way or another with race, with immigration, with the changing demographic structure of society. And I think it's interesting that it calls out that, yeah, like, so this is sort of a new and in a sense more... More challenging, a better test of our commitment to these democratic ideals of equality. Because to some extent in the past, you kind of, yeah, you give lip service to it, but there is some kind of,

you know, we kind of, we have universal franchise, but we found a way to maintain, you know, an elite authority or kind of monopoly over power anyway. And so it's universal franchise, but really it's always going to be in the interests of these people.

Scott Yeah, here's this great insight, which I think is amazing, because he's talking about how this desire and modernity for more democracy and more dignity in the individual. He says, the repeated modern attempts to essentialize racial, ethnic, and in a different way, gender differences can be seen in part in this light to secure delegation in a world in which every citizen is a king in his own castle. The distribution of personhood became fiercely, violently strict about its boundaries, even as it expanded in other ways. And indeed, over the long arc, expanded beyond the property-owning white male citizenry. It's very interesting saying, like, look, that almost, you almost have an increase in these, fixing these gender and racial lines because of the, because taking away the sacred canopy. That it didn't make everything so equal. In fact, there's a kind of, Kind of reactionary discrimination that can come when you pull apart the sort of King's second body thing.

Chris Yeah, there was something about sort of reasserting the same power through other mechanisms, other structures, I think. Sort of an attempt to preserve dominance. Another thing that sort of his writing made me just think about, so he talks about, you know, kind of part of modernity is this attempt to kind of, you know, in his words, quote, jettison religion and philosophy for scientific materialism.

Scott This is like the poster child for this is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Okay. Who's a charming guy and bright, and yet when he talks about stuff that's not scientific, like when he talks about philosophy, he sounds like almost as bad as Zuckerberg at times.

Chris That's interesting. Okay, so I've never watched—I mean, I know who this person is. I've never watched—because I guess I'm in the UK, and so he's not on, you know, BBC or anything like that. I'm sure I could find it on YouTube, but I've never— I've never sought out his television programs, so that's interesting insight. But I guess it gets to this point of is it feasible or is it desirable to adopt kind of entirely scientific materialistic philosophy towards life, the universe, everything? And I think there is this kind of, I mean, we've talked about this many times, but For me, the simplest way to think about it is that We may be modern people, but our consciousness, our language, our way of sense-making, it's not like it was software that was written last year. It's been an evolution over millennia since we made the first grunts that conveyed meaning. And so our ways of being aware in the world, in a billion ways that we are not at all aware of, contain ancient aspects of tribalism,

It moves us in an irrational way. And so the idea of building a society that is entirely rational in some ways is, you know, it's just some kind of, I don't know, classical liberal wish fulfillment, but it's... Yeah, yeah, and you're not going to get questions about teleology and purpose and the meaning of things, like, out of the human condition.

Scott And this is one of the things I think... That drives certain kinds of populism. Because they'll offer teleology. This is what this good life means. These are the good guys. These are the bad guys. This is why we're great as a people. We could say Merry Christmas again, which Trump always says. Now we say Merry Christmas in the stores because of me. That's a simple thing.

Chris I want him to come out as a flat earther.

Scott That would be great. I heard a flat earther say... Hey, so...

Chris This is tangentially related to, you know, what is going on psychologically for people who are flat earthers. It's maybe more, in this sentence, he's speaking more directly to, you know, kind of racial relations. And it goes back to something he said just a moment ago. But basically, in the modern Republican democracy, racial exclusion instantiated a strict hierarchy whose psychological gains For white citizens could blunt various other experiences of inequality. And so I think there's something in support for populists. There's a psychological gain that blunts other forms of inequality. I mean, say, for example, hostility to intellectual elites, right? Yeah, but if I can find a way to kind of dismiss you as, let's say,

Scott Absolutely.

Chris And so I think that those conflicts for self-worth, for self-dignity, are also a big part of what is playing out in a lot of our politics today.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting because this is, I feel like his finger's on the pulse of something. It's a question, can we come up with a modern, because we can't go back. We're not going to go back to pre-modern sensibilities. It's funny because even the sort of populists go back to Make America Great Again and all this stuff. It's always nostalgic and mythical. We don't go back. But yet, can we find something equivalent that functions suitably and in a way that does justice to modernity and yet isn't reductive like the worst of modernity?

Chris I think you put your finger on it right there. Make America Great Again as an example of something mythical that people hunger for. And again, if I also think about the spectacle of the impeachment hearings happening as we're speaking in Washington DC right now. So in that context, he has this line. He's talking about Albert Camus writing about the French Revolution. And at the trial of Louis XVI, Camus commented, quote, We are not dealing with law. We are dealing with theology. Which is what he means. He's talking about the sacred canopy, right? Is this about a king or is this about a people? What is the sacred canopy? And whatever it is, that's going to determine what the law says should happen in this trial for Louis XVI. And it's the same thing with Trump today. I mean, they're using law and they're using the trappings of kind of, you know, constitutional authority. But really, the contest is a theological one over what's the story here. Are we a constitutional democracy where our capacity, the capacity of the executive to act is bounded by, you know, our interpretation of this document that we're all supposed to be under? Or is there a kind of a sense of mission?

And so he goes on to write, lawyers, so in that context, but I think it's similar today, lawyers, judges, politicians, they are also actors on a stage of history. They are a part of a drama of good and evil and thus a theology. To commit violence is to commit to one or another answer to the question of what is sacred.

Scott Yeah, and I think it's interesting, because I think that we, because people find, again, there's this, the worst of modernity with all the disenchantment and differentiation, you can feel kind of nihilistic, that a call to arms can often give somebody a sense of meaning. Like, if I'm against this person, I now know that there is good and evil, and there is meaning, like, because that's evil, that's good, bad, and then... The universe says, I'm on the side of the angels. I'm good. And it recreates amidst all the disenchantment and disenfranchisement and stuff. It recreates, all right, I got meaning again.

Chris Yeah, so interesting. So yeah, this is kind of this division of good and evil, that I'm good and you're evil. And that kind of leads to the next thing that he talks about, which is, I guess, in terms of asking questions of, here we are at this moment in history, and what are the questions we need to be asking ourselves? The next question is, is a widespread distribution of sacredness Thank you very much. You know, the classical ideal of liberal democracy is the sort of humanistic view that we're all sacred. Right.

Scott But that's easier to commit to intellectually than it is to... Bring to fruition. Bring to fruition and create symbols and stories that... modern symbols and stories. Right.

Chris So this is why we're decoding as we go. This is great. So in the next paragraph, he talks about collective representations and their performance and how important those are. Things like the Gettysburg Address. Okay, in the US context, we all get that that was a sacred thing. We're all under that. Selma, Alabama. But how many of those are there? And how important, how critical are these to give people a sense that there really is a sacred canopy? I keep using that phrase because it's just so, I think, helpful in terms of trying to articulate it.

Scott Yeah, I think there's a book by the sacred canopy by Berger, Peter Berger, the famous sociologist. He has a book called The Sacred Canopy.

Chris Great phrase. So I guess sort of the challenge that we face is, so he said the king has two bodies. And in kind of modernity, the idea is supposed to be that every individual has two bodies.

Scott Yeah, we all are the sacred body. The government of the people, for the people, by the people. This idea that there's a shared, we're all the second body.

Chris Yeah, and then the challenge is that we know that we're failing in so many ways in this ambition.

Scott Yeah, because in the pre-modern thing, we exist under the second body kind of thing. We don't constitute it together. We exist under it, but we don't constitute it. We don't make it up collectively, which is a different kind of thing. This is why we need sovereign, we need the royal family to step it up.

Chris So I was actually thinking about that. I was thinking about, I think, like a season one episode of The Crown and wondering like what Queen Elizabeth would say about this, like the king has two bodies, because I'd have to look up the episode. You've seen The Crown, right? I just started season three. Okay. So, I mean, I vaguely remember season one. I can't remember quite the context, but there is some circumstance. I think in which people are encouraging her to abdicate or step to the side or something. And she talks about, she kind of goes into her early tutorial notes about being the sovereign. And I'd have to kind of pause.

Scott There's a phrase, the constant and the whatever.

Chris Yeah, but basically there's the temporal and then there's the sort of spiritual or the sacred or something like that. So it's interesting that in a constitutional monarchy there is quite, in kind of the theory of what is a constitutional monarchy and why does it exist, there is this explicit notion that the crown is the representative of this sacred canopy. That the delegates may divide over issues, but the crown is always the unifying symbol of what we are all a part of. And I guess in a presidential system where the president is also head of state. So in the parliamentary system, the prime minister is sort of the chief executive, but not the head of state.

Scott Right, right. He runs the government, not the state.

Chris Right, right. And so when heads of state get together, Canada and the U.S., It's the president, and in our case, the governor general, or here in the UK, the queen. I mean, the prime minister gets to tag along because they can get work done, but the heads of state doesn't include the prime minister. So in the presidential system, explicitly, there is those two bodies of the king in one person.

Scott And I think what he identifies is it's because the person's elected and there's so much popular emotion and energy, it's always a divisive kind of power, some symbolism. It's not, hey, I'm not partisan. I'm a symbol to try to enfold us all in some sort of union despite our obvious differences. It's almost the president picks which differences are the sacred ones in the moment or the winning ones in the moment.

Chris Yeah, but I also think I think maybe we're saying the same thing. And I think he talks about this around how recent presidencies have diminished that role of, in addition to having been mainly elected as the representative of my party, I'm now the unifying symbol. I'm the unifier. And I think certainly in current president, there's one of the issues that, let's say, a lot of traditionalists in American society, I think, have issue with, is there just seems to be a total absence of the sacred, the ceremonial, the constitutional.

Where, you know, we've had four years of just completely disregarding this group's interests. And so now that we've got the reins of power, we need to swing the other way. And so kind of the need to maintain the balance by swinging to both extremities makes it very hard to ever feel like the person in that role is ever speaking with the national voice. And then if that person isn't speaking with the national voice, then who is?

Scott What does he say? He says, it should not entirely surprise us that this format of power has reappeared in a moment in which our political culture seems ill-equipped to confront not only our deep divisions, but also the irresponsibility and indifference to democracy among certain titanic pillars of wealth. I mean, it's interesting because he's like, it's almost like this shouldn't surprise us that we feel so ill-equipped. It's sort of the nature of the beast. We've evolved in such a way that as this is,

Chris You know, this sort of fetishization of what is measurable, I think, is kind of at the root of our rooting out or marginalizing a lot of what is mythical, what is ceremonial, what is purposeful. And, you know, just having said this has been, you know, modernity, it's sort of been a 500-year journey. I discovered like, wow, it is so powerful to kind of examine the piece and to measure it and to measure the forces and the relationships. We can accomplish so much more than when we kind of took the world as a crude whole. We can accomplish so much more when we break it down into pieces that we can master and control. And it's kind of, I think, you know, that power of the piecemeal approach. Well, and yeah, and so the question is around, well, one of the big costs is around, so to what extent do we care about the whole anymore? Or do we even have a language or capacity to take it seriously?

And as the whole becomes less something that we can take for granted and more something that we have to explicitly work together to maintain, you know, that question becomes... I found this sentence where he says, the simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multi-ethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved. So he's kind of, I think that's an important sentence because he's highlighting that we're in new territory now and it's not just technological, it's also demographic.

Scott Yeah, yeah, when we think of, a lot of times in America, there's, at times when we're frustrated with our government, people will look to Scandinavia. It's not that Scandinavia's perfect, but there's things that they seem to do more efficiently, effectively. They're smaller and more homogenous, like those countries. I mean, we're a big country that's very diverse. Like, it's a challenge to govern something this big, that's this diverse, with a sort of liberal democratic ethos.

Chris Absolutely. I remember this is pretty off topic, but when you talk about the simplicity of managing more homogeneous populations, I always think back to kind of a senior delegation I was a part of that went to Estonia. I guess now it's a couple of years ago. And one of the features of Estonia is how digital that society is.

Scott Is that where they vote with the card?

Chris Yeah, exactly. So you plug in your national ID card into a card reader on your computer and you can vote from your computer.

Scott I'm into this.

Chris It's really interesting. You can also change your vote up until the polls close. So that's neat. But part of being able to implement that technology is a pretty broad faith in the technology. And I think that part of what helps a society like Estonia to have faith in that system, to have faith in the bureaucracy that builds it and maintains it, is that it is a small and remarkably homogeneous population. And so there's a background of unearned trust that is nonetheless a reservoir that allows some things to be agreed upon pretty quickly.

Scott Yeah, and I think in diverse multicultural societies, that's harder. I think that's a harder... It's absolutely harder. You know, either one of two things has generally happened. Either there was homogeneity, and now it's disrupted through an increased diversification. Or, like in the United States, you started off with... We have some relative diversity, and it's increased, but there's never been a sort of homogenous foundation. It's always been developing. I mean, there's two different ways I think those tensions form. Boyfriend, I have to catch a train soon. What's our takeaway from the king's two bodies is these two bodies, which are talking through... Okay, so you want us to land the plane.

Chris Let's land the plane. Here's how I begin the dissent. Put your trays up, everybody. Fasten your seatbelts. So this is great, but if you think of the examples you've given about other political communities that are much more homogeneous, that kind of helps you to understand in more diverse societies, like the US, where you see a rise of populism. You can understand it as... Like a desire for, as he says in this article, quote, a more recognizable body politic. There's a kind of nostalgia for like a society, a political community that is more recognizable to me. And I think that's right. People want to have a kind of, we want to be able to recognize The body politic. And it seems that there's two ways to do that. One is to kind of, you know, go back, whether it's real or imagined in some nostalgic way. Or the other way is to figure out a new,

you know, forward, a way forward toward more recognizability, which is to say, I see it and I see my part in it. And it seems to me that that's the, you know, that's kind of the liberal mega project. Yeah, yeah. If you will. To accept that we have this need that maybe has been denied.

Scott Or maybe the Liberal Project might have to admit it because, I mean, I think there's a lot of people that are committed to understanding of the Liberal Democratic Project that actually excises those questions. It's just a procedural kind of thing, right? But maybe we need more than procedures.

Chris Well, yeah. So I think we've got kind of this menu of choices. And if you're a political entrepreneur, you're kind of offering the menu, like the authoritarian choices. So we're going to offer a fantasy of total integration.

Scott Yeah.

Chris Okay. That's one way.

Scott That's a great phrase. This is total integration. We're going to get back church, society, state.

Chris We're going to make America great again.

Scott We're going to make America great again.

Chris The fantasy is total integration, and that's how the body politic becomes recognizable. You know, the other fantasy, and this is kind of the revolutionary, like, okay, so basically, we're just going to burn society to the ground and rebuild it from scratch. And that's how we're going to make it recognizable. This thing now unrecognizable, let's just wipe the slate clean and we're going to build something new that you'll recognize because we built it together. I mean, this is basically the Communist Party in China in 1949. This is how we're going to kind of recognizably give you back. Give you back your country. And then so the question is, is there a third way, which is neither the fantasy of total integration nor sort of total restart, but to kind of take the cultural mess.

Scott Yeah, can we look at where we've been and not recreate, be informed by it, not try to recreate it, be informed by it, and learn some lessons that can help us shape something as we move forward?

Chris And, and, okay, so I think our hypothesis, we agree, is that procedure, shared procedure is not enough. It can't just be constitution, rule of law. It can't just be procedural. I think there also has to be an element of myth, of purpose. Yeah, yeah, there has to be a story. Of sacred, yeah, of sacred story.

Scott There has to be something sacred about it, yeah.

Chris There has to be something sacred about it. And then that, I think, is the interesting question. How do we build, in diverse, multi-ethnic society, how to build shared sacred story? Is that possible?

Scott That should be our next episode. Dude, yeah, that's right up your alley.

Chris So you must have the answer to that. I know, but I want to talk about it. Tune in next week.

Scott Tune in next week. I love this. I like it, though.

Chris See, we've set ourselves up. That's great.

Scott All right, my friend. Always a pleasure.

Chris Always a pleasure. Watch my TED Talk again.

Scott Yeah, I'll tweet it out so people can see it. I'll do the same. All right, man. Later. Take it easy.