Is there still room for debate?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, welcome back to the show. It's good to see you. It's good to see you, too. My friend across the pond.

Chris I'm still mad at you. I know.

Scott We are Facebook. We're doing a little experiment. So if you are sitting around and you're on Facebook because you're going COVID crazy or something and you get a notification, we've been doing livestream stuff with the podcast. So what we're doing is actually... We're recording it and it'll go into iTunes and you can still listen to it like, you know, Basecamp Radio as it is. But we're also doing a live stream so you can see us and you can even, you can even, I guess, ask questions. I mean, if somebody had a question, theoretically, we could field it. So we've not done that yet.

Chris It'll be fun when we do that for the first time. Yeah, so here we are. And get completely derailed. I mean, it's... Exactly. We've got a pretty fragile focus on our agenda.

Scott Exactly, already, already.

Chris It may not be a good idea.

Scott Get the Ritalin out, get the Adderall.

Chris Well, let's, so I don't have time for a long intellectual gym session with you today. So let's just stick right in it with what you thought would be good fuel for our fire.

Scott Yeah, so you and I have been talking a little bit about maps and the sort of metaphor of cartography. And we said some of the things we're looking to do in this podcast is see a map, tear up a map that maybe needs tearing up or drawing a new map that needs to be drawn as we're negotiating a new world that's changing all the time, especially in the midst of pandemics and racial injustice and these kind of conversations about these things and trying to figure out how to move forward in the world together. We'll be kind of looking at different maps. And I found a piece that I shared on Facebook, which I'll be quite honest, I was worried about sharing it because I was worried about getting canceled, like cancel culture. Seriously, I thought, and this is because I tend to be left of center culturally and politically. And so my sympathies tend to be with left of center kind of groups. But I really like Andrew Sullivan, who's a very difficult guy to... Pinned down because he's kind of gay, Catholic, conservative, small C, but votes Democrat, HIV positive. He's a very interesting guy. He wrote a piece in The Intelligencer, which is for New York Magazine, which is a subset of New York Magazine, saying, is there still room for debate?

And he talks about how Vaclav Havel, the great Czech... Democratic activist tells the story of a shopkeeper who put a sign in his shop, Workers of the World Unite. And Havel reflects on this in an essay called The Power of the Powerless. And he says, why did that guy do that? Because if he didn't do it, he might get ratted out for not doing it. He's afraid of the kind of ideological force of not doing it. And Sullivan in this piece is sort of looking at the dangers of That kind of cancel call-out culture when we're debating hard things, right? That, you know, he's like the pressure of if you don't put this a certain kind of political statement on your Facebook wall or on your Twitter feed, then you run the risk of being canceled, right? You're not sufficiently woke or you're not sufficiently, you didn't sufficiently virtue signal or something like that. And I think that as I was reading this, I thought he's absolutely right because part of the thing he's saying is like, look, the Black Lives Matter movement is great. It's a great thing for the country.

And he thinks it's a great thing that is shedding light on a lot of systemic injustice. But he says, you know, is there this kind of, there's this kind of framework that's saying everything in the United States structural system is built on racism and institutional oppression of African Americans. He says, well, that's one way to look at it. And there's some truth that this stuff is interwoven. And he said, another way to look at it is that we've had this long struggle in the United States between ideals of equality and fraternity and greater democratic expansion, and yet at the same time have been marginalizing people. And you could look at this as something like the Civil War as this explosion of these two values and tension, right? On one hand, a liberative kind of approach, and on the other hand, this dark story of oppression. And he's like, isn't this worth debating?

Isn't this a conversation worth having? And he feels like we're getting in this moment where you can't even have that discussion. Where if you don't sort of say the party line around institutional racist, instructional racist ideology, if you don't toe the line, you're just silenced. And this is the kind of thing that I think is a problem, right? Because I think we are in really pernicious times, and we probably need more nuanced, complex thought exchange discussion than less of it. You think?

Chris Well, so that was all. I think a good first advertisement. We'll have to drop it a couple of times when we go through this conversation. For the conversation that we are convening next week on Thursday, June 25th, the next Basecamp Campfire, where the question that about 100 of us are going to get together and ask ourselves is, what is the difference between us and them? And we thought a lot about how to craft the question that would create a space for us to not debate, but explore questions of identity. And I do think that it's important to come to that conversation with a recognition that identity is real. And that there is a lot of complexity there that kind of needs to be unpacked and explored. You know, I have this question that Andrew Sullivan writes about in this piece. Obviously, it's very timely because this is what we're all talking about. One of the ways on my side of the pond where this debate is made concrete is this kind of, it seems like an almost annual exercise that Oxford University goes through. Around statues of Cecil Rhodes. So Cecil Rhodes, Rhodes Scholarship, big, big presence around Oxford, left a lot of money to this institution. Yeah, was this colonial governor of Rhodesia in Southern Africa. I mean, how egotistical is that? And was an absolutely abhorrent person by every standard today. And there are... I know I'm talking about a very little microcosm of the world is Roads Must Fall.

And it actually began in Southern Africa. And statues of Cecil Rhodes were torn down in parts of South Africa in kind of the first wave of this campaign. And then it kind of went back to the motherland. And so, you know, and the debate was about, you know, do we do we try every year to sort of purge our history or do we leave it there so that every year we can have this difficult conversation? And I think, you know, but it does. I think when it gets good, it becomes a conversation about, well, what do we what do we mean? You know. What does it mean to have the statue in a public place versus, say, in a museum? And is there anyone that deserves to be idolized forever? And maybe that is something that we'll come out of this moment with, is more like a kind of a sunset rule on every statue. After 50 years, we'll ask ourselves.

Scott John Calvin, the great Protestant reformer, in his will, he wanted to be buried in an anonymous grave because he was afraid people would venerate his grave. Now I'm thinking, is that humble or arrogant? It's humble and you don't want your grave venerated, but you think you're that big a deal that people would do it? I'm not sure.

Chris But more directly, it seems to me the question I'm hearing that you're grappling with is, Do we sometimes destroy the very space for conversation that we need? Even if the direction is good, do we skip over the social work where we develop good questions, good understanding, good tensions, and bury that? In the kind of rush to signal the virtue.

Scott Right, and I think this is, I mean, okay, the liberal democratic project is fragile and it's only existed for a few hundred years, right? And so this kind of space, I want to quote something from the Solomon piece where he talks about what liberalism is and then we could talk for a minute about. I will bet that I have the same paragraph on my page right now, but you go. Liberalism is not just a set of rules. There's a spirit to it, a spirit that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ideology. Friendship, art, love, sex, scholarship, family. A spirit that seeks not to impose orthodoxy, but to open up the possibility Thank you. Regardless of their race, rather than insisting on equity for designated racial groups, it's a spirit that delights sometimes in being wrong because it offers an opportunity to figure out what's right and it's generous, humorous, and graceful in its love of argument and debate. It gives you space to think and reflect and deliberate. Twitter, of course, is the antithesis of all this and its mercy-free wildlife qualities when combined with a moral panic are, quite frankly, terrifying.

I think that paragraph is so well written. I think it's so much the spirit of what you've tried to cultivate at Basecamp. This real spirit of generosity, of delighting when you find out you're wrong because you can find what's right. Again, you tear up old maps and it leads to drawing new ones and leads to new exploration and wonderful wanderings. And I think that, to me, what I'm noticing is the major political divide right now that I feel existentially. It's not right-left. It's liberal-illiberal. And so I find I have more in common as the guy on the left with my center-right friends who are committed to this kind of concept of liberalism. Then I do with people on the far left, the populist kind of anti-liberals. And my conservative friends feel the same thing with the kind of Trump populists and all the populists on the right.

And I think what the populists on the right and left have in common is that they're both illiberal, that they don't value this mysterious conversation and adventure that is this kind of social experiment that we've lived in for only a few hundred years. I mean, most of world history has not produced this. So, I mean, I guess...

Chris It'd be great to get Andrew Sullivan in the room because I feel like I can see... I know it's an ugly term, but I can see both sides and I think I'd need some help to kind of tease it out because I feel like part of the... So what he's basically saying is that, you know, liberalism is about holding the space where you can kind of talk about anything. Even, you know, holding the space where things that don't even fit the context can nonetheless be discussed so that we can explore what the context is. And yet, I think that a lot of, and you can call it populism, but the popular movements today are saying that even if you try to create that space, it's... You're going to bring into that space all sorts of illiberal stuff. Great example, Basecamps. This is a very, I think, in a classically liberal sense, this is a very liberal project. This is all for the common good. It is non-profit charity. There is no fee. Nobody's making any money. We all contribute what we can into the pot to create this space where we can all Meet the people that we're not meeting in our lives so that society once again has a common cookpot, a common campfire. And we're not going to try to debate and figure out who's right or wrong. The test around this campfire is who can open up.

And who can offer something from their own perspective, from their own experience that is genuinely worthy of this space and kind of our broader purpose of getting together. I mean, all of that stuff sounds great, but it's got to start somewhere. And if we are some of the founding members and we look around and say we invite our friends. A lot of the people that I know are more white than black, for example. If it's just create the space and invite people to come, it's going to reproduce some of the structural imbalances in our society, let's say. I think that's the argument for whatever it is, whatever we do, if we want to focus on some questions like racial injustice, Then there does need to be a kind of, I don't know, is heavier hand the right way to talk about it? But, you know, there has to be a kind of deliberately tipping the scales just to bring things into some kind of balance where the Liberal project can begin. And so I think that's where it starts to get, I think, confusing.

Scott Well, I think that this is the feature versus bug stuff, right? Is the feature of the system or a bug in the system? Because I think the great feature of the system is the kind of liberal, open-ended conversation can address this problem. It can address these structural issues by more conversation, by including more people. This is what I always think about, and this is a sort of religious example, but... I think about when people, as a guy who self-identifies as a religious Christian, people always talk about, well, then why is the world so evil? I'm like, well, Christianity's got a built-in answer to that, original sin. That's not a problem. It's built into the understanding of the religion. I think the same thing with liberalism. It sees that there will always be illiberal facets. to structures and conversations. And so part of it is it's developmental, it's porous, it allows people to come in. And rather than, I mean, one answer is liberalism's no good because of imbalances and things like that. Let's blow it up.

Or you could say, no, part of the beauty of classical liberal culture is that as it evolves and as we get more diverse society and as we enfranchise more voices that have been disenfranchised in the past, is that The liberal project can grow and it can expand. It can learn. It can evolve. It can develop organically. It can develop immunity to certain kind of toxic things, antibodies and things like that. So I think that it's built into the project.

Chris Yeah, I think that's right. The capacity to grow and learn. And if I can be concrete, so, you know, I think it's built into, you know, the Basecamp, for example. Yeah. So earlier in the piece, Andrew Sullivan writes about, like, he kind of puts up the straw man argument, kind of, I think what he's afraid of is that he says, to be woke is to wake up to the truth. The blinding truth that liberal society doesn't exist, that everything is a form of oppression or resistance, and that there is no third option. So you're either with us or you are to be cast into the darkness. And I think what he's saying is that, no, no, no, there is a third option where we can recognize the forms of oppression and resistance and ask, what can we do about that? And I think there's a beautiful example of the last get-together we had, where we're sitting around the campfire and somebody raised their hands and said, in the context of everything that's happening, we should be having a conversation about identity. And I don't think that we have all the right people around this fire to have that conversation.

Because it is about a facet of diversity that this particular group that's just gotten together, we don't have all of the pieces. So let's all take it upon ourselves to recognize that. And if we want to have that conversation, to bring that mix of people that are missing so that we can have it. And everybody agrees that, yeah, that makes sense. Well identified. We all are empowered to do something about it. So let's do that. Let's run that experiment. And so I think you're right that it is possible if the context is set up to welcome it, to bring the bugs, the defects in the code, to bring what is wrong up. And what is right is that we have this ability to respond to it. And I think that's kind of where he lands on Twitter as the antithesis of that, because there is no...

There is no space in social media, and especially on Twitter, to bring up a defect and say like, hey, here's something, here is a token of oppression or resistance. How can we make it better? Having recognized this, how can we bring this into play, like into serious play, so to speak, in that this becomes the work rather than the dividing line?

Scott And I think what Twitter represents, and I'm on Twitter. I like Twitter. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I tweet. I'm a user of the platform, and I get a lot of news through it. But I think what it is at its worst, or maybe at its average day, it becomes something the American founders were really wary of, right? It becomes a mob, right? And part of liberalism, like the Liberal Democratic Project, as opposed to just democracy, the Liberal Democratic Project says, look, it doesn't matter what the mob says. There are certain inalienable rights that they just can't legislate out of. I like what he says, too, that liberalism is not just law or government. It's a spirit of ideas. It's not just a form of government that precludes mob legislation, but it's also a spirit that's wary of mob conversation. Not just mob legislation, but mob conversation. Most of the time, we're not going to be at our best. We're not going to form this robust civil society.

But there are views that might irritate you or might irritate me that are not out of the sort of grand stage of the liberal project. And right now, again, I think there's a tendency... Andrew Sullivan has been... It's funny because I forget where I heard this, but... There are these kind of two millennial junior editors that are screening his stuff to make sure it's not sufficiently offensive. And this is a guy who is, I mean, in my opinion, again, and he's politically probably a little to the right of me, although he's kind of moved further leftward. He started his kind of intellectual career as a Thatcherite Reagan conservative. That is a gay man who's pretty cosmopolitan. I think he's moved left, but he still probably identifies as kind of center-right. But I find him one of the best public intellectual conversationalists. And to silence Andrew Sullivan, it's almost like there's this phrase I've heard about suicide, like the challenge of suicide is at the same time you're taking the life of the world, right?

And I think like... When you silence someone like Andrew Sullivan or cancel them, you're silencing the voice of the world. And that, to me, is totally tragic. By the way, if we get canceled by this, it's my fault. Basecamp Radio, cancel.

Chris No, I mean, I love being in uncomfortable spaces. That's where I learn and I grow. But I also, and I guess because of that, I've also from time to time suffered from the, I guess, exposing myself to be misunderstood. I guess another dimension of this is when it comes to systemic racism, so much of the oppression was about silencing, was about Whether cancel culture is shutting down the spaces, the very spaces that we need to explore and grow the project. And then we can have a kind of topic-specific debate. And it may be that that debate changes a bit depending on the topic. Right. And it just seems to me that racism would be kind of the acid test where where the oppression is to have been canceled. I can rightly understand how. How any effort to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's slow this down, this needs more conversation will be associated with every time in the past that people said that as an excuse to not have the conversation and not take it seriously. And so it's very interesting. Again, my micro example at Oxford, this colonial statue of Cecil Rhodes, and every year the conversation comes up, but this year they decided to take it down. And so what changed? The context changed. And frankly, the conversation's been had a lot. So any conversations that we're going to have that the statue is going to helpfully provoke, I mean, if nobody was recording them for posterity, I guess that's your loss.

But the Liberal Project talked about that frigging piece of stone a lot. So do we have to keep talking about it? And so I guess that's the other question is, is when Like, do all these spaces have to be held up permanently? Or at one point, do we say in the project, okay, yeah, we had that space, we had this conversation, now we've had it, and so let's move on to another conversation.

Scott Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I don't think there's anything in liberalism that precludes, like, closing chapters, right, like, of books, you know, like, absolutely, no, I think, and I think that... The strength of the project is that, I mean, I just think right now in America, there's so much being undertaken to address systemic racial injustices, which again, I don't think, there are these cultural moments where I think it opens up the space to make the changes and to make the big moves. I think sometimes they're kind of granular or gradual moves. Gradual conversations, but then something like with George Floyd happens. And again, we've had spending some time down in the southeast right now. In Atlanta, there was another basically execution of an African-American guy. And I think that there's something about the space right now where people are ready for a change. And that's part of the liberal DNA, right? That we come together conversationally and make changes together. Sometimes the conversation is stalemated and other times it's not. And I think it's a beautiful thing right now that we're actually having hard conversations. And I think that this sort of...

The cancel culture, the kind of mob things, what it ultimately does, it precludes hard conversations. I don't think it really fosters them or cultivates them. It precludes them. So there's another little excerpt from... And by the way, can I just qualify by saying... I come at this as a guy that's from the left. I mean, I'm not a kind of cranky conservative on this stuff. I mean, I feel like I'm kind of trying to do critique of my own side of the cultural conversation because we need the left right now. We need a vibrant, strong, reflective left to counter some of the populism in its worst forms. And my fear is that we're losing that in this cultural moment.

Chris So yeah, and I think that Andrew has the same fear. So his fear is, he lists them, right? He talks about, we have coworkers eager to weaponize their ideology to purge the workforce. We have employers demanding our attendance at seminars and workshops to teach us ideology. We have journalists, of all people, pouring through other writers' work or records to get them in trouble, demoted, or fired. We have faculty members at colleges signing petitions to rid their departments of those few left not fully on board. We have human resource departments that have adopted this ideology whole and are imposing it as a condition for employment. And critically, we have a Twitter mob to hound people into submission. So I think you're right. The hard question that he's trying to provoke a debate on is, I guess, how do we – well, maybe this is another way to put the question. How does righteous injustice best express in the liberal project?

And when does it or can it ever become weaponized in a way That actually harms the kind of personal growth that fundamentally is what the Liberal Project is meant to be about. We're not meant to be forced to be fully free and self-actualized persons. We're kind of meant to get there ourselves. That's kind of the hope. We all get there ourselves. And to get there ourselves, there needs to be a space to make mistakes, apologize for them, learn from them, grow together, practice good listening, practice the courage to call things out, have the compassion and the courage to navigate that journey. How much have we really grown?

Scott But this is, yeah, this is absolutely, you're absolutely correct here. And the examples I use are a guy like Bill Maher gets disinvited from speaking on college campuses. A guy who's, I don't know, gave a million or two million dollars to Obama's campaign against Mitt Romney. I mean, he is a pretty liberal guy. But because of some of the things he said on his show about Islamic extremism and why don't liberals stand up for liberal ideas, like no more genital mutilation and all this stuff, and kind of... Those sort of conversations, he's been deemed kind of insensitive and politically incorrect for saying those things. So what I've noticed in American university culture is, and this is why I think liberals have a tough time figuring out why they lose so much to conservatives, right? Because you go into university culture in America, which is overwhelmingly populated.

The professors, the faculty, the culture, it's left of center by and large, right? I mean, it's just the way it is. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing in the least. Again, this is kind of where I locate myself, right? This is not a criticism of that. But the hard thing is when you kind of box speakers out and you're not really giving a hearing... To views that half the country holds and takes seriously, right? What happens is in this university bubble, students come out that are liberals and they just think that, again, views that half the country holds on a wide array of issues are just not serious ideas and are just fundamentalist and parochial and absurd and backwater. And then they're surprised that they don't know how to talk to swing voters and people People that are deciding elections. And Donald Trump does know how to talk to them.

He is able to kind of marshal their cultural values. And this is the problem, I think, again, as someone on the left. When you create these isolated bubbles, liberals then don't know how to take seriously views that you don't have to agree with them, stuff I don't agree with, but half the country thinks it. So you can't just dismiss it and say it's absurd and parochial. You have to figure out a way to engage it constructively.

Chris Well, this is, you know, like, you know, we've embarked on an endless conversation.

Scott Yet again. Because for those of you first-time listeners, more to come.

Chris Because, you know, there's this other kind of, yeah, that's right, but there's this other sort of, like when you say, like, so half the country thinks that way, so you have to engage with it. But this is where, you know, as a China scholar, and I just think of, you know, the differences between civilizations is, you know, how much of, How much do we need to take as a given? We've got to work within the boundaries of that versus it's all just up to us. And whatever we believe is the reality and therefore we have to take it as real and work with it. So set aside these complicated questions about the state of racial discourse in the US right now and think about a very different field like the environment. So, you know, if you're an environmentalist, you're like, we've got to take nature as a given. And frankly, whether we believe that nature is at the bargaining table or not, nature is at the table.

And by the way, you know, this coronavirus, that's nature. You know, demonstrating its bargaining power, because these novel viruses, they emerge from stressed ecosystems. We've been stressing these ecosystems, so we're gonna get more of these viruses. This is, nature is collecting a bill from every single man, woman, and child on Earth right now, right? So nature's at the table.

Scott And you combine that with climate change, right? Climate change, stressed ecosystems, yeah, totally.

Chris And so, and so, like, what's the starting point? Did we start with, okay, you know, nature is at the table, and so we got to take their interests on board, and then everything else about what we do with our economy, what we do with our politics and stuff has to happen within those kind of system conditions, right?

Scott Right, right.

Chris Or we say, well, no, half of us don't believe that. And so we have to have a debate about whether nature is at the table or not. And this, I think, is a really tough question for the liberal project. Which, by the way, classical liberalism, when it was basically a few white men, landholders in London, here we are, right? You know, liberal tradition even evolved with a notion of the boundaries of play, unless maybe we would say it was kind of a Judeo-Christian thing. And so those boundaries were imported. And maybe that is true. Maybe that is the kind of moral resource that, you know, anyone oppressed within liberal tradition has had to draw upon is some kind of These moral boundaries of right and wrong in order to kind of set the rules of what is up for debate because half of us feel that way and what is not because it's immoral.

Scott Right, this is where I'm going to sound like I'm contradicting myself, which is okay. This is part of a Basecamp culture. It's part of the Atlas Project. So I want to say that one of the dangers, I think, and they talk about this in the show Newsroom, is one of the problems in liberalism can be the bias towards fairness. So the idea that there's two sides to every story, right? Well, no. Sometimes there's one side. Sometimes there's 19 sides, right? And so I think like on climate change, for instance, I'm... I think the fact that the planet is warming and that we are contributing to it, that seems like there's not two sides to that, based on most of the scientific consensus. Now, what we do to remedy it, that's a lot of different sides. How much do we wait curbing the economy?

Chris How much do... It's like the debate right now between health and economy, public health and the economy. We should have a real debate about those trade-offs. Yeah. There's not one way to respond to coronavirus. But that coronavirus is here, and it's a very successful virus right now. We shouldn't be debating that it exists.

Scott Right. Or that it's extremely contagious or these things. But I think you're absolutely right, because we have to deal with the fact we're not going to get a vaccine in the next year. I just feel like that's—I mean, people are just saying that. And I think that's fantasy land. I mean, maybe it's possible, but the odds would be against it.

Chris So I feel like now, so now it connects. Now it almost seems brilliantly like I intended to land here, but we're talking about the environment. And so, you know, so racism exists. Yes. We can have a debate about what we're going to do about it.

Scott Right.

Chris But we shouldn't have a debate about whether it exists or not. And I think that might be a good way to summarize, when it's done well, what the discourse about systemic racism is right now. And what people don't want is to be told, no, no, no, it doesn't exist. That seems to be the same kind of... Willful disbelieving of one's senses that somehow shouldn't be permissible in the Liberal project. And I think that we are really struggling with that. And now we're getting into the whole kind of post-modernism thing, which I would really appreciate if you could solve that for me. But this sense that it's becoming harder and harder to bring these givens into our public discourse because we have this kind of lazy armchair...

Scott I don't know how this works in England, but in the United States, I've seen this amazing, startling, and curious reversal where over the past few decades, you had the left saying, everything's perspectival. You can have your truth from a feminist perspective or a culturally, racially situated perspective or something like that, and that there's not one truth. There's all these perspectives on the truth. And conservatives would say, oh, that's kind of... And then you have the liberals going, give us old-fashioned objectivity. There's science, there's facts. So it's been very interesting, just the nature of the conversation, because Trump has figured a way to take the kind of postmodern sort of relativistic move and use it and weaponize it for right-wing populism.

Chris And the thing is, I think a good example is this phrase that, oh, there are a few bad apples. Right. And right now it's about police brutality. But, you know, it's it is a common trope across, you know, it is a great, you know, as a debater, professional debater, it's a great tactic whenever you want to say like, no, no, no, there's not some large systemic problem. There's just a few bad apples. That doesn't exist. You know, sure. The examples that you put in front of me, you know, with video evidence, those examples exist. But what you say, they exemplify. That doesn't exist. And so you're saying we need to solve that. And I'm saying that doesn't exist. You're saying this is a given. And I'm saying, no, it's not. And it seems to me, Andrew Sullivan's saying, I want to have a space where we can have this conversation. But that's what's destroying the space, is the denial of the existence of something that we need to talk about. So maybe...

And so that's maybe where I'm not saying I disagree with Andrew Sullivan, because if you give a fair reading to his whole piece, it's it's magisterial. I mean, like he he touches on, you know, so many of his own caveats that it's I don't know how he doesn't twist himself into a knot. It's brilliant. So I don't want to oversimplify or mischaracterize what he's talking about. But but I feel like maybe let me put it this way. Remember, I did that TED talk a year ago, which kind of. You and I could understand, but very few people could understand. I love that talk.

Scott Well, I remember talking about it with you on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Chris Thank you. But where I was left there is really what the project needs to be is we've all got to move past our own truths and search for a stronger truth together. Because where it all starts to break down is where we say, no, no, I've got truth. I don't need to look for it anymore. If I've got the truth, then I don't need for you to have a voice anymore. You're just gonna complicate it, right? I need you to shut up and see my truth, and then everything will be fine. And so there's a real danger about holding our own truth so tightly. There's no need for democracy anymore. It's all just like waiting my turn to oppress your side who doesn't get it.

Scott The person who's been most instructive on some of this stuff for me is the philosopher Michael Polanyi, who is a philosopher of science. He was a Jewish emigre from Germany, got out before the Holocaust. Went to England, was a practicing kind of chemist, biochemist or something. And then he became a philosopher of science, but he wanted to point out that the way science works, it's very subjective, right? You have opinions, you have passions, you have this. And so then you develop a hypothesis. And then he says, you know, then you try to experiment or validate that experiment in the wider public scientific community that's peer reviewed and validated. So he says, rather than talk about objective or subjective truth, and attempt to say that, look, I think you can look at this thing from a million different sides, and you're going to see that this truth holds up in the public. You can look at it from this perspective, from this angle, from that angle. And so that kind of thing, whereas I think what Andrew is saying, which I take as pretty right on, is that Twitter becomes a kind of big expansion of private... It's not a public. It's not a deliberative public. It tends to be... I mean, it can be. Not that it couldn't be. And there are some good exchanges on Twitter. I'm not saying that. But in general... It devolves into a kind of mob private space that validates everybody's... It's an echo chamber. It's the whole echo chamber factor.

I think what Sullivan's trying to defend is something like what Polanyi says is... The success of science, it's got this kind of private versus public truth mechanism where it's got a pretty good, it's developed a pretty good standard for tearing up maps that don't work and drawing new maps and that kind of thing because it's, but it's not as though science is bereft of subjectivity and hunches and passions and intuitions. It's just that there's a mechanism that's set up so that framework can harness those, can get them in dialogue with each other and then produce something different or produce something wider.

Chris So I feel like that's the... I think you just stuck the landing there, at least in my head, for this particular conversation. And if we always try to stick the landing by kind of coming back to, you know, so what's wrong with our current maps? Or what's a map we need to tear up? Or what's a map that we need to improve? And I think actually maps is a great metaphor for understanding social movements, you know, particularly Black Lives Matter and what's at stake. Because I think what it is... And I can almost contrast Black Lives Matter and There's Just a Few Bad Apples. And Black Lives Matter for me represents, if we're looking at a map, saying this continent has been missing from our map of the world. There is a continent here that we need to see was missing from our map. And the phrase, a few bad apples, is basically saying, no, there's not. And I think that that is the kind of existential debate at the moment.

Scott That's just saying we've got to touch up the map a little here, but there's no new continent. You're right. I don't know what you're talking about.

Chris And it may be, and maybe this is sort of how social movements work. That in the context to get the new, like the missing continent recognized, you know, maybe you do need to, you know, push pretty hard against the current maps to get that done. But then, you know, once it's there, okay, well, and now we can explore this continent together. So it feels to me like there's sort of two phases, right? There's the... Like putting it on the map, something that is a giant part of a reality that just wasn't clear enough for everybody who is carrying around their maps of the world. But then once you put it there, you do need to kind of open it up for exploration, right? If you put it there, and then there's just a handful of people who say, and only us are qualified to explore this terrain.

We will tell you what we find there, and you will accept our discoveries. I think that once you put it on the map, then the liberal project says, all right, and let's open it up for exploration. But you can't just erase it off the map. You gotta take it as a given that it's there.

Scott Yeah, and I think what you're saying is wise, right? For those who are marginalized, it's always going to take more energy to get things on the map, right? And that's where I think it does... Those people that are in positions of privilege are kind of obligated, probably, in a sense, to... Be aware of where, be looking more deliberately at where maybe we need map makers involved in the conversation who aren't involved in the conversation yet.

Chris Well, and I think, you know, and as a kind of underlying, I think a good way to go through life is with the guess that our current map is actually, like, we think we're so advanced. You know, we're the most advanced humans who have ever lived on this earth, and that's true. But I think that our current map of reality is still mostly incomplete.

Scott Yeah, the challenge is figuring out where the blank spaces are. And you never know that.

Chris But I think to go through with the attitude that it's mostly undiscovered is also kind of fundamental to a healthy liberal project. Because if it's mostly undiscovered, then, you know, okay. Then, you know, I'm mostly curious. And you found out, oh my God, we've been missing that. Okay, add that to the map, right? And let's get to the exploration stage. So much of the resistance stems from a sense that the map is complete. No, no, we've got the map, right? Oh, you're right, a few bad apples. Okay, we missed a couple trees there, right? If you're gonna quibble over details, we could redraw the map at a more fine scale of resolution, but we've basically got the map. If we're walking around with that, then I don't need these conversations. I don't need your righteousness. You're just complicating a picture that's fine. So there's a really close connection, I think, between discovery and curiosity and humility,

which to me are kind of some of the unlisted core values of a multicultural, multiracial, liberal society. And maybe that's part of what all this is, is kind of reconnecting with some of those, you know, kind of the fundamental mindset of the explorer.

Scott Yeah, and this is sort of the fundamental ethos of Basecamp, right? That you come into it knowing that most of the world is stuff we don't know. And we're trying to, through question and engagement and dialogue, we're trying to sort of make maps get pictures together. Because, you know, we've got fewer blind spots together.

Chris Yeah, and like when things go wrong, right, in the world or with our projects and we get stuck, you know, yeah, come back to Basecamp and assume it's probably because we're missing something. I mean, we're missing most things still. So if this isn't working right, it's probably because we're missing something. Well, what is that missing thing? And it seems to me a good way to try to answer that is to get together, you know, a diverse group of people who are interested in that thing you're looking for and say, well, what do you see, you know, from where you stand? Now, I am very interested, and interested is a very safe word, next week when we get together and we talk about, so what are we missing in our understanding of identity and how we think about we and they, us and them? Because I think that's really going to kind of put to the test our capacity to be curious,

To be explorers and to listen with courage and compassion to the journeys that we've all been on. I can't wait. I'm really looking forward to it. I think it might be one of the most worthy conversations we've had yet.

Scott Absolutely, I'm excited. And any of our listeners, if you want to take part in the Basecamp, reach out to us, send us an email, and we can tell you how to get an invitation, because we'd love to have you on the journey with us.

Chris Scott, okay, so I thought I only had half an hour for this intellectual discussion. 54 minutes, buddy. As usual, you've kept me training a lot harder than I meant to be.

Scott 54 minutes, my friend. This was fantastic, as always. Thank you, my friend.

Chris So good to see you. Good to be on the journey with you. Yeah, you too. Take it easy.