The unstoppable forces versus the indomitable will

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, it's been a while since we've talked. You've been in Canada and now you're back.

Chris In parts unknown.

Scott Parts unknown, right, exactly. It's Canada, as we like to say in the U.S., our quiet neighbor to the north. Although not so quiet in the age of Donald Trump. I mean, I feel like, I mean, Trump, it's the age of things that never, you know, never cease to amaze you.

Chris He got like... Our response to Donald Trump has been to legalize cannabis.

Scott Yeah, because otherwise, you're going to have a lot of impolite Canadians, and that's not acceptable.

Chris There's a lot of deep inhaling happening today. It's like, dude, whoa.

Scott Yeah, I mean, because if you can piss off Canadians, you're really... You're really, really a douchebag. It's an accomplishment, right?

Chris It is, yeah, that's right. I'm sure he'll be quoted on that in the... In the history books. And even Canadians.

Scott So speaking of Canada, which is a diverse society, as is England, where you reside in the London area. And so there's a pluribus and an unum in both of those places. Although the diversity and the unity have different histories to them. And the United States, of course, has its own history with that term, which is kind of at the...

Chris But somebody on his crew didn't. And it's a thoughtful, like, that's a statement worth unpacking.

Scott Isn't it like saying, like, if I was giving a toast at your wedding and like, Chris, I want to say to you, you know, this is lovely. I don't really believe in monogamy. I'm more of a polyamorous myself, but good luck with it. And hey, sweetheart, if you don't like him in the future, here's my number. I mean, that's just a strange thing to say at the UN, right?

Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott It's not a charming approach.

Chris So, yeah, we're not united nations, really, are we? And that was my predecessor, predecessor, predecessor's conceit. But I've kind of given up on the whole model because that's really hard to do. And it's really just much easier... We'll see who comes out on top of that struggle.

Scott You know, it's interesting. Well, first off, if we're talking about nationalism, we should define some terms, right? Because I think when that term gets brought up, a lot of times it might mean something populist, you know, maybe even reactionary or something. There'd be a broader term where you're thinking about people like, I was just listening to a discussion with Jonah Goldberg and Meyer. Slavoj Žižek, who I think is a rabbi in New York, who wrote this article called Saving American Nationalism from Nationalists. And I think it sounds like he's a political scientist and a rabbi, and he's looking at the biblical sort of nationalism where Israel is given borders and they're called not to transgress them. And he's sort of advocating for nationalism as an alternative to a sort of globalism. But we could think, right, if we're thinking nationalism like... A political order based on independent nations.

We can think of examples in our world right now of nations that aren't states, right? The Kurds are a nation and not a state, right? They have a national identity which transcends, you know, we have an evolution, you know, families become loyal and clannish, and then clannish become loyal to each other and become a nation.

Chris I mean, there's a whole continent called Africa that is comprised of nations that aren't states.

Scott Right, right. Or even if they – yeah, exactly, right. There's a whole continent. And then you have Iraq, which is a state but not a nation, right? We've kind of – we've sort of – in a post-colonial world, oftentimes Western colonial powers have the we break it, you bought it. It's paused.

Chris You've got to give people something to do in the future, right? You're going to go to the trouble of becoming independent and setting up a parliament. You need some intractable social challenges. Otherwise, what are you going to do?

Scott But, you know, it's interesting when you look condescendingly, if somebody looks condescendingly at Iraq or something, you think how long did it take Germany or England to become what we think of them today? I mean, they're incredibly diverse places where people speak all sorts of languages, have different religious traditions, and eventually they become nation states, but it takes centuries, right? So we've sort of forced on, you know, a geographic area So many threads.

Chris If I can just bounce off of something you just said, like look at the UK, look at the US, look at Canada, how far they've come. And I suppose one of the big questions of the moment is, you know, how far have we come, right?

Scott We've elected Donald Trump in the United States. I mean, can we get any further?

Chris But, you know, even take Canada, which, you know, the rest of the world, I mean, the rest of the world must think that Canadians are really conceited, right? But we kind of have this post-national conceit that we are, you know, we've somehow figured out how to become the healthy... Thank you very much. That questions of national identity are now sort of uncomfortable because we're past that and we're in some kind of post-national space. That's when we get into this dangerous place where there are some people in the democratic society who feel like, well, actually I still need to have that conversation. But now I live within society where it's impolite to do so. And so we're not talking about these things publicly anymore. Instead, we are talking about them sort of in our tribe or in our house or we're expressing them in the privacy of the voting booth. But we've kind of lost the public space to treat these questions because we've already come so far that we're not supposed to need to talk about these things anymore.

Scott Right. And I think when you think of the post-national identity, we're almost thinking like a post-tribal identity, right? Because when we're posing it, sometimes we use the word nationalism to stand in for tribalism.

Chris Yeah. That's your identification of terms. It's really very slippery, isn't it?

Scott Yeah, because really on some level, right, what allows a nation that is multi-ethnic to sort of not feel tribal is there's a strong national identity, right? That all the modes of difference included in the broad, diverse palette that is the country, there's some sense in which there's a broader, overarching, cohering sense of identity, right? So on one level, if that goes away, you're going to be more tribal, which is maybe what's happening in the United States right now, right?

Chris So I wonder, have you read – there's a great 2018 book by Amy Chua, a Yale law professor on political tribes.

Scott The Tiger Mom.

Chris The Tiger Mom. Was she the – I didn't know that.

Scott She wrote the Tiger Mom book.

Chris Thanks for watching. I think her takeaway is that to come together, America needs to acknowledge the reality of group differences. Acknowledge the reality that when you talk unity but it's false, it's really just another form of division. I feel kind of similar to – so a guy over on this side of the pond, David Goodhart, he wrote last year this book called The Road to Somewhere. So it's kind of about I think like populist revolt and the future of politics. But so he's like a British conservative explaining Trump and Brexit. And really kind of he's making an argument that we can't just ignore – The tribal group identities of people. You've got these upwardly mobile people who are willing to be from anywhere, but most people are actually from somewhere. And if you identify as being from somewhere, then you've got real concerns about things like immigration and how it changes the somewhere that I'm from.

Scott Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think part of the issue with the United States, which is, I think, distinctive in world history, is we didn't have a kind of feudal past, deep pre-modern past. You know, immigration in large numbers here happens in nascent modernity, right? And so you have this, we're the first country founded on something that's... Basically ideological, you know, we don't have this sort of group. We're not like Italians or French or English, you know, or Germans that have this long pre-modern tradition of tribes becoming, having, forming a sort of sense of national identity and then saying, okay, intention with these pre-modern is also now this enlightenment tradition, this liberal tradition that we, United States kind of comes here and you could argue that. I mean, some people do argue that. Now, of course, there's all sorts of tribal identity

in the colonies, too, which is why, I mean, we're, you know, one of the things that's so frustrating in American political discourse right now is that there's this sense that it's, I've heard people say it's like Iraq, where the minority rules the majority, where, you know, a conservative, so you have, let me give you a trivia question. Who's the first?

Chris I like trivia. Where it's pub quiz, pub quiz. Okay, okay.

Scott Who's the first Supreme Court justice to be confirmed by a president who lost the popular vote, to be nominated by a president that lost the popular vote and confirmed by a group of senators that were elected with far fewer votes than the people that voted against them?

Chris Dude, like what kind of pub quiz is this?

Scott That's fantastic, right?

Chris So I have no idea what the answer is.

Scott Neil Gorsuch. And the second one is now Brett Kavanaugh. So what you have is you have this sense in which the senators that voted for Gorsuch, just like with Kavanaugh, represented a smaller number of the population than the people that voted against him, and the president wasn't popularly elected. So you have this sense, and people are like, well, it's not working anymore. Well, what we're living with in the United States is a bicameral system that was devised because of our diversity. Right? Because of different concerns and a fear of majority population states, you know, overwhelming smaller states and all these things. And so to cobble together this union, you know, we have that. There's already that diversity. But you're right. I do think we don't think in terms of like Americans, we think like we could be Americans in space. Like if a post-apocalyptic thing comes and we've got to go get on big spaceships like Battlestar Galactica. We've got the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. We've got these constitutional principles. That's the most American thing there is.

Chris That's what we are. And as long as we've got that with us, we're still this society.

Scott Right. Yeah. Which, I mean, and you could look at that in good ways or bad ways. I mean, you know, like there are Enlightenment files that think it's amazing and there are critics of that tradition, at least that, you know, some of its divisions would say that America is less rich for that. But yeah, I do think she goes on to something because... I think we probably, you know, well, you look at the Civil War or something, apparently the Union wasn't, our Union, self-imposed Union was not as strong as we thought. I mean, did Lincoln save the Union or create it? You know, I mean, that's, people argue.

Chris And I mean, I guess, you know, that is the... The great thanks I think that we owe to Donald Trump and Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen. And some of the titular populists of this time is helping everyone to wake up to how important these questions of identity and ideology and community are and how wide-ranging the possibilities of the answers might be. But that understanding our community and daring to reinvent it, that that is That is huge work and really important work. And, you know, actually, so I live here in the UK, right? And every morning, my girlfriend and I, we wake up, we watch a bit of Stephen Colbert. And it is actually just a nice way to kind of, you know, smile about the world and about the news.

Scott That's so different watching it in the morning.

Chris Are you streaming it? Yeah, to start the day rather than to sort of... Well, I don't live in the kind of toxic conversation that I feel like one would live in if you're bombarded by the US media. But what I was trying to express is there is something, you know, maybe enormously positive that we are becoming so engrossed in the questions of who are we and who decides what we are and who do we want to be and how, if at all, can we ever gain control of that narrative and shape it. These are so much more interesting questions than how do we grow the economy by 2% or 3% or how do we tinker with this or that system of social welfare. All very important questions. But this is at the level of meaning and identity, and we've reinvigorated this conversation. Now, scary about thinking where this conversation can go, but also exciting that we're having it.

Scott Yeah, and I think it reminds us that the tribalism that we see in those populist movements that are, you know, cropping up all over the world, you know, and not just in Europe and the United States. I mean, they look different in other places, but I think is that it is this sort of state of nature. Right? That the kind of cosmopolitan liberal project is not the state of nature, right? We're tribal. Morality binds and it blinds, right? You have an in-group, you know, and through evolution, through, you know, I think, you know, before agriculture, it's something like 100 people is like what you've got as an in-group, right?

Chris Right, right, right. So 150, that magic number, and then you take off and form another tribe.

Scott Yeah. And so that, you know, When you look at, say, German nationalists, like the romantic German nationalists of the 19th century that kind of comes in response to some of this globalist Enlightenment stuff, that's like the state of nature. Like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is a little... Now, again, that doesn't mean it should be preferable, because I think that the post-Enlightenment way of doing society... It is actually us evolving beyond our capacity to go beyond what we're innately done for millennia. But it is going to. And then when people have anxiety and when it's displacing, there's a temptation to just go back to what is natural evolutionarily. Right.

Chris Yeah. And I guess so it kind of depends how optimistic we want to be about, you know, the liberal democratic project. Because, you know, so I'm going to quote, I'm going to reference Uval Harari here. And as I do so, I again feel this intense inner jealousy at how often I can quote his ideas and it's applicable to so many different conversations. Damn, damn it. I want to do that.

Scott It's like Seinfeld Newman. It's like Harari.

Chris So, but, you know, he talks about how one of the distinctive capabilities of the human species is to think in fiction, right, beyond our five senses. And so, you know, we have these tools now, these powerful tools of creating wide, widespread fictions. I mean, we can be a country like China and 1.4 billion people and, you know, it's not all 1.4 billion of them, but probably a good 1 billion of them Thank you for having me. So I think we have to be careful because sometimes the nationalist and maybe let's say like the tribalist, sort of that edge of the conversation reaches to our natural condition as the winning argument for why we've got to accept that reality and to try to break beyond that is kind of illogical, irrational, flies in the face of our nature. Well, there's plenty of evidence That we are capable of sharing much wider fictions. The question is why don't we in a lot of cases? What are the constraints? What are the interests in forming smaller fictions to serve particular groups, right?

Scott Do you feel like we should say stories so it doesn't prejudice? Because I feel like when people, when you say fiction, it's almost just self-delusional. But stories are true. I mean, stories are truer than fiction.

Chris But when we're telling stories... Dude, I'm lighting up my joint right now.

Scott I like that. I'm into that. If you were in Canada, can you do that anymore?

Chris I don't know. Probably not.

Scott I don't know what the law is. Pennsylvania, I don't know what the laws are here. I don't know if we have medicinal weed here yet, I'm sure. I guess this tells you about my recreational habits.

Chris Yeah, plausible deniability.

Scott Or that I'm just a libertarian, I don't care. But those stories are so definitive of who we are. And it's interesting because this conversation I was just listening to with Jonah Goldberg and this guy, this other rabbinical political thinker. It's sort of, for him, the climax of the story is when we get to nation states, right? Where the ability of nationhood and the concept of nationalism enables us to have a much more productive, peaceable, large-scale societies. And then he's arguing that that's the best, as opposed to sort of a global order, which has been the consensus, at least in both American political parties, he thinks, some sort of conception of the global order. But then I'm saying, well, okay, I mean, I'm not saying, you know, he makes some good points, but then, you know, Harari has said, right, that it's a much smaller jump to go from building solidarity between 150 people and 150 million, which we've done, than to go for, or it's a much bigger step to do that than to go from 150 to 8 billion, 150 million to 8 billion, you know, so...

That is the question, right? The myths, the emotional myths we live by, right? Well, we can have a story that can unite this many people, but it can't possibly unite that many people. Well, yeah, you're right. Well, it depends what kind of story we're telling, right?

Chris Right. Right. That's right. I mean, are we telling a story that is inclusive or divisive? And if we're telling an inclusive story, so again, this is where, and it's so hard now, actually, to evaluate The liberal democratic story, you know, coming from a guy who lived in China for five years and was bombarded by a sort of a society that sees that as pure ideology. But at least, you know, one thing I had going for it is it was a universal story, right? It maybe was blind to its own biases in propagating the universalism, but it did it as a story, the structure. was about how differences aren't as important as the thing we all share. You know, whether it is our common humanity or our common spirituality, right? Our ability to all ask some of the same fundamental questions about who am I and why is this all, right? We have, you know, so anyway, it was a universalizing story.

And nationalism, patriotism, these are Within the structure of the story, divisive, right? And so I think that's very, very interesting, is that making the shift, and again, Donald Trump at the UN was a nice way to kind of I think that is a profound shift, and we should mark that moment. Because what are the implications of making that shift, I think, within our own society, within geopolitics?

Scott Hard to foresee. I can think of that tells a story that's completely amoral. You could have a reasoned moral approach to either a kind of more internationalist approach to geopolitics, which prioritizes things like the UN or the European Union. Or an approach that prioritizes the nation-state and collaboration between nation-states. You could tell a moral story about either of those approaches. But Trump doesn't tell a moral story. I mean, there's still kind of... I guess it's because he's... I think he's... I don't say this judgmentally. I'm trying to be descriptive here. But I just don't think morality is something that motivates him as a person.

Chris Right. Now, I think that's – so that is a stunning – that is such an important insight that you make because what's interesting about that is in his amorality, he's consistent, right? The story to the UN and say the response to the alleged assassination of this Washington Post correspondence by Saudi Arabia is consistent, right? That I don't believe that there is some kind of – Unifying moral field that allows us to sensibly communicate moral judgments across our patriotic communities. And so I'm not going to do that because that is just nonsensical. It's like trying to shout in space. There's no medium along which my signal can travel. So in that way, there is a profound consistency.

Scott Do you think this is like critical academic, like academic, like theorists and like philosophy or critical theory and stuff we're going? That's not what we meant. Because, you know, you have people with critical theory. They say, hey, you know what? We've got to be too quick about saying this morality and universal morality. Well, we didn't mean a morality. Because in some sense, it's like, well, you know, you think about relativism and the significance of that in an academic perspective, you know, like, hey, there are real differences in cultures and perspectives. And, you know, you have to be wary about stories about universal morality because people see things from situated perspectives. And then Trump's sort of like, all right, I'll be that on steroids.

Chris Yeah, well, and so what's interesting is that, you know, so there's a great sort of moral theorist, Alistair MacIntyre. Have you read any of Alistair's work?

Scott I have read lots of Alistair MacIntyre, and I am constantly in dialogue with MacIntyrians. Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, I have lots of—this is a thing on which I am not a disinterested party.

Chris Awesome. Okay, so we're going to have to – well, first I'll have to reread my MacIntyre and then we've got to have a kind of a MacIntyrian episode because it would be fun to riff on that. But I'm thinking about after virtue and how it – so you need a kind of tradition in which morality makes – is intelligible. And I guess you could argue that for the last 60, 75 years, the United States was sort of operating within a tradition. And within that tradition, and let's speak in terms of international affairs at the moment, its actions had moral content, moral quality. And they were sensical. You could make sense of them within that tradition that was being practiced. And I think that in the exercise of their foreign policy, presidents felt that the boundaries of what they could do were sort of what was consistent with the tradition. And so what is actually happening in... In the current administration of Donald Trump, by taking actions that seem so... He's choosing not to uphold the tradition.

And that's, I suppose, the long-term change that's going to happen in sort of international relations, international society, is that that tradition that gave a lot of actions a kind of moral character is weakening. And it's going to affect, so to bring it back to a Canadian context, I mean, Canada, you know, we piggyback off of the American tradition. There is a kind of moral framework in which states behave with one another. But if the main architect and sort of, you know, upholder of that tradition is no longer playing that game, it's going to be hard for us to find a moral footing.

Scott Yeah, and what Trump has done, I think, is what, because he doesn't know the tradition, I mean, this is, you know, somebody that, like, is a potter and starting out might get lucky and throw a clay pot that's really good or something, but they'll never consistently do it, right? Like, I mean, you... Thanks for having me. It's an attempt to sort of step away from it, which I think generally doesn't... Now, again, if you think that tradition is completely bankrupt, which often a lot, you know, your Trumps of the world do, right? Like this sort of, you know, post-World War II consensus of some basic things. Again, parties disagree on certain aspects of it, but there's a sense in which you're right. There's a container in which those disagreements are contained generally, right? They're not out somewhere completely distinct from it.

Chris Yeah, and you're right. I feel like my world is turning upside down because, again, there is a consistency here. If you believe that the tradition no longer serves... Because it's time to sort of shift the pendulum away from a globalizing narrative towards a more nation-centric narrative, then that tradition, which is about a universal morality... So it's consistent to abandon it, right? All this liberal constructionist bullshit is just bullshit.

Scott Right, it's all held together, right?

Chris We knew they'd come home eventually.

Scott It's all just taped together, right? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I got somewhat related, I think. This project just came out, the Hidden Tribes study, and it's this group that have done some demographic work on America, and they basically say there's not two tribes. There's seven. And that David Brooks just wrote a column about this. And it's called The White Civil War. And they say basically that 8% of America is progressive activists on one end and 6% are devoted conservatives on the other. And then they think that in the middle are something like traditional liberals, 11 percent, passive liberals, 15 percent, politically disengaged, 26 percent, moderates, 15 percent, and traditional conservatives, 19 percent. But actually, what they're arguing is if you went to the exhausted middle, that wouldn't be that disparate. But the extremes who have a lot of money, like this 14% that make up the extremes, are the wealthiest, most affluent, and the most ideological. And part of David Brooks' point is you can afford to have ideology when you're that affluent, right?

Chris And so the sensible sort of... You can buy to create the world the way you want it to be.

Scott Yeah, and you have leisure. Aristotle says, right, you need leisure time to do philosophy. Generally, you have more time to go to conferences and be on these sort of cruises. They have these magazines, have these cruises where you can go and hang out with the ideologues.

Chris But Brooks's point is— Dear God, it would be great if you get on the wrong cruise. Oh, yeah. People are all like the biggest group of douchebags I've ever met. I must have gotten on the liberal boat or the Republican.

Scott As long as it's not the teetotaling boat, if you do that. As long as it's not like the Mormon boat or something, because then you might have been together. But he argues that the people in the middle don't have a philosophy or ideology, but they have some—and they kind of probably need more of it. But I wonder how much of that, because, you know, like, I wonder how much, you know, a nation state like America is devolving toward a state without nationhood because we have, you know, because the, you know, although... What holds, what myth or what story holds us together? Yeah. And it gets harder and harder to tell a story. That people can buy into together.

Chris You know, it's interesting. So like in the 90s, there was still, I think, a stronger sense of, well, yeah, obviously there was a stronger sense of we're on opposite sides, but we're part of the same grand project. I think it was Bill Clinton that said that, you know, like Democrats need Republicans to draw the lines that should not be crossed and Republicans need Democrats to remove the lines that should not have been drawn. Yeah, absolutely. And that's sort of the dialectic, right? And that makes sense. But I suppose, like, what – so there is common story – And I suppose America will always have that, right? Whatever side you're on, it's the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Washington. So there is the common story that is shared, kind of the origin story, the founding story. And that's going to be a powerful binding thing, right? The shared history. But I guess there is less and less a present-day sense Thank you very much.

Which was really important in kind of the liberal theory of democracy, right? That being ruled by reason was how we gave power to the people without becoming subject to that power, right? How do we give power to ourselves without being prisoners to ourselves? And the idea was, well, we give power to ourselves to make decisions, to make laws based on reason. That reason is what makes us all free, right? It's such a disconnected fantasy from the reality people see in how politics functions. It's really, we're just taking turns dominating each other. So, you know, when the Republicans win and if I didn't vote Republican, then I'm just going to spend four to eight years being a subject of the Republican king. And when the Democrats win, if I voted Republican, I'm just going to spend 48 years being a subject of the Democratic king. And so we're trading, we're taking turns dominating the other, but we're no longer actually, you know, co-holders of power in a shared project.

And if that, I think, becomes the story, maybe there was once a sense of common purpose, but now we're just taking turns holding the rod of power, then I think that becomes the way to break the history. And you do reach that point of kind of national... National test, right? Are we going to do this again? Sorry, I recently saw Hamilton, so I've got... The Founding Fathers' aversion to political parties is very fresh in my mind. Along with some great song and dance scenes.

Scott Yeah, and I'm trying to think about... I was just rereading some stuff in the Federalist Papers, and like...

Chris Oh, you are such a geek.

Scott It was because I listened to something, and they were referencing it, and I went to look it up, and they were talking about having a government, yeah, by reason, and not by accident, and by sort of debate, not by force, where just normally most people have lived in governments where somebody, there's divine right of kings, you have power that enforces it, and that sort of thing like that, and you don't, so this idea of a deliberative, but you know, it's interesting because... Like, what the Arab Spring teaches you, right, is you can have democracy without these sort of values of mutuality, right? Because you just have majority rule. And that's what people are feeling like America's becoming. You just have a tyranny majority rule. And you don't have these norms in the sense of there's some things you can't legislate. Like, there's norms, traditions, and rights that protect it from not being a tyrannical democracy. And you wonder, is that...

Chris Thank you very much. And it took until Marx for society to really say, well, actually, you guys can be rational with one another because you have a similar class situation. But if you look at labor as a class and recognize that they have very different interests, that what you are doing is dominating them. And as soon as you have classes that just don't have a lot of rational overlap,

Scott Well, also, I mean, do you have to keep telling an expanding story so that – so you look at, like, democracies take place – or birthed in – like, liberal democracies are birthed in fairly elite situations or by interested parties. But then as more and more people are enfranchised, can the story be – this is what people like Martin Luther King did, right? King didn't say that the story was sort of over. He thought that people aren't actually living into the story in its fullness of its founding character. So he kind of reinvested the meaning. With an expanded, with a more inclusive enfranchising, you know, story. And so, can you keep bringing new people to the table to tell, you know, tell the story, expand it, and again, continue going beyond Tribe, you know, more and more?

Chris I guess the answer we land at is yes. And if that became a part of the shared intent of the project, that we need to expand the story and we need to bring people into the story, then maybe this could work. Maybe this could hold together. And, you know, this is, I guess, the classic American line about a more perfect union, right? If everyone buys into – fundamentally, this is what we're trying to do is build a more perfect union among us, among these people here. What's challenging is that that really does take – A certain narrative of community and common citizenship. And it probably does take the big leaders that society sees as, oh, okay, that's how to behave, advocating that narrative. But when the president is so openly divisive, so openly not about expanding the story, but winning it,

Scott But that is interesting, right?

Chris But I've got numbers, right?

Scott When you see everything in terms of the zero-sum thing, because I wonder, you know, when you think about somebody like Donald Trump, when you come up in a regional real estate market where it is a zero-sum game. If that developer gets that building, I can't have it, right? And that seems to me to be how one narrow segment of the economy works, but it's not how... So now I hear the economists in this room finally nodding their head and saying, okay, now you're talking about something that interests me.

Chris Right, which is the argument that, you know, globalization was a non-zero-sum narrative, right? That we're all going to give and we're all going to take and we're all going to be better off. We're going to grow the pie this way. But, you know, the global financial crisis and what's happening with economic inequality and, you know, now more and more people see it as zero-sum. And so if China's doing better, it must mean that we're doing worse. If they're growing jobs, it means they're taking our jobs. And so, yeah, I mean, so it's about growing the story. And the economists would say that, you know, more practically, it's about growing the economy. And it's interesting. So as the China specialist, I can totally see this, right? I think we talked about this before, but in China, the policy problems are so big scale and hard, but the political problems are pretty easy because the economy is growing. All right, so the pie keeps getting bigger. And so every year we just buy off more groups of society. We don't have to make any hard choices and say, oh, this year we got to spend more on healthcare. So we got to take some money away from cities and put it on, or we need to spend more on the military. So we're going to take it away from health. No, we just spend more on more things.

But in Canada, the US, Western Europe, where economic growth is pretty slow, it's all about trade-offs, right? It's all about picking winners and losers. And especially the last 10 years where it's felt like a lot of people have really felt that, yeah, this is a zero-sum game. Well, then I've got to fight my corner.

Scott Yeah, and that seems to be – that's just interesting. Going back to where we started, like if you – it's almost like if you have that sort of – it does the sort of nationalism and sovereign national states versus a more global approach to shaping of the world order. Does that argument even matter if you don't even have functional nation states that can allow – if the internal decay – And pluralistic democracies become so bad that you don't have much to bring to the table to even deliberate whether or not you could have strong international institutions.

Chris You know, what I call like the unstoppable forces versus the indomitable will, you know, and the unstoppable forces, like, you know, Like automation, economic transformation, growing economic inequality. I mean, all the incentives are baked in and this stuff is just rolling forward and it's going to change your life whether you want it to or not. It's unstoppable. And on the other hand, the wide arc of history tells us that there is this kind of almost scary indomitable will in human society that we will break it if we don't like it. We will be willing to risk it all to create something that we think is fairer or better.

Scott And isn't most of world history shaped by unintended consequence? I mean, the biggest fear of something like, you know, like the indomitable will is like, how much do we really shape things? Or can we shape things? Or, you know, how much does something like the automobile change things? And we don't think it's going to, you know, it changes not just transportation, but... So much of the indomitable will, it would be great if it had foresight, but it often doesn't. Aren't all maps fundamentally things that are drawn from past experience? I mean, they're used to get somewhere in the future, but they're all based on repository wisdom. Right. There's no map based on things. Right. There are senses of where we've been before and attempting to chart that. But there's no map we can chart, you know, purely from where we have not yet been. Right. Because we've not been there yet, which is why the map making must go on.