Broken societies, and the post-truth reconstruction

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, you are in the UK. I am in the USA. Neither of us is in Canada as we're live together a couple weeks ago. But you are, you describe in your most recent letter or map, aka as maps, that it's as if the whole country, the UK, is waiting for test results from the doctor because we have... Brexit is about to kill the second prime ministership, or it looks like it. I mean, Theresa May won her no confidence vote, but she will, she said, not run again. And so David Cameron supported Brexit, or no, was against Brexit, and it passed, so he left. Now she takes over for Cameron, and she can't get it passed.

Chris You're so cute when you're trying to understand Brexit.

Scott I'm just like, this thing is just like, it's like Donald Trump. It kills everything it touches.

Chris But it's, you know, and I think we've talked about this before. It is like Donald Trump in that it is always in the public mind and the public conversation. I mean, it's so hard to be... I was on a train yesterday from Oxford back to London. I was doing some teaching and just chatting to the woman next to me who, it happens, works in the government for the... The Ministry of Brexit. So there was a whole government department that was created to work out... There was so much involved in taking a country out of a supranational body like this. So I can't take a train, I can't take a taxi. And then the taxi ride home, we're talking about Brexit, and a lot of taxi drivers are pro-Brexit, which is really interesting. So talking about... Why they voted that way, and the answer is always about immigration. Anyway.

Scott Now, the taxi drivers are in London. Are they non-immigrants often?

Chris Well, variety. You know, I don't have statistics. It'd be interesting to see the statistics. There's a lot of non-immigrant sort of British national taxi drivers as well. And, you know, so it's interesting because, you know, we – where do I want to go with this? It's interesting because from his perspective is about and it really reflects where the UK was in 2015 and 2016 on the migration issue where at that time if you remember there were about a million refugees and asylum seekers from the war in Iraq and Syria who had kind of poured into Turkey into refugee camps there and then when those overflowed then they poured their way into The sense of, look, we're losing our sovereignty here. I mean, how can we be a country if we have no authority over who we let into our country? And that really became, I think, for a lot of people, the issue that they were voting on or the idea, the fear that they were voting on. It was not the economic arguments. It was the cultural and the community arguments about Does being a part of this community mean that we have no power to say who the members of our community are? And it also relates to the phenomenon of fake news, which really entered into public lexicon around what was happening.

In Europe at that time and around what was happening in the U.S. with Trump's election, because that narrative that we have no control over our borders, I mean, if you look at what governments in the EU and policymakers were trying to do, it certainly wasn't to welcome so many people into the bloc that member states lose control of their identity. It was much more a case of You know, letting in as few asylum seekers and refugees as possible while still sort of staying true to their international and European commitments, humanitarian commitments and law and things like that. So, you know, on the one hand, there was a reality of a really difficult balancing act between, you know, national sovereignty concerns and, I guess, the urgent humanitarian need. But at the street level, it turned into this caricature of a debate between either we all need to sort of sacrifice everything we own to save the world and save the world's ills, or we have to go entirely the other direction and put up these massive walls. And the reality, the messy reality is always somewhere in the middle.

And what was extraordinary in the Brexit debate is no one was engaging the messy reality. Everyone was engaging these wild stereotypes on one side or the other. And now that sort of the country is grappling with, well, how do we do this? The how do we do it, which is sort of Theresa May's thankless job, is somewhere in the middle in that messy reality. And no one likes what it looks like.

Scott Yeah, this is where I think, like, referendums like that are a complete cop-out in a representative democracy, right? Like, what person is informed enough on all the issues involved in Brexit to make an educated vote? I mean, like, there's nobody... Wasn't the biggest Google search after the election, what does Brexit do? What does Brexit mean, like, in the UK?

Chris I mean... After the election, but I mean, last week, right, when, I'm trying to think what the event was, there was some big news event last week that had important consequences for, you might have to edit that out. But, you know, not just after the election in 2016, but, you know, last week, you know, every time there is some big Brexit-related headline in this country, the top Google search is, what is Brexit? And what's really interesting, so as I say, I was on this train ride yesterday back to London, and this woman who works in the Ministry of Brexit, and so her analysis is that, look, the big corporations, they've got a handle on this, right? They've got plans in place for what do we do if there's a hard Brexit? What do we do if there's a soft Brexit? Whatever these things mean, they've got a plan in place for every scenario.

It's the mom and pop shops. It's the small and medium businesses who are just completely unprepared. I mean, what this means is that there's going to be a whole new set of rules about how we import stuff that we sell or export stuff that we sell or how I hire this person or that person that they barely understand to begin with. And suddenly they're going to have to learn a whole new business environment. And those are the people who are...

Scott In the United States, a lot of people are saying that the tech companies, the big tech companies, are actually going to welcome regulation in light of all the fake news stuff and meddling in the election because it advantages them over startups. Same thing, right? Big corporations like the regulations very often because they can stay on top of them, right? It's a sort of hidden form of anti-competitiveness, right? So it doesn't really matter. They'll make money no matter what. The small entrepreneur, the mom and pop, they're the ones that will be sucked up.

Chris So it's just great. That's really interesting. Regulatory complexity is an entry barrier for a lot of businesses.

Scott Yeah, it is. This is like if you're the big corporation, always betting on red and black. You're going to win either way.

Chris So my last letter, my last map, what I find really interesting is how we live in a moment where there are There are just a ton of big, searching, complex questions in society about how democracy works and if democracy is still working. And sitting in the taxi yesterday coming home, talking to this person who had voted for Brexit and him saying that for him and a lot of his buddies, it was all about the migration question. And that really for me has become a kind of a touchstone that migration seems to be the issue that is clarifying for so many people about, you know, are we about windows or walls? Are we about, you know, globalization or nationalism? And on and on and on. It seems that migration is kind of like the gateway drug for people to be involved in these larger questions today.

Scott And it's funny because you quote yourself saying that everything... Do I do that now?

Chris Oh, my God. That's intolerable.

Scott Yeah, you say that social media, these things, these technological things, you should let everything break. Let social media run amok. Everything it breaks needed fixing. It's funny because you said that on a CBC Radio interview with Anna Marie Tremonti on The Current. I actually listened to that before the first time we ever talked. I thought it was a great interview. And I remember I was struck by you saying that. I thought that was pretty interesting. That basically, and part of the context I remember in that interview is you were saying like, look, first of all, our regulatory stuff is so far behind the technology anyway that we're not going to catch up anyway. Like our attempts to, you saw that with the senators interviewing Mark, United States senators interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. And you make, you do all this stuff free of charge. How do you make revenue? And Zuckerberg's like, we sell ads.

These are the geniuses that would be tasked with coming up with regulatory policy. But you say that basically, diagnostically, you say that the cracks in democracy, that migration is a key thing. You use the term, interestingly, the plural democratic kind of bargain. Which is intriguing because, you know, if we want to live in liberal, multicultural societies, right, diverse societies, where there's no sort of normative, you know, religious ethos, it's not one ethnic kind of nation thing. If we want to really live... Maybe we don't want to be the kind of societies we're saying we want to necessarily be. Maybe the pluralistic democratic thing is actually not where all of our commitments and moral sentiments are.

Chris So as you talk about that, I actually recall a podcast that you recorded at our Toronto Basecamp in November. And it was a great set of podcasts, by the way. I loved listening to them and it really took me back into that room. But I can't remember who it was. It might have been Ben Rouswell. And he was talking about one of the interesting things that's going on in Canada right now is a quite deliberate national project to sort of strongly reinforce multiculturalism. Yeah, it was, Ben. Yeah, I remember. You remember that conversation? Yeah. And I thought that was interesting because, as he said, and as you're talking about these choices that we make as a society, that is a quite deliberate project that's underway right now. And probably a project that if we want to maintain an adherence to or even a celebration of pluralism at a moment where the technologies and the capacities to be splittist are getting stronger, then it is going to take that kind of deliberate exercise about creating a culture of enthusiasm for difference that we can't That it's kind of naive and idealistic to assume that people just naturally end up there. That no, it's actually a nation-building project in itself to build that kind of sort of post-national identity.

And it's very interesting to think about that and then ask oneself, If that's what it takes, how generalizable is that quote-unquote Canadian model? Because as I sort of look around Europe, history weighs so heavily upon the politics of migration. I think it's really difficult to create a strong commitment to some sort of sense of post-national identity.

Scott When you say history goes towards the politics of migration, do you mean tribal sort of...

Chris It's more than tribal. So let me think. And I'm not a brilliant historian of sort of every European country, but take Hungary, for example, right? Oh, sure, yeah. You know, Viktor Orban and the Hungarian – they've gotten a lot of justifiably – Thank you very much. So living under Soviet communism, before that part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, you know, in both of those experiences of empire, basically the whole of the 19th and most of the 20th century, Hungarian people are second-class citizens essentially within their society. And so there must have been, I'm just imagining here, Speaking on behalf of our Hungarian friends, but I can imagine there must have been a kind of euphoria and enthusiasm sort of post-1989 and the wall coming down to finally just being able to celebrate our national identity, Hungarian. And to the extent that that was a kind of new thing and a hard-won thing

among a people, I can understand that there would be a knee-jerk fear or anxiety about diluting. And that's probably a loaded way to describe it, but a way that a lot of people would hear and nod their heads with, diluting that sense of identity.

Scott I feel like world history goes in that trend. The pluralistic society existing in comity and harmony, those are rare. That's not the norm. Part of it's evolutionary. Tribalism is an evolutionary advantage. What does Jonathan Haidt talk about in The Righteous Mind? Morality binds. And it blinds. It binds people together and also blinds you to other ways of seeing and doing. And so I think that liberal society is a liberal pluralistic kind of multicultural society. That's not the norm in world history.

Chris Yeah, so I think probably pluralism is fighting an uphill battle against at least three things. One is, and I don't know much about the evolutionary psychology and sociology of tribalism and stuff like that, but I hear that argument and I'm like, yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. The counterargument is that tribes have been sort of taking over other tribes and enlarging the notion of tribe sort of ever since there's been tribes. So it's probably not that simple. But I think that one, there is this kind of tribalism argument. I think two, yeah, fighting uphill against history. Because there is no world history, right? We've all got our own histories. And migration brings those histories together. And, you know, it kind of... The way that we talk about migration and migrants in society predisposes us to be very receptive to certain narratives, like narratives of charity and narratives of fear. It seems like migrants are either this passive, helpless creature or they are this terrorist evildoer.

And neither one of those two caricatures recognizes sort of their full and rich and complex humanity and the story that leads them to become migrants. There's a great book by my co-author on my last book, Ian Golden, and he edited a volume called Exceptional People. And basically talking about why people migrate. And there is so much to explore and understand about the people who do choose to uproot themselves and join a migrant caravan or get on a boat or get on a plane. That largely gets, those voices get ignored through a lot of the discourse that we have in the big... Thank you very much.

Scott Yeah, I think I might have brought this up in a previous episode, I'm not sure, but I listen to this podcast called Why Theory, and fantastic, two guys who are philosophers and do a lot of film studies and stuff, and they, I've actually had them on my Give and Take podcast, they're amazing, but they were talking about Hegel and Hegel's understanding of dialectic, and they were like, you know, and how the truth is in contradiction, and so they said, look at this sort of, you know, in America, the right-wing kind of approach to immigration, like, well... You know, one of the, you know, this is a false narrative, and said, no, the Hegelian would just say, yes, yeah, that's true. The immigrant is industrious and shiftless, just like everybody. You know, we're all at certain moments industrious and certain moments shiftless, right? We're all all of these things. And they were saying that when you don't, or the same thing, look at Nazi propaganda. Well, the Jew is dirty and awful and, you know, the Jew is awful, you know, and you don't want to be around them.

Then the Jew is also charming and slick and he'll steal your woman. Well, how could, you know, so they were saying the person that we don't let be a complexity with contradiction. Feminists have realized this, right? The Madonna-whore complex.

Chris So you've got to put that in the show notes because I want to go and read that now.

Scott Yeah, it's actually a podcast. I will put the link to the YTV. It's fantastic. I mean, maybe the holidays we can talk about. They did one on Christmas movies, dialectics in Christmas movies. It's amazing.

Chris And so you combine that with the political opportunity that it represents, right? That in 2015, you know, let's call it populist campaigns, really, really across these pluralistic democratic sort of advanced democracies, whatever we like to call ourselves, it was discovered kind of again and again and again. We can use these simplifications of people as scapegoats to create fear and anxiety that can drive masses of people to support our bid for power. Yeah, and our bid for leadership. And so it's interesting that, you know, on the one hand, migration is this fact of life. I mean, it's a fact of the human species that we migrate, and it's not going to stop. We've built societies that work Thank you very much. The other into the us is so incomplete that, you know, and so here's where my just understanding of history fails. It'd be interesting to understand, so how often has this been being done, right? The scapegoating of the migrant, the portrayal of the migrant as the demon in order to catapult or to kind of, you know, put some nitro into a bid for power.

Because we talk about it now as if it's this new thing, but of course, as you refer back to The Jewish experience, you know, sort of over centuries. And I imagine that, if I just think of a broader scope of history, this has been one of the ongoing narratives throughout human history.

Scott Yeah, immigration in America, I mean, that's the whole story. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, there's this hostility, the fear of the other. Yeah, you know, until somebody gets assimilated somehow, you know, and even that language, say, is sort of politicized, right? You know, the language of assimilation is looked at as sort of cultural eradication. You know, like, well, it's, you know, this whole, this academic debate, is America really a melting pot or more like a tossed salad? The melting pot is hegemonic as a sort of metaphor. Yeah, I mean, these things are all so precarious, right? I mean, just even the way we talk about them, our language can be so loaded, right? And somebody says melting pot, and then some people think that that has major racial sort of undertones, you know? And sometimes it might, but yeah, just complicated.

Chris And so I think, you know, the question becomes... What growth is going to happen? Or is growth going to happen? Here in this country, the UK, whatever sort of falls out of Brexit, whether it actually happens, doesn't happen, the form of it, is there going to be some kind of growth in the quality or complexity? of how this political community here thinks about the ever-present role of migrants and the process by which those who are seen as the other become part of the us, part of the community. So that one way or the other there is just a sense of, I suppose, cultural progress.

Scott Well, I'll tell you what's going to happen here. Yeah, what's going to happen there? We're making America great again over here, dude. That's what's happening over on this side of the... Are you, though? Are you, though? Look at Twitter. Look at Trump's Twitter feed. That's all I need to know. America's coming great. Everything is great. Stock market's great, except when it's not. I have 50% polling popularity, except it's only the outlying Rasmussen poll. I mean, just look at, all I need is Trump's Twitter feed to tell me we're making America great over here.

Chris Did you see there was a recent story about the Trump administration sort of looking at the immigration status of Vietnamese people?

Scott Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Insane. It's insane.

Chris So what's the story there?

Scott Yeah, they're just like basically people that are protected, like political refugees.

Chris Right, from the time of the Vietnam War.

Scott Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, we're looking at some shit in the back.

Chris I mean, this is just like, I mean... What does that have to do with national security?

Scott Well, it's interesting. The wall, we need the wall. The wall would be so great. But you know, I mean, most people that are undocumented here overstay visas. I mean, that's how the vast majority... It's not people coming from the Southern Hemisphere over through Mexico. That's just not... That's not an issue. And no terror... I mean, the State Department has said terrorists aren't coming through like the Southern... But the thing is, you can't get people angry at overstayed visas and automation, right? When their economy is changing and if they're displaced by that, like, all right, yeah, you know, it's automation stuff, a lot of, you know... And companies... Their value goes up with automation. Employing less people in technological advance actually makes the company worth more very often. That and people overstaying their visas, no one's gonna go to a rally for that. But when you say there's bad people, really bad hombres, coming over the border to take your jobs, that is emotionally powerful. It's a solution looking for a problem.

Chris So, you know, and this goes to kind of your Hegelian critique on, you know, it is possible because, you know, the migrants are presented not as people full of contradictions, but as these sort of simple shadows of people, right? Bad hombres. What is that? I mean...

Scott A lot of people that got indicted by Robert Mueller.

Chris Bad embrace. Bad embrace. That's good. Now it's clearer for me.

Scott By the way, I would be so nervous. It's funny. Trump can't get somebody to even become chief of staff. And you know, a practical consideration of that is, like, okay, you're making, what, $100,000 to be chief? It's a government job. I mean, you're not making tons of money. And you're going to have to hire a white-shoe D.C. lawyer just to work there. Because of these investigations, and who knows what obstruction of justice you're witnessing on a daily basis, I mean, it's just tough if you want to go into government service that it comes with a price tag of legal fees that might exceed your salary.

Chris Plus, you know, I'm sure a lot of these people, they don't have spotless backgrounds, and so they're probably reluctant to put themselves in the line of fire where somebody needs to then look for leverage points against them in order to flip them so that they talk about what you really want to talk about. And everybody's got lots, it seems like everybody in that orbit has a lot of leverage points.

Scott I would be worried if I were anyone, because you know what? Mueller ran the FBI, dude. You know what? What's the FBI saying? They always get their man. That guy, I mean, Mueller, you know, Princeton grad, was wounded in Vietnam. Here's one of these like sort of old school principled Americans. That guy, you know, if there's wrongdoing, he's going to find it, dude. I mean, if I were Trump, I'd resign. I'd get out.

Chris Well, yeah. I'm sure, well, that's... There's a question I want to ask you, which is... Me or President Trump? Yeah, every now and then I get into an argument with Donald Trump on the bus or in my bedroom or something and I get so... And I try to stop because you could never have... You just can't argue with someone who can't hold an argument, but... No, it's, you know, I wonder, so going back to, you mentioned that, I guess it was about a year ago. It was actually the beginning of 2018 when I was on The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti. And I made this, you know, at the time, I was just trying to be, you know, provocative when I said that, you know, this social media stuff. And it was sort of in the context of, you know, Zuckerberg was, you know, they're starting to haul his ass before Congress and all this kind of stuff. And I just decided to take the contrarian view. To say, no, you know what? Let's just let it run amok. Because everything it breaks needed fixing. And one of those statements that it felt true. I didn't really know why it might be true, but what felt true is that if somehow the empowerment of many divisive voices breaks society, then there was some deeper fragility in society.

And I think that migration is, again, like I say, kind of like the gateway drug that gets people to express in a very – it seems like a very emotional, very visceral way whether I'm good or I'm not good, I'm really unhappy. But if it is the gateway drug or if it is sort of the canary in the coal mine, what do you think might be some of the deeper pathologies or the deeper flaws in our democracy that are being bundled up into that reaction to migrants?

Scott Yeah, I remember when I listened to that interview the first time, I thought, I was kind of sympathetic to your argument, and I thought, well, here's the thing, like, I have a friend, Mike McCarg, who does a podcast. I mean, it gets like, it's probably got like a million downloads a month or something. It's called The Liturgist with a couple other guys who does it. And I thought, this is so basic, but part of what the fake news crisis stuff and social media crisis exposes is, you know, the sense of like, this gets drilled to you in U.S. schooling and civics, like we need an educated citizenry for the democracy to work, right? People that are educated, discerning, thinking. So the fact that troll farms can just throw up all these bullshit stories and people just hook, line, and sinker take it in, it might show the fact that we don't have the kind of citizenry we need in a liberal democracy to discerningly weed through things and make informed decisions about the kind of representative choices we want to make.

Chris So I had on that, so I had really fascinating, what I hope is the first of many really fascinating conversations with this Turkish woman, Gulen Kavis. She's a journalist, she's the chief editor of a fact-checking platform in Turkey called te.org. And she, earlier this year, she compiled really the first proper database of fake news stories that are out there in social media that pertain specifically to migrants and refugees. So that was why I was kind of exploring this particular issue around migration, and so that's why I reached out to her. But she said something I thought was just brilliant. I kind of sum up what she does and what her organization does and the challenge of it and this question of, you know, do we have the citizenry she needs? But the way she summarized it is this. She says, telling a lie is quick and easy. Telling that a lie is a lie, which is basically her work, is slow and difficult.

But telling people that a lie is a lie is, and her word was, quixotic. Like, it is just, it is almost impossible to tell people that a lie is a lie because... And quixotic, we're talking about Don Quixote. We're talking, yeah.

Scott To dream the impossible dream.

Chris I'm not even sure that's how you say that word. I use it so rarely. One of those words that you read, but when do you find the opportunity to put it into, like, you know, polite conversation with people?

Scott In other words, you are pointing your lance at windmills or whatever.

Chris K.O.T. does. What was his sidekick's name?

Scott Oh, shoot.

Chris What's his sidekick? Oh, come on. Anyway.

Scott The musical is Man from La Mancha, right?

Chris No, now you're exposing my... I'm a peasant man.

Scott Me too. I'm firmly rooted in the plebeian class.

Chris I need to read more of my great Spanish works. So her point that when you're fact-checking a lie, the real asymmetry is that what you're fighting isn't the lie, it's the false narrative. And it's kind of like a table with many, many legs, and you can cut out one of the legs, but it's irrelevant because the narrative is what I believe, and it's the narrative that is still true.

Scott Yeah, this is where Aristotle is wrong in that we're not rational animals. We're more like rationalizing animals. So I think that once we know what we want to believe, this is what Jonathan Haidt says, that when we are making arguments politically or culturally, we're less like careful reasoned people and we're people looking for justification for something we already want. Dislaunch, that can be really traumatic. So oftentimes, if this story is what's sort of helping you orient your way in the world, it's working for you. I mean, you'll fight tooth and nail to have that taken, lest it be taken away.

Chris So two things there. One, and I can't remember who the Republican congressman or senator was. It was in the news, I think, just a day ago. A journalist was asking for a reaction to the conviction of... Michael Cohen and what it means. And the Congressman said, well, you know, the Democrats are always trying to... And the journalist corrected and said, well, you know, in this case, it's not Democrats. It's the state attorney. It's the Federal Justice Department. And his response was, well, you know, I don't care. The point is... And so to your point about we're rationalizing, not rational.

Scott Yeah, yeah. I think it might have been Orrin Hatch, the senator from Utah. I think he's that same thing he said. At least he said, too, something similar. He said, well, you can make laws to make a crime out of anything. I mean, like, basically, he was a nihilist.

Chris I think it was Orrin Hatch. Yeah, that's right.

Scott His conclusion was reductio ad nihilism.

Chris So, yeah, so that was, you know, surreal. But also, you know, I think that you've, so when you talk about narratives, and we all need narratives to make sense of the world, I mean, I think you've also elegantly framed the question or the problem, which is, you know, given how strongly we need our narratives, And given that we come to social life in these pluralistic societies with a diversity of narratives, so are we therefore locked into conflict or is there a way that we can sort of loosen Our adherence to our own narrative enough to work in new characters and new plots and new destinations in the story? I mean, is that what sort of the economic argument is? Is, well, if people are living in a condition of economic abundance, then they're more willing to give up the security of the narrative that they're holding on to?

I mean, I wonder, is that what's the national project that's being attempted in Canada? Is it about getting people to have looser narratives? I suppose I'm fundamentally worried about whether we're... Going to be able to figure out how to create more inclusive stories.

Scott Being fundamentally worried is better than being a worried fundamentalist, which was what Mike Pence looked like sitting in that meeting with Trump and Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The guy didn't move at all. He was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? Am I going to get the tuna plate for lunch or the chicken salad? I mean, he was petrified. Yeah, now, I think that's a good... You know what we should talk about for our next podcast, maybe? There's a great essay T.S. Eliot wrote called Notes Toward an Understanding of Culture. When he actually looks at, can you... Do you need some kind of animating spirit and storing ethos behind a culture to hold it together? And I think... I mean, Eliot, it's an interesting piece. And again, it's... Something that, you know, Eliot's a particular thinker, a particular point of view that, you know, we wouldn't have to share it. But I mean, I think he raises some questions that a lot of people are raising. Is the liberal project, can everybody, is it enough to have this sort of mutual agreed upon, you know, space to pursue your ends? Or do we need something more emotional than that to keep us together, you know, to create a new sense of identity? And in a postmodern moment, right, where everything is fundamentally contestable, it seems.

Yeah, and I think, you know, that is a challenge. And, you know, this is, and again, in the anxiety of that challenge, I think this is where populist nationalist movements scratch a certain itch, right? Because not only do they deal with your anxiety, they give you something to believe in, right? A story that, you know, that's got good guys and bad guys and heroes and villains and, you know, it's a simple story.

Chris And I think that's the key word right there, is it's simple. You know, one quotation, and I think it's Heisenberg. I've fallen in love with it. I heard it a couple of months ago, and now I use it all the time. But the idea, the statement says, it's not me. I abhor simplicity on this side of complexity. I crave simplicity. On the other side of complexity, which is to say, you know, there is a simple solution out there, but first we've got to kind of hang with the complexity until we really understand what the new paradigm is where all these sort of complicated things, complicated paradoxes sort of fall away. It sounds so beautiful to me, but I think that most of us don't have the time, the energy, the confidence, the determination to hang with the not knowing.

Scott The liberal democracy. I mean, yeah, I'm trying to, like, I'm saying, is this Homeland?

Chris West Wing?

Scott I mean, yeah, West Wing, yeah, right, West Wing, right? Okay, West Wing did. That's true. West Wing does celebrate a kind of, yeah, I mean, do we have story, popular stories that are gripping and compelling on a wide scale that would cultivate the kind of values that I think would, you know, would undergird the pluralistic democratic project?

Chris I don't know. So, okay, so that's a great lead-in to... So we're going to need to have a podcast about what the campaign slogan, what the story or narrative for the 2020 Democratic nomination... We did it.

Scott We did it. It's our last... Two episodes ago. You said... Remember?

Chris Remember? We did it.

Scott We talked about it in the hotel room.

Chris That's right. We did talk about it. Okay, so I've laid that down on tape. Yeah, America the Beautiful. America the Beautiful. So I think that there's an example. So it's a part of the American myth, but there's a story that I think could be repurposed for the present day that offers an imagery and a narrative about the radical inclusivity that America has and how that makes America distinct, distinctive. And yes, beautiful in a way that very few other countries can claim to be. To end on an optimistic note, if we sort of all need stories, the other thing is that humans tend to be good storytellers. And so if we can identify, you know, what the need is, is there needs to be a story that creates a strong vision and enthusiasm of moving towards a pluralistic society, of giving sort of, giving lived expression to the ideal that diversity is strength. Then I'm fundamentally betting on the possibility that somebody can come up with that story.

Scott The best book I've read on that score, I can remember, came out maybe 10 years ago, 12 years ago, by Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, the chief rabbi of the UK. He wrote a book called The Dignity of Difference, which is— Brilliant book, brilliant book. Yeah, I mean, I think that is one of the best—and it's rooted in a kind of Judeo-Christian understanding of difference. I mean, he has—you know, it's fantastic. I can't think—I'm trying to think of something like that that I've read in a while, and I can't think of anything.

Chris One of the insights from that book that— Thank you very much. Like, charity. Charity is just this thing out there, but it's the act of charity that gives us an encounter with what charity is. Just like little acts of freedom or kindness or love give us some kind of connection with the broader concept of love. And so there's something there. About what diversity offers us is the opportunity to experience so many of the higher virtues that are important to us. And if we can kind of get to that place where we see these as opportunities to overcome some of the limitations in ourselves, to face some of the tests that help us to grow as individuals, and to grow as moral beings. Yeah, I think you're right. One, that's a great book. Throw it in the show notes. And two, a great example that yes, there are those kinds of stories out there. We just need charismatic people to be telling them.

Scott Yeah, man, a little bit of charisma goes a long, long way. And a little bit of charisma without a moral compass can get you to the presidency of the United States. Yeah, silver-tongued devils, right?

Chris Exactly. Those exist, too. Those exist, too, because we love a good story.

Scott Well, my friend, it's a pleasure, as always.

Chris Scott.

Scott Until next time. Great.

Chris See you soon.