586. Living Liberalism: Ethics, Society, and Personal Virtue feat. Alexandre Lefebvre

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Welcome

to Un Siloed, this is Greg LeBlanc, I'm here today with Alex Lefebvre, who is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney in Australia, and also the author of a couple books. The most recent book is this one, called Liberalism as a Way of Life, and this was preceded by Human Rights as a Way of Life, is that sort of a prequel?

Yes, it's a prequel, I do this dumb thing of titling very different books, basically with the same title, but yes, it's Human Rights as a Way of Life, then Human Rights and the Care of the Self, then that one.

Yeah, now look, I think a lot of people are going to see this title, like myself, and think, wait a second, this doesn't really make any sense, because everything that we learned when we were studying political philosophy pointed in the direction of liberalism as being, I guess what you might call thin gruel, right? You know, I remember when I took a course on the history of liberalism, my professor made the point that a political philosophy is really kind of incoherent and isn't really going to last if it doesn't have a theory of the good life, right? If it doesn't offer up to practitioners some vision of virtue and how they can thrive in this world.

And so most of the critics of liberalism have said that, right, that liberalism doesn't really offer any kind of vision. It's sort of a rules of engagement, you know, and it has to kind of piggyback on all of these other commitments that come from outside of liberalism. And I think you're kind of taking that head on and you're saying, hold on a second. All of us,

to

some degree, would recognize, right, what it means to be sort of a good liberal to some extent, right? Although it probably needs a little bit of refinement, and I think you offer that. But so I guess one of the questions would be, are all of these requiems for liberalism a little bit premature?

You

know, does liberalism have legs? And in order for it to have legs, does it really need to kind of lean into this notion of the good life and articulate it like John Rawls did?

That's

a great question. Okay, there's so much in there. Let me start with the thin rule comment. I take it your professor teacher wasn't altogether a fan of liberalism. The thin rule jades it a particular way. But look, liberals see the thin rule idea and that liberalism should refrain from talking about the good life. They see that as a feature, not a bug of liberalism. That's not a defect. That's something that liberalism was designed to do. So one very standard picture of liberalism is that it's history, is that it emerged out of the wars of religion in Reformation Europe, when people saw their combatants not just as kind of like

a

bad guy, some dude they didn't like, but as literally damned. And if you conduct a politics that way, it can be devastating. It leads to unrestricted warfare, persecution, and all the rest. And at a certain point, level heads prevailed and said, okay, maybe politics should back off from issues of confessional faith, from salvation. And perhaps we should just try to be a framework so that different people can, at first, just hang out without murdering each other.

And then, as the decades and the centuries pass, build up a robust sense of tolerance where that becomes valued as almost an end in itself, and as something quite beautiful and noble, rather than just this kind of necessary modus vivendi, so we don't tear each other apart. So the way liberals look at liberalism is that they see it as, let's say, thin. They see it as procedural. They see it as a framework for us to get along.

That's

how liberals see liberalism.

Where

I start my book is with actually conservative criticisms of liberalism. And contrary to what you might expect, I don't object or I don't say wrong, wrong, wrong. But rather, my kind of starting point is that they're on to something. And when conservatives look at liberalism today, they don't see—and I'm talking particularly about American conservatives. And if you really want me to push, there's this very ascendant Catholic wing of political thought going on right now that has big, very articulate boosters. People like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame. But this goes all the way to the top, as it were, because J.D.

Vance, for instance, amongst others, is—rolls deep with these guys. They're friends. They take inspiration from one another. So this isn't a marginal perspective. And when these guys look at liberalism, they don't see some light, thin ideology that lets a million flowers bloom. What they see instead is—I don't know, this is my metaphor, not theirs—but effectively the blob. They see this hegemony

coming

for their lunch that has this thick concentration of values that are around things that we know are kind of liberal-ish—autonomy, fairness, tolerance, maybe a sense of irony and distance, and like that package. And they say, look, that's not merely a descriptive framework. That has now infiltrated every single organ of society today. So it's not that we acquire our liberalism on this take from, like, civics lessons or, like, reading the Constitution. We acquire our liberalism by watching Netflix, by using dating apps, by working in respectful corporate workplaces with HR codes, et cetera, et cetera. And so we're being socialized in this stuff 24-7. And for them, that's a disaster.

They think it's a terrible political ethos. It's an even more devastating psychological one. It's just bad, horrible stuff. Now, I disagree with them on the value judgment. Obviously, I wrote this book, Liberalism is a Way of Life. But descriptively, I think they're on to something, that liberalism is much thicker, particularly because it's captured, to use their language, the institutions of civil society.

So in a way,

they recognize it for what it is. Exactly.

More accurately than the

liberals themselves, right?

Yeah, that's right. This is a political—like, Marx praised the bourgeoisie better than the bourgeoisie ever praised themselves. He knew what they were good at, and it's sort of like the conservatives. It's this irony of political thought that happens all the time, where the enemies see a position much more clearly than its adherence. And that's where I start the book. So I think that the liberal state may be still a procedural, thin kind of thing, but the horse is bolted, and liberalism has just got into family life, universities, media, et cetera, et cetera. And to that end, it is not an impartial, light ideology. It is a full-blown hegemony.

Well,

maybe we can go back in time. And, you know, I think you mentioned Helena Rosenblatt in your book. And, you know, in her work, she talks about this notion of liberality, right? Which,

prior

to the existence of anything we would call liberalism, you know, this word referred to actual character, right, and referred to virtue. And, you know, there was something there about what it meant to be sort of a liberal person. And this seemed to have been shed at some point, right? And so in a way,

I

mean, are you kind of trying to bring that back in?

Yeah,

that's perfect. The framing – so we were talking before we went on air, as it were, about how you've had that great string of liberals recently on the show. And this is perfect because all of them are sort of – so here, Helena Rosenblatt, you mentioned explicitly, who wrote a terrific book called The Lost History of Liberalism. Samuel Moyne, who wrote a book a couple of years ago called Liberalism Against Itself. And they – and me, too. And we're all kind of seeing the same thing, which is that liberalism has, as a couple of centuries have gone by, really backed off from any ethical, aspirational claim about how to live in order to become more of a framework.

Sure.

So this is where Helena

– And this is

what you call – I think you call it the libertarianization of liberalism.

Yeah, that's right. I heard that from Sam Moyne, but that's exactly right. And so it started off – so liberalism is born in the 19th century. That's when people started calling themselves liberal, and we can go into the reasons for that. Short version, they were freaked out by democracy, and they really wanted to put some guardrails around democracy. So that kind of populism, craziness wouldn't overtake people. And so that's where liberalism started, as an ethos, both to be a free person, but also, as you mentioned, to be a generous one. So you have the ideals of liberty and liberality, and that travels all throughout the 19th century.

And what's so interesting is, through the 19th and then the 20th century, is the retreat of liberalism from its ethical ambition. And it's not just because liberals got cold feet or they became cowards. There are good reasons why that happened, and they're explainable and, like, humanly understandable. So, for example, Sam Moyne really keys in on this bit. But when mid-century – 20th, 20th century, mid-century liberals were confronted with the Soviet Union,

and

they were justifiably very concerned about a state that was not just collectivist, but promoting a very clear, definite, and robust sense of what it meant to be a good person and a good subject that meant having these beliefs, meant having these behaviors, these habits, et cetera, et cetera. And what liberals wanted to do at that time, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let people figure that stuff out for themselves. So we need frameworks against the state. So liberalism lost its ethical mojo in the 19th and 20th century. That's true, but there's understandable reasons.

And now I think what we're seeing now in the early 21st century is maybe that sort of stuff, with appropriate lessons, needs to be rethought and revived. Because if liberalism can't compel ethical assent and robust commitment, then what are we talking about? We're done for. We can't campaign forever on just a set of rules, however noble they are. There has to be a there there. And so that's, I think, one of the tricks that a lot of people like myself are trying to come to, which is how to reclaim a liberal idea of the good life while not abandoning our commitment to pluralism, because those are two equally important aspects.

It's like, you know, when you're on a diving board and you have 9.5 degree difficulty on a dive. It's something like that. Other ideologies don't have to do that.

They

can just screw it. We're going to promote the good life. Aristotle said it. Confucius said it. We're just going to do that thing. And my next project we can talk about is about that. But liberals can't go jump in the pool with two feet that way. We need instead to acknowledge that there is a liberal good life, but all this at the same time respect pluralism, which is a dance other ideologies don't have to do.

But

it seems like, you know, most political philosophies start with what

the

good life is, and then they try to create a society that allows that good life to flourish. And I think what you're saying is that,

you know,

liberalism kind of did it backwards, right? It started with the kind of society that we want, and then that ultimately,

if

you follow it logically, then kind of shapes what it means to be a good person, right?

That's exactly right. Yeah,

I

mean, Aristotle, for example, starts his politics by saying, politeia has to account, do two things. It has to account for a constitution, and it has to account for a conception of the good life. And it's that marriage between the two that kicks off political philosophy and has a million permutations. And that gets reinvented by religion. So a Christian state has to bring people to salvation, to a godly life. And so all of those have a very specific vision as to what it means to live well, and they dedicate and channel their resources and their honor and what have you into realizing that. And that's awesome.

I

mean, that's very understandable, and it's a noble project. But like you said, liberals, I've never quite heard it put that way, but I think it's a really smart formulation. We don't start with the good life. We start with the kind of society that we want, and then we build from that. And liberals have a cute formula for everything. But the liberal formula for this would be that we liberals put the right before the good. And that's a line that was made famous by Rawls. But it really crystallizes something true, that typically political philosophies, Eastern, Western, old and new, put the good before the right. Well, the right is a headmaiden for the good.

It's the point of the right is to advance us to the good. And at a certain point, liberals say we can't work like that anymore. In a globalized world, in a world where religions clash, that's just not going to fly. So we have to do it backwards, like you said.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you coined this term. I think it was you that coined it, this idea of liberaldom. I think it's a play on Christendom. And I think it was Kierkegaard who looked around and said, you know, this isn't a Christian world. This is something else. And so what it means is that we don't really live in a liberal world. We kind of live in this mishmash, right? And maybe wouldn't even recognize a liberal world if we saw it. Yeah, I think

that's

altogether right. I mean, I don't think, I mean, I think that's Kierkegaard's point. Like if an authentic Christian walked up to you, you would kind of slam the door in his faith all the while. So the background here is that Kierkegaard, 19th century theologian and social critic, he lived in Copenhagen. He was kind of a man about town and he liked to observe people. And he just watched how people live and everyone professed the good life of Christ and they went to church, etc., etc. But when he really looked hard at these people, he's just like, bullshit. None of these people want to be authentically Christian. Their desires don't line up.

And what they want is a mistress on Saturday and a Sunday roast on Sunday.

I

mean, that's their idea. It's like low-key Epicureanism. That's really how people in 19th century Copenhagen were rollable. And so what he did was indict that world for hypocrisy. And he came up with this word in Danish called christenhed, which translates to, that's Christendom, but it literally means play-acting in Christianity, like Christian-ish-ness, something like that. And it's such a devastating term. And the trick, I mean, it's a very easy, simple trick I do, but I think it works, is that I said, look, we don't live in a

confessional

Christian public world like that anymore, that time has passed. But we do live in a liberal world, and people like you and me profess that we value values like freedom, fairness, impartiality. But when we look at how we live, it's just shot through with contradiction, and we show ourselves to be hypocrites. So, I mean, I don't know about you, Craig. Let me speak for myself. But, I mean, it's hard. Jesus is a difficult ideal to live up to, and a real liberal, perhaps not quite as demanding, is still very difficult to get to. And so, I think that we live in a world called liberaldom, a world that professes these values, but that just kind of leaves them behind when convenient.

So, that's the goal. And I think you're utterly right that a genuinely liberal world and a genuinely liberal person would be not utterly unrecognizable, but would be vastly different than what we have now.

Well,

I mean, is this ideal liberal world something that's actually attainable? Because, I mean, I think you make the point that liberaldom,

with

all of its shortcomings, is sort of a product of necessary compromises with things like democracy and capitalism and meritocracy, things that really aren't,

you

know, they're related to, but they're not coextensive with liberalism.

Yeah,

I

think, listen, I think, like, a pure 100% liberal state, yeah, I don't think anyone's going to get there, given the exigencies of life, other social systems, just that human beings are crappy, fallible creatures. So, yeah, but I think there's a whole bunch of low-hanging fruit that liberals might be able to get to and try to move us a little bit in that direction. So, I mean, low-hanging fruit in the U.S., there's a lot. But, for example, campaign finance reform and gerrymandering or some minimal tax overhaul and the like. And in Australia, we could point to certain things.

In Australia, get the private school system under control because there's a total two-tier track of education for rich kids and poor kids here. So it's that kind of stuff. I mean, so it's not going to bring about a liberal utopia, but it's going to be a closer vision of a fair society than what we have at present.

Now,

look, the hero of your book is John Rawls, and, you know, if you're my age, and I don't know, you look a little younger than me, but I mean, I probably had five different classes in college where we had to read John Rawls. I mean, you could not escape John Rawls, but we all read Theory of Justice. And the way I remember Theory of Justice is really, you know, more like the kind of, you know, rules orientation and less about the cultivation of the self.

And I think you tell the story about how his philosophy taken as a whole, you know, really does address issues around the cultivation of the self and the cultivation of virtues and has some kind of vision of what it means to be like a liberal person. Maybe, could you talk a bit about that? And, you know, why most people kind of never dig deep enough into John Rawls to

see this?

Let me set it up. I'll give you a little, let me tell you a story. I mean, Rawls' life is very interesting in this respect. I don't know if you know about it or if you're reading or listening to it. But so, John Rawls was born in a middle-class family in Baltimore in the 1920s, and his early life was marked by a lot of tragedy. So, on two separate occasions, this is extraordinary, like different occasions, he gave fatal illnesses to his brothers that ended up, yeah, that ended up killing them. So, twice he himself was sick, once with pneumonia, once with something else, I can't remember.

Deteria, I think it

was. Yeah, Deteria, that's right. And his brothers just wanted to play with them, as best brothers do. And they did, and then that, two brothers. And it's extraordinary. And,

of

course, Rawls developed a serious lifelong stammer that he would never overcome. And when Rawls entered into university, he was a young man of faith. He wanted to become a theologian. He wrote his honors thesis, a great, there's a variety of extraordinary, called On Sin and Faith. And it was really just a work of Christian personalist theology. Anyway, so that happens. And then he, Second World War, he, like all young Princetonians, they volunteer and they go into service, they get rid of them. And he went to the Pacific Theater and he saw a lot of stuff that made him lose his faith. And he became, if not an atheist, then at least an agnostic.

And certainly, both the Pacific Theater and then news of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, that shook him. And so, my sense is that what Rawls tried to do for the rest of his life was recover a secular version of the theological vision that had captured him during his life. And I'm not, this isn't me inventing that. But there's interpreters with Rawls that say that, to try to recover a certain model of grace and of justice that could

be... And redemption, even, right?

And

redemption,

yeah, redemption is, yeah, yeah,

yeah,

right. I make a big deal of that. And you're right, pointed out. And redemption, a secular version of what it means to live a life

that's

worthy. Because I think he thought that the ordinary stuff, having a family, raising your kids, having a drink at the end of the night, that's not good enough. And he wanted more. Anyways, so what Rawls did is he wrote two blockbuster books of political philosophy that generations have been obliged to read. So, I'm paying it forward and now make my undergrads read theory. So, apologies to students young and old. But

the

first book that he wrote, the one that reinvented political philosophy, is Theory of Justice, 1971. And there he does lay out a rulesy... So, that book has three parts. The rulesy bit of what liberalism is, both politically and economically, that's parts one and two,

and

it takes up a big part of the book. But part three is asked the question of, what would it mean for a liberal society to endure from one generation to the next? And for that, he thinks people need a certain ethos, a certain vibe and sensibility. And he goes about describing what a liberal kind of person would be. And that part of Rawls' book is the least studied. But for me, it's just, there's gold in there. Because he's really trying to articulate as honestly and, I think, plainly as he can, what it would mean to be liberal.

Well,

maybe, I mean, he doesn't use this word, but in a sense that Rosenblatt means, what it means to be free and generous in this world of ours, given that we have all these temptations, whether that's our consumerism, whether that's our trying to get a leg up for our friends and family, kind of jaded, bad meritocracy. Anyways, he's trying to outline a vision of a person. So, that's Rawls. And that, I thought, was, it's an unstudied bit of Rawls. Basically, it's the only unstudied part of Rawls. And I think it's the best. It's a deep cut, but a good cut. Now, very briefly, Rawls decides to reinvent his own project about 20 years later with a book called Political Liberalism.

And there, he confronts the idea, which is a very kind of, takes a flosser not to see an objection this kind of frank and clear. But the objection to his system is, dude, Rawls, for your system to work, everyone basically has to be like you. It has to be kind of like a Krantian, post-Christian, Protestant kind of thing. Like, that's the value package. And so, what he does is

he

then recasts the system really in a much more good, neutral kind of way, much more politics should just be about politics and rights and political values and any pronouncements on what it means to live well or what kind of human excellences should be achieved. Politics should just stay the hell out of that debate. And so, that then becomes Rawls. And again, it makes sense why he's doing that. But it means, to go back to our earlier thing, that liberalism forbears or withdraws from questions of the good life, which leads it to a very fateful kind of trajectory, which is that people now around the world are saying, first, liberals, that's a joke.

You do have the conception of the good life, and it's built in everywhere. So, the Rawlsian project isn't descriptively accurate. But then, also, moreover,

the

liberal ideal that you have kind of sucks. And we have better ideals, more robust human that get at Austin, capital T, truth, or that's how they see themselves. And if you believe that the highest good should be pursued by politics, like, what are you doing fooling around with liberalism? You should be doing something else. And that, I think, is the moment that we find ourselves in.

Yeah,

and I think, in a way, he was trying to address de Tocqueville, particularly the volume two of de Tocqueville. Because I don't think de Tocqueville ever offered a solution, right? I mean, he highlighted, he kind of grew a little bit disillusioned with democracy, right? And he said, you know, American society's got that individualism and the materialism and the conformity. And,

you

know, he didn't really have a solution. I think John Rawls is trying to say, no, it doesn't have to be that way,

right?

No, yeah, that's good. It's an interesting connection you make. Yeah, so you're right. So Tocqueville wrote volume two. I

mean,

he was still a young man, but he got really bummed out.

He

was like 35 when he wrote volume two. And he became pessimistic. He thought that the threats introduced by democracy would grow and grow until they would overwhelm the good parts of democracy. So things like our individualism, our materialism, our conformity, the tendency to centralize in a big authority that would just take care of our lives such that we all basically, like Tocqueville's vision for what democracy will end up like. It's like the movie WALL-E, if you remember that. It's like, it's the fat people on the ship who basically just drink Slurpees all day long. And that's where Tocqueville, just kind of like fat sheep, that's where we're heading.

Well,

it's like The Last Man, right? Like

Nietzsche's Last Man. Yeah, it

is very Last Man. That's right. I think that that's the right connection to pull. Yeah. Obviously, he's writing before that. But yeah, that's exactly right. And I think Rawls is more optimistic. And I mean, Sklar, Judith Sklar, another hero of the book. She was, John Rawls was the sun king of political philosophy at Harvard. She was the moon queen of political philosophy and a great historical thinker, much more sociologically rich than Rawls and had a cutting wit. And she basically describes, divides thinkers into kind of optimists and pessimists. And she says that you can be a pessimist, but that doesn't mean that you quit.

And so her great heroes were all people like early liberals like Montaigne or Montesquieu that looked at the world and realized how bad humans were. But their next move was to roll up their sleeves and design institutions to help improve us as best they

could. I

mean, they were fundamentally misanthropic, right?

That's right. But yeah, I mean, she wrote a book celebrating misanthropy in the right way.

I

mean, misanthropy can go bad reference, obviously.

It

can lead to like Heath Ledger's Joker, where you just want to watch the world burn and say, fuck it. But on the other hand, if you are misanthropic, and if you mean deep suspicion of human beings, you can just try to do your best you can to ameliorate us, whether through structures that keep us apart or through educational attempts that would socialize us a bit better. But I think Rawls is in that latter camp. I think he had no illusions about how flawed human beings are. But then he tried to design institutions and practices that would help make us better. I mean, I'll kick back to you in a second.

But one of the big ideas from the book is that I try to rework one of Rawls' most famous ideas, and that's the original position. So the original position is this thought experiment that has this life of its own mortality of its own now in political philosophy. But the idea is that you try to think of what kind of society you would want if you didn't know your place in it. So, like, I'm middle class, I'm white, I'm talking about myself, I'm heterosexual, like, I'm killed in terms of the advantages that I have, but I would be a real asshole if I were to try to design a society that would be designed to favor those.

And so he designs this exercise in order for people to try to take a step back from themselves, to try to get a bit of distance from the meanness of me and think about what your commitments are. And that, I think, it's a very deeply human ambition to just step out of our partiality, which is how we're all flawed. And so that's the kind of thing that Rawls knew very well, that we suck. But he tried to design, he wrote a book for redemption. That leads us back to here.

Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is the way you describe what he's doing is, you know, he's making a move that ultimately results in the reader

becoming

a different person, right? So it's not simply, you know, laying out a bunch of interesting principles and ideas and going, oh, okay, great, I'm persuaded. But something like the original position is not meant to be a one and done. It's supposed to be,

I

guess, something that you reflect on almost continuously, right? If you can somehow keep that in the back of your mind, like every day you remind yourself of the original position, this is going to change the way you interact with the world, right? I mean, this idea of spiritual exercises

embedded

in works of political philosophy, I really like this idea.

Yeah, no, that's, I mean, that's exactly right. It's not, it's definitely not a one and done. It's, I call it a meditation, which I think it is. And if Rawls had been a totally different aesthetic kind of guy, he might have tattooed some version of the original position on his bicep, or I don't know what.

Well, he's got to be

on your hands, you can see it.

Yeah,

I

set a reminder on his old school Nokia phone.

I

don't know, whatever. That's exactly right. And so what I tried, so the whole title, Liberalism is a Way of Life of my book, is itself an adaptation of one of my very favorite philosophers, this French historian and philosopher and classicist named Pierre Hadot. So H-A-D-O-T, wonderful reader, so clear, so kind of modest, but human. If you're interested, dear listener, an excellent place to begin is with a book called What is Ancient Philosophy? Or if you want to go a little bit more intense, but shorter, an essay he wrote called Spiritual Exercises.

But his whole career was built on the claim that ancient philosophy had just a totally different conception as to what philosophy meant or means than moderns. So moderns thinks it means some big abstract system by which you sit back, think about the world, come up with a systematic theory to explain the cosmos, and then maybe some reflections on morality at the end of it, like kind of Kant's trajectory of first critique, critique of your reason, then moving to the moral stuff. Okay, that's fine. But he said ancient philosophy didn't roll that way.

It

was entirely different. And to be an ancient philosopher really meant just to aspire to a life lived wisely, pursuing the right kinds of things, having the right kind of relationships, and being... Like everything was about how to live,

right? Everything was about how to live. Even the metaphysical speculations presumably had some kind

of implications

for how to live,

right?

And release yourself from all the grippedness of kind of the human condition. And that's very normal.

Anyways,

and so they designed all the different philosophies. Schools had a different idea about what messes us up, so they designed different theories in order to lead us in whatever direction. But they all agreed on the prior goal, which is that the goal of philosophy is to live well, and that's what all this writing is about.

And

so philosophy is a way of life. And what I try to do in my book is suggest that liberalism could be seen sort of in the same vein.

But

look, I mean, most people when they read modern philosophers, they don't read it in that way, right? Yeah.

I

mean, you know, most people who sit down and read,

I

mean, even if everyone accepts the premise of Vadeau, right, that ancient philosophy was primarily about ethics, most people don't think of modern philosophers as being about ethics. So,

I

mean, are you kind of reading into, say, Rawls? Or, I mean, do you think, you know, Rawls himself was very explicitly about this project?

I don't think, you have to be careful here. I think my interpretation can stand. I don't think I'm trying to make Rawls say things that he didn't want to. I don't think he's explicitly drawing on the ancient tradition, but I definitely think he's putting concerns, as we said, about how to live well at the core of his project, and that leads him in that direction.

But

to go back,

I

mean, it's professional philosophers. We train, I'm a professor of

philosophy.

We train the decent, good idea of philosophy out of our students, because when they come here, the gateway drug to philosophy is never, I read some logical positivism. That is never the case, right? That just doesn't happen. It's instead, it's I read some Camus, I read some Dostoevsky, Nietzsche got me when I was young, or Iris Murdoch, or something like that, like someone who's kind of coming at this stuff with human concerns. And then, of course, we have our first year session where we say, no, philosophy is about something altogether different. And we see, but I think that the kind of Vox idea of philosophy, maybe if it's not kind of coded in this way, is closer to the ancient one.

And that's why, of course, I mean, listen, this is why this, for a decade, two decades, the self-help section of publishing has been the most fruitful and popular. It's a try, when you have religion retreat, not just from the public sphere, but from a lot of people's lives, and that's in the U.S., that's like 30% are not religious believers anymore. In Australia, it's closer to 50. In New Zealand, it's like 70. Something's going to fill that gap. And Jordan Peterson, on his own, is not going to be able to fill the marketplace of meaning and spirituality. So you have all these people trying to recover this foundational aspiration of philosophy, which is to live well.

They're not calling itself philosophy, but that's the original vision.

Right.

Now, you also talk about kind of formation and education, right? You talk about Emile. And I think that's probably, I agree with you, that's like one of the most undeservedly neglected, you know, books out there. But, I mean, part of the point is that we're going to be formed and shaped regardless of what happens, right, whether it's intentional or not. And so, I mean, our society is shaping us all to be liberals to some degree. But I guess the question is, to what extent do we need to actually strive to become more liberal over and above the way in which we are shaped by Netflix and by TV and all the rest that we're exposed to?

Yeah.

I

mean, listen, it would be nice to think that we can live honest, liberal lives by tuning into Netflix, but that's not going to happen. And I think that this is just a general truth about human beings, but all human beings everywhere live in a moral system, but most of their lives are spent trying to avoid the main claim made by that moral system. Our whole life is a process of avoidance, of trying to dodge the bullet that we shot at ourselves. We're claiming this for ourselves. So, like, I don't know. If I think of what it means to be, like, a crappy Christian, I think of someone who is very judgy, someone who just wants to kind of, like,

sort

the sheeps and the goats or whatever. And that, for me, is an avoidance of the demand of love. I think that's what that is. If I think, for example, of what it means to be a bad Confucian or a bad, like, Chinese philosophy, I think someone who's very authoritarian, patriarchy, that kind of stuff, because I think the main demand of Confucianism is, like, harmony and trying to get the different parts in the right balance. And you want to avoid that because it's hard and it's demanding on you. And likewise, I think for liberalism, the main thing that liberals do most of their life is try to avoid the demand of generosity. The freedom stuff is not very difficult. That's easy.

Using the right pronouns, that stuff, it's low cost. And I think we can do that, no problem. But when I'm asked, for example, to give more in taxes or to be very generous to someone else's perspective, that makes real claims on us. Which is, you know, let people move into your neighborhood.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Although, yeah, I mean, this is why I think that the, I mean, I think that the...

To listen to

someone who disagrees with you,

right?

That's

hard. That's hard. Right. I mean, I think that's why, in a sense, that, I mean, for many reasons, but the Ezra Klein Abundance book makes a big splash. This is because it's voicing the values that liberals claim for but don't live up to. And it's just putting those in our face, particularly the yimbyism as the flip. So, I mean, you're a Californian guy. I'm sure you're neck deep in that culture.

Yeah, no, I think virtue signaling is more important than virtue.

Definitely.

Right? I mean, I think, you know, a lot of us find a lot of our liberal colleagues and friends to be, you know, annoying in some

respect, right?

Yeah. And so you can kind of understand where some of these critiques are coming from. Sure.

But listen, I agree. I can see the point. But everyone from all time is virtue signaling 20... Show me a moment in history when people aren't... There's just different virtues with different regimes of punishment and of honor. But everyone all time is virtue signaling 24-7 because we want honor and because we want asymmetrical recognition and all the shit that we so talked about and made a life about. That's been driving human beings from go. So liberals have this own twist on it. And we're particularly kind of like polite, nasty about it. But it's not new.

Well,

I mean, you talk about how some of the things that we call virtues,

they're

going to find it difficult to thrive in liberal soil, right? So, you know, things like, you know, bravery and heroism and a lot of the stuff that were considered virtues in other societies. But liberalism has its own virtues, right? Or I guess you call them perks, right? So maybe we could dig into them. And what I liked is how you articulated them as flowing from these very specific planks in the liberal political philosophy, right? So whether it's the original position or whether it's, you know, reflective equilibrium or, you know, public reasoning. I was wondering if you could kind of get into them and describe kind of what the ideal

liberal

looks like, right? And what is their life like? And, you know, why might we want to be that person and maybe even hang out with that person?

Yeah,

great.

Great.

Let me just take the first part of that question and I'll come to the stuff that you're really asking of me. I think a liberal way of life is awesome. I'm a full-throated defender of it. I think the virtues are joyful and worthy of joy. But I think it's very important to recognize that liberalism or any other kind of value system doesn't capture all human excellences, which is just what you said, that certain genuine human goods are going to be starved out in a liberal culture. You mentioned bravery, for example. I would say self-sacrifice. I would say piety, solidarity. There's a whole bunch of stuff like that. Harmony, etc. And the list goes on.

And so when people reject liberalism today, liberals like to comfort themselves by saying, well, those people just don't have the strength of spirit to live up to liberalism. They're afraid. They're backlashy. They're homophobes. They're xenophobes. They're racist. Blah, blah, blah. And they just can't live a life based on tolerance.

Now,

that may be partially true. Maybe. Sure. I don't want to deny that. But on the other hand, I think that a lot of people saying no to liberalism is not because they can't live up to its demands, but because they look at the ideals and say, no, not for me,

that

this is not the kind of life I want and that the vision of the good life and the good quality is in a different direction. And I think that those are principled rejections of liberalism that make, for me, a lot of sense. And if we want to understand the attraction of illiberalism, post-liberalism, all that stuff, we can't just think that these people are either cowards or afraid or that their leaders are just motivated by the goods of tyranny and kind of sex, power, money, all that stuff. That's part of the, no doubt, part of the picture. But they're motivated by genuine ideals that liberalism crowds out. So you didn't ask this.

But my next project is going to be to try to embed myself with these post-liberals and try to figure out what their conception of the good life is and how they think the state should really heavily promote it. So to that end, I think I have a fellowship coming up in the Hungarian Danube Institute, which is an Orban-funded think tank. And I'm going to roll with the kind of far right for a couple of months and see what's going on there.

Because I just don't think, I don't want to endorse it, but I just don't think we can understand it if we don't see them trying to recover the oldest question of political philosophy, which is what it means to live well in a community with others and devote our resources to that. So that's my little kind of intro. That said, don't

get me wrong. Presumably

it's too late to go undercover.

Yeah, right. No, no, no. I think that these places are, I don't want to go undercover. I think that these places are just kind of flattered that a liberal wants to learn from them in some sense. So I don't think they're going to climb up. I think, I mean, a lot of these people, like you listen to Steve Bannon, he's just a chatty Cathy. He'll touch anyone that listens. I mean, these people are, what's the word, vulnerable? They are loquacious with their, so that's not going to be a problem at

all,

I

think.

So coming to the real question that you asked, which is what are the goods of the liberal way of life? I do think that they are real goods. And at the heart of it, I would say,

I

would, I mean, I think any conception of the good life kind of parks two or three virtues, kind of limit it for, I don't know, at the heart of what it means to live well. And then they have kind of derivative qualities and virtues flowing out from that. So when I, so I'm not, I take liberals at their word that the two major commitments they have is, let's say, to liberty and liberality, or to freedom and fairness as a kind of interpretation of what it means to be generous. And out of that comes a whole personality structure. That's what I believe. Whole psychology emanates from that.

And it behooves us as liberals to cultivate that, not just because it makes us not jerks and not hypocrites, but because living according to those values and those virtues is intrinsically rewarding and joyful. It gives you, I call them in my book perks, but lived existential qualities that are important. And it's important, I think, so that's the first thing. I want to say that the liberal personality isn't just a political thing.

And

I want to say that it disseminates into all aspects of our life from like how we deal with our wife or our husband or our romantic partners, how we raise our kids, the kind of jokes we laugh at,

the

kind of stuff that makes us upset, et cetera, et cetera.

So

that's why I say freedom and fairness is the heart of it. And then out of that comes a whole bunch of stuff. So for example, I don't know, just to take one, I talk a lot about that.

I

think liberals have a certain, done well, because there's a lot of bad liberals out there,

liberals,

liberals have done well, have a certain lightness of spirit. And a certain kind of irony that I think is joyful, because I think a big part of the liberal self-understanding is that everything we think is kind of provisional. It's sort of like where I grew up matters a lot. It shaped me to my bones. And that brings in a lot of contingency into the world, because if I had had this life experience, I would have been fundamentally different than if I had this. And I think that that gets people to wear, liberals to wear their commitments, not lightly, like we don't give

a

shit, but that we realize the provisionality of stuff. And we can step back from ourselves. So that's why I think liberals are actually pretty funny. They're really good at comedy, because it's all about kind of slipping in and out of your perspective, making fun of it, claiming it, owning it, realizing we don't live up to it, and the like. So it's that kind of like, so being a liberal isn't like serious, heavy, I mean, part of it is this serious, heavy stuff. But it also is just about kind of a certain kind of light dancerly grace, I want to say, done well.

And

that's, yeah. So some of my heroes in the book are comedians that I think do this really well. So I talk about Dave Chappelle. He's a Muslim, but he doesn't talk about that. And then his performance, I think, is just a very liberal kind of, people are going to get upset because of the transphobia stuff. But I do think this comedy is just liberal through and through. Hannah Gatsby, I talk about Parks and Recreation as a TV show. So I find all that stuff is just liberal inspired.

Of course, a lot of people would critique that and say, well, you know, they don't take anything seriously, right? You know, the irony is

the

problem rather than the virtue.

Yes, I don't think, I think irony poorly understood leads that way, and it leads to kind of a relativism. But I think that what I'm trying to suggest is it leads to an awareness of contingency. And that might actually commit us more to fairness, because had I not been born like this, I would have had certain disadvantages, et cetera, et cetera. And so I don't think that that, I don't think that invades our moral, I don't think, I just, I, whenever,

whenever

conservatives describe liberals as someone who wears their morality totally provisionally, and anything goes, and basically it's just all about social respectability, but like Gyges and Plato, if they can put on the ring of invisibility, they'll just do that whenever. I just don't think that's right. I think that a secular, eminent morality can be fully binding, and I think liberals give daily example of that to genuinely good people.

Yeah.

Now, in addition to sort of reflecting on the original position and what that means, and it means a lot, it is a very rich content there, you talk about reflective equilibrium. And I was wondering if you could dig into that, because, again, this is one of those things that you refer to kind of as a spiritual exercise, right? So what does it mean to live or inhabit reflective equilibrium?

So in the book, okay, so the broader picture is that I have this idea from a duo of spiritual exercises, practices that people can take on to become a certain

kind

of person. Religion, of course, is full of these. So if you're a Christian, you're into things like prayer, or if you're a Catholic, you're into confession, repentance, all that stuff. All of those are spiritual exercises. And I want to say, look, if liberalism is going to be a legit way of life, then it needs its own corresponding kind of stuff. And I do this move that I think is interpretively smart, but I wonder if it limited the appeal of my book, which is I turn to Rawls and try to read some of his big headline banner concepts in terms of spiritual exercises. It binds my book very closely to Rawls. But this

is the feature that I found really intriguing about your book.

Good.

You're

welcome about that. I mean, I think it leaves different thinkers feeling differently. Because if you're someone who either goes into Nozick or into Hayek and you're a liberal, they read that and like, Rawls isn't the only game in town. Why are you doing this? So the book starts, I'm confessing the weakness of the book, but the book starts with a very big tent picture of liberalism. And then as I go further, it becomes more and more some version of Rawlsianism, in part because I think he's a very coherent thinker that got central aspects of it right. But in part, it's just to give it ballast. But anyways, that was the authorly strategy for better, for worse.

So I take three of his big, big, very famous concepts, which are the original position, which we talked about. The goal there is to become impartial. Then I take another one, which has this very wordy title, reflective equilibrium, which is about becoming more self-coherent. And then last, I take on a concept from his later work called public reason, which is speaking to one another in terms that we can reciprocally accept, so that if I were a Christian, I don't give you reasons for political life and political, for policies. For example, based on my Christianity, I try to appeal to virtues that you and I would share, say, as Americans or as fellow citizens of the country.

So the bit on reflective equilibrium is really about trying to find an alignment between the different values, between the liberal values that you profess, to try to get your principles, your habits into some sort of harmony. So basically, you're not a basket case professing ideals on the one hand and then living an altogether different kind of life on the other hand. So these practices of self-coherence are nothing new. Stoicism, for example, is called them. Ditto Christianity. I'm just trying to come up with the liberal versions of them.

Now,

to what extent can you pursue these virtues

independent

of the society you live in, right? So, you know, if you don't live in the perfect liberal society, you know, you live in our kind of sham version of it, or even if you live in sort of a, I don't know, a completely illiberal society, can you still kind of partake in the

perks,

so to speak, by trying to be sort of a liberal person, or is that ultimately going to be frustrating, depending on the environment in which you live?

I think it's, I think we need to, okay, this is a great question, it's difficult. I think we need to immediately split out the liberal and non-liberal societies. My book is really about, the whole aim of my book is to try to convince liberals to be liberal. I'm not trying to convince conservatives to be liberal. I'm trying to convince people who are basically on the same wavelength and to actually commit to their principles. So I'm not trying to convince a Christian or conservative or Muslim or whatever. And within a Western liberal democratic country, I think that can be done, and to live liberally can be done, and I think it can be a flourishing way of life.

I think it's an uphill struggle in non-liberal countries. I think to live as an out-and-out liberal in China or in Russia, for example, they're going to be serious. It's not just rubs against the grain of your culture. There's going to, if you push it seriously enough, there's going to be costs and consequences to you that might not make it an attractive or fully viable way of life. So I don't want to pretend that this kind of thing can be done just anywhere. I don't think it can. Now, with respect to doing it in the Western world, we have to kind of re-evaluate what the costs and benefits are of living a liberal way of life.

So, for example, like, let's just take the most obvious one about what it means to be generous, which is, let's say, signing up to pay higher taxes. I mean, there's all different ways we can be generous, but that's just paradigmatic, and that's what people are going to think, and it's fine. Now, I don't want to pretend that having less money is like a good thing. Like, obviously, paying less taxes is good for the person less. I mean, money is nice. It allows you to realize I don't want to—there's no bullshit there. I mean, of course it's nice to pay lower taxes.

So what I have to try to do in the book is try to suggest that the goods of being generous and of committing, for example, to a marginal tax rate of 60%, 70%, if you're a very high income earner, that those are intrinsically valuable, and they lead you to certain kinds of, like, joys in your existence. And that's what I tried to do, that you lose the world, but you gain your soul in some way. So I don't think it's prohibitive to be a liberal in a liberal society. It just means that you reevaluate what the costs and benefits are of the kind of life you want to live.

Sorry, that's a very

abstract, but I hope that makes sense.

Well,

I guess what I was wondering is, I mean, is there a way to split out your private and your public life? I mean, I think for most people, when they think about liberalism, they think about there being this sort of— Yeah,

right.

You know, these private commitments and then, you know, the public commitments. But, I mean, I think you're sort of trying to bring back this notion, which I think the founders subscribe to, which is that,

you

know, if you want to have a certain type of society, then you need certain types of people, right? And you can't really be a good citizen if you don't have kind of,

you

know, if you're not a good person. Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's—what was it? That's the Adams quote, that this land of ours needs the good Christians, essentially. A constitution that

we can only

frame for, whatever. But even the ones that weren't Christian, I mean, I think they believe that, you know, like if you can't exercise self

-control, then

how can you expect, you know, the government to exercise self-control?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. I agree with that. I agree with that completely. I mean, I don't think you can have a liberal democratic country without people who at some level aren't liberal. I mean, this is not going to work. I think it's very important.

And

so you brought up this very important issue of the public and the private. And I think that any good liberal, even if they're like me and see liberalism in

a

way of life, need to maintain that because any country today is going to be plural. And I definitely do not want the liberal state to force or foist or even favor a comprehensive liberal way of life on its population. I think Christians and Muslims and whatever, Nietzscheans within limits, should be allowed to live by their own light. So I very much want a public and private divide that liberalism affirms. What I'm saying is, is that public-private divide today in the year 2025 is descriptively inaccurate for a whole lot of people like me. And I think like you, you're not, are you, are you religious, Greg?

I

have some religious tendencies. Okay. Do you go to church? It's really bad. Not,

not, not

regularly.

Yeah. So people, I mean, so yeah, I mean, I think we all have spiritual longings. But the idea is that for some people who are kind of thoroughly socialized in these liberal values, that,

that

line dividing the public and the private just feels, it's, it's,

it's

artificial. It's just not descriptively accurate because I don't conceive of myself very differently as a citizen than I do as a person. The same kind of value menu is orienting me in both cases. And that's the thing conservatives are saying. They're just saying that liberals are through and through. So I want to affirm that. And I think it's right. I just don't want the, so to use the nomenclature of political philosophy, which is really annoying, but it's, it's, it's accurate. I want to say that I'm a comprehensive liberal. And I think for a lot of people, liberalism goes down all the way down from, from their, from their tip to their tail.

But I am not, to use the technical term, a perfectionist liberal, which is, I don't want the state to enact policies that would favor, let's say, or punish, that would favor autonomy or punish a certain kind of traditional ways of life. I don't want that either. So I'm a comprehensive liberal who's not a perfectionist liberal. And I'm just trying to talk about people who, like me, have been socialized through and through in this liberal business.

Well,

I mean, the critique, the critics of, of liberalism, I mean, they'll say that it's corrosive, right? You know, Pascal, for instance, I mean, you reference him and talks about how, you know, in the absence of strong commitments and faith, right? Everyone's just living a life of divertissement and, you know, in quietude. But I mean, is, is liberalism in some, some ways corrosive to even liberal virtues, right? I mean, how much discipline and work does it require to keep those,

you

know, keep those virtues in front of you and to keep those, those visions of the good life in front of you?

I

think,

the

great question. I think that what you're saying, so that you mentioned Pascal, who's a much more reputable source, but the, the guy making headlines in the last five years is Patrick Deneen with his book,

Why

Liberalism Failed, and

nutshell

version, for him, liberalism fails because liberalism has been so successful. And in particular, what liberalism does is it's basically like a mosquito or like a blood sucker. And it goes from different values sphere to different values sphere and attaches itself there, but then systematically strips out of its meanings and its conditions by valuing the autonomous free agent above all else. So you're going to get no fault divorce. You're going to get, you're going to get people who can opt out of religion. You're going to get at the, at the end of the line for him, trans stuff where people choose their sexuality and their gender.

And for him, one by one, this kind of idea of the free self is just sucking all the meaning dry of the different domains of human life, such that what's left then is just really nasty, hollow individuals who can basically be moved only by two sorts of motivations, either self-interest or violence. And that's the end of the line for him.

Okay.

I think that's a little harsh, but that, that, that's the claim right there. But I just,

I

just don't recognize my picture of liberalism in that description. What I do recognize much more directly is a liberal society, not failing to live up to its own ideals rather than those ideals being hollow. And in particular, if liberalism talks a big game and it certainly does about fairness and it systematically, uh, refuses to honor fairness in all these different domains. I always bring this example up, but it just blew my, it's,

it's

stuck in me, but Nancy Pelosi's stock portfolio over the last

two,

three years has gone up like 600%. I don't know what it is, but you cannot be the leader of the movement of fairness while undertaking insider training and all kinds of other self-dealing. If liberalism doesn't walk its own walk, it is particularly vulnerable to be rejected because people are going to say, it's just a deception. It's just lipstick on a pig, it's whatever. And so it's not that the ideals are hollow, it's that they're not lived up to, and then they seem hollow. And that's, I think, the predicament that liberalism finds itself in.

So I don't think liberalism is going to die today or tomorrow, but if it can, if, if its leaders and its elites continue to self-deal, I think it's going to be basically what I say at the end of the book, it's going to become the ancien regime of France and a system that kind of zombied along for maybe, I don't know, a hundred years that nobody believed in, but they just went on because of inertia. But at some point, there's going to be a kind of an end to that. So I'm worried that we are in the, I don't know how to use Ross Dowsett's term, the decadent phase of liberalism. And conservatives are right about one thing. Freedom has to mean self-governance. That's absolutely correct.

It can't just mean free choice. It has to mean self-governance. And that's the old idea of freedom, to get a handle on yourself. And if liberals don't recover that kind of discipline in their own way with,

with

alloyed with its own virtues, then I think the ideology is done for.

So

we

know that in

previous,

I don't know, worldviews, there were these institutions, right? Educational institutions,

religious

institutions that would kind of reinforce and impress upon people the, the different, you know, visions of life and virtues and so forth. And even in the French Revolution, right, when they got rid of the churches, they created these, you know, temples of reason,

right?

And then they would, you know, institute in the, the K through 12 education,

you

know, our ancestors, the Gauls and all that kind of stuff. I mean,

we

can't rely on Dave Chappelle to kind of,

you

know, educate our youth and instill these virtues. I mean, do, how, where, where would be the, the, the kind of vectors of transmission or the institutions of,

of

instruction or, or in reinforcement of these virtues? I mean, is that the role of,

say,

public schools, that the role of, of universities, right? Where,

where

do we

create

these institutions to reinforce these values?

Good.

I mean,

I

disagree with the premise. I think Dave Chappelle is like our last, our first and best line, not the guy itself, but that, that, that is what, that is how liberalism is shown to be secure. I think that, I mean, look, to go back to Tocqueville, Tocqueville is always very keen on looking at not ideologies, but at morays, at manners, at habits. And that's where he thought that kind of ideology really worked its magic. And if liberalism has conquered civil society, but like here, not just civil society, like

comedy,

that is a huge win. And so if it can continue to reproduce itself along those lines, then I think that is a rock solid foundation. So I think that liberalism is much less frail if it's education takes place in this kind of osmotic ways through all of these day-to-day things that we don't need to, that are just sort of, that are totally sub-rational rather than through dedicated training. But yeah, of course, I think that, and I think this, I mean, I don't know, but I think public schools do this pretty well already,

I

think they do in part, yeah, listen, I'm bouncing where, how specific to go.

I

think that what liberals need to do to reinvent moral education is to be, to really play up to their ideal of tolerance and to allow more different viewpoints and to be articulated without fear of sanctions. So for example, like in Australia, there's been this longstanding culture war in the public school system between the kinds of texts, like everywhere, the curriculum wars have happened. And my kid is now 17, and she's been doing English since she's a little girl. And in English, they assign them two books. There's only two kinds of books you get year in, year out in English in Australia. You either get William Shakespeare plays, okay,

or

you get radical feminist, lesbian, First Nations sort of texts that are hyper-progressive. And that's sort of like,

Scott

Fitzgerald, nuh-uh, Steinbeck, nope, Virginia Woolf, nope. You have these two polls. This is the menu. And I think that's just crazy. I think that is such a weird

- I guess in

Australia, it'd

be

like Thomas Keneally, right? Or something.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, right. And it's just such a weird resolution to the culture wars. It's like one for them, one for me. And I think if liberals don't loosen up and allow kind of like a broadening of the canon and stuff like that, I think that it's just going to be looked at

-

education is going to be looked at as indoctrination rather than

education

or socialization in the right way. And so that's what I think liberalism just needs. Liberals need to frickin' take it down a notch. And I know their opponents are not taking it down a notch, and I know that. But I just don't think that without the impulse towards generosity, both in terms of social provision, taxes and stuff, but also hermeneutic generosity, I think liberals are just going to look like little scolds that are deeply unattractive. So I think that that kind of ethos needs to work its way into public institutions.

Well,

Alex, thanks for joining me. The

latest book is called

Liberalism as a Way of Life, and I definitely look forward to this next book.

Wait for it in 2030. It's going to be called Soul Crafters, I think. So we'll see. Okay.

Well,

maybe we'll have a conversation about that. I'd love that. Talk soon.

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