Tyranny in Disguise | Dr. Yoram Hazony | EP 305

I mean take a look politically at you know what it what's happening in America, what's happening in other Democratic countries where the competing political parties, the competing tribes no longer honor one another. Right? All you need to do is to you know go back to the Reagan Mondale debates from the 80s and just look at those videos of the way they treat one another. The difference between you know what that kind of politics and the politics we have today, which consists you know of this constant drumbeat of insult, abuse, slander, dishonoring one another.

Look, it's just like a marriage; if you want a divorce, if you want a civil war, then just keep dishonoring the other person. Just keep focusing on everything that's wrong with them and you'll get your divorce; you'll get your Civil War. [Music]

Foreign [Music] Watching and listening on YouTube, I have today with me Dr. Yoram Hazoni. We're going to talk about his new book. He's written a number of books. We're going to talk about his new book, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery," and I'm very much looking forward to that. He's quite a scholar of conservative thought, political thought in general, and so I hope to learn a lot today while I have the opportunity to sift through his knowledge. Welcome, Yoram. It's good to see you.

Hello, Jordan, good to see you. So let's talk about your book. Why a rediscovery? I think most people at this point have figured out that we're undergoing some kind of cultural revolution. And I think this hit a high point two years ago in 2020 when people started getting fired from prestigious academic positions and media positions for holding regular liberal positions that people have had for decades.

And I wrote this book in order to try to make some order in this cultural revolution. These woke neo-Marxists are obviously not liberals, and it seems that the old liberalism doesn't have the fight and the firepower to be able to roll this back. And the question I think everybody needs to be asking is, you know, what kind of a force would be strong enough to stop it? Everybody talks about all the things that the left is doing wrong, and of course, that makes sense, but if we're thinking about opposition to it, the question is what kind of force is going to be strong enough to stop it? And I think to discuss that you have to go into conservatism.

How would you characterize what's happening on the left? Do you think? I mean, what's the nature of this cultural revolution? After World War II, I think both in America and across Europe, there was a kind of a consensus which—I mean all the major political parties, all the major cultural streams agreed on a kind of a liberal framework. You can call it an enlightened liberal framework. The basic idea is that what you need to know about politics is that human beings are by nature free and equal, that they take on moral obligations and political obligations on the basis of consent, and that was assumed to be sufficient in order to guide the political world.

So there were disagreements within liberalism: progressive liberalism and libertarianism and classical liberalism, but the basic framework held for 60 or 70 years. And now the—I think the most important thing to understand is that that liberalism, which you know in a lot of ways is very well intentioned, it's very, very noble, but it assumes that children, when they're being raised, they don't need any kind of traditional guidance. They don't need any kind of customary framework—guardrails.

What people call guardrails today, that are inherited and are consciously inculcated by parents, by churches, by schools—the assumption was, and I think for many, many parents still is, for two generations, the assumption was you tell your kids when they're growing up, "Look, whatever makes you feel good, whatever fulfills you, whatever it is that gives you meaning in life, that's what you should do, and the important thing is to be happy."

That sounds really nice, but as you know from your work and your studies, when you raise kids like that, a great many of them simply reach a kind of a dead end. They—whatever makes you feel good, well, they don't know what makes them feel good, and into that vacuum steps this woke neo-Marxist movement, which has answers. It gives people answers. And the surprise is that all of these mainstream liberals thought that if you just told kids, "Use your reason, think for yourselves, figure it out for yourselves, we trust you," that everybody would sort of come to something normal. But it turns out that that's not true.

When you tell all the young people for two generations, "Just think for yourselves, whatever looks good to you," it turns out that a great many of them are much more attracted to Marxism, and some of them even to Fascism, than to the mainstream liberalism. So that went on for two generations and now it's collapsed. I mean, basically 2020 was the year that the hegemony of the mainstream liberal ideas came to an end. There's still obviously lots of liberals running around, but in terms of the assumptions of the society right now, we actually have this woke neo-Marxism seeking to impose a new hegemony, and they're frighteningly close.

So it seems to me that you could make a case that classic liberalism worked because it was running on stored cultural capital, in some sense. That when the institutions that you're speaking about were more or less intact—so that would be Church, let's say, family—stable, monogamous, heterosexual marriages, and civic society, membership in clubs and that sort of thing. When all that was functioning, then in principle it was possible to treat people like they were autonomous, reasonable individuals because you had already laid the groundwork for something approximating a shared ethos.

But as that evaporated because people became more atomistic and hedonistic, then the shared ethos started to deteriorate and other idea sets became more attractive. Does that seem approximately correct?

I think that's exactly right. I would just add the loyalty to a national framework to a nation. So basically, if people are raised with loyalties to family, to a congregation, to a community, and then to a larger nation, then they know something about where they are. You know, that they can criticize, they can argue about, you know, how are we going to organize these loyalties? How can we improve things? But exactly as you said, if they don't grow up with those things, if those things are no longer clear because the cultural capital, as you say, is running down, the inheritance is basically being spent.

And once that inheritance is gone, then there are no limits. There are no frameworks, there's no common sense. I mean, what we call common sense is always the common sense of a particular nation or community or family, and once those things have broken down, there is no common sense, and people actually are willing to consider just about any crazy evil thing.

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So, I've been thinking a fair bit about the potential contribution of, I would say, clinical and counseling psychologists to this matter because there was a tremendous emphasis probably throughout the whole hundred-year course of the development say, of clinical psychology and clinical psychiatry on sanity as something in some real sense internal to the individual.

And so, you can see that, I would say, in its most stellar exemplars in the humanist psychologists of the 1960s. It's kind of figures that would occur in the 1960s that you were saying and capable of psychological well-being if you were well-constituted psychologically. But I've been thinking more recently that that's not a very useful model of sanity because it downplays the social embeddedness that characterizes people who are psychologically stable and therefore capable of happiness.

If you're stable, you're not anxious; you're not completely ridden with negative emotion. That doesn't necessarily mean you're happy, but if you do a careful analysis of what people mean when they say they want to be happy, what they really mean is they don't want to be miserable. Happiness is like the icing on the cake, but they definitely don't want to be anxious and frustrated and disappointed and in pain and confused and aimless, and all of that.

And so, it isn't obvious to me at all that it's possible to be psychologically intact in isolation. I think the most potent proof of that is even that even hardened criminals or anti-social types find being in solitary confinement almost intolerable. And so, if that's the case, you might ask, "Well, what exactly is social being doing for us?"

And if you're married, you have someone who's somewhat different than you to keep you in check constantly. Married couples are throwing back and forth information to each other about how to regulate the relationship and themselves nonstop. That's pretty much all of what communication consists of. And then if you have children or your parents or your siblings, let's say that immediate family, the same thing is happening, is that people are monitoring one another and providing each other with feedback about how to behave and how to think.

And then that's nested inside a civic community, and that's nested inside a state or a province, and then that's nested inside a country. And sanity seems to be something like, and maybe all of that's nested inside some religious presuppositions, the harmony between all those levels that seems to be essentially what constitutes sanity rather than something that's formally internal, like maybe your internal structure reflects that external harmony and that's like in a fractal manner, in a holographic manner, and that's what sanity constitutes.

And I would say that the liberal emphasis on say self-actualization and as the on the atomist itself as the center of the world has deluded itself into thinking that any of that's possible without an intact hierarchy of social structures surrounding the individual. Now, it seems to me to be the weakness, the fundamental weakness on the psychological front of even of classic liberalism.

I think that's exactly right, and I think that you were already speaking pretty much to this in your earlier work when you were telling, you were telling young people, "Look, you need to find your place within some kind of social hierarchy." And this is actually the extension of your earlier argument. I mean, both of us are drawing on Durkheim's insight that, look, if you want to know what is it that leads people to suicide, then it's anomie. What is that? Right?

That's the lack of a directional sense, a set of guardrails which comes from those nests and hierarchies that you are describing. If the individual—now, none of this means that an individual can't, you know, if he or she is unhappy, can't look for a different place in a different hierarchy. But the point is that, wherever they end up, if they're going to be motivated and directed and feel like their life has meaning and purpose and direction, it's going to be because they have found their place in a hierarchy that works for them.

And liberalism simply doesn't touch on this central human need. By the way, the Marxists are pretty much aware of this. They do think in terms of hierarchies; of course, their goal is to destroy them, but at least they can see them, whereas the Liberals are always thinking kind of in terms of flatland that, you know, by the time you're 18 or 20, then you're equal to everybody.

The assumption is that everything's level, but the truth is nothing is level. There are always hierarchies, and people feel good when they found the right place in such a hierarchy. By the way, that means that they have something to aspire to, to move up in the hierarchy. They know they have some idea of where they're going in life.

Yeah, well, you talked about, you just spoke of guardrails and direction, and now it seems about right to me. I mean, when I worked as a clinician and I was trying to understand what made for a good life, let's say when I was dealing with people who were depressed because, well, often they didn't have the necessary guardrails or direction and that was part of the reason they were depressed. I mean, depression is complicated; there are many reasons for it, but it does seem to me to be an incontrovertible truth, and I think that my audiences have responded very well to this proposition that almost all the meaning that you find in your life that isn't merely a consequence of a narrow end and short-sighted hedonism is found in the service you provide to the people who are in your social networks.

And that would be first of all, obviously your intimate relationship and your family, and then in the hierarchical, nested structures that are outside of that if you're fortunate enough to have them. And the guardrails are that there are codes of behavior that are necessary to abide by that constitute adhering to the principles of all those social relationships.

And the direction is whatever the joint venture that you're embarking on with others is directed towards, and I don't see that you do have any structure or purpose in your life in the absence of those things. I mean, if you strip someone of their, let's say, embeddedness within an educational institution, or within a job or a career, you strip them of their family, you strip them of all their civic responsibility.

I suppose perhaps they have their creative endeavors if they happen to be creative people, but even then they have to be interacting with other people to communicate about their creative endeavors or to monetize them. And without that, there’s really nothing. And we also know too that psychostatistical studies of language usage have indicated pretty clearly that thoughts about yourself are indistinguishable from negative emotion; that's how heavily tinged they are with negative emotion.

As soon as you become self-conscious, as soon as you start thinking about yourself, you're instantly anxious and miserable. They're the same thing. And so, okay, and so then on the Marxist front, because we talked about the collapse of liberalism—the fact that liberalism in some sense is an empty concept in the absence of these underlying practices and customs, let's say, where that they're actually embodied, that you actually act out—there’s something interesting: the Marxists, I think, have an advantage over the liberals, and maybe this is one of the things that accounts for the attractiveness of Marxism to young people, is that the Marxists at least have an attitude towards guardrails which is destroy them, but they also provide direction, right?

And the direction is essentially a revolutionary direction. It combines a critique of hierarchy, concentrating on the idea that hierarchies are intrinsically pathological, but then it also provides direction and group membership, and so that's pretty compelling in the absence of any structure, say—which at least in principle is what would be offered by the classic liberals, right?

But notice that, you know, I mean this issue goes all the way back to Marx: notice that the theory is that hierarchical structures and competition between groups always means that there's going to be oppression, and the goal is always to overthrow the dominant hierarchy. But notice that Marx doesn't answer the question of what's going to come after the revolution. It's incredibly vague about it, and this continues to this day which is that the unspoken truth here is that these woke neo-Marxists are masters at creating tight hierarchical structures that people can fit into.

That's the reason that people get sucked into this woke thing: they sound so much like robots and they're constantly repeating precisely the new thing that they're supposed to be saying. The reason for this is because their own hierarchical structures that they're creating are of the, you know, the tightest and most disciplined kinds.

So I mean there is, I think you can, I think a lot of people sense this, but there's a terrible hypocrisy in the whole woke thing in that the claim is that they're bringing social justice by overthrowing existing social structures, existing hierarchies, but they themselves are imposing precisely the same thing that they're... well worse. No, no, they're opposing something worse. I mean, this is something that's very, very striking historically.

So let's take the Marxist position apart. The first oversimplification is that there is a hierarchy instead of a multiplicity of hierarchies because in any reasonably functioning modern society there are innumerable hierarchies. And part of the reason that we can live without being too crushed by hierarchical difference is because, as you said before, you can move from one hierarchy to another, and that might be something as straightforward as changing jobs. Not that that's particularly easy, but it's not impossible.

And so, if you can't find a place in one economic structure, microstructure, then you can find a place in another. And I think one of the real antidotes to rigid, uniform, monolithic hierarchy is a provision of multiple games, and I think modern societies do a very good job of that. And then, and so the idea that there's one hierarchy, although you could rank-order people by wealth, I suppose. But the idea that there's one hierarchy is preposterous except under Marxist rule, in which case everything does tend to collapse into a single hierarchy that's absolutely monolithic and totalitarian beyond belief, and that just happened time and time again.

So you have to presume that there's some fundamental flaw in the Marxist formulation, and maybe the flaw is something like, look, you have to accept a moderate amount of hierarchical structuring, and you have to hope it doesn't get too lopsided so that only a few have everything and everyone else has nothing. That's a pathological situation, although it's not only a consequence of, say, Western economic structures; that is a human universal—that proclivity or natural universal, that power law distribution problem.

Now, if you criticize hierarchy to such a degree that you want to destroy all of it, then all that you do is instantly produce something approximating the most tyrannical hierarchy you can possibly imagine because you destroy the differentiated structures. Exactly what happened in the Soviet Union and China: you destroy all the intermediary, distributed, multiplicity structures and you replace that with tyrant and peasants.

That's true, but you know let me push back just a little bit because I think that a healthy society is one that certainly has a competition of multiple tribes, maybe different religions. I think these things are probably more important to people. People's identities are more tied to regional, ethnic, religious groups than they are to what job they have.

And so, what I meant about, you know, when I said that people can change is that, look, it's always possible if you don't like your nation to move to a different nation. If you don't like your religion, you can convert to a different religion. But the bottom line is that big structures, macro structures like the hierarchy that constitutes a nation, those are things that are missing, I think, from the liberal picture.

Of course, a healthy nation—and I would insert the word conservative—is that the difference between a Marxist view of the hierarchical power structures within a nation and a conservative view is that a conservative says, "Look, there's always going to be groups that are more powerful than others. There's no such thing as no hierarchy; there's always going to be a competition among groups, and some groups are going to be more powerful than others."

You know, like the Anglo-Saxon Protestant grouping within the United States for most of its history. And so there are going to be groups that are more powerful than others, but that doesn't mean that the most powerful groups have to oppress the other groups. In a conservative society, there is an ongoing negotiation among the different groups.

You know, there's a jostling and a competition just like in family life. You know, there's a constant bickering and jostling among children for, you know, for position, and even between a husband and wife. The reason husbands and wives bicker is because there’s a constant trying to find a place where you feel like you’re being properly honored, you feel like you’re being properly respected.

And in a traditional conservative society, what's going on is that you inherit certain ways of structuring things and then you can adjust them. You can try to correct them, but the goal of the conservative society is to have a distribution of honors, a distribution of what people get and where they get placed within the society.

And that distribution, the conservative claim, doesn’t always have to be evil like the Marxists say; it doesn’t always have to be oppressive. You can have a situation in which the more powerful groups understand that they have a responsibility to the weaker groups, and you can argue about exactly what that is.

But a mutually beneficial conservative society is one in which the different groups get things out of the collaboration, out of the mutual loyalty. It's not just the strongest wins and the weak get crushed, but everybody gets things, and I think that a lot of what conservatives are reacting to when they see what the Marxists are trying to build is that you're trying to grab everything for your group, whereas a traditional conservative society says, "Know the just balance of honors among the different groups; that's what makes people feel good; that's what makes people loyal to the system."

Otherwise, there is no loyalty to the system; there's just depression.

Yeah, well, the Marxists also have the advantage that I would say of two. They have a two-fold advantage. First of all, they can appeal to envy, and they're unbelievably good at that. I mean, I think the fundamental motivating force of Marxism is envy, and now it'd be a close race between that and the desire for untrammeled power, but we can certainly start with envy.

And it's very easy for people to be envious of anyone who has more of anything than they do, and one of the things that I've already been struck by on the left is the constant presupposition that if someone has more than me, they got it because they're using power in an oppressive way. It's always the cutoff between the oppressor and the oppressed, is whatever status I happen to have as a left-wing intellectual, because I got what I have honestly and through hard work and diligence.

But anybody who has more than me obviously took it from the people who are lesser than them. And so that's definitely an appeal to envy, but there's something underneath that I think that is more powerful, which is, and this is a criticism that conservatism is susceptible to, is that hierarchies do tend to degenerate in the direction of arbitrary power when they degenerate.

And every hierarchy is degenerate to some degree, right, because there's a bit of corruption in everything. And so then the Marxists can point to the corruption, especially if they're appealing to young people, and they can say, "Well, look at that person in that position of authority and the awful things they did that were oppressive and improper."

Obviously, everyone who holds any position of authority is corrupt in some fundamental way, and then obviously the whole system is corrupt. And that's given that that critique of corruption has warrant in some sense, it's not easy to differentiate and to say, "No, look, guys, you got to think this through," is that human institutions aren't perfect, and you have to be awake all the time to make sure they don't degenerate entirely.

But that doesn't mean that they're fundamentally corrupt. You know, which is the claim, for example, that America was predicated on a positive view towards slavery. It's like, well, obviously when America was founded, slavery was thriving, and so there was this pro-slavery ethos that was part and parcel of the American project at that point, but the fundamental drive of the system and all of the traditions upon which it was founded was that all men are created equal, men and women are created equal before God, and that was the principle that eventually won out.

And it's hard to teach young people, I think, to separate the wheat from the chaff when it's so easy just to throw everything out, especially if there's no immediate consequences, especially when you're lauded for doing so, and all your idiot teachers are telling you that's the right thing to do.

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Right, agreed. Look, the reason that I bothered with the historical chapters in the conservatism book is because I think there's a widespread misunderstanding about conservative thinkers—about Fortescue and Selden and Burke, and for that matter, you know, Washington and Adams and Hamilton. There's kind of this assumption that if you're conservative, then you just think that whatever exists is fine and it doesn't need to be repaired.

When you actually read these sophisticated conservative thinkers, what you find is that none of them think this. The actual view is something much more like what you were describing—that there's corruption in everything, but more than that, every good system decays; every good system runs down. This is an integral part; you just see this over and over again in Anglo-American conservative thinkers: every system runs down, every system decays, and that's just the way human societies are.

So the principal job of the conservative is not to hold on tight to whatever exists; it's to look for restoration. It's to identify what has become corrupt and decayed and to look for a model, either earlier in history or sometimes even just looking at the neighbors—the way that, you know, the Poles during the Polish Revolution looked to the British Constitution for a model.

And so, the word restoration, it's a lot like the word repentance. Restoration is kind of a national political repentance where you look at something and you say, "Look, this is decayed; we've gone off course," or "There is an inherited evil that can no longer be tolerated, and we have to fix it." The conservative's job is to find a way to make that repair while strengthening the entire system as a whole.

So, I mean, the example of slavery I think is on a lot of people's minds, and I think for good reasons. But it's important to notice that Britain succeeded in eliminating slavery on the basis of the common law in the 1770s without a revolution, without a civil war. And what happened is that Lord Mansfield looked at the integration of the mercantile law over the previous century into the common law.

In a lot of ways, that was very good; that made it possible for, you know, for Britain, in a lot of ways, to become a modern economy. But the idea that human beings could be bought and sold as slaves was imported into the common law by the mercantile law less than, you know, at the end of the 1600s. And at a certain point, the jurists—the judges in Britain looked at this and said, "We're corrupting ourselves; we're corrupting our tradition by allowing this institution of slavery to be brought into our country."

And they limited it on the basis of British tradition. The English tradition said English common law does not uphold slavery; a person who is enslaved in England is always enslaved unfairly. Now, the interesting thing is that the Americans—an important part of the Federalist Party's platform during the American Revolution was the bringing the English common law in as the law of the new national federal government. Jefferson opposed it; Madison opposed it. But the Federalist Party—the conservatives—they thought that they needed this; they needed this common law inheritance, and America in fact does still have that common law inheritance until this day.

Now, why is it that if the English could get rid of slavery, you know, without this abstract declaration that, you know, that all men are created equal, why is it that the Americans couldn't do it? And I think part of this is an optical illusion. I think that the Americans could have done it, but the strength of liberalism in America's founding and going forward comes from the fact that while Washington and his party were genuine conservatives, the American Constitution of 1787 is basically in many respects the restoration of the British constitution, and that's what Washington and his party stood for.

Jefferson and his party, Tom Paine—these really were Enlightenment liberal radicals, and Jefferson is famous for saying things like repeatedly that one generation is a foreign country to the preceding generations, meaning that each generation owes nothing to the past; each generation receives nothing from the past that can't be simply overthrown and revised.

And I think this brings us to the heart of what we're facing today. You know, I just read a very interesting scientific paper that's oddly relevant to this. It's really revolutionary, I think. It was published in "Nature" and it showed—no, there's this idea that's common currency among evolutionary biologists that mutations are entirely random, and this turns out not to exactly be true.

And so there's a hierarchy of genetic stability, and the older the genes are that code for the properties of a given organism, the more likely those genes are to be restored to their original condition if a mutation does occur by DNA repair mechanisms. Right? So the reason I think this is so relevant is you imagine that our presumptions that make up our society and stabilize them have a hierarchical structure, and some of them are old and deep.

One of the oldest and deepest would be the idea that men and women alike are made in the image of God. And so that's a very fundamental proposition. And then you might say that, well, the more fundamental a proposition is, the more other propositions depend on it, and then you might say it's those most fundamental propositions that have to be transmitted from generation to generation.

The more peripheral propositions, which are newer, and they would be akin to newer genetic variations in a given organism, the more they're free to vary because not so many things depend on them, and they should vary because their fundamental nature is still up in the air in some sense. But there's a hierarchy of presumptions, and the deeper the presumption, the less it should be amenable to change.

I think that can be worked out on the conservative side. I think so. I mean, I think you're describing exactly what I'm describing just from another field. Yeah, by the way, there's this really fascinating passage in Hayek, in Friedrich Hayek, who, you know, the great economist and liberal thinker from the middle of the last century.

He argues that there's an emergence of the picture of science as an evolutionary process by trial and error, which is the transference of the old common law idea of the law as evolutionary. The Constitution as evolutionary—the transfer of that was completely natural for English and Scottish thinkers who knew that the law was supposedly evolved. This way to begin thinking in the same way about science as trial and error—and you know, that of course could easily have inspired Darwin as well.

Well then, we could think about English common law the same way. So, English common law, and tell me if I've got any of the details of this wrong, but basically under the English system, the presumption is human beings have all the rights there are intrinsically. And then when people come together and have a dispute, the dispute has to be adjudicated, and once it's adjudicated, that becomes a common law principle.

And then those principles are supposed to be bound by precedent. And so then the presuppositions in English common law that have the most precedent are the most fundamental. And so it's an incrementally transforming structure, but it's also hierarchically structured, and it differs from, let's say, the French Civil Code.

It certainly differs from systems of thought like Marxism, which are all rational creations and imposed from the top down. And so English common law did have this bottom-up nature, which gives it, well, I would say in some sense a preeminent status among legal codes around the world. It's a remarkable body of work.

Yep, it is. Let me just add, I think your description is apt. Let me just add a couple of points to that. One of them is that the common law is a development, coming down the centuries of biblical law. If you go back to the earliest formulations of legal codes in Britain, a lot of it is taken literally, explicitly, directly from law codes in Hebrew scripture.

And a second point that's important is that what you're describing, the jostling among individuals which then create cases that set precedence, that also happens at the constitutional level—not only at the level of individuals competing with one another for rights, but also if you look at Magna Carta and the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights, and then after that the American Bill of Rights.

If you look at that as an ongoing jostling between the executive, which you know originally the king, and the legislature, which was originally the nobles, what you see is exactly this kind of trial and error to find the right balance, which literally goes on for a thousand years. And the Constitution that the Americans in 1787 took upon themselves, if you compare it to the earlier English Petition of Right and Bill of Rights, you'll see that virtually all of the rights that appear in the American Constitution are actually things that were already worked out right over centuries in this trial and error effort to find the right balance in England.

So this means Jefferson is wrong because he didn't, in the manner that you described, that each successive generation is a foreign territory compared to the previous because he's not taking into account the hierarchical nature—hierarchical nature of fundamental social presuppositions.

And so he might be correct on the fringe, in the periphery, but at the core, he's wrong. And the case that you're making is that while you have the American constitutional axioms, let's say, including expanded to include the Bill of Rights, but that's grounded in English common law, that's a consequence of centuries of trial and error.

It's not, you know, it's trial and error in a very particular way because imagine that you and I have a dispute, and we—300 years ago—and we go in front of an English court. The court has to rule in relationship to the dispute in a manner that's commensurate with all previous rulings of that broad type. And then the rulings have to be consistent enough with grounded human intuitions of what constitutes a just settlement so that when the settlement is handed down, the parties involved actually find it acceptable enough not to degenerate into murder.

That's super well said; I think that's exactly the point. And if you now want to ask, let's say that we go with Jefferson for a moment and we say, actually, you know, using reason, we can just come up with what the right answer is in the 1700s. We don't need the, you know, 800 years of trial and error before that. If you go with Jefferson, where you end up is with a view that says, "Look, I exercised reason; I don't need tradition because I can exercise reason."

I don't need an inheritance of ideas and principles and precedence, because I can just use reason. If you go in that direction, what happens is that even though your intentions are liberal and not Marxist—your intention is just to allow people to be free of previous generations—that's all—to think for themselves. If you do that, then what you will come up with is something that, it runs down; it actively and aggressively runs down the inheritance of common sense and precedence and intuitions that people have gotten.

Well, what is this logic, this reasoning that the liberals are stressing precisely? I mean, if you investigate that from a psychological perspective, I mean you could think about it as the application of pure logic, but that's foolish because people just aren't that logical, and very few people are trained to think logically in any case.

And then with regards to reason itself, unless you're a radical empiricist and you believe that the pathway forward and the guardrails are self-evident as a consequence of exposure to the facts, which is naive beyond belief, then your reason is an empty concept.

Because I mean, if we're reasoning with language, let's say—which would be the most reasonable way of reasoning because you can communicate with other people that way—every single bloody word you use was crafted by other people. Every phrase has a history; every sentence is a fragment of a philosophical tradition, and then every profound idea is very unlikely to be original.

And so the very tools of reason itself are established not only by tradition but by an unbelievably profound hierarchical consensus, because you and I couldn't even speak unless almost everything we said to each other was comprehensible because of our shared set of assumptions. Again, we can play on the fringes, right?

I mean, as long as we're 99% in agreement, we can talk about the 1% where we differ, and we can nibble away at the edges. But if we were radically different in our orientation and our individual reason, we couldn't even talk.

Right, by the way, this point is already made explicitly by Selden in the early 1600s, that every single word that we use is something that was crafted by previous generations, and that's the basis for our capacity to be able to live together.

Now, to go back to your question that you started with: if you have a society that has a common inheritance, okay? And I'm not saying that everybody has to agree on everything, but there is exactly as you said, there's an inheritance in which 90 or 95 or 98% of what we think has been inherited, and we agree on it; and then we argue, you know, as you say on the fringes.

That is a very good description of a successful cohesive polity in which there are competing parties, in which you can have Democratic votes, you can have transitions from the rule of one party to another. But all of this depends on a mutual recognition among the different parties that they're part of one inheritance and that they're willing to honor one another because even though they disagree, they may hate each other.

But they understand that they're part of one structure, as you said, one inherited logic. And what we've done today is to say no; we don't need any of that. We don't need any of that. It doesn't matter how much of it you uproot and throw out because we trust the new human reason that the revolutionaries are going to come up with to be something better than what we inherited.

Well, I think you really see this—I really believe that you see the most egregious example of this in our willingness to redefine the meaning of man and woman. Because my psychological studies have led me to the presumption that there might not be any more fundamental perceptual category than man and woman, than male and female.

And there's the direct perception of that on the biological front, which is a precondition for successful reproduction, we should point out, in case it has to be pointed out. And then there are symbolic echoes of masculine and feminine that pervade almost everything we conceptualize. So you see that echoed for example in the Taoist conception of reality as yin and yang, which is a masculine and feminine dichotomy.

There's this bipolarity of cognition that has as its fundamental basis the distinction between the sexes. And you know, when Canada moved in 2016 to force the reconstruction of pronouns onto unsuspecting populations in the name of compassionate narcissism, I thought, well, because this is such a fundamental cognitive category, if we introduce entropy into it, if we introduce disorder, then we're going to destabilize those who are already quite disordered.

And the most likely to be destabilized in that manner would be adolescent girls because there's historical precedent for that. And so this idiot insistence that all conceptions are up for grabs belies the fact that there's a hierarchy of perception in relationship to the different degrees and depths of different perceptions.

And it replaces hierarchical order not with the freedom that's promised by the Marxists and the liberals, but with absolute bloody intolerable chaos. And when we—I do believe that we're in a Tower of Babel situation in a real sense—is that we become intellectually pretentious beyond belief.

We're building scaffolds that are in principle designed to replace God, and now we've reached an impasse where we no longer speak the same language; we can't even decide what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman. And if you can't agree on that, then I don't think there's anything that you can agree on.

And so if you ask, you know, what does the individual man or woman today facing this permanent cultural revolution, which is uprooting the most fundamental things that have been inherited, the most fundamental concepts that we use to understand reality are being smashed. So where do they turn?

And here, I understand that this could be controversial for all sorts of people, but I think the bottom line is that if you see the revolution coming, you understand it's going to destroy everything, you understand there's going to literally be nothing that is not uprooted. If you see this, what's the force that could stop it?

Well, the force that could stop it is fundamentally young men and young women, young families, older men and older women finding going to that institution which continues to hand down traditions intact, which is in our society almost only at this point, the church, the Orthodox churches—I'm talking theologically traditionally, whether they're right, whether they're Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox doctrinally, or the synagogue, or some other traditional community in which a life of conservation and transmission is actually taking place.

It begins with young people saying, "Look, I need to be part of," I need to be part of a community. But the next step is to say it can’t just be, you know, any arbitrary community. It can't be, you know, like a bunch of 18-year-olds in a dorm room. We're going to set up a community because they're not engaged in conserving and transmitting anything.

All right? And so the only way that you can plug yourself into this chain of conservation and transmission which has been lost is to find older people, to find older people who've seen it done. I mean, you're not—you’re not going to be able to keep a marriage together if you don't have actual living models of older people who have succeeded in keeping a marriage together so you can see what it's like so that you can pick it up from them.

And the same thing is true for everything else. If you want to save yourself, right? I mean, I think this is true nationally also, but at the moment, if you as an individual— you want to save yourself, now I'm not talking about the Christian question about like your eternal salvation; I'm Jewish. I'm talking about you want to save yourself in this life, in this world, all right?

And then what you're going to have to do is, I know this is difficult, but you're going to have to go to older people who have a functioning congregation and say, "Look, I'm coming here to learn. I'm not coming here to judge you. I'm not coming here to preach the things I believe. I'm coming here to learn how a life of conservation and transmission used to work. I want to learn that to see whether I can be part of it."

Right? That is a very big change. The best way to fight the oncoming revolution is, as you say, the oncoming chaos is with order. But you can't create that order yourself; you have to be a part of some existing order, and luckily it still exists.

So in relationship to your comments earlier about the conservatives and thinkers who I think we should also go through, by the way—making the case that things did fall apart of their own accord—there’s a thinker, Virginia Eliade, a great historian of religions, who tracked the commonalities among flood myths across very many different cultures and came up with a formula for why God, or the gods, would become angry enough to destroy everything in a chaotic catastrophe.

And he said, well, the first issue is that things deteriorate of their own accord, and that's just an observation about the effect of entropy, I would say, is that things fall apart. If you just leave them sit, they'll fall apart by themselves because things decay. And then Eliade also said that a very common theme was that that process of entropic decay was sped along by the sins of men.

And what he meant by that was the proclivity for people to be willfully blind. Imagine that there are small things going wrong in your marriage; your wife becomes less attentive, or you do. Your attention starts to be attracted by other people and you just let it slide. You know that something's up, but you don't do the attentive work necessary to do the repairs when the time is appropriate.

Well, then you speed the process of decay. And so one of the implications of this was that the central organizing principle of the psyche, and this might be the principle to which religious systems to some degree put forward as the highest possible good, is something like constant attention to that process of decay and communication about it to stem off the ravages of time.

You could think about that as an organizing principle of the psyche—a necessary organizing principle of the psyche. So the god Horus, for example, in the ancient Egyptian pantheon, was the All-Seeing Eye that paid attention and who could see corruption when it emerged.

And the Mesopotamian god Marduk had eyes all the way around his head and spoke magic words, and so that seemed to be something like a core organizing principle. And you talked about these cardinal canonical conservative thinkers and their willingness to make the presumption that things did go wrong and needed to be fixed.

Maybe we could go through them a little bit if you don't mind? Fortescue, Hooker, Selden, and Burke... And well, you know, before we launch into them, let me just say something about the biblical flood myth and its relationship to the conversation that we're having.

Eliade's mapping is helpful, but there is a big difference between the Mesopotamian flood myth where you have basically the gods get angry because human beings are annoying. Human beings are bothering them; they're troublesome. Right? When that story in that story in the hands of Moses and the Israelite prophets, that story becomes one of God's intention of creating an Edenic world—a perfect world where human beings and animals are all eating grasses and vegetables, and no creature hurts another creature.

And what you see in the biblical account is that the world is in—it has this intrinsic—the chaotic waters that God's wind or God's spirit is fashioning the world out of those chaotic waters never, you know, they never fully go away. They're always constantly about to happen. And that affects human nature in that human beings are incapable of living in this perfect world that, you know, that God imagined in Eden.

The flood story actually has almost the, you know, the opposite meaning because what God discovers from the flood is that he thought that he was going to give Noah and Noah's children a, you know, a chance to create the perfect world. The moment that flood is over, Noah starts getting drunk. There’s sexual impropriety; there are all sorts of awful things that immediately happen to Noah, who was supposed to be the best of, you know, the best of human beings.

And that creates a religious framework in which God says, “Alright, I can't perfect the world. I have no way of perfecting the world. It's not within my power to do that,” which is not exactly the way that it's often presented, but that's what it says in the text; that God doesn't have the power to create a perfect world, and he needs human beings to take up a role as his, you know, his vice-regents, as his associates and assistants in trying to fix the world.

And that structure, notice that it's a hierarchical structure. It's not a metaphor of an all-powerful God that we should just obey; it's a different metaphor. It's a metaphor of a God who actually needs our help. He could destroy the whole world, but he can't fix it without our help. That's the fundamental structure that makes Judaism and later Christianity different from the preceding religions is that there is a role for man within the hierarchy of the cosmos. God needs us.

And the covenant is about us stepping forward and shouldering that responsibility.

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So, the other thing that I've seen, another thing that I've seen on my tours is that the call to responsibility has become somewhat of a clarion call. And you can see the Marxists and the environmental types as well capitalizing on the attractiveness of responsibility and destiny to some degree by offering these utopian schemes as a sort of messianic alternative.

The enemy of liberalism, let's put it that way, the conservative approach seems to me to be something more like what would you call it? The pursuit of responsibility in humble micro-domains, at least to begin with, right? So, to say it yourself, right?

You should try to set your family relationships right, and maybe to establish a family. And having established a certain degree of harmony and functionality in your family, then maybe you could extend out a few tentacles into the surrounding civic community, and you could build from the bottom up. You could build a stable life and a stable social life and then a stable political life, let’s say, from the bottom up as a—

One of the things that I've been heartened by is the fact that if you lay out those arguments to young people, you say, “Look, you need to be embedded in a social surround, and you need to take responsibility for it.” The reason you need that is because that's where you're going to find the purpose of your life.

That sounds to me like an echo of this biblical insistence that there actually is something for human beings to do, as long as they don't bite off more than they can chew and get all prideful about it. You said maybe, "Maybe start a family."

So, you know, this might be controversial with some of your viewers, but in the Jewish version of the biblical tradition—in the Jewish tradition—the starting a family is an obligation that everyone who can do it must do it.

Right? And if you think about that in terms of the responsibility issue, young Orthodox Jews are raised to believe that if you don't take on this responsibility—if you don't make it your business to find a wife and to have children and to do what it takes to create a stable structure—you’re going to be for your entire life unable to understand what it actually takes in order to create human order.

I mean, the various people have noticed that many of the European leaders are unmarried and don't have children. And the situation in which young people don't learn how to govern, they don't learn how to be a king and a queen in their own homes; they don't know how to govern a family.

They don't know how to hold it together, despite the incredible pain and difficulties that that often takes place between men and women. And children are, you know, they're sometimes fun, but they're sometimes incredibly difficult, incredibly painful to raise.

This whole concept that every young man and woman who can do it must take the responsibility to bring life into the world, to create the world in you, to try to build up on the basis of what's been inherited, to try to make it better than what it was in previous generations—that view, I think in many ways, that's like the bedrock Jewish and Christian view, which says, you know, we’re not slaves to the gods; we're partners in creating this world.

But that means we have an obligation to do the act of creation, and the most fundamental act of creation is creating a family. Once you've done that, then you were hinting to this—that then I think you can also learn to create congregations to uphold nations.

All of that flows from the first step of very young people taking responsibility for creating, you know, basically their own little world in a family. While there is no more profound responsibility than that, and so it's an initiation into profound responsibility.

I mean, one of the things that happens to a parent that, and I think it's very difficult for this to happen if you don't become a parent, is that once you're a parent, there is definitely someone in your life who's more important than you are, right?

So your orientation to the world, well, I would say it matures properly, and it matures under the force of moral obligation fundamentally. You have this person now who's, for better or worse, almost entirely dependent on your not-so-tender mercies, you and your wife, and whose subject to all of your trials and tribulations and inadequacies.

And if you have any sense at all, that wakes you up as much as anything will. And without that, I think it's very difficult to shed the constraints of hedonistic adolescence.

That's not good for people, if you just go—so go ahead.

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly true. I think, as you said, you can't—in a lot of ways you can't actually mature until you've created and are the government of a household. The alternative that sort of mainstream liberalism gives us is this view that, you know, when you reach 18 or 20 years old, you're a rational individual.

And you know, now you can do whatever you want. And usually doing whatever you want, we can see in young people that doing whatever you want means that they get too scared to get married; they get too scared to have children.

The, even I'm talking about something that even affects—affects even Orthodox religious communities. You can see it very, very clearly that they look at these responsibilities as a kind of with terrible fear—something they need to spend another five years and another ten years and another five years to get more degrees, right?

You know, they need to keep preparing in order to be ready to do it. And that’s the opposite of the traditional view that says, "Take the responsibility and then live up to it; you'll grow by living up to it; you'll become a complete person."

As the rabbis say, "You complete yourself by entering and taking the responsibility of marriage and children." And the alternative is adolescence; that's extended forever.

What you think that when you're 35 years old and now you're gonna start looking to get married, it's going to be easier to get married? You’ll actually be more capable of it than you were when you were 23?

I don’t think that’s true at all. I think what you learn during those extra 10 or 15 years of adolescence is to just care for yourself instead of learning how to create something, to learn something.

That idea also highlights in some sense both the practical necessity and the inevitability of faith or the lack thereof. I mean, many things in your life you have to throw yourself into without first knowing that you can do it.

And I don't mean to do that in an impulsive and foolish manner, like heedless of all risks. I mean that when you get married, you don't know if it's going to work. And in some sense, that's even a foolish question because the issue is that when you decide to get married, it's the first and foremost decision among 50,000 decisions that are going to determine whether or not you can stay married.

And you can boil that down to a question like, "Did I marry the right person?" And the answer to that is always no, and they didn't marry the right person either, and because neither of you are the right person in your current unbelievably flawed condition.

And so, but you throw yourself into it, thinking that—having faith that you can manage it. And also having faith that the alternative—that no matter how dismal the reality, the alternative is likely to be far worse.

And I would say the same thing is true on the child-rearing front, which is as you pointed out, it's difficult. It isn't obvious that you're prepared or that extra preparation is really going to help you.

But what's the alternative? To the difficulty. One of the things I love about the story of Abraham—one of the things I think that makes it such a profound story is that Abraham is really characterized by quite the protracted adolescence.

According to the beginning of the story, he's quite old when God finally convinces him to get the hell out of his tent and to get out there in the world. And God in that story is definitely manifested—manifests himself as the call to adventure, even to the pathologically underdeveloped.

The call to adventure. And of course, Abraham just steps into any number of catastrophes as soon as he leaves the confines of his tent and his father's home. But the story is a triumph in its totality because despite the fact that he encounters tyranny and the likely loss of his wife at the hands of people who are essentially tyrants and starvation and war and all of the catastrophes of life, he has a great adventure.

And that's the adventure, as far as I can tell. It's something like the adventure of truth and dedication and responsibility, and that's very seldom marketed, you know, by conservatives to young people as an adventure.

Right? And you said their default position is often to regard these strictures of community as, what would you call it, impediments and impositions on their hedonic freedom. But there's very little of value in that hedonic freedom, and all of the adventure in life, as far as I can tell, is to be found, weirdly enough, in truth and responsibility.

Yep, I completely agree. You have God telling Abraham, "Look, I'm going to give you an opportunity to become a great nation, to become a great tradition, to become a teacher of all the peoples in the world."

But, you know, that's the biggest adventure that the prophets could imagine was setting out to become a teacher to the entire world and to create a great nation that would influence the whole world and would be in covenant with God. The prophets can't imagine a larger scale adventure than that.

And yet the whole thing pivots around you take a wife; you have to have a child; you have to raise that child. That involves hardship; that involves difficulty, and you know, there are all of these descriptions of Abraham's adventures.

And you know, it takes many generations until you can see the consequences of what, of, you know, the full consequences of what he did. But the first step is taking responsibility, as you say.

And now we have to ask—we have to—I mean now we're talking about tens of millions of young people and not so young people who are beginning to realize that, you know, that a career, meaning, you know, like your place within the corporate economy, you're, you know, which cubicle, getting to that corner office—that's nowhere near the adventure of creating a family, which is creating a little nation that has the opportunity to grow if you do it right.

I mean really these two things are basically battling with one another, which of them is more important. And the answer will—you know you can have both sometimes it’s true, but it’s terribly misleading; it’s terribly misleading because that cubicle in which you sit in front of that computer screen and try to move yourself up in the corporate game—that's not a life of conservation and transmission. That’s not a life of responsibility.

That, you know, for most people, it’s almost nothing actually. And so what we really need to be telling people is, “Look, enough, enough with the fear. Come join a religious community, a congregation in which people did get married when they were young and they did have children and come see what it’s like.”

But by the way, the commandment of being fruitful and having children is only one part of your place in the hierarchy. Another part of your place in the hierarchy is the commandment to honor your parents.

And that also is something that young people find incredibly difficult. Whenever I speak in front of young audiences, the moment that I mention, you know, honoring your father and your mother, honoring your teachers, immediately somebody says, "Well, you know, only if they deserve to be honored."

Right? I mean you’re not talking about honoring them, you know, if they’re terrible. And of course that loophole basically allows, you know, every single individual young man and woman in the audience to say, "Well, you know, my parents are, you know, I judge my parents; they're not, you know, they're not worthy of being honored."

That begins by going away to college and you don’t need to talk to them anymore, and it ends by putting your parents in an old age home and paying somebody else to take care of them in old age. Again, you know, just simply dumping responsibility on somebody else, paying somebody else to take the responsibility.

And both parts of this—the fear of bringing children into the world—but also the refusal, the refusal to admit the biblical truth that you have a lifelong obligation to honor your parents, your father and your mother—you don't choose whether to have that obligation or not.

This is like, you know, this is both barrels against the fundamental assumption of liberalism, which is that you choose your obligations. But you don't choose your obligations; you don't choose which family you're born into.

You don’t choose who your parents are or who your brothers are or who your sisters are. You don't even choose where your children are. And so all of these, in the end, are unchosen obligations.

And the question is, you know, are you strong? Are you going to develop the strength of personality, the power and the wisdom and the ability to uphold these responsibilities in a way that's impressive and classy? And it can also be magnificent, you know?

You get to a certain age and you’ve got, you know, all of these decades of—I think of my, you know, my aunt and uncle who are in their 80s now and Orthodox Jews in Israel. They took a drone photograph of them with the, you know, 90 of their biological and adopted descendants who came to like a picnic, and you look at this and you say, you know, they built an empire.

I mean, they began to, you know, to alter the face of the world with what they did. What about you? Are you, you know, you're just going to sit it out?

Though that honor too, you know, I've been thinking about many of the injunctions on the religious side as moral efforts. So faith, for example. You can pillory it as blind insistence that something that no one could possibly believe to be true is true, or you could say, "No, faith is the courage that it requires to leap into the unknown and to wrestle with possibility itself."

And you could think of honor the same way, is that, you know, I read this book by Frank McCourt called "Angela's Ashes," and in that book he talks about his father back in Ireland. They were a very poor Irish family, and his father was an absolutely unrepentant alcoholic who drank up every cent the family ever made and had many, many children, a number of whom developed very serious illnesses as a consequence of the poverty induced by the father's drinking, and some of whom died.

And Frank had the wisdom even as a young man to sort of divide his father into two parts: there was sober, useful, productive, encouraging morning father, and then there was nighttime binge father. And he did everything he could to extract out the encouraging patriarchal spirit from the best that his father had to offer.

And it seems to me that that's something like honor, you know? And to honor your parents, to honor your wife, to honor your siblings, is to have the best in you serve the best in them.

It's something like that; it's active, right? It requires effort—like courage requires effort. It's not something you do blindly and foolishly. And so when people say, "Well, my parents have done things that make them less than honorable in my eyes," I mean there's two rejoinders to that.

The first is, "Well, and what makes you so perfect?" And so who exactly is it within you that's doing this judging? And second, you have an obligation to work as hard as you can to foster the best in other people, and that would include your parents and your siblings and the people that you were close to.

That's something you really work out, and that's the honoring. You know, when my wife and I got married, to speak personally for a bit, one of the things we did decide was that we were going to honor each other as husband and wife.

And so we try very hard, for example, not to put each other down, particularly in public, and not—and that wasn't because we weren't often irritated with one another, because obviously if you live with someone, irritation emerges. It's because you have a duty to honor your wife or your husband.

And if you don't uphold that duty, then you denigrate the relationship, and you make yourself look like an utter fool too, you know? If you don't treat your wife with a certain amount of respect, well, first of all, it does her no good, but it also does no you no good.

You entered into the relationship; you have a moral obligation to keep it as pristine as you can in your public utterances, and that's part of the necessary responsibility that provides a scaffold for the relationship. Same with your parents.

Yeah, I would add that it's not just the public utterances. I mean, you know, there's—everybody at this point has, you know, these Hollywood images of happy marriages with, you know, which just sort of like magically everybody's having a good time.

And unhappy marriages where people are, are, you know, are, are constantly insulting and abusing one another. And what is missing from, you know, this simplified version of marriage is that you simply don't have to say everything you think all the time.

And part of an integral part of liberalism is the—"I want to express myself. I feel something, so I want to say it." I want to tell people with the assumption being that if you say everything you think, then, you know, then you'll persuade the other, you know, your wife, or your parents; you persuade the world of, you know, the truth of your view.

But empirically, we say, you know, we can see that that isn't remotely true. If you say everything you think all the time, then what happens is that you hurt your wife over and over and over again, and you bring her to the point where she, you know, even the things that she could do that you wanted to do, she finds painful.

She starts hurting you back. I mean, the whole traditional view that honoring means sometimes you don't say the truth, okay? I'm not saying that, you know, you should lie to your wife or your husband, God forbid, I'm not talking about that.

But I'm saying that for every ten criticisms that you know come to you about your wife, it might be that only one of them is worth saying, and that one maybe shouldn't be worth saying—it shouldn't be said. Now maybe it should be said later.

Well, there's actually—he said, you know, no, there's empirical data on that. So if you track the utterances of married couples and then you use the utterance tracking to predict the longevity of the relationship, it was found that if the relationship deteriorates to the point where there's one negative comment for every five positive comments, then the relationship doesn't maintain itself.

So twenty percent negative is too high, but interestingly enough, there's a bound on the other end too, which is that if the positive to the negative exceeds 11 to 1, the relationship also tends to deteriorate.

And so it's something like judicious communication, right? You don't have to make a case that every time something irritates you, that turns into a war. But you can't be a pushover or someone who is naively blind and expect the relationship to maintain itself as well.

So that this is, you know, this is actually one of the central arguments that I make in my conservatism book, which is that honoring, which is purposely trying to—the word in Hebrew for honoring is to literally make someone heavy—to, you know, like in English we can say that certain statements or certain words were significant. Here, we're talking about making an individual significant by making them weighted—giving weight to their words, saying it was important that you did that, it was good that you did that.

This is actually the key to creating a loyal relationship. People feel—they don’t feel loved if they're not being honored. People don't feel good if they're not being honored. If they're not being honored, they begin to hate; they begin to resent.

And so you can say this with respect to husbands and wives, you can say this with respect to children's children relating to their parents, but you can also—I mean, take a look politically at, you know, what's happening in America, what's happening in other democratic countries where the competing political parties, the competing tribes no longer honor one another.

Right? And you know all you need to do is to, you know, go back to the Nixon-Kennedy debates from the 1960s or the Reagan-Mondale debates from the 80s and just look at those videos of the way they treat one another.

I mean it may be that in their hearts they hate one another and they think they’re dangerous people, but look at the way they talk; they’re constantly giving honor to the other side because they value the fact that if the other side wins, then they're going to be the loyal opposition. They'll do their best to honor them until the next election hopefully they'll win.

I don’t want to turn this into something like, you know, two-dreamy or utopian, but the difference between, you know, what that kind of politics and the politics we have today consists, you know, of this constant drumbeat of insult, abuse, slander, dishonoring one another.

Look, it's just like a marriage. If you want a divorce, if you want a civil war, then just keep dishonoring the other person. Just keep focusing on everything that's wrong with them, and you'll get your divorce; you'll get your Civil War.

So you're construing honor as something like respect and encouragement. I mean, one of the things that B.F. Skinner, who was famously able to train animals to do almost anything, pointed out that the most effective behavior modification technique, to put it rather coldly, was the use of targeted reward.

And so he would watch animals, and when they did something that was approximately appropriate to what he was trying to teach them to do, he would reward them. And so, for example, if he wanted to have a rat walk up a little ladder and do a dance on the top, he just watched the rat until it got close to the ladder, and when it got close to the ladder in its cage, he'd give it a food pellet.

And then it would hang around the ladder more, and then eventually it would pop on one of the rungs and he'd give it a food pellet, and soon he could get the rat climbing the ladder and doing a little dance on top and all sorts of complicated things.

And he knew that you could shape behavior with threat and punishment, but that reward was much more effective. Although it required of a large degree of attention, one of the things I suggested to my clinical clients and in my lectures was that you pay very close attention to the people around you, and whenever they do something that you like to see them repeat, you let them know in some detail what it was that you observed.

And that sounds like the manner in which you're construing honor, in addition to the respect element, which is to give credit where credit is due.

Yeah, this is not simply give credit where credit is due because, you know, as we said before, if your mindset is, "You know, I'm judging; I'm critiquing," then you'll easily destroy. I mean, you'll just destroy your parents' worthiness in your own eyes, your wife's worthiness in your own eyes, and your political rivals' worthiness in your own eyes.

If that's what you're doing, you're saying, "Well, I'm going to judge where it's due"; all the time you're not going to make it. You’re not going to succeed in doing the action—the biblical action of giving honor. The biblical action of giving honor is to elevate someone, to make them feel like they are important and worthy; not for you to judge whether they're worthy, but for you to make them feel that they are worthy.

And the—I mean, I—the comparison with the rats is useful, but in this case, we have this —this is going—taking place in both directions between a husband and wife. If each of them, if I tell my wife why she’s worthy but she comes away feeling loved and strengthened and important, and if she does it back to me, then I come away feeling loved and strengthened and important.

And guess what? The single relationship bond is when it's strengthened from both sides in that way, it becomes something astonishing. I mean, even, you know, the whole thing about why, you know, I don't feel attracted to my wife.

You know, of course, you don't feel attracted to your wife because, you know, you were a young person and you were in the throes of hormonal ecstasy, and that lasts for a few years, but the key to an attraction is if you keep making her feel worthy, then she'll continue to feel attracted to you, and if she keeps making you feel worthy, then you'll keep feeling attracted to her.

There's a direct connection between honoring somebody and their feeling of desire for you. And I’m including physical desire—all kinds of desire; and you know all of these things are kind of secrets of the traditional society which then wiped away by the, you know, along with the biblical tradition—the, you know, the assumption that we don’t have anything learned from scripture or from tradition basically is the key to our inability to maintain long-term any kind of loyalty.

So if you were going to extract out a message to young people and perhaps not just young people who are watching and listening from your work in relationship to how they should conduct their life—I mean, we've been touching on that the entire conversation—what would you tell them in relationship to conservatism rather than liberalism or, God forbid, let's say Marxism?

Why tilt in the conservative direction? If you're young, the most important thing about tilting in a conservative direction is that you yourself have to live a conservative life. Right? I mean there's importance in voting for conservatives, but this is not the key to the issue.

The key to the issue is if you’re voting for conservatives but you’re leading a liberal life. You’re, you know, you’re 33 years old and you’re living with a woman year after year; you go to the beach on the Sabbath, you’re not a member of any congregation, you don’t read scripture, you’re a thousand miles away from your parents.

So you don’t inherit anything from the community that you grew up in because you don’t go to a congregation; you don’t talk to your parents, you know, on Thanksgiving, or I don't know once a month. This whole construct is a liberal life. It is a life in which nothing is conserved and nothing is transmitted from one generation to the next.

It doesn't make any difference how you vote if your