Tocqueville in Hypermodernity

Georgetown Professor of Political Science Joshua Mitchell joins host Brian Smith to discuss his book, Tocqueville in Arabia, newly available in paperback, and offer Tocquevillian insights into the malaise of modernity.

Brian Smith:

My name is Brian Smith. With me today is Joshua Mitchell, professor of government at Georgetown University and the author of five books, including American Awakening, which we covered extensively on Law & Liberty, and the subject of today’s discussion, the recently released in paperback, Tocqueville in Arabia. Thanks for speaking with us Josh.

Joshua Mitchell:

My pleasure, Brian. Good to see you.

Brian Smith:

Good to see you. So I wanted to open with a fairly general question. Which is, what led you to write this book? And now that it’s being re-released, what lessons do you think it is most poignantly offering today?

Joshua Mitchell:

Well, what had happened in the early twenty-tens, and really even before that, was I had become saturated with academic political theory. I thought that the discipline itself had lost its way. And by that I mean, it had lost sight of its original insight, which was there in Strauss and Arendt, notwithstanding their differences. And that insight was, look we have to return to the great texts of the Western tradition, in order to understand the contemporary moment. And so what Strauss and Arendt did, was they juxtaposed the crisis of modernity in the aftermath of the Second World War, and notably the Holocaust, with Plato, Aristotle and the rest, and effectively invented a field. These books were studied in philosophy departments and probably in literature departments to some extent too. But the unique development that they inaugurated was the conjunction, the bringing together of contemporary events and the great ideas of history, of Western political philosophy. And the problem was that insight, which inaugurated the discipline, was slowly being lost. 1989 came and went, 2001, 2007, 2008, economic crisis. And political theorists were busy exploring secondary and tertiary literature. And it struck me that we had lost our way. And so I left Georgetown. I had been the chair, I had left to go off to the Middle East to help found the Doha campus of Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and then also left Georgetown entirely for two years and went off to Iraq and helped develop the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. But all the time I was thinking about Tocqueville, who is always one of the … he’s the central guy really. I mean, I think of Augustine and Plato a lot too, but Tocqueville is always the central figure for me. And so it occurred to me very early on, really as early as 2001, even before I left for the startup team, that I would write a book about Tocqueville in the Middle East. Because Tocqueville has this grand claim that we’re moving from the aristocratic age to the democratic age. It’s not a claim about Europe alone, it’s a claim about the very movement of history. And so what I concluded was that if his thesis is right, then one could talk about the Middle East as being an aristocratic society engaging in modernity, just as Europe in the 19th century began to become modern. And so I thought I should write a book using Tocqueville’s framework about the crisis of the Middle East. And to come back to your original point, I did that because I thought the only way that these great books are properly studied, is if we juxtapose them with contemporary events.

Brian Smith:

I think that’s an absolutely accurate depiction of where political theory is at. We have lost this sort of sense of how to juxtapose what’s going on in our world right now, with great and profound insights of all of the authors you mentioned, and the rest of the canon besides. But so what I think hooked me as a reader of this book originally, and a lot of my students over the years who I shared this anecdote with, you open your prologue with this striking conversation you had with a Saudi man in a cafe, on your way to Doha. And you recount what he said about the effects of the 1960s in America, in Europe, and in the Arab world. So I’d like you to talk a little bit about the differences this gentleman was trying to get at. Why you use them as this interesting framing moment in the book, that opens up the field of conversation you want to raise? And what they mean today?

Joshua Mitchell:

So it’s a great question. I did write a new preface for the paperback, but I did not include references to that conversation, and I wish I had. The reason I opened the book that way, is because as Tocqueville indicated, and is confirmed by our students’ sentiments and prejudices, what’s going on in the West is not universal. And while in the West we’re largely moving toward, let’s say the Anglo world, we seem to be fixated on notions of universalism that may have emerged out of the sixties in America, but there were other 1960s movements. And so I was trying to give the reader a sense really of the plurality of the world. That our account was not the only account. And I think as a device so to speak, that was an important way of getting readers to realize that the whole world is not like us. And what I had said in that introduction was that the 1960s in America, yeah it meant social revolution, but it also gave us Silicon Valley and huge advances in technology. And what I was trying to indicate there, was that Americans are fundamentally a practical people. And while I think that’s true, and I’ll come back to this in a minute, I think the American, what I described as a kind of forward edge of the 1960s, has become deeply pernicious. We can come back to that. But while the Americans are practical people, Europeans are still working out the catastrophe of 1945. And I don’t simply mean the Holocaust and the wars, I mean the utter inability to deal with the problem of guilt. Which we have in America, with respect to the slavery question. But Europe has lost its Christianity, and yet still retained the Christian category of guilt, which was Nietzsche’s prediction. But the catastrophe of that in my view, has been the development of the European Union. And while I did not put it in this way in the book, I put it this way now. The EU purports to be more than an economic union. I doubt it will be ultimately a political union, I think that’s where it will falter. But I think ultimately it’s more than either of those things. It is a public atonement for what nations did in the 20th century. Which is why elite Europeans are not disposed to go back to the national model. They believe that the only way that they can atone for their guilt is to repudiate their nations. And that’s why nationalist movements in Europe are so interesting, because they’re not ultimately going to succeed, unless they’re able to somehow address the problem of guilt in a post-Christian age. In the Middle East, as my friend said at that cafe, they were wrestling with the question of how their fathers had betrayed them. And I mean by this, that many of the leaders, not just political leaders, but thought leaders, had halfway embraced the West. And halfway embraces are always dangerous, because they produce monstrous things, as Hobbes said a long time ago. And so you had a generation of young men who were trying to think beyond the perceived material of their fathers, and so turned to a hypothetical and imagined Islam that would be a comprehensive way of life. And this is Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And for the time it has died down, but I do not believe that we’ve seen the end of this. And the reason, which I believe I indicated very delicately in Tocqueville in Arabia, was that what’s happening in the Middle East, at least in some regions, is you’re moving to a kind of hyper-modernity, which is largely to be seen in the Gulf. And you cannot build a world on hyper-modernity, where everything is disconnected. You have all the accoutrements of life, but nothing is really linked together. And what I saw in the lives of my students was this vicious oscillation back and forth, between embracing autonomy, far more even than our students in America do, one moment. And literally the next moment, dreaming of an enchanted Islamic world from the 12th century. And so I think this movement back and forth between hyper-modernity and re-enchantment is going to be a feature in the Middle East for a long time. It’s died down now, but it will re-emerge. And we need to understand it as a re-enchantment movement. I think the term Islamic fundamentalism is utterly unhelpful. Fundamentalism as we know, emerges in the United States as a category. It’s a term [coined in] 1917 with the publication of the books in Los Angeles called The Fundamentals.

So we’re using Western religious understandings, to comprehend what’s going on in Islam. And the crisis is the Tocquevillian crisis. Because what Tocqueville saw, even in the author’s introduction to Democracy in America, was that while one could speculate about how the easy transition would occur from aristocracy to democracy, in fact aristocratic societies do not forget their past. “And so they look backward at the ruins,” to use his exact words, and they dream of an enchanted past. And that’s what I saw in the Middle East. I think again, while it’s died down now, it’s still very much a living option in the future. And then to pose your question, so where do we stand now? And I do say something about this in the new preface. So I think the American sixties generation has largely gone woke. While we’re supposed to be a practical people, what I argued in American Awakening is we’ve moved away from what I, in the latest book called a politics of competence, which would be American practicality. We’ve moved away from that, and we’ve turned toward a politics of innocence and transgression. We’ve gone woke, to use that kind of language. So while in the book I indicated that America was probably the better off of the three groups, the three sixties movements, it’s not clear to me that we are now. I would say that what I said about the Europeans continues to work itself out. They are still profoundly guilty about the 20th century. And so the EU project is their mode of atonement. It is their penance, EU is their penance. And then in the Middle East as I just indicated, I think for the moment it’s died down. It’s going to be very interesting to watch Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, and the other Gulfs, Saudi Arabia, negotiate their way into modernity. My sense is they know it can’t be hyper-modernity. But it’s not clear to me that they have a stable way of proceeding, without encouraging attempts to re-enchant the world. So I think the problem still remains there.

Brian Smith:

Well and that strikes me, that the enchanted dream that Sayyid Qutb, offers in The Shade of the Quran, to use his title. I mean, you can’t say that that’s not going to be an option on the table for people, especially because he’s explicitly framing what he presents in this dream against the United States. Against his visit to the 1950s in Colorado, and all of this sort of Western decadence that he saw there. And that comparison I think is still going to be lively for the next decade, two decades, unless something … I don’t know what would change about us, that would make that comparison not seem lively to them?

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah. I think that’s right. But I also want to defend the messiness of, I’ll say America, but I mean something larger than that. I mean the Democratic Age, as Tocqueville understood it. So Tocqueville knew that there would be a temptation to re-enchant the world. And why did he know it? He said because, the current moment, the Democratic Age, has all sorts of discontinuities incoherencies. And it’s not easy to figure out how one should be. So family tells us one thing, economics tells us another, politics tells us another. There are all these domains of life that are running across purposes. And he does ask the question at one point, you might remember it’s in volume two, near the beginning. He asks the question, “So how does religion bear on this incoherence, this difficulty?” Remember, he writes the book and he says, “This entire book has been written under a kind of religious dread.” By which he means, that nothing fits. We’re in God’s world, but God’s world doesn’t fit. And so he asked the question later on, “So what kind of religion do you need in this circumstance?” He says, “Look, there’s two kinds of religion.” We can talk about Islam, and Christianity, and Judaism, and Roman Catholics, and Protestants, but that’s not how he ultimately divides it. He divides it into those religions which offer a comprehensive way of life. Which promise to bring utter coherence to human experience. And I will tell you, he doesn’t believe that can work, and we have to understand why. Because he thinks we’ve been thrown into a moment of history which is incoherent. Where we don’t really know what the future is going to bring. We can’t fully rely on the past, we can’t retrieve it, because we’ve been thrown to this new moment.

So he literally thinks that religions which offer a comprehensive way of life are tempting, but literally don’t comport with human experience. So then the question becomes, okay, so what kind of religion would comport with this human experience of disintegration? And he says, “Here Christianity is probably going to serve us better. Why? Not because it’s a comprehensive way of life.” Now, this is a huge question. Does it offer a comprehensive way of life, or not? But his reading is that it doesn’t, it offers hope. And what that means, I think in his estimation, is the world is broken. There’s a promise that it will be healed at the end of time, and the disunities will all be unified. And so what hope allows you to do, is to endure a world which can’t be put together by us now. So that kind of religion can help us endure the fractionalizing that occurs in the democratic age. But a comprehensive way of life attempts to give an alternative, but can’t deliver because life isn’t that way. And he does, we should be clear, he does have criticisms of Islam on the basis of this distinction. That Islam does offer a comprehensive way of life. That’s why he does think, this is again, long before Israel became the thorn in the side of the Arab world. The problem in the Middle East is not precisely Israel. The problem in the Middle East goes way back before that. Namely, modernity is coming everywhere, and Islam professes to offer a comprehensive doctrine. Now, having said that, we also know that there are many Muslim scholars, often in Europe, in England, in the United States, who are trying to provide an understanding of Islam that does precisely what Tocqueville thinks a good religion would do. Which is not to be utterly comprehensive. To somehow accommodate the strange twists and turns of the modern world, without Islam losing its soul. So there is a battle within Islam over this very question. Is it a comprehensive doctrine, or can it work within a world where one cannot find reconciliation?

Brian Smith:

So one other thing I wanted to draw back to before I go to the next question I actually had planned, which is with respect to what you said about Europe and the sort of repudiation of the nation-state, the European ambivalence toward it, I wonder how much that, how would I put it? Disordered, sort of uneasy sensibility, explains the European ambivalence to how on earth to deal with Ukraine right now? That they’re unwilling to sort of wholeheartedly say, for us nationhood. Now they can be all for Ukraine, but I don’t know how you embark upon this sort of military action, and support, and things like that, with half your heart?

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah. Well so Ukraine, it’s very interesting you raised this. Ukraine has been a difficult question, not only for Europeans, but for conservatives on the right, as you well know. So in the case of Europe, so you’re defending a nation-state, is that what you’re doing? And you’re defending it with a transnational organization called NATO. This is very peculiar. So Ukraine has emboldened both groups. It’s emboldened the nationalists, and it’s emboldened the EU, or of philic types who say “No, the age of nations has passed. And what we’ll do then, is absorb Ukraine into this larger European project.” I mean, this is one of the difficulties that the EU is faced with. It purports to be universal, so where is the boundary of this? Does it march straight through into Eastern Europe? Oh, what about Turkey? Well, it seems a bit disingenuous there, because it seems to me that the real reason Turkey wasn’t included, was the obvious fact that it’s an Islamic country and not a Christian country. So the charter of the EU indicates that Europe has a Christian past, a Christian pedigree, but does not say that it is Christian. But the point is, if you’ve got a Universalist society, it’s very unclear where the boundaries end for that. So Europe is, people are scratching their heads. Those who believe in the nation and the universal project. And then, among members of the right, you know this as well as I do. Ukraine has been a difficult issue. Because on the one hand, many people, and I am affiliated with the NatCon movement. I mean, I’m one of their early members and Yoram and I are good friends. And I think he’s fundamentally right that we have to return to the age of nations. And in that sense, we should be supporting Ukraine. Except the problem is, that the support that goes in that direction, does not look to be oriented by national sovereignty, but by a kind of globalist impulse that encourages, or that includes, all sorts of, let’s say social teachings that are probably anathema to most of the people who want to save Ukraine as a nation, or most eastern Europeans for example. So the project to save Ukraine as a nation seems to be more about the globalist empire of pushing back against any particularism, Russia being the particularist nation. And so the difficulty is whether Russia is a nation trying to defend its own rights, or whether Russia is an imperial power destroying the nations. And I think that’s the way a lot of conservatives who come out of the NatCon movement and are defending our involvement in the Ukraine war, they’re saying, “No no, Russia is an imperial power, trying to push back against a nation called Ukraine. And that’s why we have to defend.” Anyway, it’s going to be very interesting to see how the Republican candidates respond to this. Europe, as we indicated, both of us, there’s a huge question on the forehead of all the Europeans about this. Because it seems to be moving in both directions at once, national and transnational.

Brian Smith:

Right. And I don’t have a lot to say about it, other than that it certainly worries me, because I’ve read way too much about Russian, previously Soviet and now Russian, nuclear use doctrine and know that they view them as tools, not as this sort of abstract threat. And whatever we say or do about this, however it’s resolved, has to respect, I think … And then this gets to your central insight, the age of nations is not passed. And if we don’t recognize that, and we view, however illegitimate we see some of Russia’s claims, whoever the people who are on Ukraine’s side fully in this, I think need to recognize that Russia has claims as a nation. That if you ignore them, they’re going to continue to feel like they cannot see peace. They cannot embrace peace.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah, I think one of the things that most irked Putin, was when Kerry and Obama, a long time ago, said something like, “Don’t you know, this is the 21st century? And we’re past wars, we’re past the age of nations.” And this is the horrible hubris of the Universalists. And it’s ironic as well, because in order to get to that condition of cosmopolitan universalism, they are using the instrument of the state to achieve that. And I think that’s really the question here. Are these elites going to be able to use the instrument of the state to destroy the state? And I think that’s one of the great questions of the 2024 election. Are we going to continue to elect leaders who are not fixing on the United States? I don’t like mantras like America First, et cetera. But it does seem to me that elites who are elected by their own people ought to be concerned first and foremost with the wellbeing of their own citizens.

Brian Smith:

Their particularity, their way of life, is what their elected to defend. So use a phrase, which I of course heard you say a great deal in the classroom, but that I think might be usefully teased out here. You talk about people who are possessed by the fable of liberalism quite a bit, in your writing. And one of the things that occurs to me as we’ve been talking, is we’re often talked about right now, as being in a post-liberal Moment. That liberalism is being shown as the illusion. Or to use our former colleague’s phrase, “It succeeded and therefore it failed.” Which I don’t think I agree with, at least not in Pat’s terms. But I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, before we move on to the aristocratic versus the democratic age question that I have planned? Because I think this one might be useful for helping think through this question, particularly on the American right. On the side of these debates, to help us understand where the fault line really might be.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah. So I invoked the term, fable of liberalism, not to indicate that it’s a lie. But it’s strikes me that every political argument, every political position, has a story that underwrites it. Mythos precedes logos if you want to use that kind of language. And there is a story, there is a fable that is the preamble to the liberal frame of mind. And that story emerges out of the religious wars hundreds of years ago. And you can see this in Voltaire, for example. Not known necessarily as a liberal, but his famous saying, “I go to the English stock market. I see Jew, Christian and Muslim. They don’t care about each other’s religion, as long as their money is good.” And the liberal fable is that once there was an age of war, and by setting our sights lower on commerce, then we can bring about peace. And what is interesting is that both left and right largely hold to this fable. So we’re in a mess with China now. Why? Because we gave them WTO, Most Favored Nation status. Why did we do that? On the left, why did the Clinton administration do that? Because it believed in the fable of liberalism. So let us lower our sights. Let’s not look at the metaphysical differences between China and the West, which are considerable. Let us lower our sights and engage in commerce, and that will bring peace. And then on the right, this happened as well. In the aftermath of 2001, George Bush without wincing, thought, “Well, the reason why there is terrorism, is because these people have not yet entered …” I used that phrase in quotes, of course. “Have not yet entered into the age of commerce. Let’s get actively involved. Let’s help them develop commerce.”

This is the fable of liberalism, both on the left and the right. And the problem is, it is true that it unfolded that way in Europe for a time. I mean, it didn’t put an end to religious conflict. But the general supposition of the liberal, and here I don’t mean the Toquevillian liberal, but most liberals. Because I think Tocqueville actually, he saw the theory and the move past it, and we can talk about that. But the general supposition is, let’s just bring commerce and everything’s going to be fine. This shows up, by the way, even in our domestic policy. So Jack Kemp says, “The problem of the inner city.” Which is a euphemism for the Black underclass. “Can be solved by enterprise zones.” So it’s both a domestic and a foreign policy disposition of mind, that goes very far back. It’s 1720s with Voltaire, where gets worked out through Montesquieu, it’s lurking in Hobbes. It’s there in Tocqueville and any number of other figures. So it’s a deep, deep idea. It’s a deep, deep fable that we have, that continues to inform foreign policy. But it does not recognize that people are not simply driven by their preferences, there are deeper things at work. And this has been my great apprehension, with respect to say, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Because now what they’re using to figure out US foreign policy, is gaming simulations based on this rational actor economic model of man theory. Which is idiotic, because the rest of the world doesn’t behave the way the models behave. And I’ve got a piece coming out soon with the American Conservative, that talks about the Iraq War. I mean, we are not, let us submit and agree that America is a preeminent power, limited imperial power, whose task it is to make sure the sea lanes are open. I’m prepared to live with that. But the difficulty there, is that if we have destroyed, and we have done that. We have destroyed the vast reservoir of knowledge that was accumulated after World War II, by the area studies experts, which were then destroyed. You saw this at Georgetown, were then destroyed.

Brian Smith:

Absolutely.

Joshua Mitchell:

After 1989, when area studies became comparative politics and adopted rational choice theory, to try to understand the whole of the world. This was utterly idiotic. It was in a way purely American, because we wanted to simplify everything, and not understand the richness of these cultures, and the motives that the citizens have. So it let us submit that we have a responsibility. That empire has passed to us in a modest way, of keeping the sea lanes open. We don’t have the capacity to understand peoples around the globe, because we have accepted the crude prejudice of the fable of liberalism. That somehow commerce, by destroying the rich understandings of human life, and reducing them all to commerce, we can somehow bring peace. So we’re in a terrible position, in terms of our preparation, to understand the world. And yet we have this massive military, and a group of thinkers at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, who are utterly impoverished in their thinking.

Brian Smith:

And the irony here I think is, if you actually talk to people who lead soldiers, sailors, marines, they’ll understand on an intuitive level how people are actually motivated. Their subordinates are motivated by that whole range of interests that people from Thucydides, and honor in the classical tradition of IR would talk about. Isn’t just interest, it’s fear, it’s honor, it’s principle. And without pulling all of those in, the way that Tocqueville … I think here of some of Dan Mahoney’s more recent stuff on statecraft.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yes. Where he talks about the way that all of these great statesmen actually encompass that whole of the human experience, in the way they make their decisions, and attempt to persuade their people, and engage with other leaders. If we don’t bring that whole mix of things, I think everything that you’re saying about the disaster that’s looming before us, and that’s already upon us in many respects, will just keep on reaping horrible dividends. But let me add something here. So one of the things I’m thinking through these days, is the transformation that is underway at the moment. So let’s just pause at three moments here. I’m thinking out loud, but I think this is right. So we had that moment after World War II when the GI Bill guys saw a horrendous world out there and said, “We don’t want that to happen again.” First they went and got PhDs, and then they became our ambassadors. So they were really, really smart people.

Brian Smith:

John Rawls?

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah, right. Yeah. So my dad, as you probably might know, was a member of this group. I mean, he wrote the first book on the Muslim Brotherhood. But all of his friends went on to be ambassadors. Jim Aikens, Bill Crawford, all became ambassadors in the Middle East. And they would have ongoing conversations. So our ambassadors were studied men. And after 1989, we thought the Cold War was over. We’ve reached the post-war period. And so for lots of reasons, we gave up on all that, bad reasons. And turned to the second moment, which was kind of a rational choice model of human agency. And so we do gaming to figure out whether we should go to Iraq or not. And you hear today, “Gaming simulations have indicated that we can beat China in the South China Sea.” Please. There’s no gaming simulation that can tell us anything about what’s really going to happen. So that would be the second Moment. We turned from deep knowledge, to a kind of superficial social science knowledge, which professes to understand the whole, but is so superficial that it can’t really make any predictions. And this is what you always have to ask social scientists. Give me a non-trivial prediction, based on your so-called science. And they cannot do it. And we’ve been doing this for well over a hundred years now. But I think we’ve entered into a third moment, and this will dovetail with what I said in American Awakening.

The third moment is that we are no longer using these extensive training grounds, called universities and colleges, to produce expert competence. Even if it’s rational choice, social science expert competence. No no, that’s not what we’re doing now. What we’re doing is, we’re teaching our students fear and guilt. We are teaching them where they stand in the moral hierarchy of purity and stain. And you can be somebody who’s deeply stained, but you’re a useful idiot as long as you keep announcing that you are permanently guilty, and that you have privilege. And that seems to be what our university elites are now teaching, and we’re going to have a generation of people who think that way. And we already have. And I do think the Biden administration represents a watershed. So as much as the rational choice theory does damage, because it does not accord with the multivalence of human persons in societies, this might be even worse, this next phase. Because the only criteria we use is moral purity and stain. So the military now is not concerned with winning wars, it’s concerned with going green, and making sure that the innocent victim groups get the surgeries they need. I mean, this is really a new phase, and we have to recognize in itself. And the reason I say this at this moment, is because I think conservatives really need to upgrade their language. This is not progressivism. Progressivism was concerned with expert competence, and at least it believed in competence. The founder’s vision believed in citizen competence, and that’s why you could have small government. And conservatives keep talking about the importance of small government. None of this works, and here I draw directly from Tocqueville, unless you’ve got citizen competence that runs very deep, so that you can have a minimal government. So at least the second moment of American history, the progressive moment, believed in competence. This third moment that we’re now stepping into, the age of the new regime change. And it is a regime change, which is concerned not with either kind of competence, citizen or expert. Now our universities are training people in fear and guilt. And as long as they, I don’t call it virtue signaling, I call it innocent signaling, because it is a biblical category. As long as they signaled the right things, then they get a pass. So it’s a new phase, and it already has drastically affected our foreign policy. We will see nothing but incompetence and disasters, so long as we step away from what I call the liberal politics of competence, and move toward the politics of innocence and transgression. Which is the project of identity politics.

Brian Smith:

Right. And right now it’s already upon us. You can find on Twitter entire accounts dedicated to photographing the Sovietization of the US Navy. And when you talk to sort of expert logistics people who have recently gotten out of the Navy, which I’ve done. I mean, one of the things I point to is, it’s the slow creep of incompetence, in the face of this guilt catechesis. When you have, say a missile cruiser that goes out, and 10% of the crew is on leave for training academies or pregnancies. And another 10 or 20% are being sent to ever more required, check the box, mandatory education schools. And some of them are for learning nuclear engineering or whatever the next thing they’ve got to learn is, to get promoted. But 10% of it now is DEI training. Which if you don’t get certified, check the box to do that, you don’t get promoted. And so lots of sailors get out. And the captains and NCOs on these ships are forced to say, “Well what critical maintenance can we defer or cut, just so we can keep the ship running?”

Joshua Mitchell:

And so American ships are coming to port covered in rust on a regular basis, which they never would’ve been in the Cold War. Or even up until fairly recently, simply because there’s not enough hours of the day to stretch the human beings who are still competent, over the time remaining. Let me add something to this which nobody’s talking about, but I think we really need to think about. So let’s talk the Navy ships crashing into atolls and one another. So yes, we’ve moved away from what we’re calling here a politics of competence. We have to ask the question, what has allowed us to do that? And I think one of the things that nobody’s paying attention to, is that increasingly, as the world is operated by algorithms, then you seem not to need competence. And so you’ve got this interesting moment, where I think we’re living in right now, where increasingly we’re moving away from, or we’re trying to render competence as computer algorithms. So we’re going to have an algorithm to steer the ship. But if that goes wrong, then you’ve got a terrible problem. But if it goes right, you can carry on and push forward, away from competence, toward this politics of innocence and transgression, because you’ve got algorithms that are going to actually steer the ship. So this is going to only blow up when it becomes clear that either we need new algorithms, and there’s nobody to write them, because there’s nobody competent to write them. But I think ultimately what this is pointing to, is the need to recover competence. Another way I put this in the book is, there’s real analog competent knowledge. And then digitization is a substitute for it. So algorithmic substitution, supplementary is possible, but ultimately it all hangs together through competence. But we’ve made a bet that we don’t need to have this competence, we can turn toward algorithms. And then we can populate the workforce, not with competent people, but with woke people. So we’ve got to bring the algorithm part in here too, ’cause that’s really important. It’s not just on ships, it’s everywhere. It’s airplanes, everything.

Brian Smith:

Absolutely. And this actually does really relate back to Tocqueville in Arabia, I think in an important way. In that this is only thinkable under the pursuit of equality. Because you deny and you kick competence down the road when you don’t believe that experts can, or should be trusted. Or to set aside the highly credentialed expert thing, you don’t have that relationship with the mechanic, or with the teacher. That you defer to their competence anymore. You trust in the algorithm for the answer, but no longer have the judgment of when to use the darn thing.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah, great point. And let’s go back to the mechanic. So if a mechanic has competence, you’re going to trust him, and you’re going to build a relationship with him. And I remember this. I mean, we knew our mechanic personally. But if increasingly, cars don’t require the competence of a mechanic, but just computer automation. And everybody is taking their cars to the big city to get them tuned up once every couple of years, you don’t have this personal relationship. These algorithms, the proliferation of these algorithms, the effect of them is to destroy the local face-to-face associations that we really need. So the more we have these computer-generated algorithms that take care of everything, customer service for example, the more we’re going to be frustrated. The less and less we’re going to have any need for our neighbor. So this problem of algorithm substitution for actual competence, it is the great experiment we’re running right now. And my view is, because there is an actual by nature, proper relationship between supplements and substitutes, and algorithms can supplement but not substitutes for human competence, I believe the whole thing will blow up at some point. Because ultimately, we cannot turn supplements into substitutes. This is an ancient insight which is there in Plato, it’s there in Rousseau. I think it’s even there in Tocqueville, it’s lurking. But his formulation would be, the state can be a supplement to the mediating institutions in which we develop competence, but it cannot be a substitute for it.

Brian Smith:

And without the linked men, as opposed to the de-linked men who are necessary to make civil society run in the Tocquevillian understanding, we’re going to get that government stepping in.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah.

Brian Smith:

We’re going to get that trust in the algorithm that promises we could do it. I mean, as you were speaking, in my head I went back to conversations we once had about Leviathan and Hobbes. That the Leviathan has become this not immortal God, but the sort of invisible one floating in ones and zeros on the web around us. Which we turn to, to humble the prideful. To select who should be selected for various things, as if there wasn’t a person or a thing, sort of actively making choices that inform that algorithm. But I wonder if part of the backlash, and maybe this will drag us back to Tocqueville a bit more is, do you think maybe this backlash will be felt most keenly among the vestiges of aristocracy, and the horror of the de-linked people that they have, that you talk about quite a bit in Tocqueville in Arabia?

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah. And so this is my hope. And I should also point out, it’s Tocqueville’s. I think what Tocqueville understood, and you just said it, was that aristocratic peoples understand that Universalist aspirations are not ones that we can build a world around. I mean, I think for example of Burke’s distinction between the excellence of simplicity, and the excellence of composition, in the writings on the French Revolution. It’s a remarkable insight, because the democratic soul operates with a frame of mind called the excellence of simplicity. I’ll give you an example. Covid is here. Everything must be shut down, the only problem we have is Covid, and the state has to step in. With the excellence of composition, which is an aristocratic way of thinking, everything is connected. Well, if we shut down the economy to save people from getting Covid, there’s going to be all sorts of collateral damage. Maybe we need to think about seven or eight things at once, rather than one thing by itself? And of course, Marx is the perfect example of this excellence of simplicity. Class is the key to everything. One thing is the key to everything. Or identity politics, it’s all about identity, that’s the only thing that matters. This is another example of the excellence of simplicity. But the question is then, where does one learn, or how does one learn, this excellence of composition? And while Burke doesn’t really lay this out, Tocqueville does. I mean, where do we learn that life is constant trade-offs? We only learn this in face-to-face associations. Rich connections, where we discover that the family is … well, we have to do this in the family, but we also have to do this. And then if we’re in a family, what do we do with our neighborhood? And all these rich questions, which don’t admit of a kind of Universalist single key answer. And so I think, well I know what Tocqueville says is … And you know this Brian, it’s what saves democracy from itself, are these mediating institutions. Where do these media institutions come from? They come from the aristocratic age. They are the survivals, the church, the family, the municipal institution, the legal system based on precedent. These are survivals of the aristocratic age. And of course, now you stumbled upon the central paradox in Tocqueville, which is the very institutions that we need, these aristocratic institutions, are undone by this democratic frame of mind, that there’s only one answer. So for the aristocrat we’ll say, well men are men, and women are women. And we’re going to partly understand each other, but it’s a real distinction. No, the democratic soul is completely incensed by a real distinction that says, “No no, we’re all the same.” Which is of course, the project to destroy sex differences in the democratic age. So aristocratic souls are the ones who grasp this in their bones. And what Tocqueville had hoped, was that since there are no longer nobles around, there would be a substitute for them that would occupy the mediational space. Well, you know the rest of the argument. It’s our families, it’s our churches, et cetera. And so it’s only by engaging in those rich associations and all the complexities associated with them, that we come to develop this excellence of composition, which allows us to make proper judgments about the complexity of the world. Unlike the democratic soul that says, national security state, Covid, bring democracy to the free world, or the whole world. These single key measures which purport to solve all of our problems. It’s idiocy, but it’s only possible when you destroy those rich associations, through which we can be confirmed in our understanding that no, there’s no single answer here.

Brian Smith:

Well, and trying, as we both have for, I don’t know how many years? And you combine the two of us when we’ve taught, together would be, it’s a lot.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah.

Brian Smith:

One of the things I continually found, and I know you continually remarked onto me, as we were talking about, well what does it mean to be a professor, and moving on. Was just, you can’t suddenly take kids who have, to take the phrase you use in Tocqueville in Arabia, that don’t have any hermeneutic of deference, and suddenly give it to them. And suddenly develop that in them.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah.

Brian Smith:

It’s the work of years. And it’s remedial work for most American, and as you encountered, world college students. But I don’t think it’s impossible. And don’t think you’ve seen that it’s impossible. So maybe we could talk a bit about what is still possible, with bringing students along in an encounter with texts to develop this?

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah.

Brian Smith:

Totally new to them, kind of judgment.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah, it’s a great question. Here again, Tocqueville is so helpful. So his scheme of course is, there’s the aristocratic age and the democratic age. And there’s a number of characteristics you can identify with each of them, and they map onto each other, so in opposite ways. So in the aristocratic age, you’re looking to the past. You’re looking to the fathers literally, but also figuratively. In the democratic age, you’re looking to the future. Therefore, the aristocratic age is concerned with imitation, and the democratic age is concerned with innovation. So how does this play out in terms of the way we think about knowledge in these two distinct moments of history? Well, in the aristocratic age, there’s a hermeneutics of deference. By which we mean, we pick up a book, we read it, we have reverence for it because it came before us. Because it’s been handed down to us. Because by virtue of it being ancient and reverential, it exceeds our immediate understanding, and therefore we defer to it. And while I am, as you know, my relationship to Strauss is very mixed. But one thing I think we eternally owe a debt of gratitude to him about, is this hermeneutics of deference. I mean, he would tell his American students, “Listen, you don’t understand this book. You think you do, but what you need to do is to approach this book and pose your questions, but immediately say to yourself, the author has an answer to my question, which I don’t even understand. And so before I decide to offer my critique of him, you need to defer.” So there’s two hermeneutics, the hermeneutics of deference, and the hermeneutics of critique. And of course, this is critical thinking. And so our American students are taught to criticize. And of course we can see how this plays out in identity politics. “Well, this person has this kind of identity, therefore we have to dismiss them and purge them.” No effort whatsoever to engage another mind. This is deeply, deeply pernicious. And I do not say that we have to substitute the hermeneutics of deference for the hermeneutics of critique. I say in point of fact, what we have to do is both. We have to engage the author. We have to recognize that his answers exceed our capacity to know them. But nevertheless, to pose questions. It is morally easy, as I probably said in the book, to be engaged fully in the hermeneutics of deference, of the hermeneutics of critique. Because in both case, your soul is unmoved. You either bow down to the text, or you do nothing because you’re just ripping the book apart. That’s the hermeneutics of critique. The really difficult challenge for education is to do both. And I think what we have to do is teach our young people that their hermeneutics of deference matters. In this respect, at least when I got to the Middle East early on, the hermeneutics of deference was well in place. I will report, and I intimate this in the book. The book was written in 2013, but I’m teaching now a course, for the same group that I was at Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Doha. And the first papers I got back were very much hermeneutic of critique. It was, this is why Plato’s wrong. He doesn’t understand things political. And I would pose to my students the following question, “Well, so why is your understanding of the political, better than his understanding of the political? Maybe instead of you using your understanding of the political to critique him, maybe we ought to use his understanding of the political to critique what you believe?” So this hermeneutics of critique has penetrated into the minds of many of my students. I have very mixed views, after many, many years of involvement in American universities overseas, about what American higher education in the Middle East can do. I think at its best, it can help students who are wrestling in their own cultures, with the very problem Tocqueville thought was going to prevail in all cultures, namely the democratization of man. By which I mean the de-linking of persons. It can perhaps give those students a language to begin to understand the individuation and its perils, which they would not otherwise get in their homegrown institutions, they would simply get critiques of the West. Which they don’t believe, because they themselves are half hyper-modern anyway. So at its best, American higher education can expose them to questions which we have been wrestling with for a hundred years. Namely, what does it mean to be a citizen of the democratic age? Does it mean we’re just all Ayn Randians, running around being self-interested? Or does it mean as Tocqueville thought, that we can build a world together in face-to-face relations? Now that’s something the Middle Easterners, my students, they can appreciate, because they have rich networks of family. But what’s happening in these American higher education institutions often, not always, but I would say often. And here I’m just protecting myself in a way. What’s happening is that you’re getting faculty members who cannot get jobs in the United States. Or themselves are troubled enough, that they need to be utterly supported by huge sums of money that come their way, if they come to teach in the Middle East. You get people who hate the United States, who have one or another scheme of re-enchantment or purgation to peddle. And so our American universities in the Middle East are in a way becoming worse than the American universities in the United States. Deeply, deeply poisoned. So whereas they could have done some great good, but not to brainwash, but to indicate to the students that the feelings that they have of loneliness and isolation are not just their own. The whole crisis of modernity is this. And oh, by the way, here are some books that wrestle with this in constructive ways. Tocqueville being probably the most important. That’s what should have happened. But what is happening in fact, is you’re getting the most vehement anti-American faculty members you can possibly imagine going out there and hating on America. And thinking by the way, that that’s what those students want. Now, some of them do, some of them are fiercely anti-Western. But if you ask them what their alternative is, they will sometimes say something like, “Well, Islam.” And then you ask them to describe the Islam they have in mind. And you yourself, because you’ve studied Rousseau and all the anti-modernist marks, Heidegger and Nietzsche, you say, “Hmm, that’s curious. That doesn’t sound like Islam to me. It sounds like there’s been a vast exportation of European anti-modern thought to your region of the globe, which is now intermixed with what you call Islam. And so you’ve been poisoned by this mixture that’s neither Islam nor the West.” And that is my view on what purports to be a lot of anti-Western thought, or Islamic thought. It’s now, because of colonialism, so intermixed with European anti-modern thinking. Which is again, one thing we ought to be cognizant of, if we’re setting up universities in the Middle East. But in point of fact, we’re bringing over those who believe in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, to teach students who are desperately trying to find their way. And what they’re given really is, I hate the West, and that’s going to give you meaning. And that is no way to build a university.

Brian Smith:

And entirely destructive of souls. So I wonder, so this is a thought that occurs to me as you were talking, that something dovetails here in my thinking about this. That we have this polar, either hermeneutic of suspicion, or of deference, when living in between actually requires suffering. It requires that you open your mind and heart, up to questions that are deeply, deeply unsettling. That are triggering, quote/unquote, to use this contemporary parlance. And I wonder if you could talk about what you think the connection is between our societies, running screaming from suffering, in the West in particular. And a sort of the decline of religious faith, which would help us understand ourselves as living in a trial, living with suffering. And the challenges we’re facing right now. ‘Cause it seems like these are all deeply interlinked to me. And one of my experiences teaching, that was always so difficult, was to get students to recognize, that to be able to cope with the life that we are thrust into, you have to ask these questions about yourself, and come to grips with what you really believe about God, about our relationship to one another. And then if you don’t, you are just going to be sort of at the mercy of these outside forces entirely, and see yourself as a passive recipient of everything. And never be able to live in that active voice, so to speak.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah. Well, so just a quick, seemingly long way of getting into this. I’ve taught at Georgetown since 1993, and when I first started teaching St. Augustine, it was fairly easy, because my students had a kind of theological fluency. Now I find it easier to teach St. Augustine on the Doha campus to Muslims than I do to Georgetown students. Because theological fluency has largely disappeared in my students. And by that, I don’t simply mean catechisms and things like that. I mean, what Christianity I think, should I say it’s most important contribution. I’ll say it with a full understanding, there’s no such thing as the most important contribution. But what Christianity does, and it’s right there in the Book of Genesis, is that it indicates to the reader, who might be wrestling with the darkness in the world, it indicates right there in those passages in Genesis 3, that the preeminent disposition of the human heart is to blame someone else. So Adam and Eve sinned, they sinned. There’s a transgression against God, they rebelled against God. And what they do is, instead of looking within and taking some responsibility for that. Saying, “We should repent, please forgive me.” It’s not what they do. What they do is they say, “Well, the serpent made me do it.” Or, my favorite line in Genesis, “The woman you gave me.”

Brian Smith:

“The woman you gave me made me do it.”

Joshua Mitchell:

Hilarious. God does have a sense of humor. So the way this plays out now, to bring us back to the issue of suffering. We’re all Adam and Eve, by which I mean, not simply that we suffer from original sin, but that our response to that thing that is original, and always already in us, is to say, “No no, the problem’s not here, it’s out there.” And identity politics is profoundly pernicious, because it does this. So the Christian understanding is that there’s a vertical relationship. We are rebels, transgressors against God. That we are so errant from him, there’s nothing we could do to come back to God. And so God had to send himself. So all human beings, I’ll use identity politics language, are guilty of irredeemable stain. We’re all irredeemables, we are all irredeemables. And in fact, the only way out for the Christian is a vertical one, where we recognize that Christ is the only innocent victim. There’s none among us who are innocent victims. And he is the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world. Well, you’ve seen the three words here. The scapegoat, irredeemable stain, and innocent victim. And what I note in the chapter on religion in Tocqueville in Arabia, written in 2013, is that this understanding has dissipated. This is back in 2013. And then in American Awakening what I said was, I took it a step further and I said, “Well, it didn’t completely disappear. It got moved.” Because if the Genesis story is right, then the most primordial experience that is in all of us, because it’s really the first thing that appears, is the experience of sin, and transgression, and rebellion. Now, none of us are going to admit it. We’re going to say, “Not me, I’m not.” We’re going to do exactly what Adam and Eve did. And identity politics is this. It takes the Christian vertical understanding of staying an innocent victim, and it turns it 90 degrees and makes it a horizontal one. By which I mean, it establishes a moral economy intersectionality. According to which you rank yourself, on a scale from pure to irredeemable. And of course you can innocent signal and hide the stain under the wing of your … remember the Christian reference, “Christ hides our sin under his wing.” Well, you can hide it under the wing of a Black Lives Matter sign in your front yard, or we believe in Ukraine. However noble, rightly understood those things might be, it’s a way to raise your sin score, so to speak. So identity politics is perfectly understandable, because the churches abandoned the idea of the God of judgment. All the churches, Catholic, Protestant, even within Judaism, there were calls by Rabbi Soloveitchik, the original in the 1950s. They’re on YouTube. To return to an understanding of sin. So you had farsighted thinkers, Fulton Sheen, Soloveitchik, Reinhold Niebuhr, as you know.

Brian Smith:

Reinhold Niebuhr, yeah.

Joshua Mitchell:

All of them could see in the mid-20th century, that we had lost the fundamental insight. Which was, man is indicted, and somehow has to get right with God. But what’s happened is, that all the religious institutions have jettisoned that, but it didn’t go away. And it didn’t go away because this experience of guilt is the deepest one in the human heart. And so identity politics comes along and finds a way for us to be Adam and Eve in the Garden. Which is say, to blame someone else, so it’s white privilege. And I find this laughable, because what has to happen in identity politics is, once you purge one scapegoat, once you purge toxic masculinity, once all the men are hooked on pornography and drugs, and the young one are increasingly moving in that direction. They’re disappearing, as they’re supposed to. You need another scapegoat. And it’ll be the Karens, and then it’ll be Black men who believe that the traditional church, and the traditional family matter. And the transgenders are already going after them. So it’s just one scapegoat after another. It’s a deeply pernicious, it’s a Christian heresy, is what I’m actually calling it now. And that’s what we have to call it.

Brian Smith:

Right, that’s a Christian heresy, where you never know. Yeah, you never know. I mean, to sort of pull the analogy in a slightly different direction, you never know, in a stable way, whether you are a Jacobin or a Girondin.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah.

Brian Smith:

You never know, because tomorrow’s Jacobins are the next Girondins, and so on and so forth, and it keeps on spinning.

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah. I tell my students who are quite clear that they understand the moral economy, I say to them, “I notice you’re drinking out of a plastic water bottle. When we discover in 20 years that microplastics are destroying the ecosystem far more than carbon dioxide, do you really want to be judged as a parasite, and as somebody worthy of purging and scapegoating, because you drank water out of a water bottle?” It never ends. You will always be discovered sooner or later. But to come back to what drove this, which was how do you teach this? I think the first thing we have to do, is to propose to our students the question, “How’s that working for you?” I mean, you think that by picking out a group to be purged, then the world would be made pure. Or you think by getting rid of fossil fuels and having a quote, green economy, which there’s no such thing as a green economy. We’re going to poison the atmosphere, and the land and the water in different ways, with rare earth minerals. But I think the way this ends, is that people discover that no matter how much they’ve purged somebody, they wake up the next morning still feeling bad. And I think that’s part of the reason why the left kept keeps moving. So they thought once they could get feminists on equal footing with men, everything would be fine. And yet they woke up and still they found there was guilt. Well then, let’s go to gays and lesbians, and now transgendered. And we’re going to one innocent victim after another, around which they can wrap their hearts, in the hope of attaining purity by supporting them. Eventually this, we discovered that this doesn’t work. And at that point, I think people can listen. So you might remember in The Republic, the boys are quite confident in Book One, that they understand justice, and you have several definitions of justice. And the conversation of The Republic does not get started until Book Two, at which point Lachan says, “Well, I’m just confused. Can you help us, Socrates?” So as long as we’ve got this hermeneutic critique, where people are absolutely self-satisfied with their own answers, there can be no real education. So I think the way you get people to begin to say, to begin realize that there might be something they need to listen to, is you get them to see that what they’re doing isn’t working. Which is the way Plato does this.

Brian Smith:

Yeah. And I think that was exactly my experience in the classroom. And it’s the only route available to us. But there are signs of hope though, in the sense that, you think of the places that actually are generative in our life right now. Churches that have held to an orthodoxy of sin and repentance, and synagogues that have done this are growing, and continue to. And have not had the birth dearth that so much of our society is plagued with at this point. And so there are readouts to where someone who has raised this question, or who has come to the end of themself, can come looking for respite, and an answer that is not just, “Well, who’s next?”

Joshua Mitchell:

Yeah.

Brian Smith:

So I wanted to conclude by bringing you to the Tocqueville in Arabia‘s new preface, and just get your reaction on a quote from you. “The fateful struggle today, is between those who wish for embodiment, and those who wish to flee from it.” Can you say just a bit more about that, and how it relates to the things we’ve been talking about?