Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hi everybody. Welcome to a special episode of Asch Aviv Anything. This episode is sponsored by the adult children of David Altman and Eugene Roberts, two eminent Jewish American rocket scientists who, with full US Government approval, contributed vital expertise to Israel's security. May their memories be a blessing. Am Yisrael Chai, thank you for that beautiful dedication that is incredibly apt for this episode. Five days ago, America turned 250. Everyone everywhere seemed to have something to say. It's kind of exciting. It's kind of incredible. You don't turn 250 any day of the week. It's not just an anniversary of a declaration of independence, right? It's the first enduring, large scale, successful modern democracy. There were Athenian democracy and Roman Republic and some Dutch examples and some Swiss examples and a couple Italian city states. And people are going to nitpick this in the comments, but at large scale, with many ethnicities industrializing. Just a capable modern democracy that could be built to sail through history. Not momentary, not small, not easily collapsible. And also, Athens was not a democracy. It was more like rule of the Navy. And the Roman Republic was democratic by no meaning of the term today. This is it. This was the beginning. And it was built explicitly and very, very carefully and thoughtfully to succeed at this thing that no one had ever really tried before. And it worked. It was the proof of concept that shaped directly, sometimes indirectly, basically the entire free world of today. I didn't weigh in on July 4th. I didn't have much to add. America is extraordinary. I am incredibly bullish on America. I think it's an amazing thing. It also has real and very profound problems. And none of that is an interesting comment coming from me. So, as one American leader put it, there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America. There's plenty wrong, of course, but generally what's wrong with America is human. The struggles and failings are shared by everyone. What's right about America, the one great big thing that stands out as a beacon in history, started in America and was unique to America. And so there is this extraordinary thing called America that the rest of the world was made better by. That this era of American global dominance and prominence has been, not accidentally the wealthiest, happiest, safest era in human history. At the end of the day, when it comes to America, the good always overcomes the bad. Give me the loud messiness of America and also of the world that America built over any other world order. There's ever been every opponent of America who ever led or managed any piece of the world, did a worse job of it with all the caveats and all the concerns and all the genuine failings and deep mistakes. So that's my feelings about America, and you're all bored. And that's why I didn't publish anything. July 4th came and went. I told my kids about the greatness that America represents in human history and otherwise kept my opinion to myself. But over the course of the July 4th holiday, I was reading Americans and listening to Americans talking about this moment. And when the day after came, the morning of July 5th, and every day since recording on July 9th, it really has felt as though now that I'm at the start of the next quarter millennium, now that we're experiencing this sort of next chapter in America's grand, immense story, a thought occurred to me that I hadn't read anywhere else or seen anywhere else. It's not a unique insight of mine. It's the opposite of a unique insight. It's extraordinarily well known to Americans, but it somehow felt like it was missing from the conversation on forth, at least the conversation that I saw in the American mainstream press and places that I was reading and listening to. And it puts everything in a new light. July 4th was a bit anticlimactic for many Americans at least. Again, that's the image you get following America Online in that holiday. The polarization, the disruptions in the American economy, in American society, the listlessness, the loneliness among so many, the crisis of the youth, the crisis of men, the crisis of social media, the AI job apocalypse that everyone is expecting. There's so much of the conversation at this moment seemed to be about all the reasons not to celebrate, as though what's great about America is that it didn't have problems in the past. Now that it has problems, that greatness is somehow diminished. I was reading all of it. I was listening to all of it, and it made me realize a lot of people, including a lot of Americans, don't realize. Not because they don't know, not because they don't learn, but they don't necessarily realize it's not front and center, the big special thing. July 4th, ladies and gentlemen, doesn't matter, because America isn't about the great moments, the pomp and circumstance, the dramatic wars, the proclamations, the tumultuous events of American history. What's great about America, what's redemptive about America, at least to me, is that it brings its redemption into the world, in the in between spaces, in ordinary people doing ordinary things. In all the days that aren't July 4th. America isn't a great theory of history. It's not an ancient people. It doesn't have a vast cosmology, a religion of its own. It doesn't have any of those grand and great and epic notions about itself or about anything else in the. In America you don't have grand philosophical schools like in France. Their literature rejects the epic style. They don't like big words and they don't like big theories. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote this in Democracy in America. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided. General ideas alarm their minds which are accustomed to positive calculations. They hold practice in more honor than theory. If the mind of the Americans were free from all trammels, they would very shortly become the most daring innovators and the most implacable disputants in the world. To evils which are common to all democratic peoples they have applied remedies which none but themselves had ever thought of before. And although they were the first to make the experiment, they have succeeded in it. De Tocqueville thought that Americans lacked the grand philosophical schools of Europe. And instead what Americans had was an almost kind of civic culture or civic habit of suspicion towards systems, towards abstractions. This was the defining habit of mind that protected Americans for 250 years from the most murderous ideologies of Europe and of the rest of the world, even as many other societies succumbed. Communism is one great example. Time and again, frustrated American communists complained to the American labor union movement, the American Federation of Labor, the later AFL cio, that American labor activism lacked the ultimate ends of communist theory. They had these proximate goals, these immediate goals. The minimum wage, worker safety, you know, age, limits to work, no, no child labor, the weekend. All these things that the American labor movement achieved were always the one goal they were going for. And then there's another goal, and then there's another goal. It's always proximate incremental improvements. It's never a grand theory of history, a grand theory of a worker's utopia. In the Beatles song Imagine, it talks about nothing to live and die for. And they're talking about nation, religion, borders. But people had been murdered en masse for socialist utopias, at least as much as for nation and religion. But not in America. In 1883, the U.S. senate Committee on Education and labor heard the testimony of Adolf Strasser, president of the cigar makers union and co founder of the AFL The American Federation of Labor. Strasser was asked by the committee chairman about his group's ultimate ends. In other words, why aren't you all communists? And his answer, quote, we have no ultimate ends. We are going from day to day. We are fighting only for immediate objects, objects that can be realized in a few years. We want to dress better and to live better and become better citizens generally. Thirty years later, they're having the same debates. May 1914, another union leader made the point again more powerfully and very famously. I remember learning this in high school. Morris Hillquit, a major figure in the Socialist Party of America, was cross examining Samuel Gompers, the founding president of the afl, in front of the US Commission on Industrial Relations. Hillquit tried to push Gompers into the corner and to make him admit that the labor movement has to eventually support a socialist end state to know what it is it's fighting for. And Gompers consistently refused. The union struggle, he argued, was always focused on the next immediate hurdle. And Hillquit says to him, okay, but when these conditions are obtained, what then? And Gompers interrupts him in the transcript and he says, well, then we want better. And then Gompers explains, the working people will never stop in their effort to obtain a better life for themselves and for their wives and for their children and for humanity. You have an end, we have not. There is no socialist utopia. There's only the next improvement. Gomper's most famous articulation of this from an 1890s speech, but echoed throughout his career, we do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more. We do want more. And when it becomes more, we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more until we have received the results of our labor. That's the theory of American labor advocacy and politics and union action. He always argued that unions should focus on more wages, shorter hours, better conditions, practical relief, but no utopian projects. In fact, unions can't be a vehicle for toppling the market and demolishing industry because that pulls the rug out from under the very capital creation that can fund better conditions for workers. Unions are about uplifting workers, giving them a fairer share of the product of industry, not the demolishing of industry. He actually warned that socialism and communism made workers lose interest in the slow grinding work of long term organizing, of winning contracts, passing legislation. Revolutions are adorable. Revolutions don't get the job done. And he always marginalized socialists inside the afl. And so the American worker, unlike in many, many other places in the industrializing west never demolished the engine of prosperity that produced American strength and flourishing. And the prosperity of the American worker. The American worker took part in that flourishing. I know I'm stepping into an immense debate about whether that's still true. The deindustrializing of the Midwest, of the American economy, just the very idea that people can have safe jobs over the long. This is a valuable and important debate. But over the 20th century, countless countries and economies collapsed into communism. And it never succeeded anywhere. And America was protected from it. It was protected from it, not by McCarthyism, not by the Red Scare, not by oppression and suppression and lists in Hollywood. It was protected from it by the people actually working for the workers. Employers always resist higher wages. Workers also always need new kinds of advocacy. Capitalism is a system that drives innovation, and that means that industries change how they operate. Old industries can die out and new ones can be born. So new issues are always arising, the goalposts are always shifting, and someone always needs to be there advocating for the workers. Any labor movement that locks into one theory of utopia, which necessarily means it locks into a single economic arc of productivity, of industry, industry, of understanding how things work, won't be able to respond to these changes. Pragmatism and a refusal to succumb to the allure of all encompassing, all explanatory theory delivered for America and protected America from the collapse of the revolutions that sought utopian end states. Utopian end states sound cool to college kids or professors with tenure who don't have to respond to any market forces, but they're a recipe for poverty and motionlessness. In the real world, success is always the next contract, the next organizing drive, the next legislative win, the next workplace win. And here's the thing, it was always thus. In fact, America was built by this distrust of all encompassing theory. In Federalist 51, James Madison gives us this anti utopian, anti theory text on the need for checks and balances in government. To set political power against itself, to create that space for freedom. He writes, it may be a reflection on human nature that such devices, meaning checks and balances, should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. Any system that wants to succeed has to assume that people won't always be just and good, has to assume they will be bad and selfish and unconcerned with high and moral ideals. And then under Those conditions, the system has to deliver freedom and order. It isn't about rhetoric or endless affirmation of democratic ideas. The idea of liberty has been on the lips of every single tyrant and every single scoundrel in the history of humanity. Augustus, the great, emperor of the Roman Empire, as he dismantled the Roman Republic, called himself its defender, and pretended to be a mere consul of Rome. The Middle east today is full of presidents who aren't really elected. Their claim to be a president of a republic is a cynical test of loyalty to the tyrant. In other words, acquiescing to the lie, uttering the lie that the regime is what the president claims to be is the theater of social control that underlies the regime. Rhetoric about liberty isn't liberty. Sometimes it's the opposite of liberty, and no theory of liberty is liberty. Communist regimes, revolutionary socialist projects, all of these kinds of attempts at establishing liberty that work on paper in some way have been overwhelmingly catastrophic. The theory doesn't fit the harsh truths of reality itself. Madison argued that ambition, faction, meaning polarization, imperfect knowledge, corruptible power. These are the baseline realities that democracies must know how to mediate if they are to survive and succeed. He writes in Federalist no. 10 that there will always be faction, tribalism, polarization. He doesn't want to abolish it. He can't abolish it. So the task is to control its effects through institutional design. In federalist number 37, Madison says that political institutions are hard to build because human faculties are imperfect. And this should produce, quote, moderating expectations about human wisdom. Right. Every theory of kingship trusts wisdom. America's founders refused to trust in the wisdom of the leadership. So the Constitution itself isn't presented as a perfect machine, not at the Constitutional Convention. It's not brought down from heaven. It's not a product of perfect rationalism. It's an amendable human answer to an unfixable human limitation. Jefferson wrote a famous letter in 1816 to Samuel Kercheval where he says, constitutions are not so sacred that they can't be amended. Laws and institutions must go hand in hand, he writes, with the progress of the human mind. All of this sounds completely obvious to modern Americans. In its day, this was a wild revolution. And to huge other parts of the world, huge swathes of the world today, this is an insane idea. Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention famously said that he doesn't approve of every part of the Constitution. He has often changed his opinions with better information. He agrees to the Constitution with all its faults. He says he also mocks the certainty of different groups in the debates who he thinks they think they have the truth. And he says this. I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve. I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better and because I am not sure that it is not the best. He's not only not sure this is a good Constitution, he's not sure he can trust his own judgment about whether it's not a good Constitution. And he's not sure that even if it's not a good Constitution, that there's a better one. The point is that he's not sure that's the beginning of the pragmatic, practical way you need to build constitutional systems. And there has not yet ever been the thing that they are building. This is American pragmatism before the philosophical movement of pragmatism that would take that name and which is the only philosophical movement native to the United States. It's literally called pragmatism. William James are you seeing the theme? Once you know what to look for, it's everywhere. The founders of America believed that they themselves didn't know what the future would hold for their descendants. So the institutions they built have to be durable enough to stabilize public life, flexible enough to be answerable to new experiences, to new conditions. Durable, but flexible. Even the founders, willing to put their lives on the line for this new system to fight and die for it, never romanticized it. In Washington's Farewell Address, he warns that the alternating domination of one faction over another, Republican to Democrat in today's terms, can lead to despotism. Think about today. Neither Republican nor Democrat, when given the opportunity, has ever turned down the chance to gerrymander, to change the rules of the game in their favor. Parties are necessary. They're inevitable. I don't know if they're necessary. They're inevitable and they're dangerous. And so institutions have to be designed to keep conflict from destroying the system itself from destroying liberty. In law school, American law students read Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in his book the Common Law, he literally begins the book with the line, the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. Law is not a Euclidean deduction from first principles. It's the accumulated experience of what works and what doesn't. Experiment and consequence. William James, the only major philosophical movement native to the United States. Pragmatism is kind of the ultimate expression of this humility in intellectual form. He once said in a lecture in 1907, the Attitude of looking away from first Things, principles, categories, supposed necessities, and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. That's pragmatism. Truth is something that happens to ideas as they're verified in reality, in experience. That's his formulation. Truth happens to an idea. Ideas aren't true. Truth is what happens to that idea once it goes out into the world and is buffeted by reality. He gives a name. He gives an intellectual superstructure to the core definitional habit of American civic life. Reinhold Niebuhr argued that democracy is necessary because mankind is flawed, not because mankind is perfect. He said human capacity for justice makes democracy possible. Human inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. This is sometimes called the tragic view of man. I don't think it is. It's the honest view of man that asks what people actually need. A good parent doesn't ask what a child wants, but what the child needs. A good parent looks at the flaws and limitations of their child not as a tragedy, but as part of what is perfect about the child, as part of what the world needs to be built around to help this child, to facilitate this child's growth into the world. Only flawed humans can fix themselves. Only from brokenness do we learn to repair that we have limitations is not a great tragedy. It's just something the system needs to be designed around if you want the system to work. The American willingness to look squarely at human frailty as the core principle of democratic institution building is not a tragic theory of mankind. It's a redemptive one. Judge Learned Hand had this famous speech in 1944, the Spirit of Liberty. And this is how he defines the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right. Humility is not weakness. Humility is the beginning of the building of true liberty. And I want to maybe chime in here with one more point made a little bit too flippantly and irresponsibly. But I think it's part of the story. Even if others can make it better, this is all very Christian. It's entirely possible that had Americans not been profoundly shaped by the kind of individualistic Christianity that transplanted to those shores, the great flowering of modern democracy could never have taken place. Secular liberals should be careful today in America about demanding that America tear itself free from its roots in these Christian mental frameworks, specifically individualistic Protestant mental frameworks. What replaces that great Christian sense of the brokenness of people and the redemptive potential that that brokenness holds within it? What secular theory could build? What this sense of humanity and of the world has built. Speaking of Christianity's role in all of this, Dr. Martin Luther King's promissory note in I have a Dream, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. He said that about the Founders. The founders wrote us a check of liberty, he said, and we refuse to believe that he came back from the bank of liberty marked insufficient funds. That's his metaphor in the speech. For America has failed its black citizens. But his whole point is America is great for the promise and now it has to fulfill its own promise to itself about what it is. America is not great because it's already achieved its creed and its highest potential and its highest purpose. It's great because the creed gives the wronged language to indict the country and demand redress, demand justice. America was built by people who assumed that Americans would fail to live up to the defining creed of America. And then they would pick up the pieces and try again. Learning the lessons of those failures. America's founders and leaders created texts explicitly so they could become weapons of reform. A future correction. Frederick Douglass made this point in the debate among the abolitionists for whether the Constitution was pro slavery, as Garrison argued. And he said no, it was an argument for freedom. He quote, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted. The Constitution is a glorious liberty document because in part because it doesn't fix America's meaning in place. It doesn't say, this is America. This is what America is. Don't you dare ever think America is something else. Sometimes America is wallowing in wickedness or failure of some kind. But the Constitution creates a mechanism for fighting over all of that, for change. America's central genius is that it never found a final theory of America. It's not an idea completed. It's endless assembled ranks of ideas and arguments going at each other, critiques battling it out. It's a centuries long argument with a flag and an anthem. I'll wind down here. And maybe the best way to wind down is with the unbelievable legacy of innovation that only these great tinkerers of the human soul and of political power and also of technology could possibly have given us JFK when he gave his Moon speech. We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. It's not humble in tone, but it's humble in the structure of it. America chooses a hard task in order to organize its energies. Not because success is guaranteed right, but because it's worth trying. Intellectual humility of the kind that defines America doesn't mean timidity it's the precondition for consistently and reliably doing great things. Going back to de Tocqueville, in a chapter titled why the Americans Are More Addicted to Practical than to Theoretical Science, he writes that their democratic life kind of funnels their intelligence away from abstractions and toward useful application and improvement. So, right. The same humility at the heart of the constitutional process drives invention. You don't obsess about better sounding philosophies of history. You build bridges and schools and telegraphs and vaccines and operating systems that solve specific problems in specific moments in time. And that's how America built the technological world we now live in, all of us. Long distance telegraph, Morse code telephone, recorded sound, modern electric lighting systems, the first commercial power station, the airplane, the assembly line, the skyscraper, the air conditioner, the credit card. You know, the transistor, the microprocessor, the computer mouse, Internet, gps, polio vaccine. Stop me when you get the point. Human Genome Project, the atom bomb. There wouldn't be a modern world of the type we know without Americans endlessly poking and probing the heart of things. The very idea of the startup so familiar to Israelis as a kind of civic myth, right? The small team in a garage getting a patent, making a pitch to a venture fund, the venture fund itself, tolerance for failure. That the whole system depends on very quick scaling. Once the idea works, that whole ecosystem, the whole model that gave us Google and Apple and intel, that's an American export. Could Europe have founded SpaceX or Tesla? China spends vast resources stealing intellectual property from the Americans. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth. You notice that America does not spend its days stealing great new ideas from the Chinese. If you were betting on which side of that equation would determine the future of the world, that imbalance in IP theft, it deserves a central place in your calculations. And by the way, a lot of these American innovations I'm just heading off the YouTube comments here were made by immigrants, but it was only, or at least mostly in America, where those innovations could be realized, could fight funding, could succeed and spread, could scale. It's not a biological trait of a particular race. It's an attitude. And it's the defining mental habit of Americans. One example I happen to be familiar with and love is Martin Guitars. This is a company that roughly 200 years ago, invented the modern acoustic guitar. The steel string that can blast out guitar sound that isn't nylon or at the time, catgut, you know, quiet kind of parlor guitar of the Spanish, but this big. That is an iconic, quintessential American musical instrument. Maybe more than the banjo, I don't know. But it's certainly competitive. And that steel string guitar was invented by a German immigrant who left Saxony because the bickering guilds in his town, the cabinet makers guild and the violin makers guilds, wouldn't let him make guitars. So he went to New York and then Pennsylvania, where he could make any old thing he wanted. If somebody would buy it, he could make it. So the modern steel string guitar is not just an American instrument because Americans bought it and Americans played music with it, and Americans created their music around it. It's an American instrument because structurally, it couldn't have come into being in Europe. The market wanted it, the craftsmen wanted to make it. And those two things come together nowhere on earth more perfectly and easily than in America. Friends. American innovation dominance and American liberty have the same roots, the same drivers. And those roots, ironically enough, are maybe paradoxically, our humility, deep intellectual humility at the heart of the whole project. America is an institutional argument against certainty. America is an invention machine because it lets rival visions compete without having a final theory of every old thing. America has a lot of dogmas, okay? Racial dogmas, religious dogmas, imperial dogmas. Not as many as other European countries, but some ideological dogmas, economic dogmas. It's not that America is always humble. It's not that Americans are always unwilling to adopt theories. Look at all the young people convinced that socialism has never been tried. It's that the American cultural, social, political, intellectual operating system is fundamentally opposed to the idea that anyone or anything is infallible. It assumes that human beings are flawed. It assumes that knowledge is partial. It assumes that faction and polarization inevitable, that power corrupts, that the future is unknowable. America is not a noun. It's a verb. It's a practice. It's a way of doing things. It doesn't claim to know where history is going. It builds ships of state for people who know that storms will come. America isn't humble. Americans are the least humble people you'll ever meet. But America is humility itself. Not in their behavior, but in institutional design. They know real things because they doubt that things are knowable at all. So nobody knows what America will be in 250 years. Nobody knows what the world will look like in 25 years. America, therefore, doesn't need or want or should, should totally reject any theory of history, any eternal truth, dialectics of historical thesis and antithesis and processes of historical development that intellectuals claim to see through the chaos of endless, unknowable. I'll Stop that sentence now. America is not an answer to any specific theory of history. It's an answer to the unknowability, to human limitation. No one knows what America will be in a century or a quarter millennium, and that's not a defect. That is the American idea. The future is not scripted for us. To the American, the future is a responsibility. Prosaic, pragmatic, straightforward. And that very sense of things is the heart and engine of the sustained human flourishing, the and freedom ever since July 4, 1776. Friends, July 4th is a celebration, but the days between the July 4ths are the miracle itself. Many people have wished you a happy Fourth of July, America. Just as the Sabbath is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Precisely because it is routine and consistent and comes often. What you do routinely and ordinarily is more important and more central and a greater engine of betterment and holiness than what you do only on far distant holidays. America isn't special because of a long ago war against the British Empire. It's special for the everyday changes it produces in the world and the example it sets in the world of institutional design and human humility that produces things you should not be humble about, for the refusal to succumb to grand stupid theories, and for the example you've set that humanity can in fact better itself by understanding itself. So here I am, five days after July 4th, on a regular old Thursday, which for that very reason is the most important day of American history. The ordinary every day when real people actually live. Wishing you America, a happy and argumentative and endlessly productive and unbelievably innovative second quarter millennium. You got this, America. You were born for this. Thanks for listening.