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Them Before Us Podcast
Them Before Us #087 | How Can We Teach College Students to Seek Truth | Professor Robert P. George
00:35:12
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- [00:00]
Jen Friesen
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Them Before Us podcast. I'm your host, Jen Friesen, and today we have a great conversation interview with Dr. Robert P. George, who is McCormick professor of Jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which is at Princeton. And he's coming on to talk about his book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. And it was such a great conversation. I. I've interviewed him before for the Them Before Us podcast early on when we were still using Zoom. And he is such a brilliant thinker and for someone who is so seasoned and has been a professor for so long, he is so compelling. It's very obvious to see why he's been such a popular professor and teacher. And he's a great writer and a great thinker. He's a pioneer in the thinking about natural law. And so I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation and we highly encourage you to go grab the book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth on Amazon. But we hope you enjoy this conversation with Robert P. George. Hello, Professor George, thanks so much for joining us. It's an honor to have you back on the Them Before Us podcast.
- [01:17]
Dr. Robert P. George
Thank you, Jen. It's a pleasure to be back.
- [01:19]
Jen Friesen
Let's dive right in. I'd love to start by you just giving us a quick overview of the book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, and then why you thought it was a good time right now, culturally, to write this book.
- [01:32]
Dr. Robert P. George
Well, I've been an academic now for 40 years, four decades, all at Princeton, punctuated with a few visits up at Harvard Law School. And over that time I've taught something between 8 and 10,000 students. And so I'm kind of an observer of students attitudes. And I've noticed over the course of the past decade, students, not all students, of course, but many students, falling down what I would call the drain of believing that a reliable guide to truth is how they feel about things. And of course, this leaves them with a kind of unsophisticated, relativistic notion of truth. It generates such bizarre and utterly implausible concepts as the idea that you have your truth and I have my truth. And they may be in conflict, but your truth is what's true for you and my truth is what's true for me. In fact, there is no your truth in my truth. There's only the truth. Now, we can be wrong about it. You can be wrong about it, I can be wrong about. We both can be wrong about it. We can never get the whole truth, not in this veil of tears, frail, fallible, fallen creatures that we are. But there is a truth worth striving for, and we can attain it imperfectly, not completely, always admixed with some error, but we can get at or nearer the truth. We can deepen our understanding. And what that means is just believing in a way that's in touch with reality, not believing falsehoods, especially not believing comfortable falsehoods or ideologically welcome falsehoods. It means trying to believe what truly is the case, getting your beliefs in line with. With reality. So the. The book is really a collection of the essays that I've written over the past 10 years or so when I've faced the emergence among my students of these kinds of attitudes. And it's really a response to them. It's an effort at the end of the day to do what I see my vocation as doing. I want to do in the book for people who aren't in my classroom, what I tried to do for the students who are in my classroom, the young men and women entrusted by their family to my charge and the charge of my fellow professors. And that is form them to be. It's very difficult, but form them to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. And if we in the professoriate can manage that, if we can form our young men and women to be determined truth seekers and really courageous truth speakers, we will also make them lifelong learners and the very best of citizens, especially for a democratic republic. The very best of citizens, determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers, make great Democratic Republican citizens.
- [04:34]
Jen Friesen
That's amazing. I think anyone who's seen any of the college campus protests or you see those Q and A's with college students, love the idea of helping craft people. Students, young people who are seeking truth and speaking it courageously, because we've seen just the complete opposite. What. What would you say shifted us from. I think the book talks about it is more the age of reason to an age of the emotions and the emotionalism driving it. What was the big thing that moved us from one to the other?
- [05:05]
Dr. Robert P. George
Well, once you start tracing things back in human affairs, especially bad things, trying to figure out, you know, when did this happen? Before long, you find yourself back in the Garden of Eden with Eve and the. And the serpent. But there have been some. Some key moments, I think the rise of secularism, really beginning in an earnest way, in a serious way, among masses of people in the mid to late 19th century, and then very badly exacerbated, especially in Europe by the First World War and the Carnage and inexplicability of the, of the First World War. And then of course, the rise of the sexual revolution, beginning really in the late 1940s with Alfred Kinsey's so called research on sex. I mean, it was only research in inverted commas. That's why I call it so so called. It was really fraudulent research. But it persuaded a lot of people that the old Judeo Christian concepts of sexual morality that sex belonged in marriage and was improper, immoral, outside of the marital bond. People became convinced by Kinsey's. I said Kinsey's pseudoscience that the old Judeo Christian morality was a relic of a retrograde past. It left people with twisted personalities, it made people into prudes, it damaged the kind of free development of the personality. And that the way forward was with kind of liberal ideas about sex. And sex is really a need and it's got to be fulfilled. And it doesn't matter whether you're fulfilled in marriage or out of marriage with one partner or multiple partners, with partners of the same sex or partners of the opposite sex. The next big step there is the emergence in the early to mid-1950s of soft core porn, the normalization of softcore porn, beginning with Hugh Hefner's very commercially successful Playboy magazine. And then, you know, the invention of the birth control pill, the anovulent birth control pill in the 1960s and the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s leads to lots more promiscuity, the kind of mainstreaming of out of wedlock, cohabitation between opposite sexes, the rise of the divorce culture. Now all of this has absolutely tragic consequences. Instances, broken families, children born out of wedlock. Usually that means without a father in the picture. It's been especially devastating for the most vulnerable sectors of society, poor and often minority communities here in the United States and in other places as well, of course. So all of this contributed, I think, to the emergence of what I call the age of feeling. Now what I mean by that is this. You know, the historians are fond of breaking up the various historical epochs into the age of this and the age of that. And so we're told that the medieval period was the age of faith. The idea there is that for the medieval thinkers, you think of some great ones, for example, Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition and Maimonides in the Jewish tradition, and various figures, Averroes and so forth in the Islamic tradition. But for the medievals, the touchstone of truth, of goodness, of rightness, of justice, is conformity with the teachings of Religions, the teachings of the faiths. Now, that's an oversimplification, of course, and it can be misleading if you take that to mean that the medievals weren't interested in reason. I mean, if you read some Maimonides or some Aquinas or any of the other great thinkers of the period, you know that these were people who put a very high premium on rational discourse, rational inquiry, logical precision, careful attention to evidence, and so forth. And yet it's still true. I think there's a sense in which it's true to say the medieval period really was an age of faith. Well, these same historians tell us that the Enlightenment era was the age of reason, or sometimes they'll say the age of science. And what they have in mind there is that now the touchstone of truth, goodness, of justice, of right, is conformity with reason and especially with science. So we do experiments to try to figure out what's true or not. We follow the evidence wherever the evidence leads. Now, there's an element of truth in that, too. There is a sense in which it is true that the Enlightenment was an age of reason. The Enlightenment thinkers put a very big priority, very heavy premium of their own on reason. But it's also misleading if it suggests that all of the great Enlightenment thinkers had abandoned faith. They hadn't. Some did, especially in the French Enlightenment. But even in the case of some of the French Enlightenment thinkers, and certainly in the case of Scottish Enlightenment and English Enlightenment and German Enlightenment thinkers, you had lots of people who were, while placing a very high value on reason, also people of faith. So if the Middle Age period or the Middle Ages, if the Medieval period was the age of faith and the Enlightenment era was the age of reason, in what age do we live? That's my question. And regrettably, from my point of view, the answer we have to give is we live in the age of feeling. Because for so many people today, and especially our precious young people, who've really fallen into a ditch here, for so many people today, the touchstone of truth, of goodness, of conformity. I'm sorry, of goodness, of rightness, of justice, is conformity with one's feelings. So how one feels about something determines whether it's true or false. And I say regrettably, and I called that a ditch because, my goodness, Jen, it's hard to think of any more unreliable God to what's true than feeling, than emotion. It so easily takes us astray, it so easily overwhelms our reason and leads us down to things that are really out of line not only with faith, but with reason as well. So my own view of these things is that we should abandon the goofy belief that feeling is a reliable God to truth and in our fallible, fallen way, but nevertheless try to rely on reason and faith, treating faith and reason not as in conflict with each other, because they're not, but in harmony with each other, working together to try to get at the truth of things. The late pontiff, the great John Paul ii, one of the greatest popes of all history, and those of us who lived at his time were blessed to live in that time. Pope John Paul ii, in an encyclical letter that he wrote to the world, not just to the Catholic community, wrote to the world on faith and reason, opens the letter by saying, faith and reason are the two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of the truth. Faith and reason aren't in conflict or even tension with each other. They are mutually supporting, and you need them both. I was born and brought up in the heart of Appalachia in the hills of West Virginia. And hunting was a big thing down there, and bird hunting was something that we did. And if you've ever been bird hunting and you shoot a bird, but you just wing it, as we say, you hit it in a wing, you damage it, you don't actually kill the bird. The bird falls to the earth. One wing is damaged. The other wing is not damaged. It'll flap that undamaged wing furiously, trying to get back up off the ground and into the air. But because the other wing isn't working, it'll just go around in a circle on the ground. I've seen it so many times. You really do need both wings for the bird to fly. The bird needs both wings to fly. We human beings need both wings. The wings of faith, the wing of faith and the wing of reason, to ascend, as John Paul II says, to contemplation of the truth.
- [13:23]
Jen Friesen
That's so good. It does make me think, you know, them before us, and we're lay people that are concerned with the issues of marriage and family, so we're not scholars. And this book is so good. There's so many great chapters, and it's very. It can be feel very scholarly, but especially the first section just talks about the human person, the ethical and the metaphysical. You know, realities about human dignity. And you even have a chapter on human embryos are human beings, which I'd love you to speak on. But it's made me think, you know, in our age the things done before us is concerned with is divorce, you know, single parent by choice, going and creating a bunch of embryos or using donor conception, sperm and egg donation because we feel the marriage is over. This is not making me happy anymore. I want to leave or, you know, I want a child so desperately, it's okay that I violate the rights of a child to procure a child. And our solution for all of society's problems is that a man and woman need to stay married, they need to raise their children, and we see that as sort of the antidote to society's problems. Do you think strong family structure helps answer our desire, like our culture's desire to move towards emotionalism? Are they connected at all? Is it the rise of sort of the single parent, the single mother household that's led us toward emotionalism? What do you, do you think those connect at all?
- [14:47]
Dr. Robert P. George
No question about it. The greatest cause of our most urgent problems is the collapse of the family. I mean, that's basically it. Family disintegration, failures of family formation, children being brought up in single parent homes. Usually that means fatherlessness without a male role model, you know, centrally in the, in the picture. Sometimes that means, you know, with a mother who's got a boyfriend who's not the father of the children, or a string of boyfriends running through the house with no real father in the, in the picture. It's about as dangerous a situation as you can find yourself in if you're a kid, you know, to be in a home with your mother, but the guy she's with is, is not your father. It's not that every man in that situation is a bad guy or an abuser, but the data is what the data is. That's a dangerous position to be in. And where we failed, as the great Katie Fausta says, where we failed so often is putting us, that is adults ahead of them, that is children. Adults favoring their own desires, their own feelings, their own emotions over the needs, and I would argue the rights of their children. And we need to flip that now. That means adults have to make sacrifices. That means we. I can't focus on me, me, me and feeling good and living the life I want to live. You know, I've got obligations to these kids and I've got to prioritize those and subordinate my own wants and desires. That's what them before us is all about, which is why I'm so happy and proud to support what you do. So I think we do need to put them, that is children and their needs and their rights ahead of us adults and our wants and our desires and our emotions and our feelings.
- [16:52]
Jen Friesen
One of the other terms that comes up in one of the essays is the idea of the triumph of will, human will over nature. And it seems like that's the case in some of the topics that we're concerned with, with ivf, with surrogacy, third party reproduction, that are often separating children from their biological parents in a way we haven't seen before. It's not even been possible before. So how do those reflect that term? Yeah, triumph of the will over nature.
- [17:20]
Dr. Robert P. George
Well, I think what the fundamental concern here is. I know it's the concern for me, and I think it's the concern for. For you and for Katie and for your organization. And I think it is for most people of goodwill, the concern is that we have prioritized adult desire over children's needs. And in the process of doing that, we've adopted an essentially commodified view of the child. We no longer treat the child as a subject of justice and dignity and human rights, but rather as an object for the fulfilling of the desires of the parents or the parent. So you want a child. You're entitled to a child. You can get that child, whoever, by whatever means necessary to get the child. Well, that's treating a child as if it's a product of manufacture, as if he or she is an object and not a precious human being, a subject. The child there is reduced to the status of a means. But the reality is, the moral reality is the child is not a mere means to your ends or my ends, or your fulfillment or my fulfillment. The child is an end in himself or herself. The child doesn't exist to satisfy and please us. The child exists as a precious subject of justice, human dignity, human rights. And it's our job to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to protect the dignity and the rights of the children for whom we are responsible. Now, at a certain level, that means all children, because at a certain level, all of us are responsible for all children. But there's a special sense in which we're responsible for the children we bring into the world. And even the terms and conditions under which they come into the world are things we have responsibility about. We have the responsibility not to bring children in the world under terms and conditions that essentially treat them as products of manufacture, as objects. In fact, we've gotten to the crazy point in our society where there's no other word for it. We're selling children. They are products for sale. This is bad. We've got to do something to change minds and hearts and laws. Some people say, well, we can't change laws until we change hearts and minds. That's actually not true. Part of how you change hearts and minds is you work for the change of laws. You get legal protection for children so that their rights and their dignity is protected in law. And that helps to shape our cultural understandings. It's really a half truth, Jen, to say that law or politics is downstream from culture. Yeah, it is true that other cultural institutions and factors affect or shape law and policy, but that's only the half truth. The rest of the truth is law and policy themselves shape attitudes, beliefs, consciousness, other aspects of culture. So we need to be working in every domain we can in education, in religion, in journalism, in philanthropy, certainly in law and in policy, to straighten things out so that children are treated as human beings, as subjects, as persons with dignity, and we are not relegating them to the status of mere means to fulfill their parents desires.
- [21:15]
Jen Friesen
That's very encouraging too, because anyone listening to this can find their place where they can help advocate for children, whatever context they're in, their church, or maybe they are involved in policy and legal, or they're a professor or a teacher, a homeschool co op teacher. They can be advocating for children because we need, yeah, like you said, a multi pronged approach to changing hearts and laws. And we've talked about that. We want to change culture, technology. Oh, go ahead.
- [21:41]
Dr. Robert P. George
Yeah. So I wrote the book for a couple of audiences. One, to empower people like you, Jen and Katie, and people who are doing the work you do, and not just leaders like you, of movements, but people who want to play a role. They can't play leadership. They've got other obligations, they have their jobs, they're raising their children and so forth, but they want to play a role. I want to arm them with analysis, with arguments, so that they can be more effective in the public square. And number two, I wrote Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth to Our Young People to help them to see that this idea that we can be guided by our feelings reliably to the truth is an illusion and a dangerous illusion that there's no such thing as your truth and my truth. There's the truth. It's often hard to know. We'll never know it perfectly. As I say, we're fallible. We're going to get some things wrong. And yet our constant endeavor should be to try our best to get as close to the truth or the fullness of truth as we can. To deepen our understanding every step of the way. So I hope that parents and grandparents of high school and college age kids will get the book into their hands. I mean, read the book yourself. I want adults to read it too, but I really want this to be in the hands of high school and college age kids. I know that some of the essays are challenging, but I've written it with students in mind. It's really the fruit of my 40 years of teaching young men and women. This is not one of my scholarly books that I've got some of those where, you know, I've written them for 400 or 300 other scholars in the field across the world. This is not one of those. It's not laden with jargon. It's, that's, it's not something that, you know, you have to puzzle over every sentence or you have to have a background in philosophy or political theory to understand. I've really written this book for a general audience. So if you have a kid who's a high school kid or grandchild. Grandchild who's in high school or in college, buy the book for them, give it to them for their birthday or down the road for Christmas or whatever. But these are the people whose understandings I want to enhance so that they will see that whatever their friends may say, whatever their teachers may say, whatever the YouTube or TikTok might say, the idea that there's just your truth and my truth and none know the truth is a ditch. The idea that we can be guided reliably by our feelings and emotions, that's a dangerous illusion. We've got to get to work using the resources of faith and reason to get at the truth of things.
- [24:37]
Jen Friesen
Yeah, you've talked about. Education just isn't just about learning facts about things, you know, being able to spit it back, but it's about shaping people who seek the truth and courageously share it. And what advice would you other advice would you give to parents who are trying to raise kids with moral clarity in today's culture? So getting the book and reading it together, you know, read a chapter together, talk about it at dinner, seems like such a great idea. Do you have any other advice for parents who are. They want to create the kind of kids you're talking about before they get to your class?
- [25:07]
Dr. Robert P. George
Well, let's look at, let's begin by looking at the challenges they're up against. They're up against an ideology that's being propounded by the great institutions of society, educational, political, economic, corporations and so forth. And even Some, in many cases, religious institutions who are feeding them the nonsense. That feeling is a reliable guide to truth. That you have your truth and I have my truth. I mean, that's a powerful enemy to be up against, but it is an enemy. We have to treat it as an enemy. We gotta love our enemies. Of course. Speak truth in love. I'm all for that, 100%, but we gotta speak truth. We have to speak truth courageously. Our young people, Jen, need role models. Those parents, those grandparents, those pastors, those teachers, those coaches have influence with kids. Preach, yes, talk. You need to use words. But that's the less important half of the equation. It's setting an example of being a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker that's even more important. Now, I'm not saying. Not going to let people off the hook when it says by saying, well, if you set a good example, you don't have to actually say any words to your children or grandchildren or the kids you're coaching or the kids you're pastoring or whatever. No, you have to use words. You have to talk. But even more importantly, you have to set an example at the end of the book. And you know you can. Since it's really a collection of essays, you can start in the book anywhere. You don't have to start on page one. For a lot of parents, especially high schoolers, college kids, parents of those. Encourage your kids to start at the back of the book. The fourth section is a series of chapters on prophets and truth seekers and truth speakers. I have a chapter on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident who came to the United States and spoke truth to us, not only about the evils of the Soviet Union, but about the failures of the west itself, giving up on its own most important and cherished values. I have a chapter on the Jewish Christian German poet of the 19th century, Heinrich Heine, who brilliantly foresaw 100 years before Hitler's rise to power what would happen, and in fact did happen, if Germany abandons its faith, its historic Judeo Christian understanding of things. I have a chapter in there on my beloved late friend, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who was a great truth seeker and courageous truth speaker. I have a chapter. I'm a banjo player. As I said, I'm from the hills of West Virginia. Little boys are issued banjos at birth there. And I grew up as a banjo player. And one of my heroes was a banjo player named Ralph Stanley from Clinch Mountain, Virginia. And he was not only A great banjo player. He was a great truth speaker, especially about the Christian faith. And he integrated his music with his truth, speaking without being preachy, without being offensive, but with a deep kind of sincerity. So I hold these kinds of figures up as role models, as people our kids can look up to. We parents and we pastors and we teachers and we coaches. We have to be role models, too. It's not just the famous people and the celebrities. God bless the ones who are good role models. They do great good. And as for the ones who are bad role models, they do great harm. Unfortunately, there are more of them doing great harm than doing great good. But God bless the ones who do great good. But we can't rely just on the celebrities. It's mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and auntie and uncle and coach and pastor and librarian and teacher. It's the people who are with the kids, who know them by name, who can do the real carry the load, the bulk of the load of setting the example that our young men and women need. In my experience, by the way, Jen, if you challenge kids to be better, to be more thoughtful, to be deeper, they'll rise to the challenge they really do. I have to do this. I've been doing it for 40 years. We much more often underestimate what our children are capable of doing, including morally. We much more often underestimate than overestimate. Our problem is not that we put burdens on them they can't carry. Our problems is that we are reluctant to challenge them. And sometimes you know why? Sometimes it's because of a lack of courage on our part. We're afraid to challenge our kids to be more virtuous, to be more upright, to be willing to make sacrifices, to be willing to do hard things, to become masters of themselves, mastering their emotions, exercising self control in all domains of life. All right, we got to cut that out. Let's challenge our kids. If you do it, I tell you, 40 years of experience, if you do it, those kids will rise to the challenge.
- [30:37]
Jen Friesen
That's amazing. Yeah. We all have those adults we could think of that didn't just pretend they knew all the answers or just cut you off when you tried to ask questions. But they would if they didn't know the answer, they would say, let's go find that out together, or let me get back to you. And so when adults are modeling, I'm going to seek truth and not just say something just because I've always heard it said that way. And then, like you've said, the second Part of that is living truth out and speaking it courageously. Those adults really do set the tone for kids to learn how to do it. And then when those adults challenge you, it's much different. We can all think of those teachers and coaches that have impacted us so deeply, and they are the kind of people you're describing.
- [31:17]
Dr. Robert P. George
You know, people sometimes ask me, you know, where do you get the courage in the Ivy League to speak out against the dominant opinions and to question the most sacred dogmas of the folks on the secular left? And, you know, how do you survive at Princeton and all this stuff? Well, you know, it's actually no merit of mine. I had the example of wonderful parents and then the blessing of teachers who showed me what it means to speak truth to power, who showed me what it means to be willing to stand up and say something unpopular on a college campus, something out of whack with the beliefs of most of their colleagues. And I'll tell you, I admired them so much. I wanted to be like them, I wanted to emulate them. And it's a lot easier. I mean, I don't have a big problem because I, I have been shaped by them some. To some extent it's by their words, by their exhortations, by their teaching, but to a greater extent by their example.
- [32:21]
Jen Friesen
It's beautiful. Well, we encourage everyone listening to go get Professor George's book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. So many great essays, like he said, you can jump around to the ones that are most interesting or relevant to your context. And Professor George, what other ways can people go see the work that you're doing?
- [32:42]
Dr. Robert P. George
Well, you can follow me on Twitter if you like. I'm McCormick. Prof. My chair at Princeton is the McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence. So on Twitter I'm just McCormickProf. Or you can visit my website, robertpgeorge.com and at the website you can have access to my essays that are, you know, published sometimes in academic journals, but often in, you know, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, or other popular venues. It also has the schedule of my speaking engagements. If you'd like to hear me, I'll probably at some point or another be, be near some of most of your listeners. And there's other information in there that I like to share with people about things that matter to me. Oh, also my music videos, my banjo playing videos are up there. So there's the, there's the website. You can also look at the work I and my colleagues are doing at Princeton in the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions. And you just Google James Madison Program at Princeton and you'll get to our website and I think you'll be very heartened, especially if you're despairing about the state of higher education. I think you'll be very encouraged by what you see at the website. What we've got going in the Madison program at Princeton is a really great thing, and our young people are benefiting from it massively. And we're showing that it can be done. With all the problems we have in higher education today, and all the group think and all the conformism and all the ideology and indoctrination and dogmatism, we're a place where you get real learning, where anybody can ask any question, challenge any orthodoxy, speak his or her mind, be encouraged to do that, dissent from the prevailing dogmas or anything else. It can be done, and we're showing it can be done.
- [34:30]
Jen Friesen
Professor George, we're so thankful for your work and yeah, I know people listening are so thankful. There are folks like you at those higher levels of education and I think you said 8,000 to 10,000 students have come through your classes and yeah, I.
- [34:43]
Dr. Robert P. George
Counted it up over four decades. Of course, I couldn't get it precisely, but something between 1,000 and 10,000.
- [34:49]
Jen Friesen
It's amazing to think of students who've been impacted by you and just challenged to what you're doing, to seek the truth and to be creative, courageous about it. So we're so thankful for you. Thank you so much for your time on our podcast today.
- [35:00]
Dr. Robert P. George
My pleasure. Thank you, Jen, and thanks for the work you and Katie and the gang are doing.