The Daily Stoic - Andrew Sullivan on The Classics, Independence, and the Human Experience

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

Ryan talks to Andrew Sullivan about his new book “Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989-2021,'' the common culture that we find through ancient and classic texts, the fine line between truth and being out of touch with reality, and more.Andrew Sullivan is one of today’s most provocative social and political commentators. A former editor of The New Republic, he was the founding editor of The Daily Dish, and has been a regular writer for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, New York magazine, The Sunday Times (London), and now The Weekly Dish. Andrew is the author of several books, including “The Conservative Soul,” and '”Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality.” He lives in Washington, DC, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. For a limited time, UCAN is offering you 30% off on your first order when you use code STOIC at checkout Just go to UCAN.CO/STOICNovo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. This year, get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at bank novo.com/STOICNew Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you’d normally buy separately, so engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place. Get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100GB of data free, forever – no credit card required! Sign up at NewRelic.com/stoic.Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free!As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Andrew Sullivan: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go

for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars, and in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To me, the job of a writer is to to make people think it's to challenge them. Right, and I respect to challenge them, right? And I respect writers and thinkers who are not always on the popular side of things, who clearly think for themselves.

When I interviewed Peter Tiel for my book, Conspiracy, and Peter is a complicated individual who I don't agree with on a lot of things. Peter said that he's often seen as contrarian, which people get wrong. Like being a contrarian, this is not that impressive a thing. That's just taking what other people think and doing the opposite.

Well, what if people are right, right? Now you're wrong by nature of just reacting against that. He said, my job, he says, what I try to do is think for myself, think independently. And so I really admire writers and thinkers and leaders that do that. They think independently. They come up with their own views. They're not wedded to one party or dogma or style of thinking. This makes them originically, preposterously wrong way out there on certain things.

And you got to take the good with the bad, though, right? Because it's hard to get original thinking if you're not an original thinker, if you don't think for yourself. So that's why I like Andrew Sullivan's writing. Okay, and I don't agree with all of it. I often disagree with him. I watch him work himself into rabbit holes or go down what seemed to me to be blind alleys at best, complete dead ends in other cases. But he has challenged my thinking in a lot of ways and he has made open to my eyes to things that I wouldn't have considered otherwise. I grew up in a pretty conservative household. Andrew Sullivan wrote in 1989,

when I was two years old, the first national cover story in favor of marriage equality. Then in 1993, for the new Republican wrote a piece on the politics of homosexuality, which was of enormously consequential piece of writing in the gay rights movement. He was also one of the first political writers to champion the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Then I think he was early on predicting

some of the dangers and risks in the rise of Trump. He's a fascinating writer and now he's one of the sort of big voices on Substack. I get his weekly dish newsletter. I'm a paying subscriber. I've gotten it. I used to read him when he was writing for New York Magazine. He's just a fascinating writer and I had a really great conversation with him. It was so fun. We had some technical difficulties while we were doing it. It dropped out for a while. I thought I lost him.

This is in the middle of the freeze we had here in Texas that I recorded it in. I could tell it was affecting some power and broadband issues. But anyways, he stuck around and came back. I think we had a great conversation. One of the ones I was very much looking forward to. And I think you're going to like it. He's a provocative social and political commentator. He's a great podcaster, great newsletter as well.

He's a founding editor of the Daily Dish. He's written for the New York Times magazine, the Atlantic Time, Newsweek, New York Magazine the Sunday Times, and now his sub-stack, The Weekly Dish, can be found at AndrewSolivan.substack.com. You can follow him at SullyDish. I think this was a great conversation. I was excited to bring it to you. And remember, my job here on this podcast is to bring challenging voices, is to talk to people who you might not have heard from otherwise.

And it's to also remember, I love this from Tyler Cowan. I have the conversations that I want to have, right? You get to listen to them. You don't have to listen to them if you don't like them, right? You don't have to like everyone that I talk to. You don't even have to like how I have the conversation. This is free, after all. So if you don't like it, don't listen to it. But I think you're going to like this one.

It was an interview. I was very excited to have you talk about the classics. We talk about a little bit of politics, talked about thinking for oneself, talk about the dangers of social media, and a bunch of other great topics. You can check out his new book, It's Really an Anthology of His Best Most Consequential Pieces. It's called Out on a Lymph, selected writing 1989 to 2021. It was released late last year. His other books, the Conservative Soul and Virtually Normal and Argument About Homosexuality are also available.

He lives in Washington, D.C. and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Of course, follow him on substackandrucelevent.substack.com. Enjoy. You and I have had very different paths, but as far as the classics go, ended up in a similar place, I thought maybe we would start there. I assume your introduction to the great texts of the Greeks and Romans came through school,

or did you, were you more of an auto-died Act? No, I was, I did Latin all the way up through Oxford actually. So my first reading of, and this sounds, I can't believe I'm so much, I'm so much dumber than I used to be, but I used to be able to be given a passage of English and translated into Latin in the style of Tacitus, Cicero and Livy. So that's, and I was sitting team when I was doing that. And I am so much Dumber today. And we weren't really taught holistically in high school, anyway, my grandma school about the text themselves. So I only really read them as in graduate school and political philosophy, which is really my fundamental orientation to the classics.

It's kind of remarkable. I mean, what you just described is insane to me, because I had no background in any of that. But as remarkable as hearing someone had that today, to think that 150 years ago, anyone who was educated had that. You read about settlers on the frontier, reading Plutarch in Latin, and it's just sort of blows your mind,

the intimacy and the intellectual power that these seemingly simple people had as far as a handful of texts go. Yeah. And for me, that we introduced to just familiar features of a civilized education. I was a bit of a nerd. I really loved Latin. My biggest regret was that I chose to do study German rather than ancient Greek at the same time. I would have, I really wish I'd learned ancient Greek because to read the gospels in the original

would be just, it's how can one, how come I'm really be a Christian without having that experience in a way? But yeah, and I would, I know I was a super nerd. I was trying to avoid all social interaction as a little shy gay boy, but I would, I added my own extracurricular translation of the idiot by myself, for no one but me.

I would not do. I was just interested in how you could translate basically a prose poem into a similar kind of thing for English. Now, of course, my education as an English schoolboy in the 70s compared to someone from the 1870s would have been pathetic. Right. They mastered the ancient world. It always was a... Fascinating to me, at Oxford, where I went, did modern history, modern history begins with the end of the Roman Empire. They, which is incredibly, just...

just demarcating that, is an incredibly helpful thing for a young mind, because it just makes you begin to see a little bit of perspective. So this whole, the whole 2002 millennia that we've lived in since Christ, you can take that again all the way back since before Christ, and you still wouldn't really be

at Plato. that again all the way back since before Christ. And you still wouldn't really be a play-doh. Also, it's just fascinating. Yeah, we kind of, maybe it's because American history is so short that we, at least Americans, do kind of compress that whole ancient Greece, ancient Rome period down into maybe a couple centuries. It struck me a few years ago I was reading a passage in Marx's Realises Meditations where he sites this line from Euripides that I didn't recognize.

So I was looking it up. It's from a lost play. So the thought occurred to me, how long between Marx and Euripides and markets are really as senior rippities, right? And it was longer than Shakespeare and us, right? And so when you get a sense of how ancient, even ancient history was, it kind of humbles you just how far the past stretches back and that this period, these empires,

were not as brief as we like to think they were. No, and more mind-blowing to me, I mean, that was an early sign of the need for humility in understanding the world because we live in this this cults of content pernayity in which whatever is newest is necessarily better than anything that has come before. And I never, I never bought into that partly because of my Catholicism, but the other thing is the fact that people with brains like ours, you know, basically people that would be recognizable to also humans have been on the planet for 150,000 years.

Right. For me, I remember watching a show once that was about cave art. And they were going through these various caves and looking at it from different eras. And one thing they noted, and this is, I'm just a legitimate, so if you give me if I get a detail wrong, but they noticed that the paint style in one bunch of caves was identical in the way it was done, in the pigments it used to another one, and they were 10,000 years apart.

So basically, all of the history that we understand, just the difference between those two paintings. Yes. But equally, a sense of a human culture that did not change that is the other mind-blower, which is that we forget that not only do we have a cult of content-pronationity, we have this absolute pathological pursuit of change. And that of course has just sped up and sped up and sped up until we are currently in this kind of frenzy of liquid modernity, which is, I think, why, to be honest with you, someone like Marcus Aurelius, feels so necessary. Yes.

You know, so welcome. Feels like this wonderful calm breath of sane air. But yeah, you go to the founders and they're sort of obsession with those classic texts. How weirdly similar their lives were to those ancient people, even down to the institution of slavery, is this historical constant for thousands of years, you know, the fragility

of human life is constant. The plagues disease, all these things that now to us seem antiquated were really not antiquated even a hundred years ago. Yeah. The other plagues, you mentioned, well plagues, they are modern phenomenon. They do not stretch back more than a few thousand years, but cars, there's not the dothrails, they really didn't move enough and they didn't congregate and begin off numbers to facilitate epidemics of disease. So that's another thing. We think it plays, also it was ancient.

No, plague's quite recent. The humans have existed and constructed meaningful lives and communities, which I think is probably a better way of putting it because they weren't all civilizations as such. Forever. We just have no ability to grasp that continuity and that length of change anymore. And the classics did use to have that purpose perspective before anything else. Well, I think one of the other things they do provide that we struggle with, and I certainly am

sympathetic to the arguments that, you know, it is for a large, large extent to a bunch of old white guys, although it's more diverse than people think, and the perspectives are more diverse than people think. But there is some value in a shared intellectual culture where everyone, it almost doesn't actually matter what the techs are. I mean, I think, I think we chose widely with the classics, but the idea that everyone was taught from a handful of texts, and thus it's capable, even in the 1800s when Lincoln is making illusions from the Bible or from the Odyssey or from these classical texts,

even these ignorant farmers are familiar with the notes that he's striking. His texts are powerful to us today, but if you had heard the second inaugural in person, it would have resonated with you even deeper because everyone would have from an early age heard those phrases in those texts and been familiar with them in a way that you're not when there is no sort of educational consensus about what the great texts are. Yes, it provides what my call a common culture. I mean, and you're right, that we can understand Shakespeare if we haven't fully understood the sources that he was reading. And those span from obviously the ancients to someone as recent as Machiavelli, all the

way in which these ideas were unaware of how these ideas have sort of saturated themselves to such an extent that you're not even aware of the antecedents. So it's like a joke about someone who goes to Hamlet and is asked afterwards, what did you think? And he said, well, it was just full of so many quotes that he didn't realize that he knew Hamlet. He didn't realize it. Or in England, the book of Common Prayer was something that became this iconic part of the English language and English literature. And that creates a verbal universe at a literary universe in which you can assume certain touch stones and then play with them.

That the modernity can play with these, but only if you know them in advance. Afterwards, they become gibberish. Or you read someone like Montagne in the 16th century, and literally almost every essay of his is packed full of classical references. In fact, it's sort almost like a scientist referring to studies. He constantly refers to ancient texts. And I'm not even citing them. It's just, hey, here's a Latin phrase, and I assume that you not only speak Latin, but you will remember what book from Virgil this is referencing. And then when you go back, which which I did in in college and check those original quotes and you realize he's making a joke actually, it means the opposite. There's irony here. It means that he's cut off that last bit or that it's a pun. There are so many things that you're

missing because of this fundamental lack of civilizational knowledge. And you say dead white men. I mean, I don't, I really just, they are dead and they were men. But white is such a weird thing to say about people living in the, you know, the, the, the, the, the East in Mediterranean. I know. The epic. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories.

It's just all categories. It's all categories. It's all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's all categories. It's all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's all categories. It's just all categories. It's just all categories. It's all categories. It and the Middle East in one country known as Rome. Augustine was African. I mean, it was living in North Africa. I mean, this is,

and you ask the average person there with the, oh, Augustine is this sort of white guy with a long white beard. Yeah, and I, that's also fascinating too, because of course, we haven't selected them because of the race of this, in nature of their race. We haven't selected them and abandoned lots of others by the way. They were really awful because the test of time, that's all.

That is ultimately the test. We read Augustine today, and it is simply shocking how contemporary he feels. And that for me has always been the thrill of the classics that suddenly we understand the psyche of someone. I remember reading a, Livy, no, it's not Livy, it's, um, God, why am I liking on this? Pliny, Pliny the Younger.

Now, Pliny's Little Letters and Notes about being a provincial governor. He has a little thing about watching dolphins. He, you know, you, you just suddenly enter this rather sort of upper middle class, uh, life of observations and notes. I remember it because my Latin teacher who was a bit, let's say, flamboyant, just said one day, you know, plenty, plenty is such a poppet. It's like, I was like, really, all of the other thing is that, you know, some of the stuff like the Nicarpean Ethics, the Aristotle's is that, you know, some of the stuff like the nicotine

ethics, the aerosols that can make kinetics, which are really is worth plumbing, because when you first read it, it kind of feels banal. There's the famous anecdote of when Churchill was asked to read it and then asked his response and he said, well, I knew all that already. And some students of the Ostrouse regard that as a sign of Churchill's intense gravity. But I think it's more a function of the fact that these notions of virtue that Aristotle outlined are actually incredibly insightful about human nature. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life.

But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia and Kurt Brownauer,

we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world,

listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. And how practical it was actually meant to be, as I understand Nick and me and Gene Ethics, it's like a father speaking to his son, right? So the problem is I think so many philosophers discount the most practical of the philosophy because it feels practical because they fancy themselves, you know, intellectuals or college professors or sort of explorers of big abstract ideas. But most of what your parents tell you, you already did know, but you needed to be told it again and again and again. And it's only with age, does the profundity of that very simple advice

also really begin to sink in. Yeah, it's a strange analogy, so bear with me. But there's a point of which, if you do psychedelic drugs, Michael Pollan has this point, that you're sitting there and you're suddenly aware that all you quote unquote, all you need is love. Now, it is a complete hollowed out truism that means basically nothing, but under the right circumstances,

drainage of all that, it's a husk right now, but when you actually feel it, it's true, it's true. And I think the classics, the best classics resonate with us because they seem true. They tell our stories that profoundly reflect what we understand to be true about human nature. That's why Shakespeare is still compelling because the psyches and the stories and the consequences and the misjudgments,

there are hours and there is no time for that question. I think that's right. When I say it's all white guys, I think if you cap it at the Greeks and the Romans, it's a pretty diverse group. If you extend the definition of what we call the classics up through the enlightenment or the, you know, maybe you cap it at the declaration of independence, it does start to get weighted to towards a very specific kind

of rich European male. What I so love about Greeks and Romans is not just the diversity of geography, but, you know, the diversity of class, right? They weren't all successful. Some of them were at the lower end. We have epictetus, we have Terence. You have this great slave literature even. That's specifically what I love about the Stokes. The two great Stokes philosophers are epictetus and Marcus Aurelius could not be more different as far as their, how they experience life and what the hand that fate has dealt them.

You know, you could probably put Seneca right as the, the mean between the two, but just how vastly different their experiences were. And that's, I think think obviously our focus today on race as the primary lens through which we look at things is Nesses just how radically different and diverse the experiences of a lot of these Ancient thinkers would have been But also diversity should include the past That that obviously when you think today, for example, let's say, have a contemporary 25-year-old African-American and contemporary 25-year-old Asian-American in grad school together. I mean, yes, you can say they have different, but compared

to the difference between each of them and Clutok. Look at diversity and its And it's the look at diversity and its biggest and deepest and profoundest sense. Same is also true, of course, of the Gospels, which are in some ways among the most profound texts that the classic that we have inherited. And again, there's so much of our discourse of literature that simply takes a granted certain biblical references, certain phrases from the gospels that you that are clearly, you know, designed to evoke that memory. And today's, you know, the audience will just look at you as if they have no recognition of these things at all. It's kind of amazing that how few people who weren't brought up as Christians however read a gospel from beginning to end. That is something I think people need to do and

there was a really good translation I read a few years ago. I forgot who did it. Some professor at Yale, Tyler Cowan recommended it to me. But he basically approaches the new testament as a newly discovered classic text. Like, he sits down and translates it with essentially no religious predilection. And then you go, oh yeah, this was written at the same time. I don't know, Seneca was walking around. Like, if you can see the Bible as another classic text, I think it, first off, I think it potentially opens the door to appreciate it as a spiritual text. But it also just allows you to appreciate it

as a work of classical literature, which is, you know, Lincoln is probably an atheist for most of his life, but was clearly deeply familiar with the Bible because he read it like he read any of these other books that he checked out from the library. Yep, absolutely. I mean, and I do think that if you don't have any common culture,

I mean, you can criticize, however, loaded this common basis of Western civilization is. But if you have nothing in common, then you can't really construct a conversation. You can't really construct a civil order, which is one of the things that our culture is having a real hard time doing. It's as if there are almost separate epistemologies now at war. There are separate texts at war.

There are people brought up entirely in a certain range of thought that simply have no awareness of those outside of for whom the idea of reading a classical text would be close to meaningless. Because after all, how is that going to help on dismantle white supremacy? And if that's the core goal of our time, what is reading Plato to do with that? In fact, a lot to do with that. But you wouldn't know. Well, it is interesting, too, like a lot of these questions that we're wrestling with today, they were also wrestling within the ancient texts. I mean, that's what you, when you read even Atomis Jefferson, he knows he's a raging hypocrite.

He can't figure out how to get his way out of it. And he comes up with some hackneyed, you know, ridiculous explanations for it in many cases. But he's well aware of the contradictions. And he's also aware that, classically, this debate goes all the way back. Can a person own another human being? You know, what rights does the power, the powerful have over the powerless?

You know, all these things, it's not like any of these are new questions. We've always been asking ourselves the same questions. It's just our answers have been different. Or indeed, the cosmos of that matter, slavery, I mean, it is about the liberation of souls, and there is no way the Jefferson was unaware of that horrifying, um, uh, cognitive dissonance. But I think what I learned from that is not that Thomas Jefferson is an evil person and we should think of freedom, but that what morally Caucasian dissonance am I living with today? Yes.

That he helps illuminate because we're, again, this is the cult of Contemporaryity, because we live now, does not mean, in and of itself, that we're somehow morally different or superior to people. However much it seems in the past, their attitudes seem terribly anti-dialluvian reactionary, a little reactionary, because they're before the reaction. But in fact, we were all in that. Human culture is often in that zone. And they're finding a way to understand it without any fixed alternative is very hard to do.

When you talk about this, I think it's one of the newer essays in this book, because I remember reading it as part of your email. But what Martin Luther King does so brilliantly is he because of his deep understanding of the classic texts and the founding documents of America, he's able to make a very classically based argument, he's able to use the words of the founders against themselves effectively. I think he says in the March on Washington, we're here to cash a check that Thomas Jefferson wrote.

I think for the people who want to reject the classic texts, I mean, I can see that as a potentially potent political argument, but it seems that historically the most effective one for now thousands of years has been to take the words that these people wrote a long time ago and say let's actually make them real. Let's not write them off for being hypocrites, but how do we get a little bit closer to realizing what they actually talked about? Frederick Douglass being, you know, Martin Luther King's predecessor in this regard. Again, he so understands these classical ideas that he helps bring about actually realizing them

as opposed to tossing them out. Or to mention another essay in the book, Alone Again, Naturally, which is about homosexuality. So what do I do in that, and I'm trying to address the core arguments that often come from Christian sources, whether they be Catholic or evangelical. So the way to do that, to actually address it, is to go to the texts. So I would go to Aquinas, I would go back to natural law, and I would ask, because he also recognized the problem for him of homosexuality in existence. So he comes up with this formula that he himself understands his really unsatisfactory, but it's the best he can do that somehow homosexuality is in nature, but it's unnatural. He can't

quite grapple with that, because clearly he saw, for example, hairs, which was there they were apparently the randiest and gaiest of creatures, as well known as a symbol of the hair, is often in ancient iconography referring to homos. And this is the paradox we're still logging with with people. And I went to Notre Dame, I went to Boston College, I went to Jesuit institutions, and I went through the natural law arguments of Aquinas and tried to point out that they don't actually make sense, and he acknowledged it, and if you were to make them fully make sense, gay people couldn't be dismissed the way they are. So for example, if the core analysis that Aqu quietness maze is not natural because we're not procreating, then infernal couples cannot

be allowed to marry either. If you follow these arguments back, you actually can truly move the argument forward. And by talking to people whom you might be in disagreement with, using texts that they themselves have embraced, you have a much better chance of persuading them. And I think that's what we really did do in the 80s and 90s. We really did do that work of persuading people. That's exactly what MLK is doing when he talks of the promised land. When he talks of this dream, when he talks of the mountain top. You know, you know, the average secular person that he is the mountain top, they don't shouldn't talk about a mountain top. No, this is deep, deep, deep, deep. It's part of your life. It's been woven into every sermon.

It's in so many spirituals. It has been the source of your comfort. And here is this man, this interringent, bring it to life again and push him into the contemporary context. That is to me, always has been, always will be thrilling. The idea that humans are all the knowledge we have is just learning the last 12 months is so insane.

Well Lincoln does that too, right? Lincoln makes a very Christian argument and logical argument against slavery. And again, the idea that he wasn't particularly Christian for most of his life makes it more impressive that he's able to figure out, what is the frame of reference that these people are viewing the world through?

And how can I convince them there as opposed to merely believing myself, morally superior and smarter than them, and then bullying them into changing, which as we know does not tend to work very well. Even though it's still very popular way of doing it. Well, again, it's a question of persuasion, as opposed to just coercion,

a question of engagement, as opposed to yelling at people. And yeah, that's, well, I think also of John Locke, whose essay on toleration actually tries to say we support toleration because we're Christians, even though up until then, obviously, we didn't with the title not tolerating with the point of Christian because the importance was the sincerity of the personal conversion to Christianity, which of course you can root in the gospels. In other words, things are only made new really through a reinterpretation understanding of the old. Yes. And you can't, I mean sort of a small sea conservative burky in argument really, which

is that you can't mess with that stuff too much or you lose something extraordinarily precious. You lose perspective, you lose a sense of principle and you lose a sense of common culture. And I think that is a problem we have. I really do. I think that one reason for our descent culturally into these warring tribes of separate forms of information, separate essentially value system, separate epistemologies, which makes a common civilization impossible, it also makes a common politics impossible. Sure.

Yeah, and that's a good relation. If half the population is religious and the other half isn't, and they're on different sides of the political party, then that religion becomes a political weapon, as opposed to a shared understanding of the world that allows compromise and collaboration and all that. Yes. world that allows compromise and collaboration and all that. Yes, you could see that not so long ago, there were similar proportion of Democrats and Republicans who want to stood themselves to be Christians. Now it's increasingly fewer and fewer in the Democrats and more and more among the Republicans. Now, that's just hard to get through once that has happened. It's hard

to, so for example, if you're going to have a look at discrimination differently because the Christian Christian is going to understand this as a question of everyone's individual soul and not judging another person's soul by a superficial characteristic that you shouldn't, because it's unfair and unjust, as opposed to a post-Christian view that essentially everything is structural and systemic, and there are no such things as individual souls. There are just forces that oppress individual bodies. Now how do you, given those two core pistol, how do you even have a conversation? Right. It's really hard to have a

conversation. And I think because I've, you know, I have, in my own life, have a foot in both camps, that I particularly excruciating for people like me, and there are more of us than you think, but people who have an attachment to the deepest principles and texts of our civilization and pride. But also want to address the world that it is, to render it less unjust in ways that make sense. And we can't be intelligible in some ways. So the people we're trying to persuade and so I feel deeply conflicted. But I think that is also

a simple symptom of being in modernity. Because we know we're going to have this common civilizational inheritance, we don't, we lose the capacity to debate, to deliberate with others, and to operate as citizens in a liberal society. That is my deepest worry. That is my deepest worry. How has that been for you? Because I imagine it's strange, you pretty much find yourself the enemy of both camps on a regular basis. I mean, that's one indication that one is thinking independently, but it's also, I imagine exhausting and disorienting.

How do you know when you're right? How do you know when you're right? How do you know when you're wrong? How do you think about that? I think this, you said it shouldn't regard independence as necessarily a sign of being right. Sometimes being the odd one out is because you're dumb, something completely wrong. But the truth is there's no comfortable place. There isn't any way there shouldn't be for any of us because we should be constantly

subjecting what we already believe to new doubt. But personally, I just honestly try to figure out, I know this is profound in a way, but I really do think I'm trying to figure out what I would call the truth. The truth is not some God-given eternal verity, and it's, but it is the best I can do right now in figuring out what is real in the world. And I do believe there is something real in the world that there is an objective reality that I am by virtue of being human capable of only perceiving partially

and in ways that are not divine. But again, think about that. The core of Christian understanding, the reason there's human reason and there's divine reason. If there's no divine reason, how do you critique the individual human? How do you acknowledge the limits of our reason? Anyway, there is a difference between being a total nihilist and being a skeptic that nonetheless is perfectly aware of his or her own biases, blindness, blind spots, lack of knowledge, but also is not prepared to give up entirely

on the possibility of a common meaning. I remember when I was writing my book about Peter Tio, he sort of bristled at the label of being a contrarian. He was saying, because, you know, that just means I take what everyone else thinks and I do the opposite. And he was saying, so when I'm saying independent, I think I was referring to it in his sense of like, no, I try to come up with my own opinion on each thing, instead of inheriting an ideology from a tribe or a religion or a political perspective or just what do people like me tend

to think about this issue, which makes sense. It's also exhausting in its own way, because it means you have to think for yourself about every goddamn thing. Well, that's one reason I decided to put this book out there, because I was often accused of being contrarian, or he's off off again or he just changes his mind or now this is fashionable and now the truth is that I think when you actually look at the whole book and I haven't I didn't rig it in so I try to select what I thought was the best in the most contemporary I think it's actually pretty consistent with one obvious shift which occurs after the Iraq war,

during the Iraq war, where I have a shift, my views about American foreign policy and how we should be interacting with the world. Even though, actually, if you go further back, there were moments where I had a lot of that in me as well. I just sort of went through it slightly utopian periods in my late 20s and 30s. But I do think, I try to see things as clearly as I can, offer up all my doubts about it, but nonetheless, try and take a view. And my hope is that the book actually shows

a certain amount of consistency, a certain amount of commitment to doubt, commitment to conservatism in the small, sea sense of the word, and a commitment to liberal democracy. It seems like one of the things we're struggling with, and I think you and I know some of the same people, it seems like one of the tricky things about getting, I might be mixing too many metaphors here,

but you get out on a limb, right? And you find yourself with some strange bedfellows, right? People who are out on the same limb for very different reasons, right? And so how do you think about that? I mean, how do you think about, yeah, maintaining your independence when you might agree with someone, but you got to the same conclusion for very different reasons? Or you might disagree with them on pretty much everything else. I'm just sort of leading this towards some of the ideas of audience capture, or I just

notice so many independent thinkers who I used to like have become radicalized over the last couple of years, and they're almost unrecognizable from their earlier independent thinking, generous, generous kind rational self. They're just motivated almost by a kind of anger or spite or outright craziness. Well, I used to call it the Neocon slide, which is a weird thing, which is that I was referring back then to those who had the original Ne-Continuers, who had started out on the left, and then through a series of personal epiphanies and policy judgments moved towards the center right, but then seemed to be unable to stop there.

Yes. And just keep going. And because two things, I think one, there's people reward you for this and you're a social being too. And especially in the network world of intellectuals, journals, there is inevitably a kind of universe and no one wants to be completely left out. But also, you just fall in love with your own arguments too much and you get a slight thrill from it

and social media, I mean, this was always true of human nature, so it's not new as such. But I think being in a context in which you're not really, you cease to try and persuade or explain and are just yelling at this point. You, of course, you end up bitter and angry and your emotions get the better of you. It's very human to see people go down this route. But I think the important thing for me is that I'm not institutionally captured, or have never really been institutionally captured. From the get go, I was always an outsider within

liberal journalism and an outsider within conservative journalism so that I have a pretty rare lack of institutional coordination with one tribe or the other and have been treated with support and contempt by both of it depending upon the moment. But I think as you sometimes ask yourself, well, what am I doing this? And I'm lucky enough, I think that, I don't know, this just sounds too much, but I think I have enough talent, I think that, I don't know, it just sounds too much, but I think I have enough talent to survive without that. No, that's a good point.

I think the less talented people are more easily captured. And yeah, you might contrast institutionally captured, which definitely happens with sort of algorithmically captured, which is the spiral I think people get in, especially if you've kind of been obscure or not super interesting, maybe you talk about really wonkish policy stuff. And then all of a sudden, you're right in the heat of the action. That's an addiction. And you watch people go from being mild-mannered to, you know, insane.

Yes. Yes, I think insane is not a complete misnomer. I mean, I you know, you I just I look in horror, but at the same time you're aware That you're vulnerable to that too and you're human too and One thing I do with the weekly dishes, you know is And one thing I do with the weekly dish, as you know, is every week I publish the best arguments against what I wrote the week before, sometimes in a way that makes me squirm, to be honest, and sometimes I effectively rebut them, sometimes less effectively, or I have to concede a point.

And the point of that is to make sure that I am not sequestering myself. Or that I'm not immune to self-criticism. Now, it's just hard, you know, it's just hard to maintain that balance. I'm lucky and as much as I've been doing this a long time. I am not, if I get on the TV, it's fine, but I'm not super, super psyched, isn't changing my life, something overnight, everyone knows me, whatever.

I've gone to the point where I really do seek less publicity. I mean, with the book, I really thought I needed to, but I didn't go on cable news. I really try and keep my writing now also to the weekly dish. Of course, I'm susceptible to Twitter, I really shouldn't. But I go on there partly because that's where a lot of this stuff is happening. If I'm going to keep up with contemporary arguments and debates, you have to read it at least once a day. And sometimes in all the hustle and bustle there, people would throw up all papers, all the arguments, all pieces,

or obscure studies that you'd never have found otherwise that really help you in some way. And I try and have a feed where, you know, I have lefties and righties as well. Yeah, I think that one of the things I like about the sort of the newsletter business is that financial independence is the wrong word, but it does create a little bit of a buffer where one is not living and dying based on, you know, that publicity game. And so I do love being in a place where I can say what I want, you can't cancel me, but also I don't need to go get attention as the driver of the engine. I already have the audience, right?

I think the dependency on virality is to me the thing that has so driven our culture in an insane direction because only certain kinds of thinking and arguments go viral and it's almost never the sort of nuanced empathetic ones. It's always the opposite of that. The key thing to remember is that we now have data. We never had data really put. I would put out in a republic every week, roughly 100,000 copies,

about maybe like 25 pieces a week, something like that. I didn't know who was reading which article. Right. I had a pretty good idea that no one's going to read that 8,000 word piece on the farming methods of medieval jury. And I had a feeling that they're probably going to read my Kinsley's TRB first. But I know, suddenly all of this is laid bare. And inevitably, because as individual writer gains audience, they do gain leverage. And in fact, part of what happened to me in the early, the first decade of the 21st century was that I built that independent audience and then was able to leverage it to get more money and better deals from these bigger companies. So it's, but I always did that as a sense of both to be paid what I

thought I was worth. But secondly, because I could pursue a strain of thought with the least amount of un, un, say, unjustified intervention. You always wanted the editor, but you don't want to feel, as I began to feel at New York magazine, for example, that I'd dance, write this. I can't write that sentence. If I use that word, I have to go through it or deal. The editor is going to be embarrassed by this. My editor is going to be angry, so he has to resent this to others. It's just awful. That's the institutional capture, for sure. The institutional capture, where there's no way out. You're slowly, everyone folds, you become this pariah.

And just the human experience, even if you're not in physically in the same space, the experience is one of profound alienation and demoralization as it is intended to be. Well, that ties into one of my favorite essays from you about your struggles with you call it an internet addiction. It's probably the internet addiction and then something I've dealt with myself was a work addiction because the internet and the work are the same place and you're getting the instantaneous validation for the work. But sometimes when I pull out Twitter

and I see some of these people, I go, you just like, you think this is about whatever this political thing you're talking about, really you're just, you're in a sort of a manic spiral from the, like, you need, you need to get married, you need to have some kids, you need a more balanced, actual life in which your phone and checking Twitter is not like the totality of your existence.

And I mean, some of these people are married and do have kids. So it shows you how overwhelming that addiction can be. But I just feel like a lot of this stuff isn't coming from healthy people. No, it isn't. But also, we must remember that everyone else in this culture is playing video games or is on their iPad. That this is a function of, I think a function of humans having trouble to begin with in

integrating a new technology into their lives. I think we are at the phase where we realize it's killing us, it's making our lives much worse. We need to do less. And that it's actually clearly designed consciously as an addictive product. And we have to be aware of that, either not partaking it at all, or to have some regimen of strict limitation, or your mind is going to be taken over by this. It's like being susceptible to cocaine or to any other kind of addictive activity. And again, the fact, and I would link this to what we're saying before, the lack of a

common civilization means we have a lack of common meaning that is provided to us all. We all have to find ourselves. Most people have nowhere near the resources, all the time, or the depth to do that. That's why we have inherited civilizations which we we help inculcating people. If they don't have that, everything is a will to power. The world seems depressing. Escapism via these addictive processes is entirely rational decision. Let's get out of this. I don't want to be part of it. I don't want to think about the news. What if I do? I want to turn it into this kind of weird, psychotic one-offmanship. So you end up, we haven't mentioned any names so far, but, and it's a tragedy in a way.

Some people start out with really good minds and have done good work and can leave them in that horrible stew of incentives and they end up miserable and angry and irrational. Well, you talked about this earlier when we were starting about how you know, you used to be able to take some passage and translate it in the style of three different Latin thinkers, you think about what it takes in the way that a baseball player has to cultivate a basketball player, so cultivate a certain mind and body to perform at this high level, to do what they do.

And then that's to be an intellectual or a writer or a thinker. You have to cultivate the ability to to think about big ideas, to do deep work, to read, to understand nuance and all of that. And so it's like you train your whole life to have your brain work a certain way. And then culture is like, yeah, but 240 characters written on a phone in as short a time as possible responding to current events that just happened. That's the arena that you're supposed to compete in. I mean, it's just an utterly different way of functioning cognitively.

And I think it not only all the old muscles atrophy, I think it's like a sort of fundamentally an unhealthy way to live and be. And I think people are, it's almost like we have the bends from transitioning from one kind of environment or atmosphere to another. It's a profound source of our collective on happiness, I think. And again, it wasn't just reading books rather than tweets. It was reading books slowly.

Yeah, it was mastering a language and then absorbing the texts in that language. That takes a huge amount of time, concentration, slowness, and prestige attached to that kind of activity, which requires places which are not about productivity, not about efficiency, but literally spaces close to spiritual kind of places where you go to wander around in ideas and your own thoughts, for long periods of time, like when you enter an Oxford College, it is like entering, I mean, my old college, Mortland, I mean, you enter a 14th century monastery, the sound goes quiet. You are suddenly told, you're in different place here, this is timeless, and we're patient,

and the goal is excellence. That's not rushed. And yet, of course, most people go to college day to get a quick degree to earn more money for specific purposes. Under crippling debt to do so. And the humanities, which were the key place where this long perspective was sustained and preserved have all been turned into a sub-category of really a of of of of of Marxian critical theory. So that you the idea that you're reading Aristotle because you're interested in the truth is itself a racist thing to say because the whole idea of the truth is a function of white supremacy, which is the function of your race, and it just turns everything into boring mud. And so inevitably, the science is taken over, the humanities have committed suicide.

And we're left. My hope is that in fact, it's simply this, that I'm right and you're right, that these texts are much better than others. At some point, people figure that out. The tedium, I mean, if you force me to read three pages of Judith Butler, or compare it to reading, I don't know, Freud or Socrates, I mean, it's not a pretty easy choice.

Yeah, no, it is funny. These sort of, I was thinking about this after the killing of George Floyd and all these sort of anti-racist books become immensely popular. I know a lot of people that are buying them. I don't really know anyone that's actually reading them and talking about them. And then I went and I reread Ellison's Invisible Man, which is about all of those things,

right? There's a police shooting, there's a race riot, there's Marxists, I mean, there's all of the things that are happening right now in that book, but it's also a beautiful, provocative work of literature from a person who loves the classics written in 1956 or something like that. And I do, I think that's a good, good, a good hope that ultimately the better texts survive. And there's a reason they have survived for so long. And they've waxed and waned in popularity. Certainly, I mean, there was that little thing called the dark ages. It's not like they've been universally popular

and widely dispersed. And so perhaps we're just in a little bit of a dip, but ultimately, they win back out. I'm confident of that. I'm confident the human mind gets bored easily. I'm confident that ideologies particularly bore easily. I'm conscious of the constant attempt to make reality fit. You're pre-existing. View of the world is doomed to failure. And so we just wait patiently for these things to be.

Meanwhile, however, you talk about the dark ages, we're not allowed to call them dark ages anymore because they kind of weren't, but one thing that did typify them was my answer since sitting there in the west coast of Ireland scribbling down the gospels and copying copies of the ancient manuscripts to build this and to see this inheritance. I mean, think of that, you know, that vision.

You know, one thing I was thinking of, this is a thought that maybe you might have a reaction to I was driving in Texas yesterday. We're talking about how hard it is for people to find their identity or whatever. And I saw, now all over Texas, there are these like roadside stops that sell flags, right? Like not like American flags,

but all these political flags. Like let's go Brandon, Trump 2024. It struck me as how new and strange, like this political identity on a flag that you fly around. I mean, obviously pride flags were probably one of the first examples of this, but it struck me as such a weird political development that maybe it's not positive. No, it depresses me too. I mean, you'll write that in some ways it's just a reflection of what

the crazy left is doing. I mean, we no longer have a rainbow flag, we have a trans flag, we have a genderqueer flag, we have a, you know, it just goes on and on and on. And they're all, of course, at this point, including most of these made up gender identities, are just essentially performative tribalism. They're not really making arguments. They're just saying, they're doing what flags always did, which is showing which tribe you belong to. That's what it is.

It's like medieval armies with a Game of Thrones at this point. We're the House of Lannister and these are our various gimmicks and we even have our own slogans and you know on the one hand it's next let's go branded or the other hand it's trans women are women all caps it's just exhausting and boring and tedious and you know what I was in and this what happens is also metastasizes because so for example in the rainbow flag which used to be the pride flag then got replaced by this new diversity flag which had black and brown stripes added to it plus pink and blue and white before trans people so That went off which it looks like some hideous licorice all sort it's just vile and

If a gay person designed it they should have their gay car taken away from them. But there it is. But once one person put it off, if you keep the old rainbow flag up without these things, you're basically a white supremacist. So the pride flag becomes a white supremacy flag, pretty damn quick. It's a bit like, you know, Bossa Povls story about the green grorse who puts the poster in the window that says, work as a world unite. He doesn't do it because he's basically in favor,

because if he doesn't, then the authorities will more likely to investigate him. And I watched this happen in which people became more more wedded to the more and more crazy stuff because to confess any doubt about it would cast you out of the community. Whenever I see stuff like that, I think of Paul Graham's favorite famous essay about identity,

basically he was saying that the more identity, the clearer your identity is, the stupider you are, basically that identity is a form of stupidity, right? When you identify with a thing or with a tribe, almost immediately you're constrained. That does strike me as the through line between this book and a lot of your writing is obviously you have different identities, but you seem to always be in the process of challenging and reflecting on and perhaps contradicting those identities. And that is what's produced not just I think interesting work, but a lot of ground breaking ideas or potentially breakthroughs as in the case of writing on gay marriage. Well, the other thing I'd say about that is that in some ways, I have tried to think things through. On the other hand, I just tried to make that we could argue that I just tried to find a place for myself in the world that I arrived in. And in so doing, it

turned out lots of other people don't have a place for themselves. But my view is not about finding a place, it's about finding your place and your ability also to hold different things in your different ideas in your own mind at the same time to accept that you have multiple identities. At times, are clashing at times utterly not clashing and in fact supporting one another. But the point is to be you and always said this about the gay rights movement, the gay rights movement was never about

encouraging people to be gay. It was encouraging people to be themselves. And if they are themselves, not to have the world, persecute them for it, which is, so, for me, I am at some deep level in individualist. I think that at some level that's the baseline unit of human affairs. Obviously the family is important and the clan and the society and so but as a Christian that's the individual soul is what matters really and

and enlarging a little bit the space for a different kind of soul to exist is not mean overturning society, it does not mean dismantling anything. It means adjusting a little bit. It's what I used to call a very gradual change we can believe in. That's really Birx and conservatism's motto, no change, no react against all this happening, but let's nod to the change to make it the least disruptive and the most constructive it can be within the civilization that we are lucky to have the creeps upon us. And I think that's also helpful when you read the classics or you read the ancients, you begin to realize that these last few decades of Western liberal democracy extremely rare in human history to have

this kind of open society. And deeply hostile to lots of things in human nature, which liberalism really fights. And not eternal. Obviously, absolutely mortal. You can't read about Socrates without understanding that he was executed for being a free thinker. Nor can you read the Gospels without also understanding that Jesus himself was executed for denying that power is greater than truth in part. And so that's where I kind of come out in the end. I love it.

Yeah, to quote another dead white guy who again shows just how insufficient that term is, you know, we contain multitudes. Everyone does. And we're complicated in contradictory. And we have to figure that out for ourselves. And then also, I think, be tolerant and understanding in patient with other people as they participate in that same journey,

but yeah, as you said, society in the world is better when we make places for those people. And when you look at something like Socrates or Jesus as models, the one thing you find most of the time in them is that they respond to questions, who are questions. Yeah. They're always inviting you into the discourse.

Jesus also invited people in just by actions, simple actions. So these are, you know, it's, it's, and if you read Socrates, you also see there is something joyful in this exploration. Yeah, there's an acceptance and an intellectual humility and to go to what you said earlier, I think in both of them there was also a profound love for human beings and for the unfortunate and for the confused and for the process of discovering the truth as well. Yeah, and the great quote for me is always Elliot actually that we shall not see some exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

That to me is what's going on. That's what the classics are about. That's what a life of learning will do. Elliot, Elliot is very important figure for me. Also someone you can to read and understand, if you do not understand the gazillion references like all of them. But you know at Harvard I actually dramatized the four quartets, created four different

speaking parts within them, and then orchestrated it with Messians, I'll be Messianne's quartet for the end of time. Both were written in 1941. Messianne was ending. As the world was ending, bombs were landing in London. Messian was in a prison of war camp. Eliot was in the blitz, and they both wrote these two extraordinarily eternal pieces of art. And I just, I wanted to combine the two, which led to a rather long two hours, but at the same time, we looked at everybody's state of wake through the whole thing, but beautiful. And I began the performance with an air raid siren. So people knew the context in which these beautiful things were doing. That transcendence is

and you the context in which these beautiful things were doing. That transcendence is what scholarship can really do for you and that's why I find so much of contemporary critical theory discourse. So because there is no transcendence there, there is no truth, there is only power and there is only now. An anger. It's anger. Well, anger and resentment too. Yeah. The santi-mol, very much there. But the stuff that we love is just better. We'll always be understood to be better because humans can make that judgment over time. And it doesn't depend on the color of your skin or your sex or anything else to appreciate this. So many people have every different background of come across, home or come across, Shakespeare

or come across Marcus Aurelius and just blown away because it's the human experience Not the specific Contextualized contingent historical moment Which is so at this point in time hellish anyway I have to spend my life partly on that beginning to question what I should do that, but it's hellish. Beautiful. It's sad.

Beautiful. Andrew, thank you so much. So great to see you. Please, if people found this interesting, please let them know about the weekly dish every week and out on a limb. The book, my collection. I'm sure people, there's a lot in there. I hope people will enjoy it.

Well, I'll let you go, because I'm looking forward to getting it tomorrow. So I won't stop you from writing the newsletter. Okay, I will. I'll get back to it. I do have one book recommendation for you. You might have already known it, but since you mentioned Elliot in the blitz,

in 41-42, right before he committed suicide, Zwaiy's last book is a little biography of Monten. So it's a man in exile, he wrote it in South America, it's him in exile writing about Monten's exile during the Reformation and the Civil War there. And it's what I read it in 2016, and it was so helpful and calming and also terrifying at the same time. I just found it. I'm going to get that and the swerve.

Yes, with my book or a commendation. You know, I read, studied more pain in the original, when I was at Oxford, that's how I read. In French, my special subjects were Pascal and Montagne. Wow. Two amazing, amazing writers and stylists. You'll like this little bio. It's very short, but to me, was it reminded me of yeah just this moment so much. Two people fleeing the craziness of the world and looking inward to find truth and contentment

and peace. Yeah, that's definitely the four quartets. If you let me listen to the last section of quartet at the end of time, it at the end of time, just find it, put it on, sit down, listen to it, it's like seven minutes. I'll do that right now. All right, nice to see you, thanks. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa. The Stoa, Poquillet, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in ancient Athens. Obviously we can all get together in one place

because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stove. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You can talk about like today's episode. You've talked about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts

that's interacting with all these people who are using stoicism to be better in their actual Real lives. You get more daily stoke meditations over the weekend just for the daily stoke life members quarterly Q&As with me Clothbound edition of our best of meditations plus a whole bunch of other stuff including discounts and this is the best part All our daily stoke courses and challenges totally for free. Hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our new year, new you challenge. We'd love to have you join us.

There's a two week trial, totally for free. Check it out at dailystokelife.com. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.