[lively electronic music]
>> I was born in Cairo
and I was born in '55,
and my father had been in Cairo
off and on for a few years,
and he was getting his PhD.
And he was in comparative
politics and of course,
what was happening then
and what's actually still happening today
was there was this theory
called Modernization Theory.
And the idea behind
Modernization Theory was that
we're all moving happily
to this modern world.
We're leaving behind
the vestiges of our old
ethnic identities and our religion,
and everything is just going to go well.
And my dad stumbled upon this
group that nobody had heard of
and nobody paid attention to.
It's called the Muslim Brotherhood.
And so he spend the next 27
years of his life saying, wait.
There's a problem.
And, you know, as I reflect
back on our conversations,
our dinnertime conversations
during the 60's and 70's,
they were not about the Cold War.
They were about this
crisis in the Middle East,
which is, which actually
is, I think about it now,
was somewhat, very much behind
the line of inquiry I've taken,
that there's something
about the modern world
that doesn't quite sit with us well.
Tremendous external powers
that are available to us
and yet, internally,
there's always this
sense of impoverishment,
that something has gone
terribly wrong here.
So I've taught political theory.
I've stayed away from the Middle East
as much as I possibly could,
intellectual work, it's largely a morass,
in part because of the
Israeli-Palestine question
which I saw my father get caught up in
back in the '60s and '70s.
So I really wanted nothing
to do with the Middle East.
And then in 2005, I had
the opportunity to go
and be on the start up team, Georgetown
to set up the school and
foreign service in Doha
and I jumped at the opportunity
and as Professor Wright said,
I then took several years
off and went to Iraq
and was in the post-war zone
setting up the American University, Iraq.
All the time I was there
in the Middle East,
I was trying to put my finger on the pulse
of what was happening.
And I know there's lots of scholarship
on one side or another and
at the same moment I
was trying to figure out
what was happening in the Middle East,
I was also deeply, deeply dissatisfied
with what had happened in
American higher education,
especially in the field
of political theory,
because it seems to me that
one of the highlights of political theory,
one of the founding moments is
after World War II when
these emigres from Europe,
largely German-Jewish who
either had survived the Holocaust or
understood what was
leading up to it and left.
They tried to link together a concern
for the immediate suffering
and the Great Books.
And I don't think the
discipline of political theory
would have been born had it
not been for these emigres.
There was something that might
be called political theory,
but it really happened as a
consequence of World War II.
And as political theory aged,
and this happens to all the disciplines,
this happened to sociology,
I was in sociology before I moved
over to political theory.
What happens is they become more inbred,
they become more scholarly
and this is both good and bad
and my concern by the time I
had written by third book was
we have a real problem here.
Namely, we have all
these very sophisticated
scholarly treatments, but somehow
things that are happening
the world cry out
for some deeper account
that speaks directly
to human experience.
And as all we could do as
political theorists was
you know, cite various authors
and talk about the letters they wrote.
And I think this was actually
a real serious problem.
So about the time I went to Qatar,
I was also struggling
mightily with how to write.
I'm pretty good at writing scholarly books
with 750 footnotes.
I know how to write that Germanic style.
But I realized I didn't
wanna do that anymore.
And so, in the course of
being an administrator,
in both Qatar and Iraq,
I began to see that the
things that are happening
in the Middle East that seem so far away
from the experience of Europe and America
that in fact weren't so far away.
There were developments
there that could probably be
corroborated by Alexis de Tocqueville.
And this was actually as
much of a surprise to me
as it was to anyone.
I was a Tocqueville scholar,
but it never occurred to
me when I went over in 2005
that I could actually use
Tocqueville to understand
the modern world.
And so I wrote this book
Tocqueville in Arabia
with a view both to
speaking to high issues
of political theory but most importantly
to speak to matters of
human experience directly
and especially the
experience of young people
and you know, to come to the point,
I think the fundamental experience
is the experience of being cut off,
of being lonely and isolated.
This is the experience
of the Democratic Age
which Tocqueville understood quite well.
And so I wanted to start,
not from a high level of political theory
but I wanted to write a book
that spoke and was able to elucidate
what was happening the Middle East,
because surprisingly, for
all the differences people,
they're still wrestling with the problem
or they're wrestling
deeply with the problem
of loneliness and
isolation in the same way
that I think you are
and my generation did,
to some extent, as well.
So, I started graduate school
in 1982, it's a long time ago.
And in all that time,
I've been asking a
variant of this question.
So who's left standing?
Who in the 19th century
or the 20th century
or 4th century BC is left standing?
Who are the ones that we
really need to listen to today?
Not because they have authority
in some high, lofty sense,
but because they speak to the crisis
that we're living through right now.
And I think we are living
through a bit of a crisis.
And my conclusion really is that
Alexis de Tocqueville's
the last one standing.
Not many people have read him.
And I think part of the problem, there,
is that nobody quite
knows where to put him.
He's a sociologist, yeah,
political theory
discovered him rather late.
David Tracy used to give lectures
back at Chicago in the Divinity School
on Alexis de Tocqueville,
thought he was a theological figure,
but he's not often talked
about in Theology programs.
But I think he's the last man standing,
because what he realized was
or what he was able to do is
to understand human experience.
If you've read Democracy in America,
if you've read him deeply,
especially Volume Two,
which was written five years later
when he's had five years to
think about the successful book
that he wrote as a 28-year-old
and he sits in his father's attic,
the chateau as it turns out
and writes Volume Two,
if you read it carefully,
you will think that he
has peeled back your brain
and looked inside and you'll say,
how does this man know me?
Volume Two is written in 1840.
I had some variant of that experience.
I had finished up graduate school
and did not get a job
as none of us did get jobs
immediately after graduate school.
So I taught for a year in
the University of Chicago
common core and
was asked to teach Tocqueville
and I never read more than fragments
which is, I think, the big
problem with Tocqueville.
He writes so beautifully,
you can take a fragment,
you think you have the
whole, but you really don't.
And I spent three hours
sitting in Regenstein Library
reading the author's
introduction which is 11 pages.
And I closed the book,
and I said to myself,
in 1989, you'll spend the rest
of your life with this book.
And I have.
I've spent, and I will say
this, if you can find a book
that you will spend the
rest of your life with,
then and only then has your
college education been worth it.
I'm serious, if you don't walk away,
I'm quite serious about this,
with a dozen books that you say are worth
more than their weight in gold,
then you've been short-changed.
And Tocqueville is that book
for me, Democracy in America.
Now, as I've mentioned
loneliness and isolation,
I think it's important to
realize that Tocqueville
thinks like a sociologist.
My training is political theory, but
but I've learned so
much from social theory.
He thinks like a sociologist.
So I think we have to ask the question,
so why is it, that in this,
what he calls the Democratic Age
why is it that we have
this profound experience
of loneliness?
And his answer is this.
That, what, in the Aristocratic Age,
and you can date this to 1600 and before,
if you want, maybe 1700, I'm
not really picky on the dates,
people were linked, okay.
And he says, what happens as you move into
the Democratic Age
is there's a de-linkage
that occurs and it happens
in three different ways.
I want you to think about each of these.
So first, there's a de-linkage
between man and nature.
If you read Plato or you read Aristotle,
there is taken for granted in these works
a communion between
human beings and nature,
between logos and fusis.
There's a communion here.
And while with Plato,
there's some difficulties because
we have to make the philosophical turn
and as he says in the
opening passages of Book One,
citing Polemarchus,
how can it persuade us
if we will not listen,
so there's this profound
resistance to truth.
But nevertheless, if
you can get past this,
if you can engage in the
philosophical practice of death,
you can be in communion
with the very natural order of things.
But that gets broken up.
And you move from a view
that there's a natural order
that we're in harmony with
to a world that's, to a
view of the world that's
hostile to us.
So you get the world of
evolution, for example.
And you all watch the nature shows.
And what are they really
showing on the nature shows?
Death, the slaughter of
the innocent prey items.
How many of you have
seen the BBC nature show?
Have you paid attention to the music?
It's always when the
innocent prey item is,
you know, you have this, you
know Jaws music or something
like this.
So there's this sense that
the world is no longer,
we're no longer in
communion with the world,
it's hostile, it wants to kill us.
And so, Darwin in 1869 with
the Origin of the Species
finally breaks the spell
and there's no longer a
possibility of communion.
So, the first breaking of the linkage
is between man and nature.
And then the second one is
between the generations.
And I think this is one
of the greatest problems
we have today
is that the timeframe of our actions
collapse to the instantaneous moment.
And Tocqueville thought that
you cannot build a civilization
unless you're thinking of
the long chain of generations
of which you're a part.
So I tell my students this,
I say, so when you're
gonna go out this weekend,
are you thinking about
what your grandparents
would have said?
And what your great-grandchildren will say
about what you're gonna do?
Or are you just acting on your own?
And Tocqueville's view is you
cannot build a civilization
unless you understand that
you're part of the long chain
of generations.
And yet he says, what comes
to the Democratic imagination,
what comes naturally to
the Democratic imagination
is the idea that we are
our own, we own ourselves,
we can do whatever we want.
And Tocqueville says this can only happen
as you break the link between generations.
And there's so many things that conspire
to break the links between the generations
so that we think only in
terms of ourselves now.
Tocqueville, when he comes to the place in
Democracy in America where he says,
well, so how are we gonna help develop
this long-term thinking?
He says, well this is probably
the most important thing
a government can do,
to have one or two projects
that give you a sense of
the long chain of actions
that are necessary to
bring something to pass.
So in my generation, I
reflect this in the book,
the Space Program.
You know, we watched this for 10 years,
we know every step along the way.
And he says, even if it's
economically inefficient,
you've got to do something as a government
to give some people, give people the sense
that there's some continuity,
that events are not just one
preference following another,
that you don't belong
to yourself entirely.
And so now, it's remarkable.
Tocqueville thought that
in the Aristocratic Age
we would be thinking
in terms of the long chain of generations
and now, we can only think in terms of
generation and what's necessary for it,
namely the sexual act,
in terms of a preference
and the language of sexual preferences
is exactly what emerges
in the Democratic Age.
Because a preference is
something that you have now
and you can have another
preference tomorrow,
right and so what happens
is that sex is de-linked from generation
as we collapse the time horizon
to the instantaneous now
and we can only think in
terms of the next preference
we might have.
So even the language of sexual preference
betrays this Democratic impulse.
Let me be clear about this.
This Democratic impulse to
live only for the moment.
I have things that I've
inherited from parents
and grandparents, all
of whom have passed on,
and my kids say to me, well,
why don't we get rid of it?
And I say, because they're not mine.
And they're not yours.
They're our grandparents and
they're your grandchildren's.
THey're not yours,
you're part of a longer
chain of generations.
So that's the second way in
which things are de-linked.
First was nature,
second is the de-linking
of the generations.
And then third, and I'll say
more about this much later,
the breaking of the links
between persons in a society
or between the roles in a society.
In the Aristocratic Age,
Tocqueville thinks that
society's held together by the set of
obligations and loyalties people have.
I'll develop this more
but it's not that they're
obligations and loyalties between
persons.
Persons are a Democratic development.
What Tocqueville sees, very wisely,
is that in the Aristocratic
Age, we're not yet persons.
We're roles.
Okay, and those of you who come, as I do,
from ethnic families.
You've got grandparents or somebody who
will say things to you like, well,
you're supposed to do
this, you're my grandchild.
Or you're supposed to polish
my shoes, you're my son.
This is, my father always did with me.
Right, I'm not gonna pay you an allowance,
you're my son, this is what a son does,
I'm a father, this is what a father does.
But what Tocqueville saw
was that slowly but surely,
these roles get destroyed.
And when they get destroyed,
the old mechanisms by which
society was held together,
that is to say, a series of
obligations and loyalties,
completely disappears.
And we're left without links.
And more importantly, and I'm
not gonna develop this much
right now,
we have to find a new
way to make society move,
'cause it's not gonna be based
on obligations and loyalties.
It has to be based on money.
So precisely at the moment
when we come to see ourselves,
not as persons who bear roles,
but rather, not as
beings who'd bear roles,
but rather as persons and we have the
kind of soft, sentimental
understanding of what it means
to be a person, right?
I'm not my role, I stand
above my role, I'm a person.
Precisely at that moment,
money becomes the most important thing.
So you get this paradox
in the modern age of
on the one hand, the soft sentimentality
and the delicacy surrounding our persons
quite independent of our roles
and the very tough world in
which the only way things move
is in terms of money.
So you've got these three de-linkages.
The de-linkages between man and nature.
The de-linkage between generations
and the de-linkage between persons.
And Tocqueville says,
what is inevitably going to
happen in those circumstances
is that people are
going to feel themselves
to be completely alone and cut off
from nature, from generation
and from each other.
So loneliness will become
the fundamental experience.
And so this also means,
we should be clear,
that means each generation
does not sense its continuity
with the previous generation
and so it will deliberately break
with the previous generation.
And so I say the '60s
generation was not one,
it was three, I'll name three of them.
The first is in America
where my generation
broke from our parents who had come out,
my father fought in World War II,
and like so many of them,
they just didn't wanna
think about it anymore.
So you have the
the deliberate attempt
to build the simple world
of the 1950s and then my
generation comes along
and tries to destroy that and
wants to do everything new.
And so you get the entrepreneurship
of a whole generation,
Steve Jobs, Gates and so
we break with our fathers in one way.
And then EU, you have to understand this
if you don't already,
EU, too, was the response
of a generation to its
fathers and in this case,
the fathers were not those
who lived through the 1950s.
It was the ones who gave us World War II.
And so that generation broke
with the previous generation
by saying never again, never
again will we have nations
that go to war with one another
and that's the project of the EU.
And then there was a generation that broke
with it's fathers in the Middle East
and this was in part, Osama
bin Laden and the rest
who saw in their fathers
nothing but ongoing humiliation
at the hands of the West.
And so sought an answer to the problems
that they faced and so
one of the answers was
for every problem, Islam is a solution.
So whether it's American entrepreneurship,
the EU in Europe,
or the emergence of the
al Qaeda-like movements
in the Middle East,
the sons breaking the
links with the fathers.
This is part of what happens
in the Democratic Age.
So it struck me that just experientially,
Tocqueville was the person
we needed to look to
because he understood
this great de-linkage
and what I sought to do and
I've sought to do all my life
is to ask the question, how
far can this analysis go?
How far, what can we find in Tocqueville
that allows us to understand
the 21st century problems
that we now face?
Now I'd say that the problem
with Tocqueville scholarship
and the problem with
thinking about Tocqueville
is he's so good, that you
can go to certain passages
and say, well here he is, this is it.
And we've had a couple of what I'd call
distinct geopolitical moments,
distinct geopolitical
Tocquevilles and the first one
lemme just talk about
two of them very briefly.
The first one is the Cold War Tocqueville.
So in 1955, Louis Hartz
writes a book called
The Liberal Tradition in America.
And what he's trying to
do is answer the Marxists
who argue that no national particularity,
no national culture can
withstand the ironclad logic
of universal Marxism or Communism.
And so he goes to Tocqueville
and he finds a couple of passages,
one in the author's introduction
and the other, the last page
and a half of Volume One
in which he argues that
America is exceptional.
And so Tocqueville's
the first one to give us
the term American exceptionalism.
And there's been great debates
in the last 10 or 15 years
about whether America is
an exceptional nation.
A lot of things I could
say about this but I wanna
make something very clear.
Exceptional does not mean special.
'Kay, and I think this is the problem.
We've got a whole generation
raised on Sesame Street
where everybody's special.
And so you hear exceptional and say,
oh, America's exceptional.
That's not what it means.
It doesn't mean America's special.
It means America is the
exception to the rule.
That's what it means.
And this is not, it's not moral judgment.
It's not this is better.
It's the exception to the rule.
So the question is, what's the rule?
And the rule is the following.
And Tocqueville got this
as a French aristocrat.
The exception to the rule is that
almost every other nation
in the history of the world
comes out of aristocracy.
It's an aristocratic nation
by which we mean a number of things,
landed property,
the authority of the name,
a certain contempt for market commerce
and elevation of honor culture.
This the Middle East, by the way.
This is the Middle East.
This is the Middle East I grew up in
and the Middle East I returned to in 2005.
So I came to the Middle East
and yes, I saw different
nations but what I saw
was what Tocqueville saw
in his Europe of the 1830s,
an aristocratic world
where you've got the authority of the name
and the prominence of family.
So how does American
exceptionalism play into all this?
Well, Hartz' argument, really
which relies on Tocqueville is
America never had the
landed property relations
that you have in an aristocracy.
And we have to be clear about this.
Landed property doesn't
mean somebody owns property.
Landed property means a
relationship of patronage
between those who own the
land and those who work on it.
And this land is handed on
generation to generation.
That means slavery is
not landed patronage,
we have to be clear about that.
So America, well Hudson River
Valley, Virginia, in part,
they had a little bit of
this landed aristocracy
by it quickly disappeared
because of their laws of inheritance
after the Revolution.
So America never had an aristocracy.
And of course, a democracy
can shift gears all the time
and let's be clear, never
has the burden of history,
if you live in an aristocracy,
you always have the burden of history.
You know the weight of history.
And so one of the problems
that haunts this American
country, this American nation of ours
is that we don't understand the
incredible weight of history
in other parts of the globe.
And so we'll go to Iraq
and say, that's okay,
we're gonna bring democracy.
It doesn't work.
Americans think you can change on a dime.
But aristocratic nations, no you can't.
There's a long, slow labor.
So in terms of foreign
policy, it really hobbles us,
'cause we really don't
understand the rest of the world
because we never had an aristocracy
in the way that the rest of
the world had an aristocracy.
And to press this further, the reason why
Marxist analysis works so
well in the rest of the world
was because Marx was based on class
and his vehement, vitriolic
opposition to class relations.
We're gonna come to an
end to all these things
with Communism.
The only place where
this can even make sense
is where you've had these
entrenched class relations
which is to say Latin
America, Europe, Soviet Union,
China, everywhere except
the United States.
And so Hartz argues in 1955
based on this geopolitical Tocqueville of
American exceptionalism,
that America will never succumb to Marxism
because the category of class
is not the most important
category in America.
There's a statement,
think about it deeply,
statement, Marx captured
Europe, Freud captured America.
It's true.
Why?
Because the category of class
is the fundamental class
in Europe.
But the Americans,
because they're Puritans,
were always looking for perspicuity,
the question, am I saved or am I damned?
So there's always this internal dialogue
and so when Christianity begins to falter
in the early part of the 20th century,
we have a substitute for it.
We can look inward
without being Christian.
It's called Freudianism.
So Freud captures America.
Marx captures Europe.
And so, Hartz argues in 1955
at the depths of the Cold War,
America will never succumb to Marxism
and it's actually true.
Class analysis never is gonna
fully catch on in America,
never, because we didn't
have landed aristocracy.
We've got wealthy and poor, that's true,
but that's not class in
the aristocratic sense.
So after the end of the Cold War,
not surprisingly, very soon after,
a new kind of Tocqueville emerged
which is the Tocqueville
of civic association.
So Eastern Europe collapses,
rather Soviet Union collapses,
Eastern Europe emerges as a
kind of an autonomous zone
and people are asking the question,
well, how can we bring
democracy to Eastern Europe?
And so we discover a new Tocqueville.
It's the Tocqueville of
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone,
the Tocqueville of civic associations.
And so this gets tried
for a number of years
and I think we're still
in the throws of this
with comparative politics.
I don't think it's adequate.
And one of the things I wanna
press for, here tonight,
is the claim that I think we need,
we're in a new geopolitical moment,
that we need a much more
comprehensive understanding
of a new Tocqueville that's
not American exceptionalism,
not civic associations.
It's what I call Tocqueville
for a terrible age,
because this is a terrible age.
We don't know what's going on here
and I'm gonna try and
give some coherence to it
because I think after 1989
we've really, we've lost our way.
So in 1989, Francis Fukuyama
publishes a very famous essay
which I'm sure a lot of you have read,
called The End of History.
You can get it online.
He turned it into a book,
but the essay's all you need to read.
And I'll just read a passage.
In watching the flow of events
over the past several decades,
it is hard to avoid the feeling
that something very fundamental
has happened in world history.
The century that began
full of self-confidence
and the ultimate triumph of
Western liberal democracy
seems at its close to
be returning full circle
to where it started,
toward the unabashed victory of economic
and political liberalism,
the triumph of the West,
of a Western idea is evident
in the total exhaustion of
viable, systematic alternatives
to Western liberalism.
Now as you probably know,
Fukuyama has stepped back from that.
A lot of people who followed Fukuyama
were known as Neo-Conservatives,
some of you know this.
And they saw in Fukuyama
a way to organize their own thinking
about what American foreign
policy should be about.
So in a uni-polar world,
what we're going to do
is we're gonna bring
we're gonna help this project of
universal Democratization along.
And I think that the
Neo-Conservative project
has certainly collapsed.
I think that's part of
the reason why the Trump,
why Trump won, because the Republicans
were still under the sail
of the Neo-Conservatives
and the pure Free-Market Conservatives.
We can talk about that if you want.
But I think that moment
has sort of passed.
But still, I think there are
a number of theoretical
alternatives after 1989
that we're wrestling with.
One is still what I would
call Liberal Triumphalism.
Fukuyama's not completely dead.
There's still the globalists out there
who believe that if we can just
have a bit more free market,
if we can just have a bit
more neo-Liberal institutions
with these universal norms that everybody
really agrees to, wink, wink, nod, nod
and they don't really
universally agree to them,
just Western Europeans and
Americans and Canadians
and Australians agree to them
but the rest the world really doesn't.
But there still is this globalist,
sort of neo-Liberal universalist push
that's out there.
But what's interesting is
something that Fukuyama,
I won't go into details,
but he almost anticipates
in the last paragraph
of that essay, where he invokes
Nietzsche, strangely enough.
But it's something that I
encountered in full force
in the Middle East and I encounter it
on the campus of Georgetown
and I think every other major
university and minor
university in the country.
And it's what I call, so this
is the second alternative,
post-Colonial indignation
and the politics of identity
at home and abroad.
So so many of my students
in the Middle East are
searingly angry at the West.
And so I say, well, so what do you want?
They say, well we want modernization
without Westernization.
This is the catchphrase.
And when you really press them,
what you understand is that
what they mean is they
wanna keep their existing
social relations yet have
all the accoutrements
of Western civilization.
But they're still very
angry about colonialism.
And they push to a politics
of indignation against this.
And so I say, I nod,
because I think a lot of
a lot of the gripes
against what the Brits did
and what the French did
and what the Americans did
in the Middle East, can't
really argue with it.
But, so you say, okay, great,
so I've listened to you
for now, several hours, and
you've told me all the list.
Alright, so now tell me,
tell me how you're gonna build a world.
What are you gonna do?
And aside from the critique,
they don't have much.
Aside from the resentment,
they don't have much.
But we still see these two alternatives
that are very much in play in the West.
The kind of globalization, liberal project
and then the searing anger
of resentment that exists
sometimes justified, sometimes not.
With what I call politics of identity.
Which I take to be a deeply
pernicious development.
We can talk about that if you
want a little bit later on.
So, but let me add something to this,
something that's developed
a little bit more recently,
but honestly, it's there in Tocqueville.
And it's there in Nietzsche, too.
It's what I call the Great Exhaustion.
My worry, it's Volume Two,
Part Three, Chapter 21
if you wanna look at in
Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
My worry, yes, I don't remember
what I had for breakfast,
but I remember page numbers.
It's 645 in the J.P. Mayer edition,
'kay I can't explain it.
I think this Great Exhaustion's
actually quite real
and I see it almost everywhere.
And I think Tocqueville got it.
So lemme read a little passage
from Democracy in America.
And think carefully
about what he's saying.
Trying to discover the state of society
most favorable to great revolutions,
intellectual revolutions.
I think it must lie somewhere between
complete equality for every citizen
and absolute separation of classes.
Under a caste system,
so this is aristocracy,
under a caste system,
generation follows generation
without a change in one's position,
while having nothing more to desire,
the rest have nothing better to hope.
The imagination slumbers in the stillness
of this universal silence.
And the mere idea of movement
does not come in to men's heads.
When classes have been
abolished, now here's equality,
the far corner of equality,
the distant future.
When classes have been abolished
and conditions have become almost equal,
men are constantly on the move,
but each individual is
isolated on his own and weak.
For all the vast differences
between these two states,
they are alike in one respect,
namely that great intellectual
revolutions become rare.
But between these two extremes
in a nation's history,
there is an intermediate
stage, a glorious time
in which conditions are
not sufficiently fixed
for the mind to sleep in which
there is enough inequality
for men to exercise great
powers over the minds of others,
so that a few can modify
the beliefs of all.
This is the time when
great reformers arise
and the new ideas that emerge
change the face of the world.
Well, this is really quite remarkable.
So instead of simply saying,
here's the Aristocratic Age
and here's the Democratic Age,
he's saying, by the way,
to his fellow aristocrats,
who see in Democracy nothing but turmoil.
He's saying, you know,
that's actually not the case.
In the age of Aristocracy,
things are fixed and stable.
There's a natural order,
there's proportion and analogy.
And his worry,
and this is where he's
so incredibly prescient,
he said, while the transitional age
to what he called Democracy
is turbulent, Democracy
itself, late, late Democracy,
that's where we are, is
actually unbelievably quiet
because now, people are
lonely and isolated,
they look to the state so much
to take care of their needs,
they don't know each other,
they don't gather together to
build a world together at all,
they become frightened
of the least change,
and it strikes me that there
are a number of developments
in our world today which
suggest that we're at this stage
of the Great Exhaustion.
So, rather than Democracy
being never ending turmoil,
Democracy has the appearance
of all this motion,
but everything becomes fixed and quiet
and we fall into sleep.
And, by the way, I give a
lecture called Facebook is Death
and I think Facebook is
part of this problem.
So lemme just give you
a couple of examples
of what I would take to
be the Great Exhaustion.
So if you know your Marx, you know that
in order to bring about
an end of alienation,
you have to have the Great Struggle.
You have to pass through bloodshed
and revolution to get there.
Now, in the Communist Manifesto,
if you read it carefully
in the last several
sections, last section,
he has a list of things
that stop the revolution.
And one is what he calls
Bourgeois Socialism.
Look, you know I'm gonna step
on toes here, that's my job.
Bourgeois Socialism is
akin to social justice.
And what do I mean by this?
What I'm trying to say
is that social justice,
I'll just state it, is part
of the Great Exhaustion.
Because what social justice wants to do
is it wants to, it has
the language of Marx,
the one percent and the 99 percent.
And it believes that well,
we can get to a just world
if we just do a little bit
of redistribution here.
And that's Bourgeois Socialism.
Marx had contempt of that
because Marx's view was
you can't actually end alienation
until you pass through the struggle,
bloodshed of revolution.
And so Bourgeois Socialism
or social justice
was this stop gap which
allows you to keep the aspects
of Capitalism but we'll just
have it a little bit more fair
so corporate responsibility,
all this stuff.
If you're a Marxist,
you laugh at this stuff
because on Marxist reading,
there must be world around Capitalism
because the fundamental
problem, you know this,
the fundamental problem is
the problem of scarcity.
And the only way you can end alienation
is if you overcome the
problem of scarcity.
And the only way to overcome scarcity
is to have ruthless
exploitation of persons
for the purpose of profit,
so that you finally develop
the productive apparatus
to truly overcome the initial problem
that we have in human history,
which is the problem of scarcity
which gives rise to all the
derivative social problems,
racism, gender, whatever they are,
all of them, all of them are derivative
of this primordial problem of scarcity
which means you have to use people up
as means to make profit.
And it's gotta be this global organization
along these lines
in order to finally solve
the problem of scarcity.
That's what you really have to do
to end alienation.
And Marx could see already in 1848
that there'd be these
people who didn't have
the stomach for it.
And so they'd settle for a
little bit of redistribution
and keep Capitalism.
Another example of this I
think is identity politics.
Identity politics is very
quick to identify power
and oppression and it
comes out of Nietzsche
and it's actually, it's very fascinating.
Just as Bourgeois Socialism
and social justice
are derivatives of Marx,
but they don't have the
stomach to be fully Marx,
so too, identity politics
derives from Nietzsche
but doesn't have the stomach
to be fully Nietzsche.
Because Nietzsche saw everything
in terms of power relations.
And his point was, yeah, that's real
and in fact, the only way
you build a civilization
is based on power relations,
the new aristocracy.
It's the only possible way.
And so he wants to debunk the pretenses
of a kind of liberal order
in which we're all just
rational citizens who can use our minds.
Instead, point out that we're all
sort of these physiological upwellings
which is to say, our identities.
And he says,
and this is the only way
to build a civilization
is based on inequalities of power.
And moreover, this is gonna
produce tremendous suffering.
And here's where identity
politics differs.
So identity politics
points out the suffering
of different identity groups.
And then here's the Nietzsche point
that's so important to understand.
Nietzsche says, suffering is
not an argument against life.
That even if there's suffering,
and even if there's cruelty,
it's not an argument against life.
So one of the most famous
passages of Nietzsche
is called the Myth of the Eternal Return
in which he says the truly strong soul
would be able to look at every suffering
that he or she has endured
and every suffering
in humanity has ever endured and say,
I will take this over and over again
a thousand times and still,
life would not be refuted.
And yet today what we do is
we look at power relations
as a repudiation of life, that somehow,
somehow life itself has been violated
because there's power relations.
I'm not defending Nietzsche.
What I'm trying to do here is to show
that you've got these
powerful 19th century figures
who understood that there was
a great deal that we had to do
that was going to require
tremendous suffering
and we don't have the stomach for it.
But yet, we recur to Marx or to Nietzsche.
I'll give you another example.
Professor Wright indicated
that I'm conserving my forests
and involved in solar
sailboat technology and I am.
And I believe in it.
But I also am very,
very nervous about this
I'll use the term, I hate to use the term
but the whole climate change argument.
It's not that I think
the science is wrong.
I'm perfectly prepared to
say the science is right.
I'm concerned about the politics of this.
Because if it's the case
that we can't save the world
unless there's a global arrangement,
called the Paris Accord,
that if we don't sign it,
the world has ended, I
want you to think about
what this means politically.
It means, in effect, that you and I all,
each in our own lives,
recognize that there's a problem
and the only way it can be
solved is if they fix it.
So each of us seem to be incapable
because we're weak and
small of doing anything.
So I call myself a Steward.
I don't believe in Environmentalism.
I'm a Steward.
We're gonna labor with creation.
We're gonna never quite get it right.
But the whole idea that they are the ones
that have to solve the
problem is, I think,
a really, really serious
indicator of the Great Exhaustion.
We'll talk about this a little bit later.
Tocqueville has a beautiful phrase,
in the late Democratic Age,
we will sense ourselves
to be greater than
kings and less than men.
Greater than kings and less than men.
What he meant by that,
I'll get right to it,
was that, to use my language,
we would come to a world which
we would think of in terms of
management, society, and selfie-man.
So, with respect to the great
things that need to be done,
we're not up to it.
We have to have a Paris Accord
or we have some
trans-national organization
because we're less than men.
Ah, but when it comes to
taking pictures of ourself,
selfies, look how important we are.
We're greater than kings.
This is the paradox Tocqueville thought
would be at the heart
of the Democratic Age,
the late Democratic Age.
And I think we are right there.
So that what we have here, as I said,
these three possibilities.
We've got, still some optimism,
a global, liberal triumphalism,
the Fukuyama argument,
identity politics and
politics of indignation.
There's that.
But also, as I said, this Great Exhaustion
that has completely captivated us.
And so the only thing we think we can do
is have our Facebook pages.
This is how we become persons.
And this I think a deep, deep distortion
of what Tocqueville
understood to be the charge
in the Democratic Age, because as I said,
the Democratic Age at the end is a quiet
as the Aristocratic Age is.
And so while his aristocratic
friends are saying,
democracy is nothing but
never-ending revolution,
Tocqueville says, no, democracy
is quietude and silence.
It's everybody having their Facebook page.
It's everyone downloading Netflix
and feeling good about talking about
the latest movies that they've downloaded.
He's sees this, this is
like 692, go check it out.
He sees what he calls the New Despotism
and it's exactly where we are today.
He sees this in 1838.
So, my thesis is here, that
Tocqueville understood the problem,
and that is, I'll use his words,
a great Democratic revolution
is taking place in our midst.
Everybody sees it, but by no means
everybody judges it in the same way.
Some think it a new thing
and supposing it an accident,
hope they can still check it.
Others think it irresistible
because it seems to them
to be the most continuous
ancient and permanent
tendency of history.
So Tocqueville's view, we
have to be very clear on this,
Tocqueville thought, and here's where he
I think he gets it better
than most 19th century people,
equality is the future.
We know equality is coming.
But we have to ask the question,
so what does that mean?
Equality's a big word.
It can mean many things.
And what we immediately
tend to go to is we think,
oh, that means Democracy.
And so we think politics.
But remember what I said earlier.
Tocqueville's a sociologist,
not a political theorist.
And so when he thinks about equality,
he's thinking about what he calls
social conditions of equality.
Well now what does that mean?
So I mentioned before that
that Tocqueville thought
that the links would slowly
be broken between persons.
And those links are
the links between roles
and different obligations, right,
so you've got a role,
you've got an obligation
to another person in another role.
And you have all these
reciprocal obligations.
And these things slowly break down.
And he thought something
new was gonna emerge.
And here Tocqueville's
defending Democracy.
Tocqueville's great because he understands
that Democracy, this thing called equality
has some really great things about it,
but some really, really
dangerous things about it, too.
And I would suggest
that we listen carefully
to both sides of this.
So he recognized that when
the roles begin to break down,
you get something new in human history.
Now think about this.
You can, for the first time,
not see yourself as a role,
but see yourself as a person.
And to think of yourself as a person,
it means you can look into
the eyes of another person
and here it is, and
recognize another person.
Recognize.
And lots of words have
been used to describe this.
The gaze.
Right?
It's interesting, if you
look at ancient history,
there's no such talk about recognition.
Recognition doesn't exist.
It's not in Plato, it's not in Aristotle.
Don't really know it's in
Augustine, not in Hobbes,
not really even in Rousseau.
But it's when you get
to the modern period,
where all these social roles break down
and we see ourselves as having,
and you'll all relate to this,
a certain ironic distance to our roles.
This is why people are always joking
about their obligations and their roles.
Certain irony.
We're not quite sure who
we are at this stage yet.
We're persons, yes, we still
are tied to roles in some ways
but we always have this
ironic distance to this.
This is the configuration, I think,
we're all living out right now.
It's exactly what Tocqueville predicted.
So we move from roles
that have obligations,
but where people have loyalty,
but they don't see each other,
they can't recognize
each other as persons.
So what you get in this new Democratic Age
is recognition.
Recognition between persons.
And that's what he means
by conditions of equality.
He says, you can still have
huge wealth differences,
there can be differences
between men and women,
there can be differences
between the races,
doesn't matter.
We can look into each other's eyes
and see another person
behind the differences
and that produces a tremendous tension,
which get this, calls us
to move past the differences of roles.
Why do you think race, class and gender
are the central issues
in high school education
and in large part, in university?
Because we believe that
because of recognition,
we can see the fundamental
equality between persons
and race, class and
gender are those instances
where we can still see difference.
It's precisely because
we recognize each other,
it's precisely because
the sociology of roles
has been destroyed that
we've become persons,
that we can see each
other for the first time.
But when we can see each
other for the first time
because we're persons,
we've done so as a consequence
of breaking all the links.
And so you get this, this
delicate, beautiful thing
called the person that
declares, I'm not my role.
And yet that person also
feels profoundly alone.
And so Tocqueville writes in a letter to
one of his, this is from
my book, I'll just read.
In a letter composed just
three years before his death,
Tocqueville wrote,
this profound saying
applies, especially to me.
It is not good for man to be alone.
When I tell my students
that the whole of Democracy
in America was written under
the ages of the sentiment,
under the shadow of what could be called
the philosophy of loneliness, they listen.
Tocqueville's concern, I tell them,
was the emergence of a
new type, homo-solace.
The lonely man.
And with how this new type
would understand himself
and his place in the world.
And so my students approach
Tocqueville's Democracy in America
with a sense of urgency.
They soon discover that it is a book
that reads their own hearts,
for few things are more haunting to them
than the specter of loneliness.
They seek to understand Tocqueville,
so that they may understand themselves.
For in Tocqueville's writings,
they find an account of the ideology
of the disease from which they suffer.
Man, the lonely animal.
That is why I ask my
students around the globe
to read his book.
And because teachers of the
history of political thought
are called not only to
diagnose the disease,
but to indicate wherein health may lie,
I ask my students to
read Democracy in America
so they maybe discover in
Tocqueville's cautious hope
that such loneliness need
not be the final word
about their future.
So Tocqueville's overall theories
were moving from the Aristocratic Age
to the Democratic Age.
From a world where persons are
understood in terms of roles
to a world where we can think
of ourselves as persons.
Where the extended family is broken up
across generations and
so now we come to have
individual persons who
don't think of themselves
in terms of the long chain of generations.
And above all, where the
fixity of social positions
gives way to the constant flux
that we're all frightened to death of.
And so, just a quick footnote.
Tocqueville says that what
happens in the Democratic Age
when we move to this
condition of personhood
is that we develop this thing
called Middle Class anxiety.
And I said this to
students today, earlier.
So what is Middle Class anxiety?
Middle Class anxiety is this,
you've tasted enough of
the goods of the world
to understand the benefits,
but you don't have enough
to be secure in their enjoyment
and so you're constantly
worried about falling.
So these middle class people
have these profound anxiety.
They have the wonder of being persons
and yet, the specter of being alone.
And this, the phenomena of
roles giving way to persons
was, I think here, we've
more or less moved past it.
I mean, we understand roles,
but we don't really
believe in them anymore.
And I think that's what
we're wrestling with.
Can we have a world
where we're just persons,
and not roles?
Huge question.
In the Middle East, it's not quite there.
They still wrestle with this.
So lemme just do another passage.
It's difficult for my main
campus students to imagine
the ties of obligation and loyalty.
I routinely ask them, for example,
whether at home they do
anything in way of chores
because the family into
which they have been born
requires it.
The description already
anticipates the answer.
Very few raise their hands.
The formulation itself seems odd to them.
More than any generation
that has come before them,
they expect and receive money
for the chores that they do
and are seldom moved to action without it.
When they are young, they are called upon
to attend various family
gatherings and do so.
But from adolescence onward,
it is increasingly difficult
to concentrate their
attention on such matters.
Already, they are on their way
to breaking their attachments
with their parents.
Loyalty and obligation
can be hardly fortified
if sons and daughters begin
to leave the family fold
shortly after they reach puberty.
And because the lesson of self-interest
has often been instilled
in them long before that,
it only seems natural
that it should be extended and amplified
when their eyes shift elsewhere.
To this should be added
Tocqueville's concern
that the administrative reach of the state
extends further and further
into everyday concerns.
When it does, the real sway of the family
is bound to diminish.
When sons and daughters
anticipate that the state
will take care of their
affairs from cradle to grave,
they soon come to think
that the real source of their sustenance
and reproduction is the state.
That too encourages them to
think largely in terms of
their immediate interests.
Nothing can really dissuade Democratic man
from thinking narrowly about himself
if the state is taken away from him
the cumbersome task of
living with his family
and his neighbors.
My students in Qatar, on the other hand,
tell a different story.
They are ever cognizant of
the family name that they bear
and of both the loyalty
that must be displayed
and the obligations that must be born.
These do not diminish with age.
Many of them, especially the women,
spend evenings and weekends
involved in family celebrations
that routinely include
first and second cousins.
These gatherings bring
coherence to the extended family
and reconfirm its standing
within the larger social body.
This attentiveness to family obligation
often has deleterious
consequences for their studies,
though in vain does the
teacher implore them
to place their own
self-interest at the forefront.
Many of them do understand
themselves first and foremost
as individuals, but rather,
do not understand themselves
as individuals, but rather as
bearers of the family name.
More accurately, why they
are increasingly coming
to think of themselves as individuals,
they nevertheless continue
to understand themselves
as occupying a specific and
largely unalterable role
in the family and by
extension, in their societies.
They occupy roles, yet
they think of themselves
increasingly as individuals.
Therein lies the difficulty.
So I think the difference
then, between the United States
and the Middle East is where we are.
That in America, it is
because we never had
this aristocratic past in a deep way.
We're farther along to completely
breaking our understanding
of roles, whereas in the Middle East,
these young people are just ripped apart
and oftentimes their response
is to oscillate back and forth,
one day being this, the
next day being this,
and never quite finding the balance.
So we do have to take
stock of what's gained
and what's lost
as we move from the Aristocratic
Age to the Democratic Age.
And what's lost is honor and loyalty
and obligation.
But what's gained, and
this is terribly important.
And here I think Tocqueville.
People call him a conservative, not quite,
Burke is the conservative.
Tocqueville sees that equality is coming
and he wants to see what's great about it.
And I think what you would
put at the top of the list
and I've already given it to you
is recognition.
This can't happen in the Aristocratic Age.
And if you look at the history
of the idea of recognition,
it emerges rather late.
And the first really
serious account of this
could be seen as Hegel's phenomenology
in the Master Slave dialectic,
where the master and the
slave recognize each other.
Why does this happen in 1807,
a Tocquevillian would ask?
And the answer is, because
social conditions were such
previous prior to that,
that people couldn't think
of themselves as persons.
They thought of themselves
as roles, first and foremost.
And it's only when social
conditions break down,
you can think of yourself
as a person that you develop a theory
that accords with it.
So you get Hegel, you get, you know,
brilliant understandings
of the gaze with Levinas
in the 20th century.
All these brilliant theorists
and Tocqueville would say,
that's because something new has emerged,
a new kind of person
who's not his or her role,
but is a person.
So one of the things that you would put
at the top of the
checklist is recognition.
And the corollary to that, of course, is
that then we can look into
the eyes of another person
and see their suffering.
Tocqueville cites a letter from a woman
writing in the 1600s in France,
writing to her daughter,
and in the letter the mother says,
honey, paraphrasing,
honey, 'cause they wouldn't say honey,
'cause only in the Democratic
family do you say honey,
got it?
In the Aristocratic family,
it's rank order of birth,
so I'm paraphrasing.
So, honey, can't wait
for you to get married,
really looking forward to that.
Oh, by the way, the fiddler,
he's been acting up,
so we cut his body into four quarters
and we put each quarter,
each part of his body
on the north, south, east
and west side of town
and we're pretty sure that's
gonna stop those people
from acting up
and we're really looking
forward to the marriage.
Now, I dunno many of your mothers
that can write that story.
And Tocqueville says,
you have to understand
what's going on here.
We'll say this is cruelty.
But we say this is cruelty
because we can imagine
the suffering of another person.
But Tocqueville says, you
don't understand this.
In the Aristocratic Age you
don't imagine the suffering
of another person,
because a different class
is a different kind of humanity.
They're not your type.
And so you can only start to
think about universal humanity
when social class has been destroyed.
You can only start to think that.
So let's go down the list.
As social class gets destroyed,
we can think about universal humanity,
money becomes a singular measure,
we have recognition and persons,
all the stuff that we live,
Tocqueville saw in 1830.
So this is the great
revolution that's happening.
I need to say something
more about the pathology
here though.
So let's put recognition
at the top of the list.
Sympathy for the
suffering of other people.
Let's put that right there.
But let's ask, then, the question,
so what goes wrong?
Because something goes terribly wrong.
And we're living what's
gone terribly wrong
but few of us have the words for this.
And I used the phrase, management,
society and selfie-man.
But what that gets to is
Tocqueville's understanding that
life in the Democratic Age becomes,
to use a technical term, binodal.
We, our experience, dwells
in two different places.
So where are those places?
First, we come to dwell fully
in what could be called public opinion.
The they-say.
And so we download Netflix,
we chatter with our friends
about the latest movies
and the sports events.
So we're consumed with public opinion.
Right, we have public opinion surveys.
There's no public opinion
surveys in Aristotle and Plato.
It's unthinkable, it's unthinkable.
But in the Democratic Age,
when we destroy, let's be clear,
when we destroy the authority
of particular persons,
that's to say the landed class,
the authority of the name,
Tocqueville says authority
doesn't disappear.
It relocates.
And we always understand
where it goes first.
We say, well, yes, of course,
we don't believe in the
authority of other people,
we believe in the authority of ourselves.
That's why your education is
based on critical thinking.
Critical thinking is a
sub-text, it's a way of saying
don't trust the authority of other people,
trust only your own experience.
This is democratic.
'Kay, so that part we get.
We're not gonna trust the
authority of other people.
We're gonna trust our own experience.
But Tocqueville goes further.
He says it's not simply that authority
gets relocated from those
particular people to yourself,
it gets split
so that authority both goes above
individual persons to the
general public, public opinion
and down below each
individual person to us.
So we live this binodal existence
in which we pay attention to the they-say,
they say that, the
they-say of public opinion
and our own little isolated soliloquies.
And so the world that we're living now,
where we've got, you know,
downloadable movies at our command.
I mean can you imagine?
We can just do that.
We watch entertainment whenever we want,
it's exactly what Tocqueville predicted.
The state wants universal entertainment.
That's how it keeps us in subservience.
It's true, we're zoo animals
as I said earlier today.
We'll talk about that.
But what Tocqueville sees
is this bifurcated existence
where we live at two places at once,
in public opinion and in our
own little narrow soliloquies,
our Facebook pages.
Now what do these things have in common?
What does public opinion
living based on the authority
of what they say,
and this could be
politically correct speech,
it'll be something else
five years from now, but
there's always some speech
that's acceptable speech
and if you don't believe in that speech,
you go voluntarily to the mad house,
because there must be
something wrong with me,
why don't I believe what these people say.
I'm just me and then
there's the public, right?
So, Tocqueville sees that
life is gonna be binodal
and that we're gonna dwell in two places,
public opinion and they-say.
And what they have, what
these things have in common,
we have to be clear,
what they have in common
is that both of them involve no risk.
And of course they involve no risk
because once you break
the links between persons,
and everybody senses
themselves to be small,
and of little consequence on the one hand
and selfies on the other.
Once we think of ourselves as small,
we're frightened to take risks.
And so now we don't call each other up.
We text and say, hey, can I call you?
Because we're scared of real-time life.
Because real-time life
can't be choreographed.
It can't be controlled,
it can't be managed.
Real-time life, in short, is a risk.
And so we move to these two
other, these binodal points
both of which involve no risk.
We can talk, you know, without any risk
about the latest Netflix and
we can post on our soliloquies
we go to post on our Facebook
page as we go to sleep
our little soliloquy
and if somebody acts up,
we just de-friend them.
That's what Tocqueville thought
the world would look like
in 1838, this binodal existence.
And so we ask the question,
okay, and by the way,
this is not, this is
not the restless energy,
this is the Great Exhaustion.
We'll download our Netflix,
we'll post our Facebook pages,
but we can't do anything.
We've gotta hand it to the global experts.
'Kay, this is the Great
Exhaustion at the end of history,
Tocqueville saw this.
So we ask the question, okay,
so what are we gonna do?
How do we address this?
And so the answer's very clear.
We have to step away from
these two binodal points
and we have to step into
this intermediary zone
of real-time, face-to-face life.
And so I think the most
famous passage in the book
or the book that I think
characterizes the whole,
is the one which goes,
feelings and ideas are renewed,
the heart enlarged, the mind expanded
only by the reciprocal actions
of people one upon another.
In other words,
we can't do this with
soliloquy and they-say.
The only way we can build a world,
the only way we can justify
this thing called democracy,
the only way we can justify it
is if we're actually
building a world together.
And I'm not gonna go into
the details of this but
there are long arguments which
continue up through Nietzsche
about whether democracy's a
sustainable civilizational form.
Tocqueville knows these.
Everyone has been saying, up 'till then,
all the serious thinkers have been saying,
there's serious problems with democracy.
And Tocqueville wants
to vindicate democracy.
And he knows there's only
one way to vindicate it.
There's only one way to defend it
as a vibrant, civilizational form.
And that's that if you and I
have the courage to risk real life,
face-to-face associations.
And if not, this
civilizational form will die.
And we'll return to aristocracy.
'kay, that's the charge,
that's the moral charge he lays on us.
We have to vindicate democracy
by building a world in the face-to-face.
Now, I wanna stay more.
I think I've got a little
bit more time, if I may.
I wanna say one more thing I think is
terribly important to
understand about Tocqueville.
So, he identifies a number
of institutions in society
that you need to have in
order to build this world
face-to-face.
And they are civic associations,
local government, he's a
great defender of federalism,
the family, and religion.
And all the civic
association's literature,
Putnam, Bowling Alone, Robert Bellah,
they all see that institutions matter.
These intermediate institutions of society
that stand between the
lonely, isolated individual
and the state, all these
things are necessary.
But here's what's been missed
by every single one of them.
And that's that Tocqueville
has a very interesting
psychology which actually has
a long, historical pedigree
which has been completely lost.
It's in Augustine, it's in
Hobbes, it's in Rousseau,
it's central to Tocqueville.
And that is the following, ready?
The natural condition of
humanity is bipolar disorder.
Now we have medicalized this.
Oh, you've got a brain chemistry problem.
And Tocqueville said in
the age of Democracy,
you're gonna have more madness
than at any other time in human history.
And now I wanna explain
why he thought that.
The human condition is bipolar
by which I mean, there's this tendency
to oscillate back and forth
between brooding withdrawal,
depression and a kind of frenzy.
And as I said, this
insight has been available
for a long time, so it's in
Augustine in The Confessions
in what he does.
What does he do?
He tries to be the rhetorician.
He gets public praise and
then something happens
and he broodingly withdraws into himself
and so he oscillates back and forth
between brooding withdrawal
and frenzied satisfaction
of the world until he finally realizes,
there is no rest until I rest in Thee.
So that there is this condition,
this bipolar condition
that's there in Augustine
and he knows that only God can solve it.
Hobbes has this too, if you look carefully
at the first part of Leviathan.
You've got this ceaseless
desire for power that
or this restless desire for power
that ceases only in death.
So that's the frenzy.
But then, people aren't paying attention
to what always goes with it, which is
the privilege of absurdity,
the grievances of language
which cause people to
broodingly withdrawal
because they've been injured with words.
And so in the state of nature,
it's not just reckless desire for power,
it's brooding withdrawal.
We oscillate back and
forth, this bipolar way
in the state of nature, and
only Leviathan can solve this,
the mortal god, not the God-god,
but the mortal god Leviathan
is the reconciler of this.
And then in Rousseau in the book Emile.
Oh, the agony of that book.
Emile spends all of his
life with a washer woman.
He has five kids, gives them all away
and writes the most fantastic
book on educating children
that's ever been written.
I can't reconcile that
but I'm telling you,
you should own The Emile.
But in The Emile, it's an exquisite book,
it's an unbelievable book.
But he has this beautiful phrase.
He says, melancholy is
the friend of delight.
That's manic depression,
melancholy is the friend,
they go together, delight.
And so in the project of the Emile,
it's only with this
proper kind of education
that you can address this deep instability
in the human soul.
So now let's come up to Tocqueville.
Tocqueville thinks that human
beings are by nature bipolar.
And now we can come to understand
why he talks about the
associations that he does.
Let's go back.
Civic associations,
political participation,
family and religion.
I'll do them in that order.
Why do we have civic associations?
What do you need, why
is this sort of thing
so necessary for us?
Well because we have this
propensity to withdraw
into ourselves.
We have to have a palpable
human-scale set of relations.
And we've got this propensity
to pull into ourselves
and that's why civic associations
draw us out of ourselves.
That's why they're important.
They address one part
of the bipolar thing.
And so, too, politics.
The purpose of politics
is not representation.
We think politics,
descriptive representation,
the bean-counting of different identities
and Tocqueville says, no you've missed it.
The reason why you have federalism
is because the purpose
of politics is to induce,
to draw people out of their narrow worlds
and have to count on other
people, to need other people.
And so the purpose of politics is too,
to draw people out.
And then when you go to
his discussion of family,
it's interesting.
I dunno if he's one of the first
because I think Rousseau's
Emile Book Five,
Four and Five, eh, Book Five.
It really begins this.
And Tocqueville follows this.
There's a problem, it's
called male socialization.
'Kay, men have this
disposition to throw themselves
frantically into the world.
And Tocqueville says, you
must have women in the family
if you're gonna stop this
frenzied male activity.
And I know it's politically incorrect,
but Tocqueville really
did think there's a male
socialization problem.
And so much of the social science
literature, you know this,
has revealed that in
fact, this is a problem.
And Tocqueville thought the
only way you could solve it
was within the confines of the family.
So let me come to the last one, religion.
You know, Tocqueville says
a great deal about religion.
Rather, he says a great deal
about the importance of religion.
But when you press him on
what religion actually does,
he never cites dogma, never.
And a quick footnote on that.
The reason why he never
cites dogma is he realizes,
and I said this before,
that in the Democratic Age,
we're gonna trust in our own experience.
And the idea that a church
is gonna come along and say,
here are the true teachings,
it's just gonna float right
over our Democratic heads.
Because we're gonna pay
attention to our experience.
So when Tocqueville comes
to defending religion
in these exquisite passages
in Book One, Part Two,
Chapter Nine, it's Pascal, it's
the experience of suffering.
It's not dogma, it's the
experience of suffering.
So he's trying to bring people to religion
through a human experience,
not through doctrinal truth.
So that's the first thing I would say.
The second thing is, when
you really press him on
what he thinks religion is,
he says, strangely enough,
well, what's the two great commandments?
Not much more.
Love God.
Love your neighbor.
And so you ask the question,
well is he just kind of
reciting basic theology here
or is he have some other thing in mind?
And I think he has some
other thing in mind.
And I think we need to think
in terms of bipolarity.
Because Tocqueville will say,
isn't it curious, isn't it curious
that we are asked to love
God and love our neighbor?
Well think about this in
the context of bipolarity.
Let's start with frenzy.
If we're throwing ourselves
frantically into the world,
what better antidote is
there than the reminder
that above anything in
the world, God is God.
And nothing in the world
can feed your hungry soul.
And if the problem is
withdrawal and melancholy
and isolation and depression,
what better antidote is
there than the injunction,
you have to pay attention
to your neighbor.
So Tocqueville looks at
these two great commandments
and says, isn't curious that
these two great commandments
correspond to exactly the
weakness of the human situation?
So Tocqueville will see
that we have to have these institutions,
not simply because they're intermediary
between the individual and the state,
but because the human being
has this remarkable problem.
We're naturally bipolar, we're
naturally prone to withdraw
and to throw ourselves
frantically into the world.
And that's why we have to have
these institutions in place.
So we can move in the
direction of efficiency
and look to the powerful state
and have our selfie-selves
and management and society.
But precisely in proportions.
We do that and we don't have these vibrant
intermediary associations
which address the problem
of bipolarity, madness will increase.
And we know this is happening.
The amount of drugs
that the Americans take,
staggering amount of
drugs for mood problems.
And Tocqueville thought
mood was really important.
Mood discloses something about
the Democratic condition.
We're never going to completely
get rid of our moodiness,
but he does think that unless
we have a living set of arrangements
in our local communities, in our politics,
with our voluntarily chosen
families and our religion,
unless we have that vibrant network,
we're gonna fall into
this bipolar disorder.
And there's nothing we can do about this.
And so this anticipates exactly
what Huxley had predicted
in Brave New World.
Because there you have
no real friendships,
no real associations.
You've got sexual explorations
perhaps, you know,
among the people and that's
of course encouraged,
but you don't wanna have
family, that's terrible,
you don't wanna have family,
you have to destroy the family
and just have sex, Huxley saw this.
And you gotta have drugs.
Right, so you gotta have as much free sex
as you possibly can,
which has nothing to do with generation,
to keep people happy and kind of drugged.
And then when you have this anxiety,
well, you've got a medical
problem, here, take a pill.
And so Huxley really fills out the world
that Tocqueville had anticipated
a hundred years before.
And so, you know, my
great worry here is that
that we're right now in this moment
that is deeply Tocquevillian.
We look around the world and we say,
well, we've got this populism problem.
We don't have a populism problem.
This is absolutely the wrong word to use
and I've been saying, but
nobody's gonna listen, but
both the Democrats and the Republicans,
they just, they love this phrase.
They both gain something from it.
But it's not populism.
It's exactly what Tocqueville
thought, which is,
we're living this disembodied life
in our identity space of our Facebook page
where we're connected to nobody, really.
And committed to global universal values
which allow us also not to
be connected to anything.
And there's this desperate, inchoate
longing for home and a palpable life,
desperate, and we don't
have a language for it.
And I'm suggesting to you
that Tocqueville gives us that language.
He knows that for life to go well,
it has to enter in, let's
be theological for a minute.
It has to be incarnate.
We can't be infinite beings
who hover over the world.
We have to become incarnate
flesh so to speak.
We have to live in a broken world
where there's always going to be suffering
and limitations.
We have to stop being the
romantic, beautiful souls
that hover over the world,
which is what he thought
we would all become.
And we have to step
into life and take risks
and that's the bad news,
because it's incredibly hard to do.
It means no more text messages.
It means call your friend,
that's what it means.
It means a life of real time.
And so I argue with my
conservative friends.
And they say, well, we need to have more
you know, conservative principles.
I say, look, the problem's not there.
The problem is not what we think.
The problem is our deepest,
our mores, our very habits
are so bifurcated right now
in this binodal existence
that until we realize
that we can only build a world together
in face-to-face real time,
until we become so exhausted and fed up
with this world that promises
much with management,
society and selfie-man
that we finally say enough
and we throw it off and
we call our friends,
there's no way this is gonna work.
We're gonna continue to build
out this binodal existence
and Tocqueville saw this
in Volume Two, Part Four.
He saw this tremendous temptation.
So the problem is not the ideas we have.
It's the deepest held
sentiments in our heart
about risk, about our own weakness
and this, if I may,
and I'll end with this.
This is another thing
that I think is lurking
in there Democracy in
America about religion.
Tocqueville never thought
that the Democratic Age
is gonna be a parsimonious one.
Nothing's gonna fit.
It's all gonna run at cross-purposes
to one another.
And so his understanding
of faith and hope is that
what we need, what we desperately need
is this faith and hope
which allows us to recognize
that life isn't gonna quite fit now.
There's a promise that
there's a meaning to this
that we can't fully understand.
But his view is life is not gonna fit
in the Democratic Age.
That's the agony of it.
That's why we hide.
That's why we hide behind
our Facebook pages.
That's why we hide in
trans-national organizations
because we see the impossibility
of building nations
and building local communities.
So I know, let's go to global government
or universal human society.
And Tocqueville says, no,
you've gotta throw yourself
knowing, into all these
particular communities
which have all legacy of
imperfection and grievance,
I get all that.
But we still have to
throw ourselves into them
knowing their limitations
but having hope and faith
that this is part of our moral charge
is to build a world together,
despite all of its imperfections.
And he says, only if you
start from that posture
can we fix the situation.
There's nothing from above,
no Trump, no Hilary Clinton, no Bernie,
no, wrong place to look.
It's not up there that's the problem.
It's right here.
It's how we're living every day.
And until we turn, there's
no end to our trouble.
>> Announcer: Biola
University prepares Christians
to think biblically about everything,
from science to business,
to education and the arts.
Learn more at Biola.edu.
