Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with my old friend Walter. Being at the BookFest and interviewing Walter Isaacson, I figured it's like interviewing Bruce Springsteen at the Jersey Shore.
Well, I would love to come with you. I know you're a huge Springsteen fan. And if I remember correctly, you went with Jeffrey Goldberg all the way to Italy to hear one of his concerts, right?
True fanaticism. It is exactly more exciting than coming to New Orleans to sit with me.
So, we're going to talk about this book, which I've slaved through over the past several weeks. It's taken me forever to get through this thing. But and I thought it'd be fun — we're both admirers of the founders and admirers of a lot of the same people, a lot of the people Walter has written biographies of — but I thought it'd be fun to pick a fight.
And to disagree that this isn't the greatest sentence ever written. It's kind of a mediocre sentence. No, I'm kidding. But I thought — and the point I'm going to make through a series of questions is — that a lot of the problems America experiences today are actually implanted in that sentence.
Interesting. And the way the book is structured, for those of you who haven't read it: Walter goes through each of the words or phrases in that sentence and digs out what they really mean. And so the first word in the sentence is 'we'.
Do you want to repeat the whole sentence? So, we—
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He chose 'unalienable' instead of 'inalienable.' Yeah, tricky little thing: Jefferson writes 'inalienable,' which is the better word, and John Adams miscopies it and makes it 'unalienable.' So in the Jefferson Memorial it says 'inalienable,' but in the final document it's 'unalienable.' This is a really boring part of that sentence.
So, as you point out in that first chapter, the founders were greatly influenced by a school of philosophy that was common in the 17th and 18th century called the social contract theory. And the most famous examples of this are: Thomas Hobbes has a version of it, John Locke has the most famous version, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau has another famous version. And the basic idea — it's a thought experiment, but the experiment is that humanity started out in a state of nature. There were no governments. People were running their farms or whatever they were doing to make a living, and then they decide this life is really dangerous: somebody could come in and steal all my food.
So what I should do is bind myself with my fellows, and I'll be willing to sacrifice some freedom in exchange for rule of law.
Right. And so I think they argue, and the Declaration and the Constitution are in some sense a social contract. Now my problem with this is that this state of nature never existed. I remember reading Hobbes in college and he's describing the state of nature as nasty, brutish, and short. And I'm like, where are the families? Who gives birth to these people? Are there any women in this state of nature? And when you think about how life actually is, we never existed as individuals who then formed contracts.
We existed as communities, families, clans, as relationships. It's relationships that form individuals. And so the question I'd ask you is: what this whole thought process implies is that the individual is prior to the collective.
And in our society today I think we've become overly individualistic — a little selfish, a little breaking apart from community — and it stems from a mindset that's overly individualistic.
When they were writing that, there had been no real nation founded on the consent of the governed. Because whether or not there was really a nasty, brutish, and short state of nature, what happens to all those clans you talk about is they either have the divine right of kings, which they develop in order to have a government, or the sword of the conquerors. And so you ruled because of the divine right of kings or the sword of the conquerors, and we were trying to get rid of a king. And so we said: no, the legitimacy of a government comes from a social contract. That's what Hobbes says and Rousseau in the second treatise. And it is a balance.
And this is where Locke, I think, gets it right. And you're picking one side of the balance. But one of the things our founders knew — because they were scientists: Franklin, Jefferson, Locke were all scientists, Newton was — is that you have to balance the rights of the individual and the rights that the individual gives up in order to become part of a social contract. And so we create what's called the commons when we do that. And the commons — you know, you and I lived in Boston. We thought, okay, Boston Common, I know what that is, it's a nice park. Not as nice as Audubon Park, but it's nice. Then you realize they call it the common because it's what they decide to put in common for those who don't own land: they can graze their sheep there, they can bury their dead there, they can plant their gardens there.
So what they're doing at that time is what Locke does in the second treatise: we have individual rights, and then we come together and put certain things in common. And community comes from the common — same word, communus — and it comes from saying, okay, we're going to put police protection, fire protection — maybe we should put health care in, no, maybe we shouldn't, whatever it may be — that'll be part of the common. So yes, we may have gotten too individualistic, as opposed to too believing in the commons, in the last 20 years or 40 years or whatever time frame you want to use. But I would not blame it on Locke, who says in the second treatise everybody has a right to their individual liberty and their private property. In fact, the line he uses is life, liberty, and property.
He says everybody has that right, but he has what's called Locke's proviso, which is as long as there is enough and as good left in common — meaning you have to keep the balance. Jefferson changes 'life, liberty, and property' to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Because, as Oren Cass said yesterday, Jefferson's theory, your theory, Michael Sandel's theory is that the purpose of an economy is not just to create wealth, it's to create a good society. And so I would argue that by saying, 'All right, we've had too much emphasis on the individual liberty part' — you're right, but please don't blame it on John Locke and the founders who kind of got the balance right.
Yeah, we'll return to that balance point. But it just seems, as a matter of historical accuracy, that people started out with the common. They didn't have any sense of individual selves. In a lot of cultures — in almost all cultures except the cultures we call WEIRD: Western, educated, I forget, individualistic, whatever the WEIRD stands for — we imagine that you could have people without the commons. But when you grow up together in a clan, you don't have much sense of private property. You don't have much sense of an individual. And in most countries, a lot of countries around the world, that still is the mentality. I teach.
Okay, but let me turn it on you. Isn't there a moral good to having not only the commons but having individual liberty with the individual right to private property? Don't you think so?
Of course. And my bank account agrees. But I do think it's important to see relationships come first, and individuals flow from relationships.
And then if you have an economy that destroys relationships and rewards everybody being out for themselves, all on their own, you get a problem. And what happened, I think, over the past 50 years — I'm not getting political here because it's not any particular president — over the past 50 years we decided, we meaning you and me and Tom Friedman, who doesn't totally agree with you, but you all, Aspen, stroke your chins, and you have the Aspen, Davos, Washington consensus.
Walter's pulling the common man on me. Walter Isaacson.
Yes, right. I'm a man of the neutral ground here. But that's our form of common ground. We all stand on the neutral ground and go to the parades together.
But I think that over the past 50 years we celebrated individualism, free trade, free movements of capital, unfettered migration, people coming in, and we all thought that was good and would create wealth. And we were right — it created an enormous amount of wealth over the past 50 years. What we didn't figure out was that it would hollow out the middle class and somewhat destroy the bonds of community and make it all out for oneself.
I had an uncle in Bogalusa. Some of you knew Sallie Ray and Alvin, and they had a furniture store and a factory, and they worked with wood. If you go to Bogalusa now, there's a big sign saying 'the American dream is dead.' Why? Nobody — it's all outsourced to Malaysia and places like that. So I think we got the balance wrong, and we should go back to what the founders knew from Isaac Newton: you always had contending forces, but you had formulas for putting them in equilibrium. We let them get out of equilibrium.
Now, before we get off this word — I didn't dwell on my dig at you for being an Aspen pinstroker with Tom, so ludicrous on its face that — just to apply this to a current figure: a couple of years ago, you and I and a guy named Roger Reer and a guy named J.D. Vance.
I'm sorry, who was before J.D.?
Roger Reer. We were up at St. Francis.
Yeah. Okay. Oh, there. Yeah.
For the Walker Percy weekend.
That's the opposite of an Aspen Ideas. Yeah. St. Francis.
Our close personal friend J.D. Vance. He gave a beautiful talk. But—
Oh boy. I wish I had a better memory. I don't remember that.
Now I do, actually. He didn't have a beard, did he?
I don't think he had a beard yet.
Okay. No wonder. He was still in his never-Trump phase back then.
And he has since made the point, as vice president, that when he defines America, he doesn't define it as this sentence, as this idea.
He says, 'My family in Kentucky, we have a cemetery where seven generations are in the graves.' And so that's a very different conception of what America is. I just wanted to ask you that.
Right. And Mitch Landrieu talked about it yesterday. Many people have talked about the question of: are we a creedal nation? Which is a ridiculous word, but it means: do we all subscribe to a creed? My version of the creed would be 'we hold these truths to be self-evident.' And is that what makes us American, or is it blood and soil — the notion that we have seven generations in our Kentucky cemetery? For us, obviously, I'm on the side that everybody came over — whether you came over on the Mayflower or the Amistad slave ship or across the Rio Grande or whatever — we came over and subscribed to a creed.
If you look at this city: you first get Bienville deciding what's the swampiest area that'll have the most water-main breaks, and he plants a flag there among the Watchatika Indians, and then the Spanish come in and take it, and then the French, then the Haitians come in, and then German Jews like my family, or the Italians, or the Spanish. And what do you get? You get a jambalaya that gives you jazz, great architecture. There are people who love the diversity of a community and believe in the creed of that community.
And the other type of people in this country are the people who just aren't comfortable with diversity. The fact that it's not bad to have the Vietnamese come here, help us rebuild from Katrina, and then make the king cakes actually taste good, which they didn't before the Vietnamese. It's true. I mean, I'm not making that one up.
And so I think if you want a great divide in America, it's those who think we live by a wonderful creed — that we all came here on different ships and different waterways and that we all subscribe to 'we're all created equal,' an aspiration that has taken us 250 years to try to achieve — or you think if you have seven generations in your cemetery, you're more American than others. So obviously I'm on the side that we're a nation that believes in a creed and gets its strength and its good food and its music from the fact that many rivers have flowed here.
You believe that, don't you?
I absolutely believe that, minus the inside New Orleans jokes that I don't get. But—
You know what a king cake is. So, let's move on to the next little bit of the sentence: self-evident.
I love that. And so I think you point out in the book that the idea that all humans are created equal was definitely not self-evident in the 18th century.
Right. Well, first of all, Franklin edits it. If you get the book, you can see in the flyleaf: the original Jefferson draft is on the flyleaf and says, 'We hold these truths to be sacred.' That's the way Jefferson writes it, which is odd because Jefferson's not religious. But Franklin's dark black backslashes of his printer's pen cross it out. He writes 'self-evident.' Now, I love Dr. Franklin. Actually, in my Ben Franklin book, if I remember, I quote you in the opening chapter because you called him America's first yuppie. And I thought that was such a good line, I stole it. And then I thought, well, I might as well give you credit for it because they may have plagiarism police someday. And so I gave you credit. Isn't that right?
That's correct. I don't remember J.D. Vance, but I do remember quoting you. So, and I thought, well, okay: Ben Franklin, he's a regular guy. He talks like Poor Richard's Almanac. And why would he say 'self-evident'? He should say 'obvious,' because, you know, it's a simpler word. But he had, I discovered, been living with David Hume, the greatest philosopher of that time, right after John Locke, in Scotland in 1775 and 1776, because he had been over there trying to keep the revolution from happening, unsuccessfully. And so David Hume has just written a book about truth.
And he said there are two types of truth. There are truths based on evidence, where you go around and you look — which is, say, Boston is bigger than New Orleans, and in order to prove that to be true you have to say how many people are in Boston and compare. There's another type of truth that's a self-evident truth, such as 'all bachelors are unmarried.' If you want to know if that's true, you don't have to go around surveying bachelors and saying, 'Do you have a wife?' You know it's true because it's by definition, or self-evident. The reason Franklin uses that is that if you go around the colonies — or you go around this audience right now — and you say, 'Is everybody equal?' the answer is, in some ways, no. I mean, some are taller, some are smarter, some are better looking, whatever it may be. Some are better athletes, and certainly back then some are enslaved and some aren't. But by virtue of the fact that everybody entered into that social contract, it's self-evident that they are equal under that social contract. So it's a way to say that the sentence isn't something — when we describe all the people, the two million people in the colonies, and say they're equal — it is self-evident that under the contract we're equal. And now we have to have a narrative that makes that true.
Yeah. So you've just described basically a theory of knowledge, which is David Hume's theory of knowledge: how we know things through logical inference.
And I think there are two different theories of knowledge bouncing around in America that flow from this moment. And if you want my 30-second definition of how we got liberals and conservatives, I would start in the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries, where Europeans just killed people in huge numbers. They would stuff the wells with bodies because Catholics and Protestants were just massacring each other.
And so eventually along comes the 17th century and they said, 'Enough. We're going to stop killing each other over religion, and we're going to have an Enlightenment.' And one of those Enlightenments is in France, and they say, 'Enough with religion. We're going to lionize reason.' And they have temples of reason. They had the French Revolution. They had a festival of reason.
Voltaire and all those guys. So that's one train of intellectual history, theory of knowledge.
Then there's a bunch of guys in Scotland, starting with David Hume, but including a guy named Ferguson, Adam Smith, the Irish guy Edmund Burke—
The Scottish Enlightenment.
Right. And so they said, no, do not trust reason. Hume famously wrote, 'Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.' And by passions he meant emotions. And they said, trust your emotions — trust your emotions when they're well educated: educated by manners, by custom, by family, by all the civic structures of society. Do not trust your reason. And it strikes me, and it comes out in this phrase, especially the contrast between sacred and self-evident, that the Americans were divided on which Enlightenment to follow.
And that shows up in how they greet the French Revolution. Jefferson likes it. Thomas Paine likes it. Alexander Hamilton doesn't like it.
And I think we're still kind of divided. If you want to know where, to me, conservatism comes from in its best form — not its current iteration — it comes from the Scottish Enlightenment: we have to preserve the customs that educate our passions. And progressivism descends from the French Revolution: we can use planning and reason to improve society. And it seems to me we're still divided on which Enlightenment is best. And the assertion of 'self-evident' is sort of going over to the French side, that we can use reason.
That is so brilliant. I wish I had thought of it myself. And as Dr. Kissinger would say, it has the added virtue of being true.
Yeah, the interesting thing about that is: Gary Wills does a book in which he credits the Scottish Enlightenment, like you do, and it's in your books. The Franklin and Jefferson version of the Enlightenment — I'm now going to develop my own theory here — is on the other side of that, about self-evident truths, because they are very much scientists.
And they believe you're a philistine if you don't understand Newton, checks and balances, correlation of forces, how you do those in science. If you're going to talk about the Enlightenment, you gave a lot of people credit for it, but the person I would give the most credit for the Enlightenment is Isaac Newton — but that's because I'm kind of on the Jefferson-Franklin side of this equation. I'm not as spiritual, say, as the Scottish Enlightenment.
So science, and more importantly the scientific method — which, believe it or not, didn't exist until, you know, Galileo helps, Newton helps, Francis Bacon helps — which is: you have a theory, but you don't believe it spiritually, you don't believe it emotionally; you test it. You say, 'How can I test this theory?' And then if you test it and the evidence comes back that it's not exactly correct, you revise the theory. So Franklin lectures on that a lot, which is the famous line that always comes down — 'and when the facts change, I change my mind' — Keynes says it too. But they were into the science. For example, I'll take two moral issues that were important then and are now: welfare payments — are they good for helping community, or are they bad because they disincentivize individualism and work? Instead of having a spiritual, emotional thing on that, Franklin goes around different places, different states in America and then to the north of England and Scotland and looks at the welfare laws to say how much do people get on the dole, as it was called, and what does that do to work incentives, and he does a scientific analysis. Same with the estate tax or death tax or whatever: he looks at it. He says, 'I don't want to have a preconceived emotional theory. Let me gather the facts like if I were a scientist.'
This is a question we've never talked about, but I'm going to ask it to you just out of curiosity. It was either Ludwig Wittgenstein or Taylor Swift who said — he said — 'When all the scientific questions have been answered, the most important questions of life will have been untouched.' That was the late Wittgenstein, not the late Taylor Swift — not that she's dead, by the way. Do you agree with that?
There are things that science, of course, will never touch — the grandest of all questions it will never touch, like: what is our purpose here? Why does the universe exist? Could you have an existence without the universe? What caused it all? There is no way you're going to get science to answer those questions. And one of the things you've written about is that it's dangerous when scientism can lead you down bad paths, when you think everything can be answered by science. Franklin and Jefferson were deists. They were not religious, but they kind of believed there was a creator — they didn't talk about God specifically. Jefferson famously has the Bible at Monticello where he uses a razor blade, cutting out all the mentions of Jesus's miracles and just leaving the moral teachings. So they are way on the side of scientism, and both of them end up — Franklin on his deathbed: Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, the minister, says to him, 'Do you believe in God?' He said, 'I believe that God made all of his creatures, so the best way to understand him is to look at what would be best for all of his creatures. Do you believe in the divinity of Jesus and miracles?' Franklin says, 'I haven't gotten much evidence on that in my life one way or the other, and now I've quit worrying about it because I'm going to find out soon enough with less effort.'
In your writings about Benjamin Franklin, the criticism of Franklin over the years, and to some extent Jefferson, is that he doesn't have a spiritual or elevated or grand moral dimension. His morals — I'm now quoting your book; you're supposed to be quoting mine — but your book basically says that those virtues of Benjamin Franklin, you know, industry, honesty, frugality, that they're bourgeois virtues as opposed to the more elevated spiritual virtues. And the answer is yes.
Yeah. I think D.H. Lawrence, the writer, hated Franklin for that reason. He said he doesn't touch my dark forest.
Now let's go to the next phrase: 'all men.'
Now, one of the things — and this is a great democratic principle, that we're a people — and obviously, as you make very clear in the book, they were not actually dealing with all men or all humans, obviously, but it's still a gesture toward a beautiful democratic vision. One of the things that haunts me is that the people who wrote this document and then wrote the Constitution were mostly — not all men — they were mostly aristocrats, and they were able to create these two magnificent documents.
And if I walk around the halls of Congress today and said, 'Why don't you guys write a Declaration of Independence and form a Constitution?' I don't think it would be as good. This is why we're against the move today to have a new constitutional convention, which some people want. I'm saying that's a bad idea. And I ask you as the author of the first book of yours I loved, which I think was your first book, The Wise Men, who were also — this is a book about the post-World-War-II era: Dean Acheson, John J. McCloy. These guys were also aristocrats. They went to Groton and Choate, and they learned how to be aristocrats. And both these generations of aristocrats — like, they read Plutarch, they got an aristocratic education: you're the elite, you have an obligation to govern society well, and here's how you do it, because we've got these great authors. As the author of The Wise Men, do you think there is some virtue in having a natural aristocracy?
Yeah. 'Natural aristocracy' is a word that Jefferson uses. 'Noblesse oblige' is the concept that you've just described, and obviously one can yearn for natural aristocracy. What happened — I can take Jefferson and Franklin; they both start universities, and their founding documents are fundamentally different. Jefferson says the goal of the University of Virginia is to create a new natural aristocracy, where we skim the cream of the top — the five percent smartest, the twenty smartest people, I think he picked each year — and they become the new natural aristocracy. Franklin starts the University of Pennsylvania and says the goal of education is to make sure every person gets to rise to the level in which they can flourish, and whether they're the most talented or the least talented, we have to do it. So he's against the natural aristocracy.
What happened bad was, in my opinion, right after World War II, we created not a natural aristocracy but a meritocracy, where we said if your SAT scores are good and your credentialism is good, you get to look down on other people and say, 'I know better what you should do.' And like globalism and everything else, we forgot that was going to cause a pitchfork-type backlash — that the meritocracy deserves to rule us.
Would it be nice to get back to an era of Jeffersons and Franklins and McCloy and Lovett? It's, you know, I guess it's the end of The Sun Also Rises where he says to Lady Brett, 'Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?' And the answer is no.
It's a real problem when you have a media elite like we did in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and a banking elite, a John McCloy elite, and the elites lose total touch with what is valuable about communities in St. Francisville where we went to, or Bogalusa, and other places.
would be more in favor of that elite had they not, excuse my language, screwed it up so royally beginning in the late 1960s to the present.
Yeah, I guess, let's hope... say they screwed it up. So we screwed it up. I was part of that Time magazine, you know, elite, and we just got things wrong.
Just us proletarians up here.
Yeah. No, move back home. I think one of the things Jefferson got wrong, which a lot of subsequent meritocrats got wrong, was the idea that intelligence exists without the, without context.
And one of the problems with the meritocracy is affluent people invest massive amounts of money in their kids and get them into Yale and Harvard and Princeton and places like that. But I think the way I would think about this is that Walter Lippmann had a phrase: the people, meaning every, all of us, are not often wise, but they're usually sensible.
