The Case for Minding Your Own Business
Episode Stats
Summary
Brandon Wormke is a professor of philosophy and the co-author of Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. In this episode, he explains why what he calls "commencement speech morality" distorts our moral vision by emphasizing one version of the good and valuable life at the expense of a life marked by ordinary morality.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Attend the graduation of a college senior and the commencement speech is likely to include a few
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themes. Do something big, make a name for yourself, change the world. My guest is not a fan of this
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advice and says that rather than focusing on solving large scale problems, we ought to concentrate on
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making things better in our own backyards. Brandon Wormke is a professor of philosophy and the
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co-author of Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. Today on the show, Brandon explains
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why what he calls commencement speech morality distorts our moral vision by emphasizing one
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version of the good and valuable life at the expense of the value and good of a life marked
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by ordinary morality. Brandon first unpacks the dangers of intervening in other people's business,
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including becoming a moralizer and a busybody. He then makes a case for the benefits of minding
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your own business and putting down roots, creating a good home and living in solitude and for how a
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smaller, quieter life can still be generous, important, and noble. After the show's over,
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check out our show notes at aom.is slash ordinary morality.
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All right, Brandon Wormke, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, Moral Grandstanding. You got a new book
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out called Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. And this is really interesting. It's about minding your
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business morally. What's interesting is you're a moral philosopher. So you wouldn't think a moral
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philosopher would say, hey, just mind your own business. But you make the counterintuitive case
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that to make the world a better place, you might start just minding your own business and just focusing
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on your inner circle that you have in your life. And you start off the book talking about that there's
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two types of morality that you see out there. You call one type commencement speech morality
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and the other ordinary morality. What are the differences between the two?
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So commencement speech morality, if anyone's ever been to a commencement speech, when I talk about
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this sort of outlook, they almost immediately know what I mean. So it's an outlook that has certain
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values and priorities and judgments that commencement speakers usually pulled from the social elite
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tell young graduates. And they'll say something like, the world is full of injustices that need
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addressed. The world is full of people who need help. It's clear what needs to be done. But all of us
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old people, we don't care enough to do it. But you care. You have the spark in your hearts. And so get out
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there and make a name for yourself, solve the biggest problems you can, and make the world a better
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place for everyone. And that's the kind of message that most college graduates get. Now, this kind of
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message, you don't just get it at commencement speeches. You can hear it all kinds of places in society.
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But it says moral life is simple. The world is your business. The world is a kind of buffet of problems
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to solve. And in fact, what gives your life meaning is solving these problems. And the bigger problems that
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you can solve, the better, the bigger that you can make a name for yourself. And what makes all the
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difference is your good intentions. And that's a message that a lot of young people hear, not just
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a graduation, but through high school and college. And it's the view of life from the podium when we're
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high minded and when speakers have an audience. What we argue in the book, though, is that the problem
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with commencement speech morality is that it distorts our moral vision. It focuses on only one kind of
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valuable life, which you might think of as like political engagement or saving the world. But in
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the book, we offer a different kind of outlook. And we call it, for lack of a better term, we call it
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ordinary morality. It's not the view from the podium, but it's the view from your backyard garden,
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your local library. And it takes a much wider view about what's important in life. It says life isn't
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just about shaping the revolutions of your time or solving the world's biggest problems. Life is also
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about reading to your kids and coaching t-ball and mowing your yard and volunteering at your local
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library. And so that's an alternative outlook to commencement speech morality that we give in the
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book. And it's when we defend. Has commencement speech morality always existed or is it a relatively
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new cultural development? This is a really, this is a nice question. I suspect that the tradition of
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giving young people, especially young people, advice to accomplish big things and do big things with
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their lives, I suspect that's nothing new. I think that what makes this modern moral of advice
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somewhat novel is that it requires a certain kind of cultural background that didn't exist until
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fairly recently. And even now probably only exists in some parts of the globe. So think about what has
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to be true for a society's social elite to tell young people to get out there and solve the world's
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biggest problems and make a name for yourself. I mean, one thing that sort of has to be true is you
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you have to have a society that's pretty affluent. I mean, you know, to be able to spend your life
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working at a nonprofit or like going door-to-door canvassing for your favorite political party,
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like you have to have a society that's pretty affluent. It's hard to imagine people giving
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advice to lots of young people like this and, you know, this 1500s or something. And I think you also
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have to have a global culture. I mean, to see the world as a repository
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of problems to solve and people to help requires, you know, having access to far-flung parts of the
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globe. So, you know, if you listen to like NPR, like that's the sort of information you have to
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have access to. I mean, it's hard to imagine even just 200 years ago, young people being told to sort
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of like get out there on the globe and solve inequality in the far-flung places. So I do think,
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you know, look, young people have been getting advice about how to live their life for a long
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time, but this particular brand of commencement speech morality is probably fairly recent.
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And you also talk about in the book that utilitarianism could be seen as an ancestor
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of this commencement speech morality because commencement speech morality is all about
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doing big things and affecting as many people as possible. And utilitarianism, I mean,
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one of its mantras is the greatest good for the greatest number of people. You want to
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try to do things that will have the biggest effect on people.
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That's right. So utilitarianism typically says that there's one most important value. And depending
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on who you ask, it's something like happiness or pleasure or well-being. And what morality tells us
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is that you need to be doing the most good that you can do, or at least, you know, a lot of good.
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You got to be out there doing a lot of good in the world. And so you can see why there's some overlap
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with utilitarianism and commencement speech morality, even though you will rarely, if ever, hear in a
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speech, you know, Bill Gates say utilitarianism is true. You got to go maximize the pleasure in the
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world. But there is this overlap in the following sense that there's this kind of, you know,
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kind of single-minded focus on being useful and making the world a better place. And I think
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those things are important. It's important to be useful. Obviously, it's important to do good in
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the world. But the question is, is that the most important thing? Does that dominate all other
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concerns? And one of the things we argue in the book is it's that's a very distorted moral vision.
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Yeah, because it ignores just the small day-to-day things. It ignores spending time with
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a parent who is aging and has dementia. And you're watching The Price is Right with them for,
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you know, the 10th time this week or something like that. Utilitarianism be like, well, you're
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doing some good, but you could be doing more good if you spent time on some other project or group
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that's doing more good for more people. That's right.
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So the first half of the book is about the dangers of minding other people's business. And the second
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half is about the merits of minding your own. And one of the dangers of not minding your own
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business is that it can turn you into a moralizer. There are different forms of moralizing that exist,
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but you concentrate on a particular type in this book. What type is that?
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So the kind of moralizing that we focus in the book involves overstepping boundaries when it comes
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to enforcing morality. And to see what I mean. So just think about what we do when we enforce
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morality. So morality is important. It's important for people to do good things and avoid doing bad
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things. And sometimes we enforce morality. We're like morality cops. We intervene into other people's
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lives. We tell them how to behave or what to do, or we blame them when we think they do something
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wrong. We say, you know, shame on you, or you shouldn't have done that. We might withdraw friendly
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relations or censure them some way. And moral enforcement is good. It's useful when it's used
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properly. But one of the ways that we can improperly enforce morality is when we overstep certain
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boundaries. So the idea is that, look, just because, you know, even if you're right that someone has done
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something wrong, that doesn't mean you always have a right to enforce morality. Our rights to enforce
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morality are limited. So sometimes they're limited just because the thing isn't that important.
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So suppose you hear someone at the park lying on the phone about their present whereabouts. They say
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they're at work, but they're actually at the park. That's just not your business, right? There's just
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not sufficient reason for you to walk up to that guy and, you know, give him a lecture about lying
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to his, you know, wife or whatever about where he is. You just don't have a right to intervene. It's
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just not that important. Sometimes we don't have a right to intervene and enforce morality
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because we don't know enough. We don't often have enough information about the nuances of a situation
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or a relationship or the histories of the people involved. Other times the issues are just too
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complex or unclear to warrant, you know, inserting ourselves into other people's lives and, you know,
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telling them what to do or blaming them. Other times we don't have sort of, you know,
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standing, social standing to intervene in people's lives. Sometimes this is because we're hypocrites.
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So, you know, a chain smoker with no intention of giving up his bad habit doesn't really have the
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right to lecture people about the harm they're doing to themselves by smoking. Sometimes we just don't
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have the proper social role. So, you know, Brett, like you might not be doing your dishes, you know,
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you're the dish guy at home, you know, and maybe your wife, it would be appropriate for her to sort
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of like blame you or call you out on this. It would be totally inappropriate for me to do it. Like,
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that's not my business. Like I shouldn't enforce morality, even though it's true that you, you know,
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you need to be picking up the slack at home. It's just not my call to make.
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And so for all these reasons, and probably many more, our right to enforce morality is very limited.
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And what the moralizer does is they enforce morality anyway. So the question isn't so much here,
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does morality belong here? The question is, do I belong here? Like, do I belong in someone else's
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business as an enforcer of morality? And often the answer is no. But what the moralizer does is,
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intervene anyway. Yeah. You see a lot of this kind of moralizing online, right? People jump into
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social media discussions to tell strangers, hey, you know, you shouldn't eat that diet or, you know,
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you shouldn't set up your family life that way. You know, you shouldn't make that joke. There's a lot
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of policing of comments and discussions amongst strangers who probably don't have the standing to
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do so. And then related to this idea of online discussion and moralizing, something else you talk
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about that moralizers do is they inject morality into everything. And as a consequence, they're
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just constantly morally outraged. But the thing is, if you're constantly morally outraged, that can get
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in the way of actually doing things to help make the world a better place.
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Yeah. So another problem with moralizing is it actually is self-undermining. So if you really care
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about morality, you'll use your moral enforcement. You know, and outrage is one of these tools that we use
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to enforce morality, anger, disgust. But enforcing morality is a bit like, it's like watering a cactus.
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I've killed a lot of cactuses in my day because I'm just too nurturing, right? I just care about
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them so much. And I think, wow, it's been two weeks since they've had water. Of course they need more
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water. And I end up killing these for cacti. And the point is, look, you don't get better results just
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by doing more of something. Cacti need water, but you don't care for the cactus. You don't get better
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results just by giving them more water. You have to respect the limits. And outrage and moral
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enforcement, they operate under a similar logic. So if you want to retain the power of outrage and
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moral enforcement, you have to use them sparingly and appropriately. And the more we moralize,
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the more we undermine the utility of moral enforcement itself. So in a way, it's a bit
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paradoxical. Like, you know, if you really care about morality, you will pick your spots. You will
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keep your powder dry and enforce morality when it really can do good. So moralizers, their big problem
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is they overextend limits when it comes to enforcing morality. Yeah. They might expand the scope of what is
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a moral issue, or they might extend their standing as moral enforcers. So I mean, the question is,
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like, how do you know what those limits are? How do you know when you should intervene with somebody
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and say, hey, you're doing something wrong here? How do you figure that out? Yeah, this is a really
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difficult question. And I think any moral philosopher who gives you a very specific test is probably
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lying to you. I don't think there's really, I mean, morality is just really messy. And Aristotle
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pointed this out in book one of Nicomachean Ethics. Like, morality is just very complex and difficult.
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What I usually do is I, you know, there's a kind of moralizing self-inventory. So the idea is not that
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you ask yourself these questions when you think you're about to enforce morality, but the idea is to
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sort of, like, become the kind of person who is reticent to intervene. So you can ask yourself
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questions like, is this really important? Is this a morally complex situation? Am I sure I'm seeing
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the moral answer clearly? Would I be a hypocrite like the chain smoker for involving myself? Do I
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have the right social standing? So is there someone better suited to intervene than me? Maybe, you know,
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look, I shouldn't be calling you out on your dish duty. Maybe that's your wife's concern.
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Okay. So one of the dangers of commencement speech morality is it can turn us into moralizers,
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illicit moralizers, where we overextend our boundary. Another potential problem of commencement
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speech morality is it can turn us into busybodies. What's a busybody? I think we all kind of know what
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a busybody is, but how do you define it as a moral philosopher?
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Yeah. So a busybody, so whereas, you know, a moralizer oversteps the boundaries in enforcing
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morality, a busybody is someone who oversteps boundaries and trying to help people. Busybodies
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stick their noses in other people's business and try to solve their problems for them or try to help
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them. So, you know, you might go around the gym and help people correct their weightlifting form.
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No one likes that guy. Or you might interrupt a conversation at a coffee shop and, you know,
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explain why these people don't understand the economics of minimum wage law.
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You know, you can imagine a group of, you know, Yale undergrads traveling to a poor,
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remote traditional village and like explaining to them how they should set up their society to
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conform to like gender egalitarian ideals. So, you know, a busybody basically goes beyond the proper
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limits of helping. And our view is that just like moralizing being a busybody, being a meddler in other
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people's affairs is a way of not minding your own business.
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What's interesting about the busybody is ancient philosophers even talked about this guy.
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What did ancient philosophers think of busybodies?
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Yeah, it's interesting. If you read those, you know, Plato in the Republic says,
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doing your own business and not being a busybody is justice. The author of Hebrews, actually,
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I don't know if we actually know who the author of Hebrews is, but the author of Hebrews in the New
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Testament tells his readers not to be busybodies. Epictetus, Therophrastus, a lot of these ancient
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philosophers really had this conviction that before you go around trying to solve other people's
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problems, you should have a pretty good handle on your own. There was something about the idea of
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trying to help people, often when you don't know enough, when you don't have standing,
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maybe you're, you know, you're doing it because you have a need, you have a pathological need to
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help or be useful or be seen as a messiah. I know people like this. I'm sure you and many of your
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listeners do. They have a need to be seen as extremely compassionate and helpful. This type
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of character really bothered a lot of ancient philosophers. And I, and I think it's, it's, it's a
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part of sort of the history of moral thinking that we have lost in a lot of Western society is that
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it's, you know, look, everyone agrees helping is good. It's good to help people. But I think a lot
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of people find it counterintuitive that you could actually do something inappropriate by trying to
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help people. It would be an example of you helping someone, but it's ends up being inappropriate
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because you just did no context. Yeah. So, you know, you can imagine you over here, a couple at the
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park, like having a dispute, you know, maybe they're an old married couple. And you read one book
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on like a relationship therapy or something like couples therapy. You can imagine walking up and
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say, Hey, you know, I heard you guys were having a dispute. Hope you don't mind. I have a few thoughts
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about how to handle this and come to a resolution. I think everybody, you know, everybody would think
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this is none of your business. Like, I know you're trying to help, you know, and it's, so it's,
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it's not moralizing, right? They're not blaming, they're not calling out, they're not enforcing
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morality. They are literally trying to help. There's something about this that is inappropriate.
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And this is a pretty like small scale, fairly innocuous, you know, it's annoying or a source of,
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you know, maybe minor conflict. You might tell them, Hey, you know, Hey man, get lost.
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But the problem is that you can also be a busy body and meddle in other people's affairs on a larger
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scale. So you think about certain kinds of disastrous military actions. There's a lot of
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failed public policy, what the government tries to do when they're trying to help. And even, you know,
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a lot of counterproductive humanitarian intervention. It's sort of coming to light now
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that a lot of traditional charity just lines the pockets of warlords and corrupt dictators and so on.
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And so, you know, just because someone's heart's in the right place, you know, they, for all kinds
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of reasons involving the world being extremely complex, they might end up doing more harm than
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good. This made me think of one of Immanuel Kant's ideas. Kant said you had to balance respect and love
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in your interactions with people. And sometimes when you show love, you have to show a lack of respect,
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right? So maybe you, you see someone who's having a hard time because maybe they have a disability and
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they're having a hard time getting up some steps. The love part will be like, well, I need to go help
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this person. But when you're doing that, you're putting that person in an inferior position. Like
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they need to be helped. And I am the helper. Yeah. And Kant would say, well, maybe they don't want
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your help because, you know, that would be a lack of respect. So I, maybe that's an example,
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another example of busy body. They, they emphasize the love part and they don't think about the respect
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parts. Like how would this make this person feel as an individual? Maybe they don't want my help
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because they, they have a sense of dignity they want to keep and they don't want to be put in a,
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a helped position. Right. Yeah. Good. So the Kantian idea, you know, as you rightly point out,
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has to do with, you know, it's like autonomy, like fully functional, mature, moral adults.
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You sort of have to give them within the wide limits, a lot of freedom to rule themselves.
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So that's what autonomy means is self-rule. Like, and often what that means, and I think most good
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parents realize this is you have to let children and adolescents self-rule often in ways that are
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hurtful to themselves because what you're teaching them is something like how to make wise decisions,
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how to take responsibility for their actions. And there's something inappropriate. And, you know,
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as you point out, condescending about intervening in other people's lives, always trying to help
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them is, you know, like Epictetus says, like, who put you in charge? Like who put you, are you the
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queen bee of, you know, of the hive? Are you the bull of the herd? Like who put you, uh, in charge of
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these people's lives? And so, uh, yeah, I mean, I think in that respect, Kant was onto something like
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sometimes you, you just have to, uh, you have to mind your own business and let people make their
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own decisions. So again, the question that this raises is like, when do you intervene?
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I think one of the lessons from this discussion of busy bodies is, um, is thinking about, well,
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what are the kinds of moral virtues that can only be exercised with people close to us? A friend of
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mine, David McPherson has an excellent book called the virtues of limits, I highly recommend it. And
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one of the things he says is, look, morality requires sometimes treating people close to
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you differently than others. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be compassionate, um, in ways that are
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appropriate to people across the globe, but it does require often treating your neighbor, your friend,
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the stranger at the grocery in special ways as well. We're going to take a quick break for a word
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from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So we've talked about some of the potential
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dangers of not minding your own business of this commencement speech morality. Uh, it can turn
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you into a moralizer and that can just make things unpleasant for people. And all your energy can be
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siphoned off into just constant moral outrage, uh, rather than being channeled into something,
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doing something concretely good. Uh, it can also turn you into a busy body where you spend a lot of
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time investing in politics, uh, you know, big social programs, large scale public policy. Um, and these
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things aren't necessarily bad, um, but they can also unintentionally cause harm. You know, people can
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mean well with these things, but end up causing a lot of damage with their, with their do-gooding.
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Um, and you say they were much more likely to be able to do real good on a smaller scale. Um, and you
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make it a case that for why you should just mind your own business and maybe stick to your own inner
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circle, your home, your garden, you know, your spot, uh, in the world. Um, so you make the case that
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people should, instead of trying to change the world on a large scale, spend their time and energy
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establishing roots in their community. Um, I really like this idea of rootedness. Uh, what do you mean
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by rootedness? Rootedness is an idea that a lot of people in my line of work talk about, but it was a
00:24:37.500
key concern of an early 20th century philosopher named Simone Weil. She, she actually went insane and
00:24:44.440
starved herself at age 34. But before that she wrote a book that after her death was published
00:24:50.380
and called the need for roots. And what she argued is that being rooted is one of the crucial needs of
00:24:56.160
the soul. The problem is she doesn't say much at all about what it means to be rooted. And so what
00:25:02.320
we do in this chapter is try to explain what it means, what it, you know, what does it mean to be
00:25:06.980
rooted? And we take the metaphor of a plant having roots very seriously. So if you think about a plant,
00:25:11.740
the roots attach it to a place, the roots allow the plant to, to receive benefits from the soil
00:25:17.940
nutrients and so on, but the roots also give back. I mean, what farmers know is that like roots, if you
00:25:23.600
leave, you know, sort of plants in, in your field, it helps prevent soil erosion. It helps prevent things
00:25:29.380
from being destroyed. And the idea is that for a human to be rooted is very similar. So rooted people are
00:25:36.320
attached to a place, they feel at home there, they have affection for the place, they're loyal to it,
00:25:41.820
they know it and love it, and they miss it when they're away from it. There's entire literature in
00:25:46.080
psychology on place attachment. But rooted people are attached to a place, and they also receive
00:25:51.540
benefits from that place. So being rooted gives you a sense of security, it helps you feel at home in
00:25:56.820
the world. It provides an anchor and sense of stability through the sort of trials and tribulations
00:26:02.920
of life and all the changes that you can go through. But finally, rooted people also give back to the
00:26:09.980
place where they live. So it's not just a sort of selfish taking from the land. Rooted people give
00:26:17.160
back by preserving it. So people who are rooted, try to preserve the habitats and the institutions that
00:26:25.260
have been created by others and have been passed down to them. So libraries, parks, you know, public
00:26:32.320
schools, Kiwanis Club, T-Ball, like these are all institutions and things that have been given to
00:26:38.860
us by our ancestors. And rooted people are very anxious to preserve our habitats and our institutions
00:26:46.100
so that they can be maintained. You know, a lot of people, like they get real excited about being
00:26:51.800
innovators and founders of charities, political parties, but the world also needs maintainers. I mean,
00:26:59.980
people provide an incredibly valuable service to mankind simply by taking care of and preserving
00:27:06.600
the good things around them. And this is like, you know, if I were to, if I had one message to like
00:27:11.960
tell young people or like stay at home moms who feel like they're not making as much as their lives as
00:27:18.060
they could, or someone who just likes being at home and you can do an incredibly valuable thing for the
00:27:24.800
world by preserving the good things around you. Because, you know, they're not going to preserve
00:27:28.920
themselves. Things erode, things get destroyed, things fall prey to entropy, and it takes people
00:27:35.620
to maintain and preserve the good things around us. You're not going to like make a name for yourself.
00:27:40.720
You're not going to get famous by being a maintainer. And this is the problem with
00:27:44.220
commencement speech morality is it tells people, get out there, make a name for yourself, make a big
00:27:48.480
splash. But we need people who are committed to preserving the good things around them that make
00:27:54.360
life tolerable and enjoyable in the first place. And so rooted people do a lot of good for the world,
00:28:01.280
even when they're not out there making a splash.
00:28:04.820
And I think the other benefit of rootedness, it allows you to solve problems more effectively
00:28:12.280
So, you know, for example, I am a leader in our churches and I lead the young men.
00:28:17.340
And they're like teenage boys. And a lot of these boys, I've known them since they were
00:28:21.640
like three years old. And so I've, I know their history. I know their family situation. I know
00:28:27.420
their unique personalities, their interest, et cetera. And so when a problem does come up and I'm
00:28:33.800
trying to figure out how I can help them, I have a pretty good grasp on the situation compared to
00:28:38.600
some, you know, maybe some person at a nonprofit, you know, in another state coming in like,
00:28:43.560
hey, we got this program we're going to do, it wouldn't be as effective because it doesn't
00:28:47.800
take into account, you know, the unique histories and personalities of these boys.
00:28:52.680
Yeah, that's an incredibly important point. I mean, you have a kind of expert knowledge
00:28:56.500
of that group of guys that probably no one else has. And you certainly don't have of a similar group
00:29:03.080
of guys, you know, across the globe. And so you have a kind of insight and expertise
00:29:09.320
that you wouldn't have if you were trying to help people elsewhere. I mean, the other interesting
00:29:15.180
thing about doing these sort of small preservation, you know, rootedness projects is you have to pay
00:29:22.440
the cost if things go bad. Yeah. This is one thing that drives me nuts about a lot of political
00:29:28.120
experimentation and people who love radical politics and revolutions is that often they impose
00:29:34.540
these schemes on people besides themselves, they're not going to have to pay the cost.
00:29:40.240
And so, you know, if you want to introduce a radical risky scheme to your local community,
00:29:45.480
you have skin in the game, and you will probably be more risk averse and more cautious about radical
00:29:51.520
change, and instead be more interested in preserving the good things around you as imperfect as they are,
00:30:00.400
Right. And so, yeah, volunteering to be the t-ball coach, volunteering for big brothers,
00:30:05.400
big sisters in your area, that stuff, you might not think it has a big impact, but it does. Like,
00:30:11.840
it really does. And I'm sure all of us listening know of a teacher we had in elementary school or
00:30:17.300
high school or a mentor we had, a sports coach that had a big impact on our life. And they weren't
00:30:22.800
doing the commencement speech morality. They're just trying to help this one kid. And that's all they're
00:30:27.980
thinking about. But their little efforts had rippling effects across time.
00:30:32.900
Huge effects. You just never know. So, I'll be transparent with you. When I was writing part of
00:30:38.380
this chapter for this book, I felt really guilty because I didn't feel like I was practicing what I
00:30:44.200
preached. And so, this is a true story. I signed up for Big Brothers, Big Sisters. And so, I've been
00:30:50.480
meeting with this young man now. He's 15 for about two years. And when I first met him,
00:30:56.080
so, it's a mentor relationship. We do fun stuff, but we help him with his homework and so on.
00:31:01.320
He didn't know how to shake someone's hand. He didn't know how to look someone in the eye and
00:31:04.540
have a conversation. He didn't know how to order at a restaurant. And these are all things that he
00:31:08.500
knows how to do now. And it's one of those things that's like a lot of people take it for granted
00:31:13.040
because they grew up in great homes with loving two parents. And not everyone has that situation.
00:31:19.320
And so, this kid, hopefully, is going to have his life totally changed, not because I made some
00:31:27.820
massive sacrifice, but because he was the student that just happened to be around who I could help.
00:31:35.400
That sounds self-indulgent, by the way. I just said, that sounds a little braggy. But,
00:31:39.220
you know, it really depresses me when people think that they have to
00:31:43.480
do something big to be helpful. And it's just so many smaller things in life that need our attention.
00:31:52.300
Besides rootedness, you make the case that enriching our home life can help us
00:31:56.580
make the world a better place. So, what's the argument there?
00:32:01.420
Yeah. So, we define in that chapter, a good home is just a safe, peaceful, and welcoming one.
00:32:08.460
It provides physical and emotional safety. It's peaceful. It's not chaotic. And it's welcoming.
00:32:13.860
It's a place where people can come in and be shown hospitality. And one of the things we argue in that
00:32:20.580
chapter is the benefits of creating a good home. One is that it provides a refuge, allows us to escape
00:32:27.680
stresses of work in politics, show emotions that would be out of place at work, say. It provides a
00:32:34.720
setting to show hospitality. And what hospitality does, above all, is turn strangers into friends.
00:32:41.880
And it provides a unique kind of social situation where you can't argue with politics. You're not
00:32:47.080
supposed to, anyway. You're not supposed to harangue your guests about their politics and morality. It
00:32:51.000
has to be, you know, to be a good host, you have to show hospitality. And a good home also lays the
00:32:56.820
foundation for, you know, a physically and psychologically healthy child. Peace, peaceful and safe,
00:33:02.800
orderly, loving homes are incredibly important for kids. And homes are often taken for granted.
00:33:08.960
But as I'm sure you and many of your listeners know, like, many homes are bad, very bad. And
00:33:16.220
the world would be much better if more people grew up in good homes. And so, again, it's one of these
00:33:23.380
things that, like, it would be bizarre to hear a commencement speaker get up there and say,
00:33:27.480
hey, you know, and also, be sure that you create peaceful, loving, caring homes. And if you have
00:33:33.020
children, make sure you're bringing them up in a way that's loving and teach them virtue. Like,
00:33:38.200
that's not something you'd ever hear in a commencement speech. But, you know, if you want
00:33:41.600
bang for your buck, creating a good home is one of your best investments.
00:33:45.860
You know, I've heard the idea of family or home. It's like a laboratory where you get to practice
00:33:51.680
what it means to be a good citizen. You get to practice what it means to show regard for other
00:33:56.640
people. It's where you get to practice how you can show love in appropriate ways. And focusing
00:34:01.880
on your family life and your home life can allow you to develop those social skills, those
00:34:06.560
virtue skills to help you go out into the wider world and be a good person and an effective person
00:34:11.400
out there. Yeah, that's right. You also talk about the idea of being alone, just minding your business,
00:34:16.560
being alone can also make the world a better place. People might be hearing that like, well,
00:34:20.020
that sounds selfish. Make the case for being alone. Yeah. So the way the second half of the book works is
00:34:26.480
we kind of shrink the circle of minding your own business. So there's like rootedness, which is
00:34:30.420
like your local community, your home, which is, you know, your house, and then solitude. So we actually
00:34:36.140
defend, you know, not spending all of your time in solitude, but spending a considerable amount of
00:34:41.440
time in solitude, maybe more than many people spend. It's tempting to think that, you know, we only make
00:34:47.840
the world better by being useful, that we are really only morally above board when we're solving
00:34:53.820
problems in the world or using politics to address injustice. And of course, you know, as I said
00:34:59.160
earlier, it's important to be useful, but being useful is not the sole purpose of our lives. And
00:35:05.100
it's a harmful distortion of morality to think that if you aren't trying to solve other people's
00:35:08.960
problems, you're somehow a moral failure. And so in this chapter, we argue that, you know, one way to
00:35:14.280
mind your own business is to spend time in solitude. And we go through several of the benefits of
00:35:19.080
solitude. One is just rest. And rest, you know, the benefit of rest is not just so that you can
00:35:24.560
get back out there and change the world more. You know, you don't go home and take, you know, a nap
00:35:29.200
and find rest and relaxation and leisure just so that you can do more canvassing for your favorite
00:35:34.440
politician. The idea is that rest itself is important. It's important, you know, all on its own
00:35:40.420
to have a healthy mind and body. We also argue one of the benefits of solitude is a kind of
00:35:45.860
intellectual freedom. So 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was really important
00:35:51.560
to be able to keep a critical distance from your society. So if you're constantly, you know, imbibing
00:35:58.400
social messages from social media, from friends, from work culture, you know, entertainment, if you're
00:36:04.840
constantly bombarded with the watchful eye and social censure and expectations, you will basically
00:36:11.820
become an unthinking, uncritical, walking sort of automaton that sort of mimics the norms and
00:36:18.560
expectations of your culture. And he thought it's actually no, it's good to step back and take a
00:36:22.960
critical eye towards your society. And he thought solitude is the best place to do this, to have time
00:36:28.540
to read and to think and to actually critically assess your society. And the last benefit is just being in
00:36:35.980
solitude allows you to appreciate things and to achieve things that you can't achieve in society.
00:36:43.800
So in solitude, we're able to appreciate things like natural beauty, going for a hike, for example,
00:36:49.200
or going fishing by yourself. It's also probably the best setting to develop your talents and create
00:36:55.260
beauty. So, you know, just practicing piano, painting, becoming a better swimmer, you know, prayer,
00:37:01.800
cultivating virtue. These are all things that are important to do by yourself. And what's important
00:37:06.120
to see is not that these things are valuable just so that you can be in a more effective at solving
00:37:11.340
other people's problems. These things are important in their own right. You know, Roger Scruton, who's
00:37:16.880
passed away a few years ago as a philosopher, I really admire, you know, he says, look, humans are not
00:37:22.640
here merely to be useful. You are here to be lovable. And what we argue in the book and how we conclude is
00:37:31.660
that solitude is one way for us to become people for whom love and appreciation are fitting responses.
00:37:39.720
We're not here just to be tools and to be useful. We're here to be lovable.
00:37:44.820
It's interesting you mentioned John Stuart Mill, and he was a utilitarian, right? And he was raised to be
00:37:51.640
a utilitarian Ubermensch. Like his dad raised him from like, since he was a kid to become the ultimate
00:37:59.040
utilitarian. And so John Stuart Mill, like his whole young life was dedicated to these big projects.
00:38:06.140
You know, he fought for women's suffrage in slavery, et cetera, alleviating poverty. And his whole identity
00:38:13.980
was wrapped up in this idea of being a moral reformer and trying to make the world a better
00:38:18.780
place. But then in his twenties, he had an existential crisis and he got depressed. And the thing that put
00:38:24.360
him in the funk was, he thought, what if suddenly all these things I'm trying to fight for, they were
00:38:30.600
realized, like all the changes in institutions and opinions that I'm looking forward to, they were
00:38:36.740
immediately solved the way I want it. And he asked him, would this be a great joy to me? And he said, the
00:38:41.760
answer would have been no, because I would have nothing to like work for because I've tied up my identity and my
00:38:46.300
happiness and all these things. And so it put him in an existential funk. I mean, he contemplated suicide.
00:38:51.460
And the thing that saved him was what you were talking about, like finding things to do for their
00:38:57.840
own sake. So he got really into poetry. That was his thing. He just spent time alone reading and
00:39:03.420
appreciating poetry just for the sake of reading and appreciating poetry.
00:39:08.540
Yeah, that's a nice little background story to Mill. I mean, I think it illustrates two things. One is
00:39:15.080
the dilemma of the activist and moral reformer, is that when you derive most or all of your identity
00:39:23.040
from accomplishing social or political ends, what are you left with when you're done? And I think a
00:39:31.440
lot of people do have a crisis of identity when they accomplish their goals. They have to find new
00:39:36.780
ones or invent new problems to solve. I think the other thing that his life shows is, you know, it's a
00:39:41.960
kind of concession to many of our critics. So a lot of our critics are going to be utilitarians or
00:39:48.660
social reformers, people who think it's really important to be out there on social media and
00:39:54.440
having discussions. I mean, these are all things that are right up Mill's alley. However, in spite of
00:40:00.300
all that, he also recognized the importance of these other kinds of goods in life. Life is not just about
00:40:07.900
being politically active and solving social problems. You also, for example, have to spend
00:40:13.040
time in solitude. And so that's a kind of like, you know, even if you disagree with us about a lot
00:40:18.500
of this book, I think his example shows that commencement speech morality cannot be your entire
00:40:24.660
outlook. Well, Brandon, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more
00:40:28.860
about the book and your work? Well, the book is on Amazon and most online booksellers. And so that's
00:40:40.040
where you can find it. You can also just Google me. And that's about it. That sounds like enough
00:40:45.400
information. Fantastic. Well, Brandon Warmke, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:40:49.860
My guest's name is Brandon Warmke. He's the co-author of the book, Why It's Okay to Mind
00:41:01.160
Your Own Business. It's available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash ordinary
00:41:06.060
morality. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another
00:41:11.840
edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. We find our
00:41:15.880
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00:41:19.780
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00:41:27.280
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00:41:34.660
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