Tradition vs. Natural Rights ｜ Guest： Paul Gottfried ｜ 9⧸22⧸23
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
177.38069
Summary
Dr. Paul Gottfried, editor-in-chief of Chronicles Magazine, joins me to talk about a back and forth he's been having with Michael Anton, a conservative political commentator in the right-wing sphere. They discuss the difference between natural rights and human rights, and the role of natural rights in American politics.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
So you're hosting the family barbecue this week, but everyone knows your brother is the grill guy
00:00:05.160
and it's highly likely he'll be backseat barbecuing all night. So be it. Impress even
00:00:10.280
the toughest of critics with freshly prepared Canadian barbecue favorites from Sobeys.
00:00:17.460
Hello everybody and how's it going? Thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. Sorry about
00:00:22.440
the delay. We're having technical issues, but finally we are here. I'm bringing you today
00:00:27.280
somebody who is an excellent political scholar, somebody that I know you guys really enjoy.
00:00:32.860
Dr. Paul Gottfried, thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you for having me on again.
00:00:38.400
Absolutely. So Dr. Gottfried is of course the editor-in-chief over at Chronicles magazine. He's
00:00:42.520
got a number of different books that you should definitely check out. But today I'm talking to
00:00:47.160
him about a back and forth that he's been having with Michael Anton, who is himself a well-respected
00:00:52.420
political commentator in the conservative sphere, in the right-wing sphere. And they have been going
00:00:57.740
back and forth. I guess originally, you know, there was some disagreement about the idea of natural
00:01:03.340
rights versus tradition. And then Michael Anton was responding to you and then another anonymous
00:01:08.840
blogger by the name of Z-Man. And so there's been the kind of this dialogue back and forth on whether
00:01:13.980
natural rights are kind of the core foundation around which people should understand kind of their
00:01:19.200
relationship with each other or the state or whether tradition is more of the thing in which
00:01:24.360
our kind of relations and different peoples and nations are set. And so I wanted to bring you in
00:01:29.220
today to talk a little about this, because I think for a lot of people, when they hear natural rights,
00:01:33.780
they think, well, this is kind of the basis of America, right? This is the basis of the founding.
00:01:38.280
This is kind of the Lockean principles that are imported into the Declaration of Independence.
00:01:44.460
So if you're talking about natural rights, aren't we talking about the kind of thing that's
00:01:48.560
fundamental to the American understanding of governance? I think it is certainly right now.
00:01:55.840
And I think the left and the right, the official left and the official right,
00:02:01.060
are agreed that the United States was founded on the basis of natural right principle.
00:02:07.520
Lincoln invokes natural right. We find this in the Declaration of Independence, some of the state
00:02:14.480
constitutions that were created and promulgated during the American Revolution and immediately
00:02:21.520
thereafter. And of course, there's a famous work by Lewis Hartz on America being founded as a liberal
00:02:29.740
country. And Hartz defines liberalism in terms of the Lockean principles upon which the American
00:02:37.460
Republic was built. So there is, in fact, a long, entrenched belief that the United States is founded
00:02:46.040
on the basis of natural right. And that creates, one might say, sort of our shared ideology as Americans.
00:02:54.280
Do you feel like that's a more modern construction, a more current construction of the party system?
00:02:59.020
Or do you think that that would be a reasonable understanding of kind of how the fundamental
00:03:07.060
Yeah, I think that that is, I think it's been, it has been intermittently understood
00:03:11.360
as a country based on natural right. That language does appear in the Declaration of Independence.
00:03:19.080
And you find it in Virginia and New Hampshire, other state constitutions. There's some reference to
00:03:25.240
natural right. And the constitutions are typically used to defend the right of property and the right
00:03:31.700
of religious conscience. These things are seen as natural right. Then the natural right language
00:03:38.500
disappears for a long period of time. And there's an invocation of the constitution, invocations of the
00:03:46.020
Bible all the time, because America is a profoundly Protestant country through most of its history.
00:03:51.920
So something like biblical morality, and even biblical precedent for the founding of the American
00:03:58.400
Republic is frequently invoked. Language about America is a commonwealth. Then certainly in the 20th
00:04:09.580
century, natural right becomes important, although it becomes transmuted into something called
00:04:15.820
human rights, which I think is in many ways sort of a logical extension of the notion of natural
00:04:22.080
right. Although the West Coast Straussians tried to distinguish between the two. And today the
00:04:29.280
conservative establishment, which probably neither one of us is a member, affirms natural right and
00:04:37.600
inborn individual rights as the basis of American politics and morality.
00:04:44.240
So I think it's interesting that you pointed out there, and Michael Anton does try to do this in
00:04:50.120
his response to you, that separation between natural rights and human rights. Obviously, that's not your
00:04:56.280
position specifically, but how do you think somebody like Anton would try to differentiate between this?
00:05:02.620
Okay, natural rights are here. They're core to the American founding. They're core to the Constitution,
00:05:06.980
Declaration, those kind of things. Human rights, this is something new. This is something that's
00:05:11.540
created by kind of modernity in our understanding of kind of the current civil rights regime. How would
00:05:19.280
Yeah, I think what Anton does is say that by natural right, he means the rights that John Locke
00:05:28.620
proposed and which are found in a slightly modified version in the American Declaration of Independence.
00:05:35.660
It's basically life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or if you will, you know, life, liberty,
00:05:40.980
and property, private property. So Anton's argument would be that these inborn individual rights stop,
00:05:48.840
with the list that, you know, goes back to John Locke in the 1680s, 1617, 1680s, and those are the ones
00:05:58.620
that are affirmed by the American Republic, the early Republic, and can be found in the Declaration
00:06:05.620
of Independence, which West Coast Straussians or the Claremont School would maintain is the true
00:06:12.760
founding document of the United States, whereas most people on the traditional right would say it's the
00:06:18.000
Constitution. You know, the Declaration, they viewed the Declaration of Independence simply as a
00:06:24.860
declaration of American sovereignty in relation to the English motherland from which the early
00:06:34.460
United States was cutting, they were cutting their ties. I think traditional conservatives,
00:06:41.240
which I identify myself, obviously, may go too far in insisting that natural right has nothing to do with the
00:06:49.720
American founding. And that, you know, the Constitution is much more important than the Declaration of
00:06:55.240
Independence. And Jefferson's rhetorical flourish about natural rights was something just written by an exuberant
00:07:03.440
young man, and he didn't be taken all that seriously. My position is actually somewhere in the middle. I would say that
00:07:11.100
natural rights are a tradition in the United States, a legal political tradition, but they're certainly not the only one.
00:07:19.400
And I think making this the centerpiece of the American political experience can have very, very harmful results.
00:07:28.780
Yeah, that's something you definitely go on about at length, you know, trying to understand why this might be a dangerous
00:07:36.040
precedent on which to set your entire understanding of the American experience, because, you know, one way that I've often
00:07:42.380
seen, you know, more mainstream conservatives attempt to draw this delineation is between positive and negative rights,
00:07:49.500
right? Negative rights are the things the government can't do. They're not allowed to do these certain things. Positive rights are
00:07:55.280
things that the government is compelled to do on your behalf. And so this is kind of where they attempt to draw
00:08:00.760
the line, though I think it's not even clear to me that that's really something that contemporary conservatives
00:08:05.900
would draw the line, because it does seem to me that they have bought in largely to the idea not just of natural rights,
00:08:12.540
but to human rights. I think you would run into most senators or congressmen in the GOP, and they would affirm the
00:08:19.800
existence of human rights that need to be perpetuated, not just in the United States, but globally.
00:08:26.860
Yes, no, I think it's right. Once you say that these are universal rights that inherit each individual,
00:08:33.780
independently of civil society, and civil society, you know, we supposedly call it this, we come into the world
00:08:41.420
and we develop social relations as already bearers of these rights, which I suppose are injected into us,
00:08:48.260
you know, as fetuses or something or other. I don't know exactly what process these people have in
00:08:53.180
mind. Therefore, you know, the right to bear arms is not part of a legal tradition or an historical
00:09:02.520
right. It is a right with which we come into the world. And as the conservative natural rights theorists
00:09:12.400
would argue, it's a right that comes from God. Left-wing human rights, lock-ins, and so forth,
00:09:19.540
people like John Rawls, usually develop other theories in explaining, you know, how individuals
00:09:24.800
develop these rights. But I do agree that, you know, there's no reason to stop the list with,
00:09:31.120
with, you know, three rights. We can just go on, on the basis of our superior moral consciousness,
00:09:37.600
and now include the right of sexual transitioning, for instance, to be a human, to be a human right
00:09:43.460
and a natural right with which we come into this world. So that, that, that's why it has to be a
00:09:48.500
very dangerous precedent. It also creates an imperative to give other people these rights. I mean,
00:09:55.480
what, why should we, you know, hog them all in the United States? Why are we not actively striving
00:10:03.720
to give our rights to other people, which of course is happening in Ukraine, right? I mean,
00:10:08.680
it's not enough that we give them military aid. We have to help them, you know, sexually transition,
00:10:14.000
have gay marriage, whatever we now consider to be a human or a natural right.
00:10:19.460
Yeah, it seems like the, the lack of any kind of binding mechanism, any kind of particularity
00:10:25.500
lends this to a, a Whig history that will always be growing, right? If these, if these rights were
00:10:32.440
discovered somewhere by John Locke, you know, he, he found these, these three rights that existed
00:10:38.100
throughout human history, but you know, we, we discovered them at this time. Why would not more
00:10:42.180
rights be discoverable? In fact, that's in the, in the bill of rights, right? That not all of these
00:10:46.640
rights have been enumerated. And so we will discover more of them. And so if these things are objective
00:10:51.240
and they're universal and they exist for everyone, why wouldn't we continually discover these new
00:10:57.780
rights that would then need to be spread? That's just a, like you said, kind of a,
00:11:00.680
a logical extension of the idea that we will always be progressing and discovering
00:11:05.260
these universal things that we should then apply to everyone.
00:11:09.640
Yeah. I mean, even, even if we want to take the conservative, so-called conservative position
00:11:14.160
and say they come from God, why does God limit, you know, his gift of rights to the, to the three
00:11:20.680
that, that, that John Locke provides us with in second treaties in government? Why can't these rights,
00:11:28.980
you know, these God-given rights include all kinds of other things, you know, the, the, the, the,
00:11:34.500
the right to have equal marriage with, with, with gays or with, with heterosexuals? And so what,
00:11:42.640
why isn't this a right that God has given to us? And of course they, they would probably object
00:11:46.780
to that point and say that it goes against the Bible or it goes against religious teachings or natural
00:11:52.660
law, but you know, that, that, that is to introduce something else beside natural law,
00:11:58.960
you know, in, into their, into their moral reasoning. By the way, I am not against what
00:12:05.240
Catholics call natural law. I think that's fine. I mean, if, if we, that there are things that
00:12:11.420
through natural reason, we are able to know are right and wrong and that, and that we are able,
00:12:16.880
we should be able to judge positive existing law on the basis of these moral imperatives, like,
00:12:22.640
you know, you don't, you don't murder people, you don't steal. And so I have no problem with that.
00:12:29.020
But I, I, I think that natural right is something else. It is, it is these inborn individual
00:12:35.480
permission, you know, to do certain things. And also the, that you're not,
00:12:42.080
you're supposed to limit government by, by doing this. Of course, you don't really limit government
00:12:48.240
in the end because the government can always reinterpret what you're doing and saying,
00:12:52.380
this is an extension of human rights or natural rights, right? I mean, we just discovered this.
00:12:58.260
And this is the language the left uses all the time that we have a human or a natural right,
00:13:03.420
whichever term you choose to use to have gay marriage or to have the government
00:13:07.940
help children sexually transition in schools and so forth. So, you know, my, my, my question is,
00:13:16.420
you know, how do you keep the government at, and of course the government does interpret,
00:13:20.580
even according to Locke, it does interpret what it does interpret natural right. Because when we
00:13:25.400
seek power to the government, it's on the condition that it will enforce these rights for us, but we're
00:13:31.740
also dependent on the government at that point, you know, to interpret natural right.
00:13:36.040
Well, and I think that's such a really important distinction that the, you put there between,
00:13:41.360
you know, natural law and natural rights, because I think a lot of people will conflate those
00:13:45.980
immediately. Natural law is something that I think from which all healthy traditions would spring,
00:13:51.200
right? They would, they would proceed forth from the fact that this is how society seems to naturally
00:13:56.140
order itself. These are the laws of which nature seems to follow. These are the behaviors by which
00:14:00.560
we seem to be rewarded and flourish. And so from that, we develop traditions that then take us
00:14:05.340
kind of along, along that way. But natural rights are a different assertion, right? And I think for
00:14:10.360
a lot of people, that's hard because they, and Anton kind of alludes to this, he, or he says it
00:14:15.740
directly, he doesn't allude to it. He says, basically, if you abandon natural rights, then you're just
00:14:19.360
going to moral relativism. There isn't, there can't possibly be any moral truth outside of these
00:14:25.760
rights. Because if you just go to traditions, then the only question is which tradition, and now we're just
00:14:29.820
emotivizing, we're just, you know, we're just favoring our own, our own, you know, being close
00:14:36.280
to something, our own locality, rather than any kind of actual reason or understanding. And so I think
00:14:42.240
that's weird, because the idea of natural rights, you know, comes, comes very late in the game. And I
00:14:46.980
don't think everyone prior to John Locke was a moral relativist. But that seems to be kind of the
00:14:51.400
implication, right? Without these rights, we can't possibly have any kind of real understanding of
00:14:56.060
morality. Yeah, but I think West Coast Straussians and others who buy into natural right, very often
00:15:02.020
see them as an extension of natural law, and they're not. You know, I think they're different.
00:15:08.880
I think natural rights are something developed in the 16th, 17th centuries, in response to a certain
00:15:15.460
historical situation, which is the excess of power, what it's seen as excess of power by monarchs,
00:15:25.040
and also the persecution of religious minorities. And natural right thinking develops in Catholic
00:15:30.820
and Protestant countries both about the same time, typically in response to tyrants, you know,
00:15:38.480
who are trying to take away the religious and other rights, you know, of their subjects.
00:15:43.120
And, you know, I can understand why that theory together with the state of nature and so forth
00:15:49.780
develops when it did, was very popular among the Scottish covenanters in the second half of the
00:15:55.920
16th century. But it doesn't mean that I have to believe it, or that I think it is, you know,
00:16:05.780
So if natural rights aren't the best way to understand that, and by the way, guys, I see some
00:16:10.680
people are putting in some super chats, I just want to let you know that due to the technical
00:16:14.120
difficulties, we might not have time to get to all those. So I appreciate any donations. But
00:16:18.440
we were already late and everything. And I don't know how long Dr. Godfrey's connection will hold
00:16:23.460
for us. So I want to focus on our conversation here. But, but kind of given the fact that, you know,
00:16:29.060
a lot of people think that natural rights are the only way to defend this, maybe it would be
00:16:33.260
worthwhile explaining to people, this is something I think that would have been obvious for most of human
00:16:37.680
history. But, but bear some explaining now, why are traditions a robust defender of these things?
00:16:45.400
Yeah, I think you have to understand that the United States is a country in flux. And now it's
00:16:50.140
going through a moral political revolution, being sponsored by public administration and the woke left,
00:16:57.540
the woke left state church. And the traditions have become weaker. I mean, I understand this,
00:17:04.680
you know, religious views, you know, religious views have become diluted traditional religious
00:17:08.960
views, belief in the Bible, and also the view that we have, you know, traditions going back to medieval
00:17:15.760
England, such as the the right to bear arms, which is possessed by every free man. We don't we don't
00:17:23.300
we don't think that way any longer. And I can I can see why people would would be attracted to
00:17:31.520
a natural right, as the French say, as a peace allee, you know, just as it just there, you just grab
00:17:37.220
on grab onto it for, for want of anything better. But, you know, I don't think it's a satisfactory
00:17:44.120
replacement for for tradition, historical rights, other things that Edmund Burke spoke about, I think,
00:17:51.540
quite correctly, in his critical response to the French Revolution. And I think I think it'll be
00:17:58.580
better, certainly in terms of, you know, a sense of community, if we talked about traditions or biblical
00:18:06.740
morality or something like that, instead of individual entitlements, which is really what
00:18:12.620
we talked about with with with with with natural right. It does not create a sense of community. It's,
00:18:19.900
you know, it creates a sense of I, you know, I have these rights. And I think the kind of mentality
00:18:26.280
you find among many libertarians in America is exactly what locking a natural right leads to,
00:18:33.260
you know, when it when it's made, you know, sort of the centerpiece of your morality,
00:18:37.020
and politics. So I mean, I don't I don't consider natural right the answer to the breakdown of our
00:18:45.480
traditions, I think rather the traditions have to be recovered. How this is going to work,
00:18:52.460
you know, I don't know. But I would think that would be the precondition for being able to reason
00:18:59.200
as a community about moral matters. I agree with Alistair McIntyre on this. I mean, there has to be
00:19:05.960
sort of a community understanding of what is right and wrong. And it's not, you know, my individual
00:19:12.880
entitlement. It's my responsibility to other people, and their responsibility to me.
00:19:19.380
Yeah, virtue has to be grounded in a in a tradition that can't exist in and of itself. Absolutely. So
00:19:25.800
I think a lot of people, you know, this, this is a huge problem for I think a lot of the mainstream
00:19:32.080
conservative, especially the libertarian crowd kind of attached to it, is there's this idea that it's a
00:19:39.700
battle between collectivism and individualism. And so they think that rights are the key, because if
00:19:45.100
they just keep demanding individual rights, then that will break the collective hold to try to
00:19:50.060
compel people's behavior. And so it's rights, rights, rights, rights, rights. However, I think,
00:19:54.960
you know, the case that seems far more powerful is, you know, a lot of the people come over from the
00:19:59.820
left to the right, kind of the I didn't leave the left, the left left me types, they harp on this,
00:20:05.060
we have to get back to rights, we have to get back to the individual. But by putting the individual
00:20:09.100
first, it feels like we are now isolating people in a way that keeps them from having
00:20:13.800
any moral force in building any actual cultural momentum that would allow the reassertion of a
00:20:20.760
different understanding of what the government's role should be, how it should be involved in
00:20:26.260
families, all of these different things. It feels like by asserting rights, we're opening the door more
00:20:31.020
to a state that would say, seize a child and force them to go through your transition than we are
00:20:35.500
creating an invaluable family unit based on a collective understanding of how children should
00:20:42.100
be raised. No, I agree with you. You know, the atomization of society is not the response to
00:20:50.260
government overreach and government's attempt to impose woke morality on us. There has to be
00:20:58.060
communal effort. Communities are much stronger than individuals, for one thing. And, you know,
00:21:05.320
the resistance has to be in the name of community. By the way, West Coast Straussians probably would
00:21:10.880
not deny most of the things that I have said, they would just insist that the centerpiece,
00:21:16.100
the moral political centerpiece should be natural, right? But most of them are very traditional.
00:21:22.340
And, you know, just about any political, cultural question. I mean, I very rarely, if ever,
00:21:28.300
disagree with them. It's just when the, Michael Anton and I are political allies, it's just when the
00:21:33.920
question turns to natural right. There weren't opposite sides.
00:21:37.700
Yeah. And I think that's really important. A lot of people, you know, I'll talk to someone like
00:21:41.680
Chris Ruffo and Chris is awesome. He's doing amazing work, you know, and, but we'll have a
00:21:47.100
disagreement about some point of, you know, strategy or some point of, you know, kind of
00:21:52.340
origination of something. And people say, oh, well, this means that you guys are just at loggerheads
00:21:56.420
who can't work together. It's like, no, that's not the case. Just like you and Anton,
00:21:59.220
you know, you're, you're political allies, you're pushing in the same direction. You know,
00:22:03.820
this is not a, this is not a knockdown drag out about, you know, everything where it comes to
00:22:08.600
political goals. This is just trying to best understand, you know, how the ball is moved
00:22:13.660
forward the best, how to ground these things so that you can be successful. So that's why I think
00:22:17.860
the discussion is so valuable. Yeah. However, I think with, with, with the conservative establishment,
00:22:23.100
my unwillingness to concede the natural right argument has made me an outcast. You know,
00:22:28.980
they'll never ask me onto programs. They'll never have me write for their anthologies or write
00:22:34.160
articles for their magazine. And I, I think it's my, my, my critical reservations about natural right
00:22:40.840
that, that have made me an outcast. Um, and have made other paleo conservatives outcasts. Um,
00:22:46.780
and, and most, you know, most paleo conservatives, I think, are united, you know, in their skepticism
00:22:52.680
about natural right. And, uh, I mean, you turn on Fox News and you think, you know, you're listening
00:22:58.380
to John Locke, uh, nonstop, you know, on the natural rights question. Uh, I, I, I find the argument
00:23:05.200
against abortion based on natural right to be ridiculous. Um, it's totally unconvincing. Uh, the, uh,
00:23:14.780
I, I, I doubt that Locke would ever have imagined that the fetus has, you know, a natural right to
00:23:20.080
life or something. Um, if you were, if you regard the fetus as a human being, destroying it as a,
00:23:26.900
as homicide. I mean, it's as simple as that. You're just taking it. It's, it's a unjust,
00:23:32.340
unlawful taking of human life. Um, why do we have to start talking about, uh, these imaginary natural
00:23:38.620
rights? Uh, that, that's, that's, that's my response to the right to life argument.
00:23:43.460
We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight. Rocky's vacation. Here we come. Whoa, is this
00:23:50.220
economy? Free beer, wine, and snacks. Sweet. Fast, free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations
00:23:57.220
before we land. And with live TV, I'm not missing the game. It's kind of like I'm already on vacation.
00:24:05.100
Nice. On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels. Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped
00:24:11.120
Flight. Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply. See your Canada.com.
00:24:14.800
So I think a lot of people would want to understand how a, how a traditions,
00:24:22.260
kind of a return to tradition here to, to, to pick up a meme, how that would, uh, work in this
00:24:28.320
scenario. Because I think the problem for a lot of people, one reason that so many people grab for
00:24:32.420
this, this universal rights doctrine is that the idea of a shared tradition is almost beyond them.
00:24:38.580
Now, you know, we're in this postmodern world. So many people are broken from their traditions.
00:24:42.820
They no longer participate in, you know, kind of these traditions, the, the religions of their
00:24:47.900
ancestors, uh, you know, connecting to the folk ways of, of kind of, uh, their people. This doesn't
00:24:53.560
exist for a lot of people. And so that's all that's left is kind of this vague appeal to this
00:24:58.560
universal natural right. And that's the only thing that can kind of forge the coalition. So I think the
00:25:03.780
question for a lot of people would be, okay, well, if we're going to shift the basis of this
00:25:07.860
focus, what would we connect to? And how would, how would that work? How would people who had been
00:25:12.820
so thoroughly disconnected from a tradition, find their way to something that could once again,
00:25:20.300
Yeah. I mean, they would have to consider themselves a community, um, you know, held together
00:25:25.660
by, among other things, you know, shared moral assumptions, assumptions about human nature.
00:25:30.420
Uh, this, this may be, may be tough to do. Um, at this point in time, I, I recognize it. What I'm
00:25:38.560
saying is the natural right argument just doesn't work very well. And even, you know, people who talk
00:25:44.220
about natural right are really talking at each other because they come with very different notions
00:25:49.900
of what these rights are. The, the, the people who are, who are arguing about the, you know, right to
00:25:55.840
life, um, are going to run smack dab into people who are saying, well, there's the right of the
00:26:01.720
mother, uh, to the reproductive right. And for them, that's a natural right. Right. You see, no,
00:26:09.320
there's another one, another human right here, which goes back to Locke or someone, which I don't
00:26:14.220
think even applies in this case, but, uh, you simply have, you know, I, I was it, um, there,
00:26:20.900
there, there is a, uh, uh, was a Yale professor of law of, of politics who wrote a book, um, on, uh,
00:26:27.540
too many rights, you know, but you basically have human, human rights or natural, or what people
00:26:32.800
posit as natural rights coming into conflict. And there has to be some kind of moral consensus,
00:26:39.780
uh, that, that, that exists rather than the assertions of rights. Uh, and I, I, I agree
00:26:47.580
with that argument. Um, and of course my, but you know, the, the problem is for a long time,
00:26:52.580
the real basis of American morality was biblical morality. And, uh, now, you know, that this has
00:26:58.960
sort of gone out the window and natural right has become sort of, uh, or, uh, people into,
00:27:03.740
or human rights by now become a substitute for that. But then people define human rights
00:27:08.720
differently and they're not going to, you know, they're not going to stop with the, uh, the three
00:27:13.600
big rights in John Locke. They have a much longer laundry list of rights, which they want. And they
00:27:18.880
have also new rights. Um, uh, I'm saying, I don't have the answer to all these problems. I mean,
00:27:25.700
I'd like to go back to the way things were when I was a kid in the 1950s. It's not going to happen,
00:27:30.380
but I, I think the natural rights argument is a dead end. And, uh, I'm simply calling attention
00:27:38.100
to this. Um, I, I'm always telling people when I was in college, we were given John Locke's second
00:27:44.480
treatise to read and then Burke's reflections on the revolution in France. And I found Burke much more
00:27:51.060
convincing. It's just, you know, it's a description of man's corporate nature, uh, our social nature,
00:27:56.620
you know, which we've been finding Karl Marx. I mean, uh, where, where's Locke's sort of atomized
00:28:02.420
men with a constructivist society sounded highly implausible to me. I mean, I couldn't even,
00:28:08.260
I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I still can't. Um, whereas I, you know, I have no, I have no,
00:28:13.720
understand, no problem understanding, uh, Burke's understanding, Burke's view of human nature,
00:28:19.280
of the social bond, of the continuity of generations. All this stuff makes sense to me
00:28:29.500
Interestingly, I ran into a, you know, I got some backlash myself from many mainstream
00:28:34.240
conservatives because I was trying to explain the state of exception when it came to the,
00:28:38.800
the New Mexico gun ban and, and, you know, kind of how that worked. And a lot of people got really
00:28:43.680
riled up when I explained that, look, whether you hold the right to own a firearm as, uh,
00:28:49.280
you know, as a natural right or not, it doesn't matter if you don't have a tradition that rounds
00:28:54.160
that if you don't have people who will step up and defend that, if that is not basically held
00:28:58.880
sacred, if it's not seen as part of your moral vision and held sacred by the people, then the
00:29:03.480
fact that you've asserted is a right somewhere, the fact that it happens to be occupying a piece
00:29:07.320
of paper won't protect it from the state of exception. The only thing that is going to prevent
00:29:12.180
a, you know, a sovereign from stepping in and violating that is a shared belief across,
00:29:18.400
you know, the, the, the culture and the tradition that that is a, you know, a bound too far, you
00:29:23.640
know, think of, you know, the, the Romans and the dictator, right? Dictator, you know, it's,
00:29:28.240
it's a temporary office until there's no longer kind of the, the, the traditional will to hold
00:29:33.520
that back. And then it becomes something that's far, that's far more expansive. And I just feel like
00:29:38.240
that's so hard for people to understand, like, even if you want to hold to this natural rights
00:29:42.660
idea, unless there's some kind of, you know, just mechanically, if there's not that tradition,
00:29:46.740
that deep grounding of sacredness and understanding that right, then it's, it's not useful just to
00:29:51.620
quote it at people. Yeah. I think, I think since we're referring to Carl Schmitt, I think Schmitt also
00:29:56.860
makes an important distinction between legality and legitimacy and, you know, legality is what you
00:30:02.940
have in a sort of a, a Republic, sort of a legislative Republic based on a document, a shared document
00:30:11.360
and obeying the law be, you know, is legality and sort of by provides legitimacy. But it is not a
00:30:20.580
kind that one could really bank on, Schmitt would say, whereas the, the deeper source of legitimacy
00:30:27.100
is different. And that is, you know, uh, being part of a, a nature with a, a nation with a shared
00:30:32.480
culture, um, a, a form of government going back centuries and so forth. Um, and even there, if you
00:30:39.760
have, uh, a dictatorship, a provisional dictator, uh, that person can rely on a certain kind of moral
00:30:47.580
political consensus until he's able to address the, the political crisis that has necessitated the
00:30:54.800
dictatorship. So you mentioned, uh, Alistair McIntyre there. And I thought that was interesting
00:31:02.660
because, you know, one, one of McIntyre's points in after virtue is that, uh, you have basically this
00:31:09.860
loss of a shared language to even have moral discussions. Like that, that's kind of the,
00:31:14.520
the, the big opening point that he has that we've lost any, any ability to even, uh, have a shared
00:31:19.200
reference point for discussions to have the language to even, even investigate moral questions.
00:31:23.480
And, you know, he kind of says that we, one of the issues that moral philosophy ran into when it hit
00:31:30.060
the liberal tradition is it kind of, it eventually just abandoned this idea to find a completely
00:31:34.400
rational basis for morality. And so it just kind of embraced the efficiency of managerialism. You
00:31:41.240
know, it was kind of this Weberian, uh, you know, something is right because it's efficient and because
00:31:46.640
it produces regularly and, and, and, and it can be kind of quantified and those kinds of things.
00:31:50.580
And I wonder what you think about the relationship between the expansion of human rights and the
00:31:55.540
expansion of managerialism. Do those go hand in hand? Do they do the, does the reliance on that,
00:32:01.600
uh, have to do with the way in which we've ordered society around these managerial apparatuses?
00:32:06.840
Yeah, I think they go together. You know, I think one is the, uh, uh, the, the proliferation of human
00:32:12.980
rights is the natural consequence of living under an administrative regime that really has no moral
00:32:19.140
legitimacy of any kind, uh, other than providing services and somehow making everyone equal.
00:32:26.160
Uh, uh, managerial governments don't even, are not really, uh, bound up with any kind of nation
00:32:33.120
state. Um, I, I think what, what, one of the problems that I keep running into with, uh, you know,
00:32:39.680
people writing on, on, on this history of the state is they imagine the present managerial state
00:32:45.580
is an extension of, you know, government set up by, by the new monarchies back in the 16th or 17th
00:32:52.160
century. They're not, you know, they are, they're a form of government that I, as I argue in my book
00:32:57.240
after liberalism, they come into existence in the 20th century and they just keep expanding. Uh, and
00:33:03.500
they're not, they're not really, um, tied to particular nations or peoples and they can become
00:33:09.360
universal. I mean, like the administrative state here has decided to become universal. So it just opened up the
00:33:14.680
borders, let everybody come in. Right. You don't have to be an, even pretend to be a nation state any
00:33:19.900
longer. Uh, but what, one of the justifications for power, uh, used by the administrative state
00:33:27.420
is that it is, uh, addressing the problem of human rights, right? Prejudice, discrimination,
00:33:36.000
uh, treating people differently because, you know, in an ideal society, we'd have homogenization.
00:33:41.700
Everybody would be treated the same. The, the German word Gleichschaltung applies here. You
00:33:47.260
know, it's like everything is sort of put under the control, you know, of, of the same forces
00:33:52.300
and, and made, and in the, in the end, just homogenized. Uh, so I, I, I think the human
00:34:02.600
Yeah. And this results that we talked about this last time you were on with, where you, uh,
00:34:06.340
where you talk about the therapeutic state and how this becomes the reason that the state
00:34:10.640
can enter into and, and interfere with all of these, what were, you know, originally
00:34:14.960
naturally sovereign areas, you know, other, other, other areas like the family, like the
00:34:20.220
church, all of a sudden, because of this need to ameliorate all these different evils that
00:34:25.280
violate human rights, uh, the state now has this ability to put everybody through these
00:34:30.440
processes to make sure that they comply and are, are, uh, you know, uh, respecting those
00:34:38.680
Yeah, that, that's, that's, that's sort of the nature of the right. By the way, the October
00:34:42.820
issue of Chronicles has two essays by me, one on, uh, precisely we're talking about the
00:34:49.180
way the, the managerial state, uh, digest, absorbs everything into its maw. I think comes
00:34:56.200
out the same. And the other is a long essay, a long sketch in Carl Schmitt. So, you know,
00:35:01.480
I think some of your listeners may find the, this reading to, to be of interest. Um, but
00:35:07.820
I, you know, I, I, I, I think when the managerial regime was sort of created in the 20th century,
00:35:13.140
it did not necessarily have to go in the direction in which it went, you know? And I, I think this
00:35:18.040
is something which you find, uh, foreshadowed in James Burnham's writing. I mean, the managerial
00:35:24.400
state could serve a communist regime, a fascist regime, all kinds of regimes. Yet for some
00:35:30.300
reason, the managerialism now has, uh, uh, seems to go hand in hand with, with, with
00:35:35.540
the woke left, uh, with the woke left state church and with enforcing the dogmas of the,
00:35:40.780
of this church. Um, I don't think that there's any kind of historical inevitability about this,
00:35:46.200
but, um, the, uh, the managerial state is going to adopt an ideology that is consistent
00:35:54.640
Yeah. See that's, yeah, that's what I've been exploring. Cause I feel like Sam Francis was a
00:35:59.120
particularly very, very hit this a lot in Leviathan and his enemies, uh, on, on kind of
00:36:04.360
what proto wokeness, how it would be essential to the advance of managerialism, how those things
00:36:10.900
would, would, you know, the cosmopolitan hedonistic nature of that was going to be necessary for
00:36:15.980
the advancement. So it feels, you know, and, and, and I've also been speaking with someone
00:36:20.220
who I haven't read enough Jacques Ellul myself that, uh, to have a firm grasp on it, but it sounds
00:36:24.840
like that's also something that he felt about kind of the managerial state and technique that
00:36:29.040
the, that kind of the way that it operates almost demands that we would actually move
00:36:34.520
into this kind of a hyper-progressivism, this universal brokenness, because that would be
00:36:40.820
what allowed those managerial structures to universalize in the widest possible sense.
00:36:46.580
Yeah, that, that, that's absolutely true. But, you know, I think it's burning points out
00:36:50.600
that the managerialism, uh, also, uh, uh, was able to, uh, become associated with, uh, with,
00:36:58.620
with Nazism, fascism, communism, which are also universalist ideologies, right?
00:37:03.800
So, uh, and they plan to take over the world and have these, uh, administrative state control
00:37:09.360
them. Uh, the, the, the one, the ones who want, win out are sort of the social Democrats
00:37:14.880
or the welfare state Democrats represented by the United States and England. Um,
00:37:20.200
but it could, it could have developed differently. I, where Sam Francis and I obviously parted ways,
00:37:26.440
and I don't think he ever forgave me for this deviation, um, is that, uh, I believe that those
00:37:33.340
who run the managerial therapeutic state believe what they're saying. I don't think it's just a,
00:37:39.840
a, they're giving us sort of a tool for dominating people. It's that too, but I, I think they're also
00:37:45.520
saturated in the doctrines of, of wokeness or whatever they're supposed to believe.
00:37:50.640
And to the extent that they have any system of belief, it's, it's what they're now imposing on us.
00:37:56.020
Yeah. Nima Parvini, uh, academic agent and I have a similar disagreement. He, we've got a few
00:38:01.260
cigars writing on, uh, on a bet on whether the, uh, the managerial elite will be, uh, able to put the
00:38:06.360
woke away as he says it, or whether they are true believers. And, uh, I'm, I'm feeling pretty good
00:38:11.060
about my, uh, my chance of, uh, getting that box of cigars, but we'll see. We'll see.
00:38:16.220
Yeah. I noticed Nima wrote about this book in which Sam Francis and I both figure prominently,
00:38:21.480
but, uh, I, I think he leans, he leans towards Sam's side, you know, in this debate. Uh, I think
00:38:28.000
No, he does. Absolutely. So given, I guess, this understanding of natural rights being so central
00:38:36.580
to kind of the modern conservative understanding of, of kind of where they are and how to push
00:38:43.720
back and how to form a coalition, I guess the question, like, and you've said, you know,
00:38:47.760
you don't have all the answers, so it's okay. This is a hard question, you know, but I just
00:38:51.300
wanted to pick your brain about it. What would, if particularism over universality, the, the
00:38:57.620
understanding of the tradition is kind of the key to this. Can there be, I guess, the international,
00:39:05.140
uh, meeting of nationalists or, you know, like the universal understanding of the need
00:39:10.700
for tradition? Cause I see a lot of like the, the natural conservatism conference and things
00:39:15.380
like Yoram Hozoni, they're looking, I think for a way to create, to forward that would create
00:39:21.020
the ability for, uh, you know, nationalism or traditions to reemerge and be particular, but
00:39:27.160
it feels like there needs to be a wider coalition outside of any individual tradition or nation
00:39:33.420
to establish that because the current order is already universalist.
00:39:37.560
Yeah. You know, Hegel believed that the nation state was sort of the ultimate form taken by the
00:39:43.720
world spirit, the ultimate political form. Uh, but the nation states would remain in conflict.
00:39:49.020
There'd be wars between them and so forth. Um, I think many modern Hegelians have gone,
00:39:54.320
taken the view that the nation state is sort of the highest political form or the one that is the
00:39:59.960
most fulfilling for us. Um, but at the same time, nation states can, can survive, um, while
00:40:08.100
cooperating, you know, the, I think was the goal spoke about a Europe of nations or of nation states
00:40:13.420
rather than this, uh, uh, glob, you know, woke glob that the, uh, European union has now become.
00:40:20.440
Um, um, and you know, I, I, I think, I think that is entirely possible. I think the national
00:40:25.940
conservatives may be correct, although I don't see the United States as a nation. I mean, that's one
00:40:30.960
of my, it was a nation at one time. Um, it has become, you know, it's sort of a, sort of a collection
00:40:37.000
of minorities, you know, controlled by a managerial state and, uh, subject to the market. Um, but you
00:40:43.900
know, certainly Lithuanians, Poles, uh, Germans, if they weren't so crazy, you know, and, uh, stop
00:40:50.560
hating themselves, they could be a nation, Italians, all kinds of other people, Israelis. Uh, uh, I mean,
00:40:57.640
you know, there's nations all over the Scots are a nation, even if they're the Irish. Uh, so there,
00:41:02.500
there are, there are nations, but I, I think that nations do, particularly in the West where they
00:41:07.380
have a common Judeo-Christian tradition, I think they can cooperate, you know, and, uh,
00:41:13.660
their traditionalism, uh, obviously their traditionalisms overlap, you know, and, uh,
00:41:19.600
I think there's certainly possible for cooperation, even if there's economic competition, which,
00:41:23.820
which will go on. Uh, so I, I said, I have hope for nation states, although, as I said, I,
00:41:29.900
I don't think nationalism is the answer in the United States. You know, I think we're well
00:41:34.820
beyond that point. Uh, in the United States, I'd like to see regionalism if it's still possible,
00:41:39.900
but the, the, the centralized state and the conservative movement, you know, is certainly
00:41:45.020
complicit in this, have pretty much destroyed regionalism. Uh, yeah, they're no friend to it
00:41:50.320
either. Yeah. I mean, you cannot go on beating up on the white South all the time and say you're in
00:41:54.680
favor of regionalism. Uh, you know, the only regionalism they seem to, to accept is Martin Luther
00:42:00.700
King or something that, you know, as our common savior, um, or Lincoln, you know,
00:42:06.600
it's nice appeal to Lincoln. And it's always, you know, what's held, what holds America together
00:42:10.780
is human is natural right or human rights or something like that. Um, but I, I, I think,
00:42:17.580
I think regionalism is a, uh, uh, a, a much more feasible, you know, alternative to what we have
00:42:24.840
right now. Um, if regions can assume some kind of identity, uh, in the United States, uh, and in the
00:42:32.060
case of smaller countries that have existed for them, I'm, I'm all in favor of, I'm all in favor
00:42:37.120
of, you know, Baltic countries being nationalist. Um, I'm not terribly happy with Russian nationalism,
00:42:42.360
I have to tell you, because the, the Russians seem to have a part of their nationalism and involves
00:42:47.320
an appetite for, uh, border countries that border them. They, they try to occupy and take over,
00:42:53.480
uh, so I, I, I think we have to be on guard against, uh, national aggression, which I think
00:42:59.540
is still a problem in some places. Um, but I'd be very happy to see, you know, nation states
00:43:05.320
reasserting their identity and in the United States, I, you know, I believe in a, in a strong,
00:43:10.360
healthy regionalism. So you mentioned Russia there, and that's kind of interesting because
00:43:15.400
I was about to ask you about Alexander Dugan. So in his fourth political theory and then other
00:43:21.120
places, Dugan speaks, uh, quite a bit about how he feels that nations are basically, uh, unable,
00:43:28.280
unable to push back against kind of a global empire. And so that basically you'll need a
00:43:33.460
civilizational, like basically, basically multi-polarity through large empires. It seems,
00:43:39.720
you know, I think the part of Dugan I don't like is his hatred for the West, you know, and his, uh,
00:43:46.760
Russian nationalism, uh, pan, it pumps a kind of pan-slavic nationalism that he asserts. And I
00:43:52.800
have read a lot of Dugan, uh, and I'm not terribly sympathetic to him, although people very often
00:43:57.980
identify others in terms of our thoughts, but, uh, you know, I do not, I do not like the form that
00:44:03.480
Russian nationalism takes, um, and his rejection of the West, you know, as being, uh, somehow perpetually,
00:44:10.500
um, uh, perpetually materialistic going back to the middle ages or something I think is very
00:44:16.680
simplistic. Yeah, I tend to agree. I, I find some valuable things in Dugan. I think he has a,
00:44:23.780
a, a decent grasp of, of some, uh, important ideas, but the fact that, like you said, he just
00:44:29.400
had, he, it's very clear his hatred is his, he's dripping with hatred for the West. It seems,
00:44:33.680
seems, seems to want total Anglo death on a pretty regular basis. And so I always tell people there,
00:44:39.120
there's value in Dugan, but he's not your friend. This is not a guy.
00:44:41.880
Yeah, no. And, and, and he seems to prefer Muslims, you know, and, and the Chinese communist to the
00:44:47.500
West. Um, it's, uh, he does have a very low opinion of Western civilization, uh, even though he did
00:44:54.300
write a very good book on Martin Heidegger, uh, which I helped him to translate. Well, I, uh, I hope
00:45:00.300
in the translation of the Greek terms, uh, my Russian isn't that good. Um, so, uh, before we start,
00:45:07.720
uh, going, I wanted to ask you one more thing. Uh, you, you spoke about regionalism in the United
00:45:12.540
States. Uh, this is something that I have also, uh, pointed to a decent amount whenever people
00:45:17.060
ask me how I think things are going to go, you know, obviously a lot of people, a very spicy term
00:45:22.020
that people like to throw around, even, even some of the mainstream conservatives is a national
00:45:26.260
divorce. You know, they talk about national divorce and, and, uh, how we need a national divorce
00:45:30.680
and whether this could happen. A lot of people get angry about that. They say that's unrealistic.
00:45:35.220
That's silly. Other people say, look, it's absolutely necessary. I always explained it
00:45:39.160
this way. And it just kind of gets your idea of what you think about. I always say, look,
00:45:42.720
I don't think there's ever going to be a actual declaration of kind of formal secession between
00:45:48.960
any of these places anytime soon. I don't, I don't think that's going to be a thing that
00:45:52.840
people need to focus on, but as the federal government becomes more inept and it becomes clear
00:45:57.480
that regional governments are more capable in many ways and, and can create better standards
00:46:02.860
of living and, and, and, uh, you know, have better shared moral visions than a unified
00:46:06.740
federal government. You're just going to see people like say maybe Ron DeSantis or, you know,
00:46:11.240
other governors just say, yeah, we're, we're just not going to do that. You know, it's nice
00:46:15.160
that you made your ruling, but now enforce it. And, and kind of, as that goes, you'll start
00:46:19.000
to see regional identities emerge more in that way, rather than some kind of formal national
00:46:24.500
divorce along any, any kind of a real breakup, the United States.
00:46:28.200
I agree with you. Uh, the real breakup, the, the kind of, uh, apocalyptic breakup that they
00:46:34.100
are hoping for, um, is not going to go very well for our side because the other side has all the
00:46:40.020
armed might that it needs to crush it very easily. Um, and of course the media will side with the
00:46:46.300
central state, which is carrying out its woke leftist agenda. Um, and the people who will be
00:46:52.160
succeeding will necessarily be on the right. So, you know, you have to be very subtle and I agree
00:46:57.500
that DeSantis is doing whatever is possible, uh, given the existing political circumstances,
00:47:04.060
but it will have to be done very cleverly over a long period of time. Um, uh, I, I do think people
00:47:11.440
are sort of sorting themselves out that way, right? I mean, there's some areas, red states in which
00:47:17.360
people are moving and the people like living in blue areas, like my kids, you know, who do not
00:47:24.020
share my, my political views at all. And, uh, you know, they've opt for a lot for blue states. And,
00:47:29.480
um, I'm, I'm living in a, uh, uh, a right-wing enclave in a very, very blue state, which is
00:47:35.380
Pennsylvania, which I don't think is purple anymore. I think it's turned blue. Yeah. Um, but you know,
00:47:40.120
the area in which I live is very conservative. Um, so I, I, I think we'll not, it will also be
00:47:46.400
enclaves within other regions that try to assert their identity. It's, it's not going to be as
00:47:51.500
simple in terms of large blocks as it was in 1861, even though the South got creamed in that war,
00:47:58.200
but, you know, they did, they did have a unified block on their side and we're probably, we might
00:48:04.000
have, you know, some of these, uh, flyover states, you know, which, which act for us. But, um, uh, I
00:48:10.860
think we're going to have a lot of these enclaves that try to survive within, within blue states.
00:48:16.640
No, I think that's right. Yeah. I don't think the cohesive geography exists at this point. And so
00:48:22.040
I think that does change things. All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up guys.
00:48:26.740
Let me go to our super chats real quick. I don't think there's any questions, but just some,
00:48:30.160
some nice things said, I'll run those down real quick. Uh, just a super chat for $10 or 10 pounds
00:48:35.800
rather. Thank you very much, sir. Oh, now he has a question here or he has a statement. Uh,
00:48:40.640
I cannot, uh, stay, but we'll look forward to this podcast in the tractor tomorrow. Excellent,
00:48:44.860
sir. Glad you're listening as you work. One of my favorite things to do as well when it comes to
00:48:48.960
podcasts, I enjoy. And then enlightened desperate here for 10 Canadian. Thank you for keeping the
00:48:53.340
discussion going on natural law issues. People don't like it, but it is key. Absolutely. All right,
00:48:59.300
guys. Well, we are going to go ahead and wrap this up, but thank you once again, Dr. Godfrey for
00:49:04.260
coming on everybody. Please make sure you're checking out Chronicles magazine. Sounds like
00:49:08.100
there are some excellent articles that you should be reading from Dr. Godfrey there this month.
00:49:13.300
Thank you very much for having me. No, thank you. And of course, guys, if it's your first time
00:49:17.980
on the channel, please make sure that you go ahead and subscribe. And if you'd like to get these
00:49:22.000
broadcasts as podcasts, you can subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform.
00:49:26.720
All right. Thank you, everybody, for coming by. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.