Legal scholar Robert P. George comments on the meaning of friendship across disagreement, the need for public virtues of courage and humility, and how to address political polarization and hateful divisions through seeking the truth, thinking critically and openly, and respecting the dignity and freedom of the other. Interview by Evan Rosa.
Legal scholar Robert P. George comments on the meaning of friendship across disagreement, the need for public virtues of courage and humility, and how to address political polarization and hateful divisions through seeking the truth, thinking critically and openly, and respecting the dignity and freedom of the other. Interview by Evan Rosa.
Episode Introduction (Evan Rosa)
How do we heal from 2020? Yes, how do we heal from this pandemic, but how do we heal from the political rifts deeper than we can remember? How do we heal from physical distance that has isolated and alienated us from embodied presence and genuine connection with others? How do millions of public school children heal from remote learning and the psychological impact of disconnection?
How do we heal in a moment like this?
We’ve been trying to tackle this question in a variety of ways on the podcast, and we'll continue in upcoming episodes.
This week, we’re sharing a conversation I had with Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
We spoke just a few weeks before the election, really, as the frenzy and vitriol and worry started to peak. We spoke about American division and the punishing and apparently unrelenting hatred that can be on display in the disgust one side mutually feels for the other, even in the birthplace of modern democracy, where the idea of personal dignity grounds our freedom to live together. I asked him about what it means to achieve friendship across deep disagreement—something he’s become widely known for in his close friendship and collaboration with Cornel West. We spoke about the virtues of citizenship, including humility and courage; specifically the courage to stand for what you think is right even at the horror of being thought heretic in your tribe. This kind of homelessness from the tribe, especially for Christians who find themselves in tension with their tradition. He reflects on seeking the truth in a world where anyone can portray themselves as an expert and facts are no longer commonly regarded as such. I asked him to offer some practical steps toward mutual understanding and civil discourse, which prizes collaborating around a pursuit of the truth far over mere victory for power’s sake.
The kind of divisions we feel now—whether social distance or political distance—won’t be mended and healed with one strategy. So we’ll be bringing a variety of perspectives to bear on the question of healing. But the way Robert George frames civic friendship that shares a value for the truth and a commitment to respect for the other… maybe there’s some potential there. Thanks for listening today.
Show Notes
About Robert P. George
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Professor George is a recipient of many honors and awards, including the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, the James Q. Wilson Award of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Stanley N. Kelley, Jr. Teaching Award of the Department of Politics at Princeton.
He has given honorific lectures at Harvard, Yale, the University of St. Andrews, Oxford University, and Cornell University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and holds twenty-one honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates of law, ethics, science, letters, divinity, humanities, law and moral values, civil law, humane letters, and juridical science.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more information, visit faith.yale.edu.
Robert George: If we, as we are prone to do, wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions and we become dogmatists, then we become unwilling to consider the possibility that we might be wrong.
But as a practical matter, it's much more difficult because with our deepest, most cherished, identity forming beliefs, as a practical matter we tend to think of ourselves as infallible and think of people who disagree with us about those beliefs as bad people.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. How do we heal from 2020? Yes, how do we heal from this pandemic, but how do we heal from the political risks deeper than we can remember? How do we heal from physical distance that has isolated and alienated us from embodied presence and genuine connection with others?
How do millions of public school children heal from remote learning and the psychological impact of disconnection from their friends, from their community. How do we heal in a moment like this? We've been trying to tackle this question in a variety of ways on this podcast, and we'll continue in upcoming episodes.
This week we're sharing a conversation I had with Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton university, we spoke just a few weeks before the election, really, as the frenzy and vitriol and worry started to peak, we spoke about American division.
The punishing and apparently unrelenting hatred that can be on display in the disgust of one side, mutually for the other, even in the birthplace of modern democracy where the idea of personal dignity grounds our freedom to live together. I asked him about what it means to achieve friendship across deep disagreement, something he's become widely known for in his close friendship and collaboration with Cornel West, with whom he disagrees vociferously. We spoke about the virtues of citizenship, including humility and courage, specifically the courage to stand for what you think is right even at the horror of being thought heretic in your own tribe, this kind of homelessness from the tribe, especially for Christians who find themselves in tension with their tradition.
He reflects on seeking the truth in this kind of world where anyone can portray themselves as an expert and facts are no longer commonly regarded as such. I asked him to offer some practical steps toward mutual understanding and civil discourse, which prizes collaborating around a pursuit of the truth far over mere victory for power's sake.
The kind of divisions we feel now, whether social distance or political distance, won't be mended and healed with one strategy. So we'll be bringing a variety of perspectives to bear on the question of healing, but the way Robert George frames civic friendship that shares a value for the truth and a commitment to respect for the other; maybe there's some potential there.
Thanks for listening today. Robbie. I'm so delighted to bring you on the podcast today. Thanks so much for your time. How are you doing these days?
Robert George: Doing pretty well Evan, thanks so much for having me on the, on the podcast. It's a, it's an honor to be on, it's a pleasure to talk with you again, it's been quite a while since we've had an opportunity to chat.
So I've been looking forward to this.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, so am I.
We're we're in a, a weird year and we need perspective on how to communicate with each other, how to talk about the strangeness of 2020. We need leaders that are guiding us in wisdom, and you have historically been a key figure in a beacon for civil discourse in this country. I wanted to start with just this week's version of calling out incivility in our public discourse.
And it comes from Senator Mitt Romney, where he released something through his Twitter, a statement of sorts about the state of politics in 2020 we're in, he says, that politics has moved away from spirited debate to a vile, vituperative, hate-filled morass that is unbecoming of any free nation, let alone the birthplace of modern democracy.
And so, of course, people have been saying things like this for years now, that we've, we've... People began to notice incivility years ago, and that was in fact the way that we first connected and met, but what do you think about Romney's comment and its accuracy and what it means? Like, what is this reminding the public about incivility? What does it do at this point?
Robert George: Well, Sentor Romney is clearly right in what he says. I don't see how anybody could argue with that. What he's talking about is the breakdown of civic friendship and the indispensable, necessary role that civic friendship plays in the maintenance of Republican institutions. CIvic Friendship is actually important for all sorts of policies, but for a self-governing people, for a democratic people, civic friendship is really critically important.
That's why I say indispensable, necessary. And there's a reason for that. If we failed to treat each other as civic friends, that is to say as fellow citizens, and instead regard each other as enemies to be defeated and even destroyed, then everything is up for grabs every time there's an election. There's nothing that's stable. The losing side can expect nothing but retaliation. The winning side will have to claim the power to completely control the norms that will govern into the future. And you get a breakdown. There's, there's no question about it now. You're right too, to say that we have heard this before, but that doesn't mean we need to be concerned about it.
We have indeed heard it before. We had a serious breakdown of civic friendship, very, very near the beginning of this Republic. And that is in the period of the late 17 hundreds and early 18 hundreds, especially around the election of 1800, which pitted the incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson. It's a terrible breakdown of civic friendship.
The Federalists saw the Democratic Republicans, also known as the Jeffersonians, not as fellow citizens with whom they disagreed, but as enemies to be defeated and destroyed as enemies of the regime, enemies of the Republic, people who wanted to bring the spirit of the French Revolution through the United States. And the Democratic Republicans, the Jeffersonians, felt exactly the same way about the Federalists, that they were not fellow citizens to be disagreed with in an honest democratic debate and whose rights were to be respected even if the Jeffersonians prevailed, but rather as enemies of the regime, people who would establish, if they had their way, a British style monarchy, and that breakdown of trust really threatened the Republic right at the beginning.
It was not at all clear, certainly it wasn't clear to the Jeffersonians, that if the Jeffersonians won the Federalists would peaceably hand over power, that Adams would leave the White House. That was a genuine concern. And it wasn't at all clear to the Federalists that if the Jeffersonians won, they did of course end up winning, it wasn't clear to the Federalists that if the Jeffersonians won, that there wouldn't be a reign of terror and revenge against the Federalists.
And of course we saw it then another 50 years later in the run-up to the civil war and in the war itself, a complete breakdown of civic friendship. Those in the North saw those in the South, and those in the South saw those in the North, not as fellow citizens to be disagreed with robustly robustly, but nevertheless, to be regarded as fellow citizens, they saw each other as enemies and they could not see how they could live together in a Republic.
And of course we know what followed from that. So the fact that it has happened before should give us no comfort. It shouldn't cause us to think, "ah, well, you know, people always complain about the breakdown of civil friendship, civic friendship. They always complain about the lack of civility in politics, but it's no big deal because we always survive." Well, we almost didn't survive in 1800 and, I don't need to say anything else about what happened in 1860 and 1861.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if, if you'd say a little bit more about what you mean by that friendship? Because I think the concept of a friendship between, especially the extreme left and extreme right in America today does seem implausible, again, and it's really helpful to be drawn back into other moments in history where, where there is a form of proof, if not coming with a really significant challenge to the Republic and to individual citizens to work through it. But I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about what that friendship would entail, because it seems to me to require, necessitate, seeing the other as more than just the sum total of their politics.
Robert George: Well, that's certainly true. We human beings pride ourselves on being rational creatures, rational animals, or rationality, we say rightly, is the distinctive thing about us, at least among the terrestrial creatures. But of course we all know that we're not just rational. There are other aspects of ourselves.
We also have emotions. We have feelings. We have passions to use the old ,fashioned term. And that creates complications for us, because as emotional and affective creatures, as creatures with passions, we tend to wrap our emotions more or less tightly around our convictions, including our political convictions.
We tend to construct our identities around our beliefs. Now that's not bad in itself, or just in itself. In fact it's good. I mean, we wouldn't want people not to wrap their emotions somewhat tightly around their convictions. We need an emotional investment in what we believe in order to make our beliefs effective, in order to accomplish the things we think are worth accomplishing, whether it's the mundane things of life, you know, getting the kids up in the morning and getting them fed and off to school and getting off to work and so forth, or whether it's acting for the sake of a cause that we regard as especially urgent, just, and noble.
So, there's nothing wrong in principle with fact that we wrap our, emotions around our convictions. But if we do, as we are prone to do, wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, then we become dogmatists. Then we become unwilling to consider the possibility that we might be wrong and that a critic might be right.
Or at least that we might have something to learn from a critic, even if the critic's not a hundred percent right. We assume a posture of infallibility. Now, of course, if you ask anybody or you infallible, they're gonna say no, I recognize my own fallibility. That's one thing to be able to answer the question correctly, check the right box on an SAT exam.
Are you fallible or infallible, but as a practical matter, it's much more difficult because with our deepest, most cherished, identity forming beliefs, as a practical matter we tend to think of ourselves as infallible and think of people who disagree with us about those beliefs as bad people. They don't share our deepest beliefs. They're bad people. They don't share our beliefs on things that we really care about. They're bad people, and because they're bad people, they can't be our friends. Rather, they're enemies.
And since they have beliefs that they are prepared to act on, that would establish what we think is wrong or unjust or bad, they are enemies to be not only defeated, but ideally to be destroyed, to be driven out. I've always said, something Cornel West emphasizes as well, it's a real point of agreement between the two of us, which I think is important, that the virtue, one of the key virtues that's needed, which is really missing, and it's hard for all of us, is the virtue of genuine humility. This is hard, but it takes humility to recognize that I might be wrong, not merely about the less important superficial and more trivial things of life, but I might be wrong even about the most important things. And it's only with that virtue of humility that you or anyone can open ourselves up to genuinely listening to a critic and considering whether the critic might in fact have something to teach us. Indeed might in fact be right, and we might be wrong.
Civic friendship, civility is not just politesse, Evan. I think it's really important to see this and people don't. They think incivility is being polite. No, no, it's good to be polite. I'm not arguing against it. But that's not civility. What civility is, is more than simply politely sitting quietly while the other guy speaks. And then you get your turn to speak and he sits quietly while you speak. No, that's just politesse.
That's not civic friendship and it's not civility. Civility is something deeper. It is genuinely listening to the guy who disagrees with you, listening to your conversation partner, your interlocutor, listening with an openness to learning, considering whether in fact he might be right, or again, if he's not a hundred percent right, considering that he might be right about something. Or at least have something to teach us. Civility means genuinely engaging the other person, honoring the other person as a rational creature like oneself, who's thought about things and has something to say, something from which I might learn.
And that means having an open mind. You can't have an open mind unless you have intellectual humility. You generally need to be open-minded. Now some people think, "Oh gosh, we can't be open-minded because of I'm open-minded I'll have no convictions. And if I have no convictions, I won't act that I won't act for the sake of justice. I mean, clearly you can't have an open mind about the most fundamental things, because that would paralyze us."
Well, I certainly try to have an open mind. I don't succeed all the time, I'm sure, but I try and it hasn't paralyzed me. Same for Cornel West, somebody on the opposite side of most political questions for me.
Cornel's a passionate actor in the public square. He advocates strongly on behalf of the things he believes. And yet I can tell you as his frequent interlocutor, he's got an open mind, a willingness to listen and a willingness to engage, a willingness to challenge, to be challenged, not simply to challenge others, but to be challenged, even on his most fundamental convictions.
And when you have that attitude, then you can have genuine civic friendship. You can recognize the humanity, the dignity, the rationality of people who disagree with you, even if they disagree with you on profound issues of morality, justice, human rights, and the common good. But it's hard to achieve. It's hard to achieve in any society and we're failing very badly at it in our society today.
People on the left, think that people on the right are monsters, people on the right thing that people on the left are monsters. Why should I be a fellow citizen with a monster? That's not a person to be engaged or learn from. That's a person to be defeated and if possible destroyed because he's a threat to everything that's true and good and righteous and holy.
Evan Rosa: When I hear you talk about seeking a virtue of humility as well in the context of friendship, I'm reminded of some of Miroslav Volf's work on the porous boundaries of the self, that there's a certain minimum threshold of understanding oneself as having enough of an identity such as to be able to relate to others, to have something genuine to offer a relationship, and yet to be flexible enough with one's convictions, perhaps, and how that identity is then constructed and presented to a relationship or to the world, such that you might be able to allow others in to shape you.
The reasons that they have that convictions that they have can have a way of entering into you, in a way, and that's the gift of rationality, perhaps for rational animals like us.
Robert George: Well, that certainly makes a lot of sense to me. It's getting at the same idea that I was gesturing toward with this idea of our being creatures who tend to wrap our emotions more or less tightly around our convictions. You need to have an emotional investment in your convictions in order to get anything done. We wouldn't want to embrace a view that said we should get rid of our emotions. On the other hand, if we wrap those emotions too tightly around our convictions, we're not going to be open to learning anything from anybody.
We're not going to be open, to changing, to reforming, to converting, no matter how powerful the actual reasons are. If we'd open up to them for changing a view or changing a position.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you could speak a little just at a kind of practical level about what you undergo as you prepare for any kind of debate.
I mean, you've been in both more fraught conversations, as well as conversations where there is spirit of openness and humility. I've been witness to that with you and Cornel. Can you speak a little bit to the sort of mental space that you believe is required to seek that, or the kind of habits that you try to cultivate in order to achieve that level of deep civility that honors and respects the dignity of the other, despite disagreement.
Robert George: Yeah. I think one of the things that's important to do is to try to understand an interlocutor's point in the most favorable light, try to view it in its most positive aspects. So if somebody says something to you that strikes you was wrong, even scandalous or shocking, instead of immediately seizing on that in order to try to embarrass your interlocutor, accuse them of being a monster, try to see whether there's a light in which the point makes some sense or could be interpreted in more favorable way.
And I encourage this very much in my students in the conversations in class. I want them to have robust debates, but robust debates should not be point scoring contests. And that's the temptation when people are talking, when people are debating. They look for ways to score points. They look for gotcha moments against the other guy. When you're doing that, you're arguing for victory, not for truth. And I don't see the point in arguing for victory. The point of arguing is for truth. I mean, this is a really important teaching that we, that we have from Plato and it would be really advantageous if we could all take that on board, though notoriously Plato was no friend of democracy.
But we who do affirm democracy and live in a democratic polity would really massively benefit from that teaching of Plato's, that the point of discussion, debate, argument, dialectic is not victory, it's truth. And if that's your attitude, if that's the mental position you put yourself in going into the conversation, then you're going to try to interpret, understand, read what your conversation partner says in its most favorable light, see if there's any truth in it, rather than seizing on it or depicting it at its most negative light in order to score points against your debating partner with a view to getting a victory.
It really depends on what you're after. If you're after victory, you obviously don't give your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt. You take his points in their most negative light. You seize on them. You try to score points on the basis of them. everything's an attempt at a gotcha. if, if on the other hand, what you're after is not victory, but truth, you're going to take the opposite position. You're going to read what your interlocutor has to say in a favorable light.
I'll tell you something that might be scandalous to you. Obviously, you know, my views on the sanctity of human life are strongly held, are firm, which is why I'm opposed to elective abortion and euthanasia, the killing of cognitively disabled or physically severely handicapped people, eugenics and so forth, or the direct killing of innocent non-combatants in war. One of my colleagues famously, Peter Singer, disagrees with the sanctity of human life very dramatically. He believes not only in the moral legitimacy of abortion, but also of euthanasia and indeed, even of infanticide. Now, should I treat Peter Singer as my enemy? Well, in a political contest, I hope his side loses and my side wins because I'd like to see human life in all stages and conditions honored and protected.
And yet, in my conversations with him, even when we're in public settings, as we were last year in a conversation about euthanasia and brain death, I see my task as trying to learn from him, not to embarrass him or defeat him. It's rather to try to learn from him. And I have learned from him, having to engage his arguments, which are serious arguments, it has caused me to understand more deeply than I otherwise would these really important, critical issues. It has not caused me to change my mind, although who knows, maybe it will someday. It's not caused me to change my mind, but I much more deeply understand the issues. And I think my own reasons and the reasons I can present in favor of my position or are more powerful, more compelling than they would otherwise be because I've had to face the challenges, very serious challenges, that Peter. presents, and I like to think, I certainly hope that he would say the same thing from his perspective of about his engagement with me.
The way you pursue knowledge is by challenging and being challenged. Sometimes it's an interlocutor challenging you. And by having to deal with those challenges, you deepen your understanding. Sometimes you change your views. Sometimes, it's not an interlocutor but if you were doing your job correctly as a rational person, it gets to the point where you will often be your own best critic.
You're the person challenging yourself. You're the person interrogating your own views. But again, that takes humility, it takes open-mindedness, which can not exist but for intellectual humility, and it takes courage. Let me speak to that because I think that's an important part of our predicament right now.
Evan Rosa: Sure. I was hoping to ask you about courage.
Robert George: Not only do we construct our identities around our beliefs, our convictions, we also become members and maintain our membership in communities, in formal and informal communities based on our beliefs and convictions. That's what gives us tribalism, political tribalism, or even ideological tribalism.
The Yale law professor, Amy Chua has written quite brilliantly about this. And here's where courage comes in, because if you are an honest, independent thinker, it's very likely that your reflections will take you places with respect to some issues that make you out of step with people in communities you belong to.
Even small circles of friends, very informal communities. Not just this or that political party or a lobbying organization or association, or what have you, even your circles of friends, you can become a heretic very fast by breaking ranks, even on a single issue, if the issue was even moderately important.
And gosh, you know, we, human beings, we're social animals. We like belonging. That matters to us. We're invested again, emotionally in the communities to which we belong. We don't want to be ex-communicated. We don't want to be a suspect in our communities. We don't want to be regarded with suspicion or be even as a heretic.
So there's a lot of pressure to stay with the team, stay with the orthodoxy, don't challenge, stay aboard. But if you're an independent thinker, if you're a truth seeker, if you're a truth seeker you will be an independent thinker, there's no truth seeking without independent thinking. If you're a truth seeker and an independent thinker, it's inevitable that sometimes you're going to be out of step with the majority opinion or the dominant opinion in these communities that are important to you.
Cornel and I found this ourselves in 2016 from our very different perspectives. Once Hillary Clinton became the nominee of the democratic party and Donald Trump became the nominee of the Republican party, Cornel found that he could not consistent with his own conscientious beliefs support Hillary Clinton. Now that scandalized many of his friends. Those with whom he was in informal sorts of communities as just ordinary friends and of course, those who belong to a more formal groups that he belonged to. Because they argued well, gosh, you know, when, whether we think of Hillary Clinton as a great person, or she was our first choice or not, the alternative is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is the devil incarnate, and therefore we've got to get behind Hillary Clinton. And when Cornel refused to do it, he was treated as suspect. He was treated as a heretic. He's still not been forgiven for refusing to go along.
And at that very same time I was finding myself in exactly the same position. I could not in good conscience support Donald Trump. But in the circles in which I travel, in the conservative community, many of my regular friends, of course, who are conservatives and then organizations that I belong to decided whether Donald Trump's the ideal guy or not, and most people agreed he was not, he's our guy. And the alternative is Hillary Clinton and the radical left wing Democrats. So we have to circle the wagon and get on the Trump train. Well, I couldn't do it. I'm not condemning those who did any more than Cornel's condemning those who went for Hillary Clinton, but I couldn't.
And he couldn't. And so we found ourselves heretics, in some cases ex-communicated from the communities to which we belong. Well, that's hard. You know, it's hard because you're emotionally invested in those relationships. We need that kind of companionship. And when the companionship is shared around shared convictions, built around shared convictions, which is again not bad in itself, but when that happens, once you no longer share some key convictions, for some it's moderately important convictions, you're going to be an outsider, and who wants that?
So I really encourage my young people like my students, my own children, to try to develop the virtues of intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and courage, because sometimes courage is going to be needed. When you face the prospect of losing friends, being ex-communicated from important communities or communities that are important for you because you're standing by your conscientious beliefs. You're standing with what you think is right.
Evan Rosa: What you speak to here, the threat of being ostracized by your tribe, being deemed heretic, being ex-communicated, being a scapegoat, brings home a phrase that we've been kind of throwing around metaphorically, homelessness, political homelessness, that seems to be running rampant for many people, especially, and here I want to sort of shift a bit to religion and politics. This feeling is shared by a lot of Christian Americans, the feeling that they are constantly in tension with their political or perhaps their religious tradition, when you try to seek a life that is both public and faithful.
And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that, about the kind of practices that can help encourage just some perspective for people who do find themselves in that very difficult and challenging position of I've got to buck up and find some courage. I have to take a deep breath and seek more humility. I've got to open my mind, as painful a processes as that can be. What do you say in this especially religious political environment.
Robert George: Maybe it would be useful to begin with something that was pointed out I think more than two decades ago by sociologists of religion in the United States, including, or perhaps, especially my colleague here at Princeton, Robert Wuthnow, that you find something interesting politically when it comes to American religion.
The political cleavages don't tend to run between the different traditions of faith, Protestant and Catholic, Christian Jewish, Muslim, what have you, but rather they run across them or within them. So, more or less roughly speaking, conservative Catholics have far less in common with liberal or progressive Catholic than they have with conservative or traditional evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews. And liberal or progressive Catholics have little in common with their co-religionists on the more conservative side, but a lot more in common with liberal Protestants or, folks on the liberal... and in the Jewish tradition.
And the animosity between the liberal Catholics and the conservative Catholics is much greater than between even conservative Catholics and liberal Protestants or conservative Catholics and liberal Jews and so forth and so on. That's a really remarkable phenomenon. If you think about human history. That's a really different thing. That's a new thing, a novum.
But I think it has continued. I mean, Wuthnow and the other sociologists, they noticed as I say more than two decades ago, but it has continued. And what you see now, especially in the current situation, a situation Donald Trump did not create and that certainly was well underway before Donald Trump even came down the escalator, but which Trump sort of crystallizes. What you see in the current situation, Trump and anti-Trump evangelicals and pro-Trump and anti-Trump Catholics, and pro-Trump, anti-Trump Jews, are at each other's throats. I mean, if you go onto social media, the of the hostility that one finds between the left and the right as it were, I mean these are rough categories and really hard categories to use in the age of Trump, because suddenly nobody seems to fit into the categories as they were traditionally understood, but if you just, roughly speaking, use those categories, the hostility between, say, the left wing evangelicals and the right wing evangelicals, or left-wing and right-wing Jews or Catholics is just remarkable. The vitriol, the language that they use and characterizing each other, it's ferocious.
Well, that can't be a good thing.
Evan Rosa: Each views the other side as having betrayed their community.
Robert George: Yeah, I think that's right. So, the tribalism element ends up there as part of the picture as well. I think that's right, Evan.
Evan Rosa: One aspect of this is the concept of group and tribe and crowd as well. And I wonder if I can get you reflecting a little bit about the nature of this. I wonder if part of what draws people who otherwise worship in the same way on Sunday and yet find themselves at odds with one another in the polling booth, or on social media, or in any kind of political conversation, I wonder if it's the feeling of safety in numbers or safety in a crowd, the safety that anonymity... that whatever the group is, there's a group that's offering a kind of way of being that is protecting you and solving your fears and offering you a plausible way to be. And yet, we are in the age of the crowd, as the late 19th century Gustave Le Bon spoke about. And you brought up a little bit of American history. There's perhaps a very similar thing happening as in the French revolution right now, where people are finding themselves as part of a crowd rather than as individuals with an agency that can allow them to take responsibility.
That feeling of responsibility is requisite for seeking the virtues that you're talking about. This is, this is a quote from Gustave La Bon "The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduced them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master. Whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand which the wind stirs up at will. By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual. In a crowd, he is a barbarian that is a creature acting by instinct."
Robert George: Very powerful, a lot of truth there. No question about it. But I can't help but remark Evan that, much of what he says by way of critique there could be said every bit as much about elites, the cognoscenti, certainly in our own society.
And thinking back to others, the same could be true, is true. The same criticisms could be launched, could be made against, elites. So, it's not just membership in the crowd. I think it's the human condition. People don't want to hear truths that contradict their.... and not just their interests... their deeply held convictions, those convictions that they've constructed their identities around, those that they're deeply invested in.
They don't want to hear challenges to the group-think. And you have as much group think among the elites as you do among the quote "masses," as Le Bon calls them there.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. That's important. That's important to acknowledge.
Robert George: I mean, you just go to any university campus, you don't want to single out Yale or Princeton, but certainly visit us here. I'm sure if I visited you there, I'd find a really remarkable measure of a group-think for an institution that prides itself and advertises itself as universities do, as places where we encourage independent thought and open-mindedness and an engagement of all views and so forth. So we've got a group think problem, and it's not just at the level of the masses, it's at the level of the elites as well.
People don't want to hear the truth. They don't want to hear unpleasant truth. They don't want to be challenged. They don't want to be unsettled. And yet truth seeking is all about being challenged and being unsettled. It's just all about that. You can't do it without that. And as I remarked earlier, Evan, if you get this going the right way, you're not wholly reliant on other people to do the challenging and unsettling.
If you develop a proper Socratic stance and character, you are the one challenging yourself. You are the one challenging and unsettling yourself on a regular basis.
Evan Rosa: That kind of speaks to critical thinking that seems to be in short supply. We need to cultivate that. And we're here talking about it.
We're talking about the significance, the importance of it. And you've given us already some strategies to kind of put us in that place. But, I'm wondering if I could just press you a little further, right? Because it's deeply important for that kind of critical thinking that kind of living most deeply into the fullness of our rational potential, while also holding in hand these important moral categories of civility and respect, of appreciating and honoring dignity and seeking justice in the community. How can we seek that kind of critical thinking? What do you tell your students? How do you try to build a person of character where they are a critical thinker? They're thinking for themselves, they're thinking at depth, and they are unafr a id to uncover very uncomfortable situations.
What does it take?
Robert George: I advise my students, whether they are conservatives or liberals or something else or something in between, discover, learn, ask around, find out what the best writings are against positions you hold. Think of the positions you hold that are most important to you, typically at least for young people today, they are things having to do with social issues.
Okay. Fine. Think of the perspectives that are most important to you, the ideas, the beliefs. Now, find out which writers, which thinkers, which philosophers or theologians or others, have a different point of view and defend it and challenge your point of view. Read them and read them sympathetically. Try to take on board what they're saying. And think about whether in fact you have good answers to their points, or they have good points to which you do not perhaps have answers. Now, when you do that you're going to be unsettled. You should also look at people who defend your perspective.
So, I want a pro-life student to read Peter Singer, and I hope and trust that the student will be pretty unsettled by some of the points Peter makes and the challenges he makes to the pro-life position. And then what student to consider that seriously. I also want those students to consider, say, the writings of Christopher Tollefsen or Elizabeth Anscombe for the pro-life position and the challenges that they represent to Peter's view. And then I want them in that Socratic spirit to rethink where they are and decide whether they are where they should be, or whether they should alter in some respect or another their view, maybe a complete turnaround that could happen, maybe a revision around the edges that could happen too. But unless you're reading material that challenges your fundamental beliefs, you're not getting anywhere in the truth seeking process. You're wasting your four years at Princeton or Yale or Ohio State or Kansas Wesleyan or wherever it is.
Another thing I advise them to do, ask yourself, do you have any good friends who really see things differently? And if you don't, you go out there and make a friend who sees things differently. You just find a smart person. They got them in this university. They're here. I don't care whether you're socialists, libertarian, left, right pro-life, pro-choice, whatever you want are there are smart people here, your fellow students who disagree with you.
If you're in a friendship circle where everyone agrees with you, go find a friend who disagrees. Do it through social media or whatever mechanisms you have to do it, but find a smart friend who disagrees and develop a friendship.
A nd the way you do that, by the way, is not by talking politics right away. And the way you do that, it's certainly not by lecturing the person about why he's wrong. Your goal is to listen and learn now. You know, your friend should get the benefit of that as well. And your friend will, if your friend, your new friend will listen and learn. I'm not asking anybody to be a wet blanket, or to go to a new friend just for tutorials. What I'm looking for here is engagement, a friendship that bears the great fruit for both of the friends of pushing them along toward truth.
Evan Rosa: Sharing of life together, even, in the way that friendship requires sharing oneself.
Robert George: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Cornel makes the point very often when we talk about a friendship that, you know, the first thing you want to ask a person with whom you disagree is not, you know, why do you think it's okay to kill unborn babies? Or why do you think it's okay to deny women the right to choose, or however you want to characterize your position.
Now, your first question is where do you come from? What was it like where you grew up? Tell me about your folks and your grandparents. You know, get to know a person. Enter into a person's life. This is a real flesh and blood human being just like yourself. This is not just a kind of box of political and moral and religious convictions.
Evan Rosa: This really is kind of coming back to the task of humanizing the other as a kind of antidote to this, that we need to take regard for the deep dignity of the human person, and allow that to sort of unwind those really deep and often all too aggressive emotions that are wrapped around our convictions, like you say, and just continue to humanize the other, and allow them to be fully human in our own eyes.
Robert George: Yeah. Of course, everybody wants to know where the limits are. So would you be friends with Hitler? You know, that's the clincher. Yeah. And the answer is no, befriending Hitler is a fool's errand. Gandhi tried it, if you recall that little story from history, you know...
Evan Rosa: Did he, I don't remember that.
Robert George: He still draws opprobrium for a famous letter he wrote that I think began with the salutation, some salutation, like brother Hitler. Obviously, Gandhi didn't agree with Hitler. He was trying to reach out to him as a fellow human being. But it's a fool's errand to try to befriend Hitler.
And yet we need to recognize, Evan this is so critical, that we don't need to agree with someone to respect and honor and esteem them, and to be friends with them. We don't have to agree with how they live their lives. And we mustn't insist that they agree with how we live our lives in order for us to recognize them as decent people, and to recognize them as our friends. We can have powerful differences. We can think the other guy's wrong, advocating things that truly are unjust.
While still being friends and still learning from each other. Here's one way of characterizing it. I think that all of us should be willing, honestly, truthfully, and in a true spirit of friendship, to engage anyone who was willing to do business in the proper currency of truth-seeking intellectual discourse, and that's a currency consisting of reasons, arguments, and evidence.
If a person is willing to do that, then I will listen to that person, even if that person, like my friend Peter Singer, advocates infanticide. And I think folks who were on the other side of the sanctity of human life issues should take the same stance toward those who are on the other side from them, the opposite side from them.
If they are willing to do business in that currency, if they're willing to give reasons, make arguments, present evidence, then we've got something to learn from them. People who are like that have a great deal to learn from each other, and they can honor each other and they can esteem each other, and they can break bread together, and they can learn with each other.
And they can trust each other despite very, very profound differences. The ability of friendship to survive profound differences is there, if we'll let it happen. It's really up to us at the emotional level whether we're going to let it happen or whether we're going to dismiss anybody who disagrees with us on anything that we regard as important, as unworthy of friendship and indeed as a monster in an alley.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. That sounds like a really beautiful way to be faithful in this political moment. It puts it in the hands of an individual to be able to make impact. We can seek each other out on that kind of common ground.
Robbie, thank you so much for joining me today. I just continue to admire these perspectives of yours. I'm really grateful for the faithful presence that you had in our culture.
Robert George: That's so kind of you, Evan, thank you. It was real pleasure to get together with you again. And I hope we can see each other soon. May this pandemic end quickly.
Evan Rosa: Amen. Thank you so much.
Robert George: Bye bye.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured legal scholar, Robert P. George. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday, and you can subscribe through any podcast app.
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