‘Many truths that need to be spoken today are deeply unpopular’: Why the truth still matters in our postmodern world

Video

Robert P. George, McCormick professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University, discusses his must-read book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. He critiques the postmodern notion of subjective truth and warns that feelings are unreliable sources of objective truth. He also discusses the state of liberalism and pluralism in Canada and the U.S. and why some on the political Right are doubting these bedrock ideals.

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Program Transcript

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ROBERT P. GEORGE: Thank you, Sean. It’s a pleasure to be on your show.

SEAN SPEER: I enjoyed reading the book as I’ve enjoyed so much of your commentary over the years, and I’m really looking forward to talking about it, including some of the big ideas that I know will resonate a great deal with our audience. Before we get into those, though, I just want to level set for viewers and listeners. Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth covers a remarkable range of topics that you’ve studied over your career. If you had to distill it down, what unites these essays and why this book now, Professor George?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, if I had to distill it down to its essence, it’s a plea for people to dedicate themselves and not just young people, people of all ages to dedicate themselves to being determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. That means we have to actually believe that there is such a thing as truth. And of course, so many people today think, well, there’s your truth and you have that and I have my truth, but there’s no such thing as the truth. Well, that’s a deeply pernicious and false idea. There is such a thing as the truth. There’s not simply your truth and my truth. Is it sometimes hard to know? Yes, it’s sometimes hard to know. Are we ever going to know it fully and perfectly? No, because we are frail, fallible, fallen creatures. But the truth is being in touch with reality, that when we’re looking for truth, we’re trying to be in touch with reality. And we need people to believe that it’s worth it. It’s worth striving to be in touch with reality, to understand the truth as best we can, and always to work to further deepen our understanding of truth and to correct any errors that we fall into. And then it’s important we need people to dedicate themselves or rededicate themselves, Sean, to speaking the truth. Especially when it’s hard, especially when the truths that need to be spoken are unpopular truths and many truths that need to be spoken today, as you know, are deeply unpopular, if not unpopular with the mass of our population, unpopular with the most powerful, economically, politically, culturally powerful people and forces in our society. We need to be willing and able to speak truth to power. And that’s going to take courage. So that’s really what the book is about, and that’s why I call it Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. I want to help people to become really determined truth seekers and courageous truth.

SEAN SPEER: Speakers in that vein, you frame history in terms of ages of faith, reason, and now feelings. As I was thinking about that framing, I wondered, are there any virtues in the notion of the age of feelings that are worth keeping? And how do we restore a greater emphasis on reason and truth?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Okay, well, let me try to explain what I mean by the ages of faith and reason and feeling. I’m here drawing on many historians who break up the epochs of history into the age of this and the age of that. So, they tell us that the medieval period was the age of faith. Now, there’s some truth in that. That’s not false. Certainly, for the great thinkers of the Middle Ages, whether they were Christian thinkers like Aquinas or Anselm, whether they’re Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, whether they’re Muslim thinkers like Alpha Rabi, those thinkers placed a very high premium on faith. They saw faith as the ultimate touchstone of truth, conformity to the teachings of religion as the ultimate touchstone of truth, of goodness, of justice, of right now. It can be misleading, especially if you take it to mean that the medieval thinkers were not interested in reason or did not have a high view of reason. In fact, they had a very high view of reason. They believed, as I myself believe, that faith and reason need each other. They’re mutually supportive. They are, in the words of the late pontiff John Paul II, the two wings. Faith and reason, he says, are the two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of truth. But nevertheless, it’s not false. There’s truth in the styling of the medieval period as the age of faith.

Well, these same historians, Sean, tell us that the Enlightenment era, whether we’re talking about the Enlightenment in Germany or France or Scotland or England, that the Enlightenment is the age of reason, or sometimes they say the age of science. Now, what do they mean by that? Well, they mean that for the Enlightenment figures, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, the touchstone of truth and of goodness, of justice, of right, is conformity with the findings of rational inquiry in the most exemplary case in the scientific sciences. Scientific inquiry. Now, again, that can be misleading. There’s truth in it. But it can be misleading if it’s taken to suggest that none of, or very few of the great Enlightenment thinkers were religious people or people of faith. In fact, many were. No, not all. There were some pretty hardcore secularists and even atheists among the Enlightenment thinkers, but many, you can begin the list with Newton, were themselves quite dedicated religious believers. But still, there’s some Truth in the idea that the Enlightenment was the age of reason. Well, if the medieval period is the age of faith, and if the Enlightenment is the age of reason, in what age do we live today? And here’s where I make the point that for a great many people, especially, although not exclusively young people, the touchstone of truth and of goodness and justice and of right, our source of knowledge, ultimately, is not faith. It’s not reason. It’s feeling. It’s emotion. It’s how I feel about something. This is what generates the idea that you have your truth and I have my truth. You have your way of feeling about things. I have my way of feeling about things. So instead of relying on faith or reason as sources of knowledge or wisdom, so many people today just look to their feelings, to their emotions.

Some people, of course, now it’s quite widespread, believe that even whether one is male or female is not determined by biological facts, something we can inquire into rationally, using scientific methods. We can determine whether someone is male or female. They believe you’re male or female, depending on whether you feel you’re male or feel you’re female. Feel like a man, feel like a woman. That really gets us to the core of what it means to live in an age of feeling. And my problem with that, Sean, is that all you need to do is have a cursory look at human history to see that feeling is a very unreliable indicator of truth or goodness or rightness. Now, our reason, part of our fallen nature, is imperfect, but it’s a better, a more reliable source than feeling. For those of us who are believers, we believe that faith, although we never understand religious truth perfectly, and sometimes we admix it with quite a great deal of error. Nevertheless, faith can be a very reliable source of truth and wisdom. Feeling, it’s a subjective thing. You have your feelings, I have my feelings. And beyond that, Sean, my worry about treating feeling as a source of wisdom and truth is that it is a conversation stopper. We can’t have a discussion if you think that the source of truth is consulting your emotions. I have no access to your emotions. All I can give you is my reasons for thinking that what you believe is false and you ought to rethink it, or at least partially false, and therefore you ought to rethink it. But you’re going to be unwilling to be challenged, to be criticized, to engage in the conversation if you think that, well, how I feel, just the end of the matter. I mean, that’s my source of. That’s my source of truth. You can’t reason about these things. Now to get to your specific question, is there anything that can be redeemed in the idea of consulting our feelings? Well, I’m not advocating here a kind of hardcore anti emotion view along the lines of say what you find in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, for which I have great respect by the way, but, but one that where the whole goal of the spiritual life is to squeeze out emotion, to eliminate desire. I’m not advocating what in the, the tradition in the west that came to be known as Stoicism, where again, we’re, we’re trying to, you know, to the extent possible, get rid of emotions and, and feelings.

What I’m arguing for is trying to integrate our feelings with our reason, with faith and reason, but where it’s reason that has the control. We decide whether a feeling is worthwhile or not, whether we should act on a feeling or not act on the feeling, not on the bas basis of the strength of this or that feeling, but on the basis of our rational assessment of whether the action in question, however strongly we feel motivated to do it, would advance or impede human well being, human flourish and human fulfillment. Now, do I think people should be compassionate? Absolutely. I think we should be motivated in part by our compassion. But a compassion that is pure feeling, that is detached from rational assessment, will quickly degenerate into a very wicked thing people can do and have done throughout history. Very, very bad, deeply immoral things on the basis of compassion. Killing people out of kindness, out of compassion is far from unknown in human history and is now of course coming back today with regimes of assisted suicide and so-called voluntary euthanasia and so forth. It can be the road to hell. So yes, I’m all for cultivating positive emotions like compassion, but they’ve got to be subjected to the mastery of reason. Our goal should be to be the master of our passions and not the slave to them.

SEAN SPEER: Brilliant answer. And it seems to me, Professor George, one potential source of squaring that circle is your concept of human dignity. How do you define it? Where does it come from? And can we have a shared understanding of human dignity? In an age of secularism and pluralism?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Yes. Dignity refers to that which gives something its inherent value, something that has inherent value. We can divide things up into those things whose value is purely instrumental, that is those things whose value is purely as a means to other ends, and those things that are valuable in themselves. An example of the former is money. Another example is insurance policies. No one can intelligibly or intelligently desire money just for its own sake. If money, if you can’t do anything with money, if it has no instrumental value, if it’s just little green slips of paper that you can’t do anything with, it’s valueless. Same with an insurance policy. Nobody buys an insurance policy for its intrinsic value because it has no intrinsic value. You buy it for instrumental purposes, you know, in case a catastrophe happens and I need money, I’m investing now to get the insurance coverage so that I’ll have the money if the catastrophe happens. But human beings are not like money and insurance policies. Their worth is intrinsic. And that’s what we’re referring to when we talk about human dignity. My thesis in the book is that the, er, principle, the foundational principle of all sound morality is the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. What does it mean for people to have profound inherent and equal dignity? Well, I think the roots of it are in the status, the unique status, as far as we can tell, on this globe, the unique status of human beings as being free and rational creatures, that is, creatures who are capable of envisaging states of affairs that do not now exist, understanding the intelligible point of bringing those states of affairs to. Into existence, seeing the value of doing so, and then acting not on impulse or instinct like a brute animal, but freely and on the reasons that we grasp to bring the state of affairs into existence. Those powers, if they exist, if there really is such a thing as rationality, if there really is such a thing as free will, those cannot be material capacities. They are immaterial capacities. They are spiritual capacities.

The idea is captured and communicated to us, at least in the Western tradition, in the biblical teaching. We find it in the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, that the human being, although fashioned from the mere dust of the earth, mere material stuff that will someday, you know, just disappear, disintegrate. That the human being, though merely material in his composition, initial composition, is nevertheless made in the very image and likeness of God, the very image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is. Well, ask yourself the question, Sean. How are we godlike, we human beings, if that teaching is true? How is it that we are godlike? Does that mean that God has five fingers on each of two hands and hair on his head and a nose? Well, no, can’t be that. Because God is spirit, an immaterial reality. Well, then, what could it mean? Well, it means this. We possess, we human beings, we possess what God possesses. We possess it in a limited and finite way. He possesses it in an unlimited and infinite way. But the it that we possess and he possesses is reason and freedom. It’s the power to envisage states of affairs that don’t exist, understand the intelligible point, and bring them into existence. And then acting freely on reason or reasons, and not just on impulse or instinct, like a brood animal, to bring them into existence. Look at the creation account in Genesis 1. God envisages states of affairs that don’t exist and he creates.

So you know, whether it’s the, the heavens and the earth, whether it’s the sun and the moon, whether it’s the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air. God envisages a state of affairs that, that it would be good to bring it into existence. He grasps the intelligible point of bringing it into existence. He brings them into existence acting freely and rationally. Now, of course, the Bible tells us God saw that it was good. But you know, we. If, if God is the God of the Hebrew Bible, God was not surprised to find they were good. That’s the whole point of creative. He understood that it would be good to have the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air and ultimately man made in his very image and likeness, and that’s why he did it. Well, again, in our very limited and finite way, we have a share in those powers. And what’s interesting to me, Sean, is that even people who themselves don’t believe in a personal God can nevertheless understand and acknowledge, recognize that we have precisely the powers of reason and freedom that God would have if God existed. So some who share this fundamental understanding of human dignity is rooted in those powers of reason and freedom, although not believers themselves will say, yes, our sources of dignity are in our rational capacities, our, our human nature, our rational nature as human beings. But we have created God in our image. Our image of God is as free and rational because that’s what we experience ourselves as. And so we envisage, we manufacture, an omnipotent being who has those powers in a kind of unlimited and infinite way. Well, I don’t agree with their atheism, but we’re on the same page as far as what it means for human beings to be bearers of profound inherent and equal dignity.

SEAN SPEER: I framed my last question in the language of pluralism. I want to stay on that for a couple of questions, if you’ll permit me. Because of course, it’s something that strikes me as even more important These days is our populations transform and our public square is subject to multiplicity of views on fundamental questions, including the good life and human flourishing and so on. You’ve written about what you call pluralistic perfectionism. What do you mean by it? And how does it differ from the pluralism that we practice today?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Today, pluralistic perfectionism is a position, one that I hold in discussions of political philosophy. I’m not the only person who holds this, this position. There are, there are many others, including some very notable political philosophers. The late Joseph Raz, who’s one of my teachers at Oxford University. Professor John Finnis, another of my teachers at Oxford University. Some are more on the liberal side, some are more like myself, on the conservative side. But the basic idea here is that there are many respects, not just one. There are many respects in which human beings can flourish or fail to flourish. We can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our physical wellbeing. In other words, we can be healthy and robust and in good shape. Or we can be ill, sick, dilapidated, you know, failing in our, in our health. And it’s obviously better to be the latter. I’m sorry, better to be the former. I should say I got that wrong. Better be the more, better be healthy than to be sick. And you don’t need any deductive proof to show people that it would be better to be healthy than to be sick. We grasp that as, in the technical sense of the term, a self-evident proposition, in the same way that we grasp the proposition known as the principle of non-contradiction, that something cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time. So that’s one perfection of the human being, one aspect of human wellbeing and fulfillment. It’s the aspect that we have in virtue of our being biological organisms, human beings being animals. But that’s not the only respect in which we can flourish or fail to flourish. We can also flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our intellectual vitality, our cognitive capabilities. We can be sharp with it, on top of it, drawing correct conclusions, drawing correct inferences, assessing the data, being critical in our understanding of things, conducting inquiry, getting to right answers.

Or, we can be inattentive, mindless, stupid, you know, believing silly things, believing the last thing anybody tells you. And again, it’s much better to be the former than the latter. And you don’t need a deductive proof to show that. It’s much better to be intellectually alert, alive with it, getting at the truth of things, than to be in the opposite condition. So we can flourish or fail to Flourish in respect of our intellectual wellbeing in the same way we can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our physical wellbeing. Sure, but that’s not, still not the whole story.

We human beings are also social wellbeing creatures. We don’t flourish in isolation. We flourish in communities, being parts of communities, beginning with the intimate community of the family and the intimate community of friendship are essential to our flourishing. So, we can have a rich set of relationships where you know, we, we love our friends and our family members, and they love us and we cooperate, and we are living in harmony with each other. Or we can fail to have good relationships, we can have bad relationships and those are of course ruinous and catastrophic. We can be like Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghostly visitors bring him around to a transformation or a conversion. Or we can be another character in that same story, a Christmas carol like old Mr. Fezziwig. I don’t remember, I don’t know if you remember old Mr. Fezziwig who’s a, he’s a character in, in the story who is wonderful to other people and other people love him and he loves them and he’s kind to them and he’s good to them and he’s generous to them and they of course are very, very fond of him. Well, we want to be like Mr. Fezziwig. We don’t want to be like Ebenezer Scrooge, at least prior to his conversion experience. But again, that’s still not the complete picture. We can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our biological wellbeing, in respect of our intellectual wellbeing and our respect of our social wellbeing, our wellbeing as social creatures. We can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our spiritual wellbeing. You know, we can have a vacuous or virtually nonexistent spiritual life or we can have a rich spiritual life. And I, I could go on with even more dimensions. We can have beauty in our lives and understand and appreciate beauty, or we can be Philistine in the modern sense of that, of that word, not the ancient tribe, but you know, just not cognizant of beauty, no appreciation of it. And, and, and we could go on and on. So there’s not just one respect in which people flourish, there are multiple respects in which people flourish. And that’s, there are multiple perfections of the human being. And that’s why the view that I hold and some of the others I mentioned hold is called pluralistic perfectionism.

SEAN SPEER: It prompts the question in my mind, Professor George, how Do we think about the relationship with what you just set out and the moral vision that underpins it and our system of liberalism? Some increasingly argue that liberalism’s procedural neutrality is itself a moral position. How do you reconcile liberal institutions with substantive moral vision?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, of course we have to begin in answering a question like that by noting that the term liberal, like the term conservative or other labels like that, has no fixed canonical meaning and different people mean different things by it. People in different places mean different things by it. If you say liberal in many Latin American countries, that will be taken to be a reference to someone who is economically libertarian or economically conservative.

SEAN SPEER: Yes.

ROBERT P. GEORGE: And if you say conservative in some countries, that would suggest that or in some cultures that you believe in monarchism, very different from what American conservatives understand themselves as holding. So we have to be very cautious here. My first book, the book on the basis of which I got tenure at Princeton, was really challenging the dominant form of what was in those days going by the label liberalism in American political theory. And it’s the one that you referred to sometimes it’s called neutralist liberalism. It’s the idea that justice, true principles of justice requirements that in fashioning laws and public policies we abstain from making choices or decisions based on favouring one particular view of human well being over another.

SEAN SPEER: Yes.

ROBERT P. GEORGE: That the law needs to be public, policy needs to be neutral as between competing conceptions of what makes for or detracts from a valuable and morally worthy way of life. And in that first book, which was called Making Men Moral, subtitled Civil Liberties and Public Morality. But in Making Men Moral, I made the case against that sort of liberalism. I argued that its stricture that we could must refrain from making laws based on controversial ideas about the human good was not only not the right one, not only wrong, but strictly speaking impossible that liberal theories themselves would necessarily and unavoidably smuggle in to their premises controversial conceptions of the sort their stricture is supposed to exclude concerning what makes for a detracts them a valuable and morally worthy way of life. And I use the example of the dominant figure of the time, the great John Rawls, the Harvard liberal political theorist John Rawls famous anti perfectionist political theory. That’s the label attached to this sometimes what you refer to as neutralist liberalism. Rawls was the dominant figure promoting that anti perfectionist liberalism. And I gave my reasons and a demonstration to show that he himself was smuggling into his thought ideas that formally the, the, the, the thought the theory ruled out of Bounds. So I think we need an alternative. It can’t be, it can’t be anti perfectionism. We’re going to have to make some important decisions based on our best judgments, you know, using the ordinary democratic processes, our best judgments as a people as to what’s good and bad, what’s right and wrong, what makes for detracts from a valuable and morally worthy way of life. And it’s certainly possible that we’ll get some of those wrong, but, but we really have no alternative than to do our best. Now then, that raises the question, well, does that mean that the alternative to liberalism or anti perfectionist liberalism, Rawlsian liberalism, is illiberalism? Will the alternative be illiberal? Will we give up on rights and liberties and basic freedoms, basic civil liberties, and argue that no, it needn’t be and shouldn’t be that we can have a robust conception of civil liberties that’s rooted in an understanding of the human good rather than a principle that we must abstain from acting on our understanding of the human good. And the very last chapter of Making Men Moral, I believe it’s chapter seven. It’s been 30 years and 32 years, so I, I might have it wrong, but I think it was chapter seven. In any case, it was the last chapter in which I sketched out an alternative pluralistic, perfectionist understanding of civil liberties where I tried to show that actually a natural law, so called natural law approach, a perfectionist approach to these, a pluralistic, perfectionist approach to these matters could put our basic civil liberties, by which I mean freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, assembly, petition the government for deaths of grievances, due process, equal protection, put those basic rights and liberties on a much more secure basis than liberalism can provide.

SEAN SPEER: Staying on the subject for a moment, your new book outlines, amongst other things, the growing current on the American right of skepticism of liberalism itself. What’s behind it, Professor George, and what might it mean for American conservative ideas and politics?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, my worry here is that some people who rightly see the flaws in the kinds of liberalism that has dominated or kinds that have dominated academic discussions and actual practical politics, that that kind of liberalism, those who see the faults and flaws in it, and they are very significant for the reasons I laid out in Making Men Moral and then develop on in the new book, in Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, my worry is that people who see the flaws will wrongly draw the conclusion that we must therefore abandon basic civil liberties, give up on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, due process, equal Protection illiberalism is not the answer and it’s not the answer for a very good perfectionist reason. And that is the flourishing of ourselves as human beings depends in no small measure on our having the freedom to inquire and to speak our minds, to reveal our judgments, to argue with other people, to challenge dominant orthodoxies.

So freedom of speech, our flourishing as human beings, depends on our ability to reflect on the great questions of meaning and value, the questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, human destiny, and then do our best to act consistently with our best judgments, authentically, with integrity, on our best judgments. In other words, the freedom of religion. We shouldn’t be imposing religion on people. That’s contrary to the very idea really of religion or faith, which must be freely assented to and acted on. And the same with the other basic rights and liberties. So I worry, as my co-author of the relevant chapter, and I say about contemporary conservatives or some, some contemporary conservatives, especially some younger contemporary conservatives, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, there’s a lot of bath water to be thrown out. You know, I think I and others have shown that there’s some very serious defects in contemporary liberal, modern liberal political theory. And, and we shouldn’t go along with that. Yeah, that’s the bathwater. Throw that out. But the baby of basic civil liberties should not be thrown out. The baby should be cared for. And, and, and that’s why I want to provide an alternative and superior intellectual moral foundation for our basic civil liberties. And in a number of chapters of Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, that’s precisely what I propose to do.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, thanks for indulging me on those questions. They’re big ones that a lot of us are thinking about. And I couldn’t resist the temptation to put them to someone who’s thought about them for a lifetime. In our remaining moments, I want to shift the conversation to your work as a scholar and a person of faith living out his witness in a secular institution. There’s a growing interest in post secondary reform and the creation of institutes that can live out the principles of open inquiry and free speech. And a lot of that is driven in part by the tremendous success that you’ve had at the James Madison program. What makes it unique and can its model be replicated and scaled elsewhere in your mind?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, thank you, Sean, for that question. I hope I can be forgiven for taking some pride in the James Madison program at Princeton. Now I’m the founder, but I did not do this by myself. I had tremendous people at every step of the way, working with me and working with me today. The great Brad Wilson, who was my executive director for many years, the first associate director, Seana Sugrue. Our program managers, including Elizabeth Schneck and Debbie Parker today. Shilo Brooks was executive director. Adam Thomas is now executive director of wonderful staff who served us and what we’ve done is I think, shown that it is possible today to have a truly first-class program in a modern secular elite university of civic education. One that draws on the very best of the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem, the two streams that have fed the Western tradition, what I sometimes call quoting Isaiah Berlin, the central tradition of thought in the west about civic life, the traditions that really fed the American founding. And at the Madison program we really practice what is so often preached but so rarely practiced today in universities. And that is free speech, free inquiry, not telling students what to think, but teaching them how to think more deeply, more critically, which always includes of course, self critically and for themselves. And in doing this and providing courses and seminars and lectures and lots of opportunities for robust engagement of ideas, respecting the diversity of viewpoints and having people challenge each other and challenge themselves in doing this, we have provided a model which I’m delighted to say has been replicated now all over the country in private universities and in the past, I guess since 2017 when the first one was established at Arizona State at big flagship state universities where programs on a much larger scale than what we have at Princeton. We’re a small university, we only have about 7,500 students, including our graduate students. But at Arizona State, at University of Texas, at University of Florida, at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, at University of Tennessee, at the Ohio State University in the fall, one’s opening at University of South Carolina, others are on track to open down the line, you see the replication of the Madison program on a much larger scale.

SEAN SPEER: I mentioned your personal model of living out your faith will, succeeding in the secular world of universities and scholarship. Channeling a question I get a lot from religious believers, particularly young Christians. How have you navigated, successfully navigated that balance?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: I, I’m not sure it’s a balance. I just try to seek the truth with determination and, and speak the truth as God gives me to, to see the truth. And, and that will sometimes mean I’m going to agree with some of my secular colleagues and sometimes it means I’m going to disagree and I’m going to challenge them and I’m going to let them challenge me and I’m going to give my reasons. I’m going to listen to their reasons. I’m going to consider what they have to say. And if they, if what they have to say is persuasive, I’m going to change my mind. And if what I say is persuasive, I ask them to yield and change their minds and follow the argument wherever it leads. I think it’s just a matter of trying to practice the truth-seeking disciplines that were modeled for us in the first instance by Socrates as he’s presented to us in Plato’s dialogues. Asking questions, including hard questions, including tough questions, including embarrassing questions. All with a view not to winning debates, not to showing off, not to gaining celebrity or money or power, but to try to get at the truth of things. I try to model for my students and I certainly try to form my students to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. Really the book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth is an effort to more widely disseminate what I try to do for my own students. So, I want, you know, people of all ages to read the book and, and I hope benefit from what I’m trying to show there, but also to share it with their college and even high school age children and grandchildren. I have not written this book like some of my books for 300 other scholars in the field. I’ve written some pretty technical stuff. You know, that’s just for a very narrow audience. This one, Sean, is really for everybody. So I’d like grandma and grandpa and mom and dad to read it, but gosh, get to the hands of your college age son or daughter, your high school son or daughter. They’re very readable. That’s not arcane language.

SEAN SPEER: Well, let’s speak directly to them then. Professor George, what advice would you give, particularly young scholars seeking truth in environments that can be hostile to their worldview or viewpoints?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Be a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker. Don’t hide. I didn’t hide. Now it’s scary. I, I grant you, you know that people are going to be prejudiced against you. People are going to discriminate, especially if they know that you’re a religious believer and so forth, or a conservative, something like that. Yeah, well, that’s the reality we face. And the temptation is going to be to try to go undercover, you know, stay in the closet, try to get through your doctoral degree, through your tenure period, get tenure and so forth, and to put off, put off, put off speaking your mind courageously. I think that’s a mistake. It’s not good for your soul and I don’t Even think it works. To tell you the truth, it’s not the way I did it. I’ve given this advice to all my students and graduate students who’ve aspired to academic careers. None of them has found it easy advice to take as far as I can tell. All of them have though taken it and they are all succeeding and doing beautifully out there in the academic world. I find that, you know, our secular liberal colleagues are more often than not impressed by a courageous conservative, you know, truth seeking, truth speaking scholar than they are put off by them. They, they might not like his views, but they’ll be impressed that he’s got the, the courage to speak them, but, but only if he’s got the arguments to back them up. So it’s not just being a courageous true speaker that’s necessary, but you also have to be a determined truth seeker. You have to actually figure out why you believe what you believe and not just be a dogmatist or an ideologue. There’s too much of that on both the right and the left. Dogmatist and ideologue stuff. Be a genuine truth seeker. Try to figure stuff out, give your reasons, work your way, earn your way, think your way to your conclusions and then lay your arguments out there and take in the criticism. And if the criticism is persuasive, change this or that view. But if not, you know, stick to your guns and courageously assert it and challenge people who have the alternative view and tell them why you think there’s a mistake in that view, that there’s a premise that’s wrong or an inference that’s being illicitly drawn, or what have you.

SEAN SPEER: Final question. After decades of thinking and writing about law, morality and public life, what gives you the most hope about American democracy and culture today?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: It’s my students. I have to tell you, I think there’s a lot of concern about young people today and a lot of it’s justified because there are a lot of kids who bought into this idea that you have your truth and I have my truth and there’s no such thing as the truth. And it’s a very pernicious and dangerous, deeply false, obviously idea and it, and it undercuts learning and it leads to dogmatism and, you know, ideological rigidity and all sorts of things. But while I run into, you know, plenty of students like that, I also run into plenty here at Princeton and in other places who are already forming themselves to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers.

Not only are they brilliant, which is, which is great. See how brilliant they are, but they’re open minded, willing to learn, willing to be challenged. And not only are they brilliant, but they are brave. I’ll mention a few. Now, I probably shouldn’t mention names because I’ll, you know, I can’t mention them all, but Sherif Girgis, who will be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School next spring. Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Melissa Moschella, Daniel Mark. I could go on and on just with my own former students who are out there just doing such wonderful work by digging and digging and digging to get at the truth of important questions, vitally urgent questions, and then boldly speaking the truth, even when it’s hard, even when they’re flying in the face of cultural and economic and political power, when they’re speaking truth to that power. I mean, how can you not when you get to interact with young people like that, how can you not have hope? My goodness.

SEAN SPEER: What a brilliant way to wrap up our conversation. The book is Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. Robert P. George, the McCormick professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program of American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Thank you so much for joining us.

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Thank you for having me on, Sean.

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Robert P. George, McCormick professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University, discusses his must-read book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. He critiques the postmodern notion of subjective truth and warns that feelings are unreliable sources of objective truth. He also discusses the state of liberalism and pluralism in Canada and the U.S. and why some on the political Right are doubting these bedrock ideals. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. ROBERT P. GEORGE: Thank you, Sean. It’s a pleasure to be on your show. SEAN SPEER: I enjoyed reading the book as I’ve enjoyed so much of your commentary over the years, and I’m really looking forward to talking about it, including some of the big ideas that I know will resonate a great deal with our audience. Before we get into those, though, I just want to level set for viewers and listeners. Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth covers a remarkable range of topics that you’ve studied over your career. If you had to distill it down, what unites these essays and why this book now, Professor George? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, if I had to distill it down to its essence, it’s a plea for people to dedicate themselves and not just young people, people of all ages to dedicate themselves to being determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. That means we have to actually believe that there is such a thing as truth. And of course, so many people today think, well, there’s your truth and you have that and I have my truth, but there’s no such thing as the truth. Well, that’s a deeply pernicious and false idea. There is such a thing as the truth. There’s not simply your truth and my truth. Is it sometimes hard to know? Yes, it’s sometimes hard to know. Are we ever going to know it fully and perfectly? No, because we are frail, fallible, fallen creatures. But the truth is being in touch with reality, that when we’re looking for truth, we’re trying to be in touch with reality. And we need people to believe that it’s worth it. It’s worth striving to be in touch with reality, to understand the truth as best we can, and always to work to further deepen our understanding of truth and to correct any errors that we fall into. And then it’s important we need people to dedicate themselves or rededicate themselves, Sean, to speaking the truth. Especially when it’s hard, especially when the truths that need to be spoken are unpopular truths and many truths that need to be spoken today, as you know, are deeply unpopular, if not unpopular with the mass of our population, unpopular with the most powerful, economically, politically, culturally powerful people and forces in our society. We need to be willing and able to speak truth to power. And that’s going to take courage. So that’s really what the book is about, and that’s why I call it Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. I want to help people to become really determined truth seekers and courageous truth. SEAN SPEER: Speakers in that vein, you frame history in terms of ages of faith, reason, and now feelings. As I was thinking about that framing, I wondered, are there any virtues in the notion of the age of feelings that are worth keeping? And how do we restore a greater emphasis on reason and truth? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Okay, well, let me try to explain what I mean by the ages of faith and reason and feeling. I’m here drawing on many historians who break up the epochs of history into the age of this and the age of that. So, they tell us that the medieval period was the age of faith. Now, there’s some truth in that. That’s not false. Certainly, for the great thinkers of the Middle Ages, whether they were Christian thinkers like Aquinas or Anselm, whether they’re Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, whether they’re Muslim thinkers like Alpha Rabi, those thinkers placed a very high premium on faith. They saw faith as the ultimate touchstone of truth, conformity to the teachings of religion as the ultimate touchstone of truth, of goodness, of justice, of right now. It can be misleading, especially if you take it to mean that the medieval thinkers were not interested in reason or did not have a high view of reason. In fact, they had a very high view of reason. They believed, as I myself believe, that faith and reason need each other. They’re mutually supportive. They are, in the words of the late pontiff John Paul II, the two wings. Faith and reason, he says, are the two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of truth. But nevertheless, it’s not false. There’s truth in the styling of the medieval period as the age of faith. Well, these same historians, Sean, tell us that the Enlightenment era, whether we’re talking about the Enlightenment in Germany or France or Scotland or England, that the Enlightenment is the age of reason, or sometimes they say the age of science. Now, what do they mean by that? Well, they mean that for the Enlightenment figures, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, the touchstone of truth and of goodness, of justice, of right, is conformity with the findings of rational inquiry in the most exemplary case in the scientific sciences. Scientific inquiry. Now, again, that can be misleading. There’s truth in it. But it can be misleading if it’s taken to suggest that none of, or very few of the great Enlightenment thinkers were religious people or people of faith. In fact, many were. No, not all. There were some pretty hardcore secularists and even atheists among the Enlightenment thinkers, but many, you can begin the list with Newton, were themselves quite dedicated religious believers. But still, there’s some Truth in the idea that the Enlightenment was the age of reason. Well, if the medieval period is the age of faith, and if the Enlightenment is the age of reason, in what age do we live today? And here’s where I make the point that for a great many people, especially, although not exclusively young people, the touchstone of truth and of goodness and justice and of right, our source of knowledge, ultimately, is not faith. It’s not reason. It’s feeling. It’s emotion. It’s how I feel about something. This is what generates the idea that you have your truth and I have my truth. You have your way of feeling about things. I have my way of feeling about things. So instead of relying on faith or reason as sources of knowledge or wisdom, so many people today just look to their feelings, to their emotions. Some people, of course, now it’s quite widespread, believe that even whether one is male or female is not determined by biological facts, something we can inquire into rationally, using scientific methods. We can determine whether someone is male or female. They believe you’re male or female, depending on whether you feel you’re male or feel you’re female. Feel like a man, feel like a woman. That really gets us to the core of what it means to live in an age of feeling. And my problem with that, Sean, is that all you need to do is have a cursory look at human history to see that feeling is a very unreliable indicator of truth or goodness or rightness. Now, our reason, part of our fallen nature, is imperfect, but it’s a better, a more reliable source than feeling. For those of us who are believers, we believe that faith, although we never understand religious truth perfectly, and sometimes we admix it with quite a great deal of error. Nevertheless, faith can be a very reliable source of truth and wisdom. Feeling, it’s a subjective thing. You have your feelings, I have my feelings. And beyond that, Sean, my worry about treating feeling as a source of wisdom and truth is that it is a conversation stopper. We can’t have a discussion if you think that the source of truth is consulting your emotions. I have no access to your emotions. All I can give you is my reasons for thinking that what you believe is false and you ought to rethink it, or at least partially false, and therefore you ought to rethink it. But you’re going to be unwilling to be challenged, to be criticized, to engage in the conversation if you think that, well, how I feel, just the end of the matter. I mean, that’s my source of. That’s my source of truth. You can’t reason about these things. Now to get to your specific question, is there anything that can be redeemed in the idea of consulting our feelings? Well, I’m not advocating here a kind of hardcore anti emotion view along the lines of say what you find in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, for which I have great respect by the way, but, but one that where the whole goal of the spiritual life is to squeeze out emotion, to eliminate desire. I’m not advocating what in the, the tradition in the west that came to be known as Stoicism, where again, we’re, we’re trying to, you know, to the extent possible, get rid of emotions and, and feelings. What I’m arguing for is trying to integrate our feelings with our reason, with faith and reason, but where it’s reason that has the control. We decide whether a feeling is worthwhile or not, whether we should act on a feeling or not act on the feeling, not on the bas basis of the strength of this or that feeling, but on the basis of our rational assessment of whether the action in question, however strongly we feel motivated to do it, would advance or impede human well being, human flourish and human fulfillment. Now, do I think people should be compassionate? Absolutely. I think we should be motivated in part by our compassion. But a compassion that is pure feeling, that is detached from rational assessment, will quickly degenerate into a very wicked thing people can do and have done throughout history. Very, very bad, deeply immoral things on the basis of compassion. Killing people out of kindness, out of compassion is far from unknown in human history and is now of course coming back today with regimes of assisted suicide and so-called voluntary euthanasia and so forth. It can be the road to hell. So yes, I’m all for cultivating positive emotions like compassion, but they’ve got to be subjected to the mastery of reason. Our goal should be to be the master of our passions and not the slave to them. SEAN SPEER: Brilliant answer. And it seems to me, Professor George, one potential source of squaring that circle is your concept of human dignity. How do you define it? Where does it come from? And can we have a shared understanding of human dignity? In an age of secularism and pluralism? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Yes. Dignity refers to that which gives something its inherent value, something that has inherent value. We can divide things up into those things whose value is purely instrumental, that is those things whose value is purely as a means to other ends, and those things that are valuable in themselves. An example of the former is money. Another example is insurance policies. No one can intelligibly or intelligently desire money just for its own sake. If money, if you can’t do anything with money, if it has no instrumental value, if it’s just little green slips of paper that you can’t do anything with, it’s valueless. Same with an insurance policy. Nobody buys an insurance policy for its intrinsic value because it has no intrinsic value. You buy it for instrumental purposes, you know, in case a catastrophe happens and I need money, I’m investing now to get the insurance coverage so that I’ll have the money if the catastrophe happens. But human beings are not like money and insurance policies. Their worth is intrinsic. And that’s what we’re referring to when we talk about human dignity. My thesis in the book is that the, er, principle, the foundational principle of all sound morality is the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. What does it mean for people to have profound inherent and equal dignity? Well, I think the roots of it are in the status, the unique status, as far as we can tell, on this globe, the unique status of human beings as being free and rational creatures, that is, creatures who are capable of envisaging states of affairs that do not now exist, understanding the intelligible point of bringing those states of affairs to. Into existence, seeing the value of doing so, and then acting not on impulse or instinct like a brute animal, but freely and on the reasons that we grasp to bring the state of affairs into existence. Those powers, if they exist, if there really is such a thing as rationality, if there really is such a thing as free will, those cannot be material capacities. They are immaterial capacities. They are spiritual capacities. The idea is captured and communicated to us, at least in the Western tradition, in the biblical teaching. We find it in the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, that the human being, although fashioned from the mere dust of the earth, mere material stuff that will someday, you know, just disappear, disintegrate. That the human being, though merely material in his composition, initial composition, is nevertheless made in the very image and likeness of God, the very image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is. Well, ask yourself the question, Sean. How are we godlike, we human beings, if that teaching is true? How is it that we are godlike? Does that mean that God has five fingers on each of two hands and hair on his head and a nose? Well, no, can’t be that. Because God is spirit, an immaterial reality. Well, then, what could it mean? Well, it means this. We possess, we human beings, we possess what God possesses. We possess it in a limited and finite way. He possesses it in an unlimited and infinite way. But the it that we possess and he possesses is reason and freedom. It’s the power to envisage states of affairs that don’t exist, understand the intelligible point, and bring them into existence. And then acting freely on reason or reasons, and not just on impulse or instinct, like a brood animal, to bring them into existence. Look at the creation account in Genesis 1. God envisages states of affairs that don’t exist and he creates. So you know, whether it’s the, the heavens and the earth, whether it’s the sun and the moon, whether it’s the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air. God envisages a state of affairs that, that it would be good to bring it into existence. He grasps the intelligible point of bringing it into existence. He brings them into existence acting freely and rationally. Now, of course, the Bible tells us God saw that it was good. But you know, we. If, if God is the God of the Hebrew Bible, God was not surprised to find they were good. That’s the whole point of creative. He understood that it would be good to have the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air and ultimately man made in his very image and likeness, and that’s why he did it. Well, again, in our very limited and finite way, we have a share in those powers. And what’s interesting to me, Sean, is that even people who themselves don’t believe in a personal God can nevertheless understand and acknowledge, recognize that we have precisely the powers of reason and freedom that God would have if God existed. So some who share this fundamental understanding of human dignity is rooted in those powers of reason and freedom, although not believers themselves will say, yes, our sources of dignity are in our rational capacities, our, our human nature, our rational nature as human beings. But we have created God in our image. Our image of God is as free and rational because that’s what we experience ourselves as. And so we envisage, we manufacture, an omnipotent being who has those powers in a kind of unlimited and infinite way. Well, I don’t agree with their atheism, but we’re on the same page as far as what it means for human beings to be bearers of profound inherent and equal dignity. SEAN SPEER: I framed my last question in the language of pluralism. I want to stay on that for a couple of questions, if you’ll permit me. Because of course, it’s something that strikes me as even more important These days is our populations transform and our public square is subject to multiplicity of views on fundamental questions, including the good life and human flourishing and so on. You’ve written about what you call pluralistic perfectionism. What do you mean by it? And how does it differ from the pluralism that we practice today? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Today, pluralistic perfectionism is a position, one that I hold in discussions of political philosophy. I’m not the only person who holds this, this position. There are, there are many others, including some very notable political philosophers. The late Joseph Raz, who’s one of my teachers at Oxford University. Professor John Finnis, another of my teachers at Oxford University. Some are more on the liberal side, some are more like myself, on the conservative side. But the basic idea here is that there are many respects, not just one. There are many respects in which human beings can flourish or fail to flourish. We can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our physical wellbeing. In other words, we can be healthy and robust and in good shape. Or we can be ill, sick, dilapidated, you know, failing in our, in our health. And it’s obviously better to be the latter. I’m sorry, better to be the former. I should say I got that wrong. Better be the more, better be healthy than to be sick. And you don’t need any deductive proof to show people that it would be better to be healthy than to be sick. We grasp that as, in the technical sense of the term, a self-evident proposition, in the same way that we grasp the proposition known as the principle of non-contradiction, that something cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time. So that’s one perfection of the human being, one aspect of human wellbeing and fulfillment. It’s the aspect that we have in virtue of our being biological organisms, human beings being animals. But that’s not the only respect in which we can flourish or fail to flourish. We can also flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our intellectual vitality, our cognitive capabilities. We can be sharp with it, on top of it, drawing correct conclusions, drawing correct inferences, assessing the data, being critical in our understanding of things, conducting inquiry, getting to right answers. Or, we can be inattentive, mindless, stupid, you know, believing silly things, believing the last thing anybody tells you. And again, it’s much better to be the former than the latter. And you don’t need a deductive proof to show that. It’s much better to be intellectually alert, alive with it, getting at the truth of things, than to be in the opposite condition. So we can flourish or fail to Flourish in respect of our intellectual wellbeing in the same way we can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our physical wellbeing. Sure, but that’s not, still not the whole story. We human beings are also social wellbeing creatures. We don’t flourish in isolation. We flourish in communities, being parts of communities, beginning with the intimate community of the family and the intimate community of friendship are essential to our flourishing. So, we can have a rich set of relationships where you know, we, we love our friends and our family members, and they love us and we cooperate, and we are living in harmony with each other. Or we can fail to have good relationships, we can have bad relationships and those are of course ruinous and catastrophic. We can be like Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghostly visitors bring him around to a transformation or a conversion. Or we can be another character in that same story, a Christmas carol like old Mr. Fezziwig. I don’t remember, I don’t know if you remember old Mr. Fezziwig who’s a, he’s a character in, in the story who is wonderful to other people and other people love him and he loves them and he’s kind to them and he’s good to them and he’s generous to them and they of course are very, very fond of him. Well, we want to be like Mr. Fezziwig. We don’t want to be like Ebenezer Scrooge, at least prior to his conversion experience. But again, that’s still not the complete picture. We can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our biological wellbeing, in respect of our intellectual wellbeing and our respect of our social wellbeing, our wellbeing as social creatures. We can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our spiritual wellbeing. You know, we can have a vacuous or virtually nonexistent spiritual life or we can have a rich spiritual life. And I, I could go on with even more dimensions. We can have beauty in our lives and understand and appreciate beauty, or we can be Philistine in the modern sense of that, of that word, not the ancient tribe, but you know, just not cognizant of beauty, no appreciation of it. And, and, and we could go on and on. So there’s not just one respect in which people flourish, there are multiple respects in which people flourish. And that’s, there are multiple perfections of the human being. And that’s why the view that I hold and some of the others I mentioned hold is called pluralistic perfectionism. SEAN SPEER: It prompts the question in my mind, Professor George, how Do we think about the relationship with what you just set out and the moral vision that underpins it and our system of liberalism? Some increasingly argue that liberalism’s procedural neutrality is itself a moral position. How do you reconcile liberal institutions with substantive moral vision? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, of course we have to begin in answering a question like that by noting that the term liberal, like the term conservative or other labels like that, has no fixed canonical meaning and different people mean different things by it. People in different places mean different things by it. If you say liberal in many Latin American countries, that will be taken to be a reference to someone who is economically libertarian or economically conservative. SEAN SPEER: Yes. ROBERT P. GEORGE: And if you say conservative in some countries, that would suggest that or in some cultures that you believe in monarchism, very different from what American conservatives understand themselves as holding. So we have to be very cautious here. My first book, the book on the basis of which I got tenure at Princeton, was really challenging the dominant form of what was in those days going by the label liberalism in American political theory. And it’s the one that you referred to sometimes it’s called neutralist liberalism. It’s the idea that justice, true principles of justice requirements that in fashioning laws and public policies we abstain from making choices or decisions based on favouring one particular view of human well being over another. SEAN SPEER: Yes. ROBERT P. GEORGE: That the law needs to be public, policy needs to be neutral as between competing conceptions of what makes for or detracts from a valuable and morally worthy way of life. And in that first book, which was called Making Men Moral, subtitled Civil Liberties and Public Morality. But in Making Men Moral, I made the case against that sort of liberalism. I argued that its stricture that we could must refrain from making laws based on controversial ideas about the human good was not only not the right one, not only wrong, but strictly speaking impossible that liberal theories themselves would necessarily and unavoidably smuggle in to their premises controversial conceptions of the sort their stricture is supposed to exclude concerning what makes for a detracts them a valuable and morally worthy way of life. And I use the example of the dominant figure of the time, the great John Rawls, the Harvard liberal political theorist John Rawls famous anti perfectionist political theory. That’s the label attached to this sometimes what you refer to as neutralist liberalism. Rawls was the dominant figure promoting that anti perfectionist liberalism. And I gave my reasons and a demonstration to show that he himself was smuggling into his thought ideas that formally the, the, the, the thought the theory ruled out of Bounds. So I think we need an alternative. It can’t be, it can’t be anti perfectionism. We’re going to have to make some important decisions based on our best judgments, you know, using the ordinary democratic processes, our best judgments as a people as to what’s good and bad, what’s right and wrong, what makes for detracts from a valuable and morally worthy way of life. And it’s certainly possible that we’ll get some of those wrong, but, but we really have no alternative than to do our best. Now then, that raises the question, well, does that mean that the alternative to liberalism or anti perfectionist liberalism, Rawlsian liberalism, is illiberalism? Will the alternative be illiberal? Will we give up on rights and liberties and basic freedoms, basic civil liberties, and argue that no, it needn’t be and shouldn’t be that we can have a robust conception of civil liberties that’s rooted in an understanding of the human good rather than a principle that we must abstain from acting on our understanding of the human good. And the very last chapter of Making Men Moral, I believe it’s chapter seven. It’s been 30 years and 32 years, so I, I might have it wrong, but I think it was chapter seven. In any case, it was the last chapter in which I sketched out an alternative pluralistic, perfectionist understanding of civil liberties where I tried to show that actually a natural law, so called natural law approach, a perfectionist approach to these, a pluralistic, perfectionist approach to these matters could put our basic civil liberties, by which I mean freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, assembly, petition the government for deaths of grievances, due process, equal protection, put those basic rights and liberties on a much more secure basis than liberalism can provide. SEAN SPEER: Staying on the subject for a moment, your new book outlines, amongst other things, the growing current on the American right of skepticism of liberalism itself. What’s behind it, Professor George, and what might it mean for American conservative ideas and politics? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, my worry here is that some people who rightly see the flaws in the kinds of liberalism that has dominated or kinds that have dominated academic discussions and actual practical politics, that that kind of liberalism, those who see the faults and flaws in it, and they are very significant for the reasons I laid out in Making Men Moral and then develop on in the new book, in Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, my worry is that people who see the flaws will wrongly draw the conclusion that we must therefore abandon basic civil liberties, give up on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, due process, equal Protection illiberalism is not the answer and it’s not the answer for a very good perfectionist reason. And that is the flourishing of ourselves as human beings depends in no small measure on our having the freedom to inquire and to speak our minds, to reveal our judgments, to argue with other people, to challenge dominant orthodoxies. So freedom of speech, our flourishing as human beings, depends on our ability to reflect on the great questions of meaning and value, the questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, human destiny, and then do our best to act consistently with our best judgments, authentically, with integrity, on our best judgments. In other words, the freedom of religion. We shouldn’t be imposing religion on people. That’s contrary to the very idea really of religion or faith, which must be freely assented to and acted on. And the same with the other basic rights and liberties. So I worry, as my co-author of the relevant chapter, and I say about contemporary conservatives or some, some contemporary conservatives, especially some younger contemporary conservatives, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, there’s a lot of bath water to be thrown out. You know, I think I and others have shown that there’s some very serious defects in contemporary liberal, modern liberal political theory. And, and we shouldn’t go along with that. Yeah, that’s the bathwater. Throw that out. But the baby of basic civil liberties should not be thrown out. The baby should be cared for. And, and, and that’s why I want to provide an alternative and superior intellectual moral foundation for our basic civil liberties. And in a number of chapters of Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, that’s precisely what I propose to do. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, thanks for indulging me on those questions. They’re big ones that a lot of us are thinking about. And I couldn’t resist the temptation to put them to someone who’s thought about them for a lifetime. In our remaining moments, I want to shift the conversation to your work as a scholar and a person of faith living out his witness in a secular institution. There’s a growing interest in post secondary reform and the creation of institutes that can live out the principles of open inquiry and free speech. And a lot of that is driven in part by the tremendous success that you’ve had at the James Madison program. What makes it unique and can its model be replicated and scaled elsewhere in your mind? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Well, thank you, Sean, for that question. I hope I can be forgiven for taking some pride in the James Madison program at Princeton. Now I’m the founder, but I did not do this by myself. I had tremendous people at every step of the way, working with me and working with me today. The great Brad Wilson, who was my executive director for many years, the first associate director, Seana Sugrue. Our program managers, including Elizabeth Schneck and Debbie Parker today. Shilo Brooks was executive director. Adam Thomas is now executive director of wonderful staff who served us and what we’ve done is I think, shown that it is possible today to have a truly first-class program in a modern secular elite university of civic education. One that draws on the very best of the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem, the two streams that have fed the Western tradition, what I sometimes call quoting Isaiah Berlin, the central tradition of thought in the west about civic life, the traditions that really fed the American founding. And at the Madison program we really practice what is so often preached but so rarely practiced today in universities. And that is free speech, free inquiry, not telling students what to think, but teaching them how to think more deeply, more critically, which always includes of course, self critically and for themselves. And in doing this and providing courses and seminars and lectures and lots of opportunities for robust engagement of ideas, respecting the diversity of viewpoints and having people challenge each other and challenge themselves in doing this, we have provided a model which I’m delighted to say has been replicated now all over the country in private universities and in the past, I guess since 2017 when the first one was established at Arizona State at big flagship state universities where programs on a much larger scale than what we have at Princeton. We’re a small university, we only have about 7,500 students, including our graduate students. But at Arizona State, at University of Texas, at University of Florida, at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, at University of Tennessee, at the Ohio State University in the fall, one’s opening at University of South Carolina, others are on track to open down the line, you see the replication of the Madison program on a much larger scale. SEAN SPEER: I mentioned your personal model of living out your faith will, succeeding in the secular world of universities and scholarship. Channeling a question I get a lot from religious believers, particularly young Christians. How have you navigated, successfully navigated that balance? ROBERT P. GEORGE: I, I’m not sure it’s a balance. I just try to seek the truth with determination and, and speak the truth as God gives me to, to see the truth. And, and that will sometimes mean I’m going to agree with some of my secular colleagues and sometimes it means I’m going to disagree and I’m going to challenge them and I’m going to let them challenge me and I’m going to give my reasons. I’m going to listen to their reasons. I’m going to consider what they have to say. And if they, if what they have to say is persuasive, I’m going to change my mind. And if what I say is persuasive, I ask them to yield and change their minds and follow the argument wherever it leads. I think it’s just a matter of trying to practice the truth-seeking disciplines that were modeled for us in the first instance by Socrates as he’s presented to us in Plato’s dialogues. Asking questions, including hard questions, including tough questions, including embarrassing questions. All with a view not to winning debates, not to showing off, not to gaining celebrity or money or power, but to try to get at the truth of things. I try to model for my students and I certainly try to form my students to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. Really the book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth is an effort to more widely disseminate what I try to do for my own students. So, I want, you know, people of all ages to read the book and, and I hope benefit from what I’m trying to show there, but also to share it with their college and even high school age children and grandchildren. I have not written this book like some of my books for 300 other scholars in the field. I’ve written some pretty technical stuff. You know, that’s just for a very narrow audience. This one, Sean, is really for everybody. So I’d like grandma and grandpa and mom and dad to read it, but gosh, get to the hands of your college age son or daughter, your high school son or daughter. They’re very readable. That’s not arcane language. SEAN SPEER: Well, let’s speak directly to them then. Professor George, what advice would you give, particularly young scholars seeking truth in environments that can be hostile to their worldview or viewpoints? ROBERT P. GEORGE: Be a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker. Don’t hide. I didn’t hide. Now it’s scary. I, I grant you, you know that people are going to be prejudiced against you. People are going to discriminate, especially if they know that you’re a religious believer and so forth, or a conservative, something like that. Yeah, well, that’s the reality we face. And the temptation is going to be to try to go undercover, you know, stay in the closet, try to get through your doctoral degree, through your tenure period, get tenure and so forth, and to put off, put off, put off speaking your mind courageously. I think that’s a mistake. It’s not good for your soul and I don’t Even think it works. To tell you the truth, it’s not the way I did it. I’ve given this advice to all my students and graduate students who’ve aspired to academic careers. None of them has found it easy advice to take as far as I can tell. All of them have though taken it and they are all succeeding and doing beautifully out there in the academic world. I find that, you know, our secular liberal colleagues are more often than not impressed by a courageous conservative, you know, truth seeking, truth speaking scholar than they are put off by them. They, they might not like his views, but they’ll be impressed that he’s got the, the courage to speak them, but, but only if he’s got the arguments to back them up. So it’s not just being a courageous true speaker that’s necessary, but you also have to be a determined truth seeker. You have to actually figure out why you believe what you believe and not just be a dogmatist or an ideologue. There’s too much of that on both the right and the left. Dogmatist and ideologue stuff. Be a genuine truth seeker. Try to figure stuff out, give your reasons, work your way, earn your way, think your way to your conclusions and then lay your arguments out there and take in the criticism. And if the criticism is persuasive, change this or that view. But if not, you know, stick to your guns and courageously assert it and challenge people who have the alternative view and tell them why you think there’s a mistake in that view, that there’s a premise that’s wrong or an inference that’s being illicitly drawn, or what have you. SEAN SPEER: Final question. After decades of thinking and writing about law, morality and public life, what gives you the most hope about American democracy and culture today? ROBERT P. GEORGE: It’s my students. I have to tell you, I think there’s a lot of concern about young people today and a lot of it’s justified because there are a lot of kids who bought into this idea that you have your truth and I have my truth and there’s no such thing as the truth. And it’s a very pernicious and dangerous, deeply false, obviously idea and it, and it undercuts learning and it leads to dogmatism and, you know, ideological rigidity and all sorts of things. But while I run into, you know, plenty of students like that, I also run into plenty here at Princeton and in other places who are already forming themselves to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. Not only are they brilliant, which is, which is great. See how brilliant they are, but they’re open minded, willing to learn, willing to be challenged. And not only are they brilliant, but they are brave. I’ll mention a few. Now, I probably shouldn’t mention names because I’ll, you know, I can’t mention them all, but Sherif Girgis, who will be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School next spring. Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Melissa Moschella, Daniel Mark. I could go on and on just with my own former students who are out there just doing such wonderful work by digging and digging and digging to get at the truth of important questions, vitally urgent questions, and then boldly speaking the truth, even when it’s hard, even when they’re flying in the face of cultural and economic and political power, when they’re speaking truth to that power. I mean, how can you not when you get to interact with young people like that, how can you not have hope? My goodness. SEAN SPEER: What a brilliant way to wrap up our conversation. The book is Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. Robert P. George, the McCormick professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program of American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Thank you so much for joining us. ROBERT P. GEORGE: Thank you for having me on, Sean.

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