The Declaration of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787 Pull in Opposite Directions

Lex Fridman opens by refusing to treat the evening as a contest with a winner. He wants a conversation in which Yaron Brook, the Objectivist philosopher, and Yoram Hazony, the national conservative, can explore the tension between their ideas without pretending the words they use already mean the same thing. Hazony goes first. Political conservatism, as he uses the term, is a standpoint that treats the recovery, elaboration, and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.

He is careful to put conservatism in a different category from liberalism and Marxism. Those two, he says, are universal theories: they claim to tell you what is good for human beings at all times and in all places. Conservatism does not. It carries different values in every nation and every tribe, even in every family, and the loyalty groups that hold those values compete with one another. That, for Hazony, is not a defect in the theory. It is a description of how human beings actually work.

Brook will not accept the word as a package. In the United States, he notes, "conservative" mostly means Republican, and the label has been worn smooth. Hazony agrees that this is a real problem and reaches for a benchmark: the English common-law line that runs through Fortescue, Hooker, Coke, Selden, Hale, Burke, and Blackstone. Against that measure, the American Federalists at the founding look conservative. What comes later is more mixed. By the 1960s, with William Buckley, Frank Meyer, and the jargon term fusionism, Hazony thinks the public creed is already a liberalism worn in private as conservatism. Two camps then use one word for almost opposite things, and intelligent debate becomes hard before anyone has stated a principle.

Hazony's father was a physicist, and he uses that fact as a needle. Many physical models, he says, treat the universe as if time did not matter: a particle is fully described by its present position and velocity. The political analogue is rationalism. Liberal and Enlightenment theories, on this telling, try to be instantaneous. If there is such a thing as universal human reason, and if people who reason properly reach the same conclusions, then tradition and context drop out. Locke is an example. Hobbes is an example. Kant is an example. Conservatism is the opposite claim: history is crucial.

Brook cuts in and names a false dichotomy. One side pretends that a particular historical path tells you where to stand tomorrow. The other pretends you can ignore history and facts and derive truth from a priori axioms. Both, he says, are false, and the better Enlightenment thinkers knew it even when they sometimes sounded like rationalists. Then comes a rare moment of agreement. Brook and Hazony both hate Kant. Brook goes further: Kant divorces reason from reality, from history, and from experience, and is "the destroyer of good enlightenment thinking." He thinks Rousseau belongs in the same camp. A great deal of academic history, he adds, still treats Kant as the embodiment of the Enlightenment. That, for Brook, is a mistake.

His substitute is not a leap into the void. Reason, he says, is a faculty for identifying and integrating facts—facts of sense perception, facts of history, facts of what actually happened. From those you abstract principles about what has worked and what has not. The principles may turn out to be universal, or they may not; people make mistakes. The point is that you do not get them by ignoring the past. You get them by learning history, understanding tradition and where it leads, and then trying to do better. Fridman asks for the difference between that journey and tradition as momentum you cannot refuse. Brook's answer is a standard of judgment. Parents, teachers, and states are often wrong. You cannot accept a practice merely because it came before you. His standard is human well-being: that which is good for human beings as human beings.

Hazony grants a point that critics of conservatism often miss. It is hard, he says, to find a serious conservative theorist who claims that whatever comes from the past is right. Selden, Hooker, and Burke all knew that tradition carries past mistakes. Their empiricism is a social search for truth by trial and error, which means that at any moment the inheritance might be false. The job of the political thinker is first conservation—do not lose the good things you already have—and then repair. That process is creative. In that limited sense, Hazony says, it resembles Brook's philosophy: you take what you inherited and look for a way to shape it into something better. That is the baseline he wants for the word conservatism.

Fridman hears an emotional difference under the epistemology. Hazony sounds as if he accepts a permanently flawed system improved by trial and error. Brook sounds as if perfection is available now, or soon. Brook accepts half of that sketch. In science, he says, you do not tinker forever. At some point you see a pattern: some actions lead to bad consequences, some to good ones. You abstract the difference, build around the good, and refuse the bad. He thinks the American founders did exactly that. Whether one calls them conservatives or individualists, they studied Venice, the ancient Greeks, and other cultures, drew lessons, and tried to derive principles. They got close to what Brook would call an ideal. They did not get it completely right.

Two hundred years later, he wants the right to look back and improve, the way a science does after enough experiments. Insisting on incrementalism in the name of not moving too fast is, for him, a mistake: there really is something wrong with having a king, and there really is something wrong with taxation without representation. The special problem of politics is the stakes. "There was a big trial around communism," Brook says, "and 100 million people paid the price." He claims he could have told them in advance that it would not work, and that many people did. Fascism was tried. Many other systems were tried. After three thousand years of civilization, he thinks history converges on one lesson: build systems that protect individual freedom. Place the state, the ethnicity, the race, or the class above the individual, and the consequence is negative. He adds, without comfort, that he is losing this battle. People will keep experimenting with collectivism, and they will keep paying in lives and in missed flourishing.

Hazony will not let communism be used as a stick against every empirical politics. No major conservative thinker, he says, would propose erasing the inheritance and starting from scratch; that is the conservative accusation against rationalists. He defines the terms. A rationalist in the style of Descartes sets aside the past as unreliable and tries to deduce infallible conclusions from self-evident premises. An empiricist in the style of Hume, inspired by Newton and Boyle, tries to build a science of man from observation. Brook agrees with the contrast and then claims a third path for Ayn Rand: axioms plus evidence, like science, yielding truths that remain open to new facts. Truth, in that sense, is contextual. The burden of overthrowing a conclusion is high, but it happens, and it happens even more in politics and ethics than in physics because those fields are messier.

Fridman asks both men why communism failed, and then tries a harder prompt: can you put yourself at the beginning of the twentieth century, among workers who were being crushed, and see why solidarity, nation, and respect for fellow man might have looked conservative? Hazony refuses to pretend he likes the actual communists. He offers Disraeli and Bismarck instead. Those conservative statesmen looked at industrialization, saw damage not only to families but to the social fabric of Britain and Germany, and took the first steps toward pensions and disability insurance. Conservatives, he says, do care about the nation as a unity. He then draws a line Marx will not let him erase. Marx is an intellectual descendant of Descartes who says every society is oppressors and oppressed, and that the only relation between the stronger and the weaker is exploitation. Once you say that, revolution and the annihilation of a class follow. Disraeli and Bismarck were trying to keep people at peace with one another. Marx said there is no peace.

Brook will not start the indictment at the firing squad. Communism, for him, is one more collectivism in a long string: some people are to be sacrificed for the whole, and mysticism supplies the truth. He reads Marx as a reformatting of Christianity, with the proletariat in the place of God and Lenin or Stalin communing with its spirit. Bismarck, responding to pressure from the left, does not escape the pattern. He replaces the proletariat with the state. The welfare state, Brook says, legitimizes sacrificing some to others. The deepest Bismarckian evil, in his account, is public education: one standard set by a bureaucracy in the national interest, training some children to be workers and others to be managers, with little room to break out of the box. The American model copied the Prussian one. Once the state funds schools, it funds what promotes state growth, and the left, being better at that, now dominates the institutions. German nationalism of that form, taken to its conclusion, is fascism, just as socialism taken to its conclusion is communism.

Are conservatives simply against revolution? Hazony says no, and he uses Burke against the cliché. Burke opposed the French Revolution because the French overthrew a flawed system instead of repairing it, moving away from what was known to serve human flourishing, freedom included. He supported the Polish Revolution, happening at almost the same time, because the Poles moved toward the English constitution: they had a traditional order that could not raise armies, and they installed a king on a British model. Conservatives, on this reading, object not to speed but to annihilation plus brand-new theory. Brook agrees that the French Revolution was a real evil, but not because it was a revolution and not because it tried to change everything. People were starving; the monarchy was detached. What made the change catastrophic was Rousseau's philosophy, equality of outcome rather than equality before the law, and the annihilation of a class. A good revolution, he says, is about the sanctity of the individual. The French Revolution denied that there is such a thing.

That is the place Fridman chooses to ask the question that has been waiting under the rest. Were the American founders individualists or conservatives? Hazony's first move is to break the plaster statue. Educated Americans talk as if the founders were a collective with one brain. At the time, nobody saw it that way. Roughly, he says, there were two camps, mapping onto the rationalist–empiricist split. Jefferson and Paine are the real revolutionaries, the people Burke was writing against, the people who supported the French Revolution. Paine's *The Age of Reason* is a manifesto that claims to have the answers to political and moral problems throughout history. Brook will not let Rousseau be folded into Locke and Voltaire. Rousseau, for him, is anti-Enlightenment: reason is the destruction of humanity, civilization is awful. The spirit of the French Revolution is Rousseau. The American Revolution is a rejection of him.

Hazony then makes the claim that organizes the night. America had two revolutions, not one. After the Declaration there were ten years under the Articles of Confederation, a constitution built on the hottest new ideas: one elected body as executive, legislature, and everything, running as a big committee. He calls those the ideas of the French Revolution, implemented in Pennsylvania and later in the French National Assembly, and he calls the result a disaster—wonderfully rational, unable to raise taxes or muster troops. The second revolution, in 1787, is the work of a more conservative group: Washington, Jay, Knox, Hamilton, Morris, soldiers and lawyers, the nationalist party that later took the name Federalists. They already had national legal traditions, the common law, forms of government imported from Britain, and Christianity as inheritance. They wrote a unified national government with enough power to fight wars. Jeffersonians, Hazony notes, hated them for it and called them apostates who had betrayed equality, liberty, and fraternity by adopting an English-style constitution.

Brook agrees the founders were not a monolith—Jefferson and Adams went decades without speaking—and then refuses the rest of the map. He does not think it just to call Paine and Jefferson rationalists in Hazony's sense. They were coming out of Europe's religious wars and looking at starving subjects and frolicking kings. They knew what British freedom had given Englishmen, and they were trying to build a more perfect system on that observation. He is a huge fan of Jefferson, with two regrets: the holding of slaves, and the early support for the French Revolution. The Constitution is a great document. The Declaration, for him, is greater. Lincoln is right that you cannot understand the one without the other. The key concept is individual rights, and the compromises the founders made—slavery, Jefferson's public university, Hamilton and Jefferson both giving government a role in banking—set America on a path of regulation that only grows. He thinks the country was founded on the primacy of the individual as an idea, even if not fully implemented, and that the idea is now almost without advocates.

Hazony registers a dissent about Lincoln and about the documents themselves. If you accept the evidence of history, he says, the Declaration that starts one revolution and the nationalist Constitution of 1787 are in many respects contrary to one another. He has no objection to life, liberty, and property. He has a strong objection to calling those truths self-evident, which he thinks is a pompous overreach: if they were self-evident, someone would have come up with them two thousand years earlier. He prefers the Constitution's preamble, with its seven purposes, beginning with "a more perfect union"—a property of the whole, not of any individual. Brook agrees that the truths are not self-evident; they are massive achievements of studying history and human nature. He will not agree that there were two contrary revolutions. The most cited thinker in the *Federalist Papers*, he says, is Montesquieu. The American Revolution is about the rights of the individual. The French Revolution is a negation of those rights, a rebellion against a class, equality of outcome rather than equality before the law. On the Declaration he will go further than almost anyone in the room: it is, in his view, the greatest political document in human history. He dislikes "self-evident" and is not crazy about "endowed by the Creator," but he likes that it says Creator rather than a specific God. What matters is that the rights are inalienable: a majority cannot vote them out, and revelation cannot vote them out.

The argument then becomes a close reading. Brook can accept six of the preamble's seven purposes; he worries about "general welfare" because it is too easy to hear as a group good apart from individuals, and in modern hands it becomes the government telling you what gender you should be assigned. Separation of powers, in his story, exists so that government does only what it is supposed to do, which is protect rights. Madison objected to listing rights in a bill because unlisted rights would be lost; Brook thinks that fear was justified. The Ninth Amendment never really stuck. He does not see 1787 as a second revolution. He sees a fix that put the states under one set of laws, and he thinks that fix is what made the Civil War, and the end of slavery, possible. Under the first arrangement, states were sovereign in a way that could have kept slavery in perpetuity.

Hazony says you simply cannot read the first stated purpose as a hymn to individual liberty. "A more perfect union" describes a characteristic of the whole. You can look at how the individuals are doing and still not know whether their union is more or less perfect. The condition he has in mind is concrete: to fight at Yorktown, someone had to write a personal check in order to move armies. A more perfect union is a more cohesive union, the ability to get different individuals to do one focused thing when it is necessary. Brook agrees with the description and then asks the purpose. The purpose of the more perfect union, he says, is to preserve the liberty of the individuals within it. Common defense is there because foreign invaders violate rights. Domestic peace and justice rest on the rule of law and individual liberty. Even the men Hazony calls conservatives were, in Brook's reading, generally agreed on the importance of individual liberty—most of those rights were already traditional English rights.

Hazony calls the argument circular. Brook will not allow the possibility that great and decent men, men both of them admire, wanted the independence of their nation not because it would give individuals liberty but because national independence was itself a great good. Brook says they clearly disagree. He does not think the independence of a nation is a good in itself. The first sentence of the Declaration does announce a collective right: a people breaking bonds with another people and taking an equal station among the nations of the earth. For what purpose? To protect individual rights. The founders struggled so hard not to break from England, he says, because England was pretty good—England was the best. That struggle is evidence that they did not view having a nation as the primary value. They identified flaws that violated their rights, and they concluded that the only way to secure those rights was to break away. Brook is not an anarchist. You need nations to secure rights. The nation is a means. The end is the rights.

Fridman quotes John Donne—"No man is an island"—and asks about cohesion not only as politics but as the human condition. Hazony says he keeps feeling that the disagreement with Brook is empirical. Enlightenment rationalist thought features the individual and the state. There is not really a nation in between: the people as a collective is created by the state, and when the state disappears the collective disappears. Conservatives look at that picture, he says, and call it a terrible theory before they even get to consequences, because it does not look like a description of human beings. Adopt the artificial model and the consequences are horrific, because you are no longer describing reality.

The conservative starting point is what people are like. The first thing Hazony notices is that they are sticky. They clump. Take any arbitrary collection of human beings, set them to a task or even leave them alone, and they form groups. The groups are always hierarchies, with competition for who leads, and the groups compete with one another. That pattern, he says, is universal. He borrows the language of emergent properties. A table has features—you cannot put your fist through it—that you cannot read off its atoms. Political theory is the same. Looking at one human being and asking what that person needs, which Brook does eloquently in his writing, does not tell you the characteristics of the hierarchical group. Once the group exists, it has its own qualities. What holds it together? Mutual loyalty: the capacity of one person to include another within the conception of the self, a bond like the bond that makes a molecule. The people inside it may still compete. The bond is still real. Political history, for Hazony, is the coming together and the dissolution of those loyalty groups. Honor given by one group to another is one of the tools that can bind rivals who still hate each other into a nation. Without those tools, he thinks you are not yet talking about politics.

Fridman offers a physicist's metaphor that both men accept as fair. A theory of everything describes the basic laws, and you can feel as if you understand all of reality, the way understanding the individual can feel complete. You have still forgotten chemistry and biology: how molecules stick, how some systems kill each other, how some make pancakes and bananas and some make poison. Brook takes the analogy and keeps his unit. The basic moral and ethical unit of society is the individual. Of course people form groups; you cannot understand history without group formation and group motivation. From a political point of view, the groups should be voluntary: join when you want, leave when you want. Marriage, businesses, sports teams—all of these help in the pursuit of happiness. The question is the standard of well-being. Is it a utilitarian algorithm that maximizes the group? Is goodness an inherent property of the group, so that individuals can be ignored so long as the group functions? Brook's answer is that the goal of creating groups is the well-being of the individual, which is why there must be a way out. Exit can be costly, which is why you should think hard before you join. That is also why free immigration matters to him: it is another group people should be able to enter and leave. He knows this is an ideal, not the world we live in, and not the world of history. Philosophically recognizing that the individual exists is itself a massive achievement. After three thousand years of known history, he thinks we can evaluate what promotes individual flourishing. He does not believe in a zero-sum world. A system that promotes his flourishing will, he argues, tend to promote yours, and in that sense the general welfare.

Hazony had said that not all human relations are voluntary. Fridman presses Brook: how can a person be free in the way he describes if some part of who we are is other people? Brook narrows the word. Freedom does not mean the negation of physics. In a political context it means the absence of coercion. You cannot choose your parents. Once you are an adult, he thinks it is incumbent on you to evaluate the religious context you were born into, look at other options, and choose a philosophy of life. One system curses you, by the state or the group, to follow a path. His view is that you should be in a position to choose the path, using history and knowledge. That, for him, is what freedom means.

Hazony says the coercion–freedom pair is too thin. The older Anglo-conservative view is that a society has to be ordered and disciplined, and that there are two ways to do it. One is that a people is ordered by its own traditions. Fortescue, five hundred years ago, already said the genius of the English was that government could be mild and apply very little coercion because the people were so disciplined. What he meant, Hazony says, is strong traditions that channel people through honor and dishonor. If you will be dishonored for not caring for an aging mother, that is not a gun to the head. It is pressure. It is a guideline. Brook's reply is that the pressure is dangerous because it can serve a bad tradition, and that the standard of a good tradition cannot be postponed. Hazony wants the factual question first: if all societies work this way, then saying we should be free of it is a fantasy.

Brook denies the iron law. He thinks much of nineteenth-century America, and the industrial revolution, did not work that way. Innovation breaks tradition; that, for him, is the genius of the country and of the post-Enlightenment world. He does not want people doing what he thinks is right merely because a founder set a custom. He wants them to respect property because they understand its value, and not to murder because they understand why murder is bad for them and for the world they want to live in, not because a commandment said so. That is the break he thinks the Declaration represents: from following rules because they are the rules to individuals capable of discovering why the rules are good. The danger of tradition, he adds, is not theoretical. It was once a tradition that it was acceptable to kill Jews, to steal from people of a certain color, to enslave. Stop and ask what those practices are based on, and you find they cannot serve happiness or success.

Fridman lingers on stickiness as something to celebrate, not only as a political risk: community, family, love. Brook does not flinch from the word. He calls himself a lover, not a fighter, and says the whole philosophy is love-based—a love of life, of the world, of other people because they represent a value. The stickiness should be chosen. The trader principle in his writing is easy to hear as material, chores split with a spouse, but he means something more spiritual: a trade in emotions, in how people see each other. Friendship, on that account, is a form of trade, and it is incredibly important. Fridman worries about emphasis. If you raise voluntary choice as the highest ideal, history and Tinder both suggest the bonds dissolve, gas instead of liquid, especially among the young and the impulsive. Hazony does not want to deny the individual. He dates a civilizational change to the books of Moses announcing that the individual is created in the image of God, a step he thinks is without precedent. Underneath the argument he hears a Jewish current in Brook: the desire to improve the world, including family, tribe, congregation, and nation, coming from what Brook calls selfishness. In the Hebrew Bible that desire is positive. "Turn the other cheek," love your enemy, give away your cloak—those, Hazony says, are Christian tropes that do not exist in Judaism. Brook calls turning the other cheek unjust, a lack of self-respect. Fridman tries to save the phrase as long-term discipline. Hazony says almost every tradition, even Kant, distinguishes short-term from long-term interest. That is not the dispute.

The empirical disagreement, Hazony says, is about what is good for a person and what makes a person happy. He goes back to Durkheim, popularized more recently by Jordan Peterson: a book on suicide, a coined term, *anomie*, lack of law. Individuals are healthy and happy, on that account, when they find a place in a hierarchy inside a loyalty group. They compete to rise, but they know where they are and who they are; their self expands to take on the leadership, the layers, the past and future of that hierarchy. Some hierarchies are pernicious. What Hazony doubts is that you can find human beings who become healthy and happy off by themselves, without participating in such a structure. Tell the young they can be free of all constraints, teach them contempt for hierarchies, train them as Marxists who want to burn the existing ones or as liberals who pretend the hierarchies are not there, and you have eliminated the possibility that they will find a place in which to grow. You have put on them a Nietzschean burden to be the fountain of all values. Maybe some people can do it. Almost no one can. He thinks that by telling this generation about their freedom rather than about the need to join a traditional hierarchy that can be good for them, "we're destroying them."

Brook answers that the problem is not an excess of freedom. How many people are indeed free? He does not think it right to tell people they are free to do whatever they want, follow their emotions, think short-term. Taking responsibility for your own life means establishing a moral framework. People can find and choose the values of a good life, but they need guidance. That, he thinks, is why religion evolved: it was the original philosophy, a primitive one, offering instruction about what to do and what not to do. Secular philosophy is supposed to do the same. The trouble is that religion and ninety-nine percent of secular philosophy give bad advice, so people do bad things. Kant, Hegel, and Marx, in his account, gave the young awful counsel, and the pathologies of the present are the product of Christian ideas on one side and secular philosophical ideas on the other. You do not fix that by imposing a new set of ideas from the top. He worries about who would do the imposing, and he does not believe you can force people to be good. You challenge the ideas. You present an alternative morality, centered on what an individual should do to attain a good life. Politics, at the end, is a servant of that. It is not an end in itself.

Other people, Brook says, are an enormous benefit because we do not produce all our values, spiritual or material. That is why teachers matter. What he does demand of individuals is that they understand what they are doing. Do not embrace a moral teaching because it was tradition, because your parents embraced it, or because your teachers are teaching it. Challenge it. You might embrace the wrong one, but take moral responsibility by evaluating what you have received. He admits that empirically most people do not do that, which is why the voices in a culture matter: the people who will not think for themselves should at least follow someone good. For the thinkers who shape a society, he wants chosen values, not values accepted because of a commandment or an accident of birth. He also believes in universal values. Communism and fascism are evil. South Korea and Japan, cultures very different from the West, adopted ideas of freedom and individualism—MacArthur even forced "the pursuit of happiness" into the Japanese constitution—and those societies are successful today. The Asian societies that did not adopt them are not.

Hazony answers the Japan example with a number. The birth rate is 1.1 or 1.2 children per woman. He reaches for the Book of Judges: everyone did what was right in his own eyes, and what followed was civil war, theft, idolatry, murder, rape. He is not offering the Bible as an authoritarian text; he thinks the sanctity of property is already there in Moses and Samuel. He is asking what happens when a people cannot do the most basic work of propagating itself and its values. Immigration is a separate discussion. Replacement is not. If your values leave you unable to continue, he says, you are finished.

The mechanism, as he describes it, is identification, not Mussolini's immersion of the self in an organic whole. People enter a society to which they are loyal, compete inside the terms it allows, and sometimes bend or change the rules. In the liberal West, and in countries hit by its industrialization and its idea of individualism, he sees a collapse of the willingness to look at what the whole needs and to make the choices Brook would call selfish: self-expression, competition, honor, wealth, inside a framework you still recognize as yours. A few people will live the life Brook describes and have a fantastic time. The great majority stop being willing to take risks, to marry, to have children, to start companies, to put themselves out to do great things. The guide rails that told them what to attempt, and the social feedback that honored marriage and children, have been crushed. They have been crushed, Hazony says, by the false view that if you tell the individual to be free and make all your own decisions, the individual will then be free and make them. "They don't. They just stop. They stop being human."

Brook will not have children for the nation. People who had children in order to perpetuate a people or expand a society would, he thinks, make terrible parents. You have children because you want to embrace a beautiful, extremely difficult experience, a long-term projection that is also a self-interested act of creation. Not everybody should have children; too many people do, and too many are awful parents. A low birth rate does tell you something: it reflects a lack of optimism and a short-term society, because children are a long-term investment. Those are moral problems. Japan's alternatives after the war included nationalist empire, North Korea, and the poverty of Cambodia. In that set, Japan chose a regime that generally led to prosperity and freedom, imperfectly, still under Kantian and Hegelian weather from the West. Give people freedom, he says, and if they have a bad philosophy they will do bad things with it. You can get a free society with a rotten philosophy. It will not stay free for long. The way you pass a good life on is through ideas, not through a birth quota. Having children is an individual choice.

Hazony does not accept the split. How can a philosophy be decent if it does not care about posterity? If good ideas do not produce future generations, they cannot be good ideas. Sparta had warrior values and stopped having children and was overrun. Brook says that in Sparta's case being overrun was a good thing, then grants the larger point is not about that example. Who, he asks, makes the decision about how many children? The individual. Hazony says he is not talking about a number. He is talking about the intellectual, cultural, and religious inheritance you give your children. Brook says good ideas perpetuate because they are good. Hazony looks at the earth and sees every liberal society in demographic collapse, not one he is willing to defend. Brook says those societies do not have his moral foundation, only a faint political resemblance to what he wants. People with the right foundation, most of them, will have children and fight for a future, not because they care what happens in two hundred years but because part of enjoying a lifetime is having kids and projecting forward. Hazony asks if he is really going to say people have children because it is fun. They are fun at four, he says, and not at fifteen. Brook laughs and drops the word. You do not marry for fun either. You do it for happiness, fulfillment, challenge, a better and more interesting life. Part of it is fun. Part of it is hard work.

Fridman restates Hazony's fear: dissolve the cultural backbone, emphasize the individual, and people will more and more choose short-term optimization over anything beyond their own lives. Brook says he does not think about posterity. He does not know what the word means. He can project into his children's lives, maybe his grandchildren's, and it ends there. Trying to think three hundred years ahead is ridiculous; things change too much. Hazony says that projection is exactly what the conservative founders did. Brook thinks they set up a system that would be self-perpetuating if people lived up to it. Hazony says no systems are self-perpetuating; things rise and fall. The great individuals, in his picture, are the people who see a decline and redirect it. Brook wants people to rebel against conventional morality, which he identifies with Christian morality secularized through a Christian lens, because he thinks it is destructive and unsustainable. He does not want them to dump it and replace it with nothing. A moral code is a set of guidelines and values that help you identify what is good.

Fridman, speaking as someone who works on artificial intelligence, asks why Brook is so sure reason is the center. Human beings have limited cognitive capacity. It is possible to argue that the accomplishments of reason would not exist without human connection, that reason is a property of people interacting, that the greatest inventions are a room full of bubbling ideas rather than a lone inventor. Brook calls that a straw man, delivered more politely than most. Of course we stand on the shoulders of giants; of course invention is often collaborative. Newton is a poor example of a man bubbling ideas in a room. Then he offers a metaphysical fact: there is no collective stomach. You cannot eat for him. You cannot think for him. You can stimulate, challenge, and add, but only he can do his thinking or refuse to do it. Can he think on a desert island? Yes. Can he think as broadly as in Aristotle's academy, or in this conversation, where he is forced to notice why he is not being understood? Of course not. He regrets using the desert island in a book, because it was taken as a brief for the dark room. He is not a collectivist. He is a trader. He wants to choose whom he engages with, because some conversations make him worse.

Why reason? Because that is where values come from. It is the only tool we have to discover truth. It does not guarantee truth; it is fallible; it is all we have. Emotions are not tools of cognition. Love and the rest are ways of experiencing the world. Experiencing the world and evaluating what is true are different acts. As a scientist, Brook says, he respects reason; emotions and love are consequences, not primaries. Different people see the same scene and feel entirely different things because they bring different values and thoughts. Fridman tries "maybe love is primary." Brook's reply is hard. You can fall out of love with somebody. Why? Because you learned something new, because you discovered something new about the person, and now you do not love them.

Hazony's book *The Virtue of Nationalism* contrasts nation-states with empires and with global governance of the United Nations sort. The claim he wants is that nationalism uniquely provides "the collective right of a free people to rule themselves." He repeats that he is an empiricist, not a rationalist: he has no deductive proof that the nation is best, only what he takes to be a valid observation of history. Human beings form loyalty groups. For most of history they lived in tribal societies of constant friction among small groups. Large-scale agriculture created vast wealth and standing armies. Sargon of Akkad can pay five thousand men to drill and then send them to conquer neighboring city-states, and there you have empire. The Bible, in his account, is the source of another picture: a world of independent nations not constantly trying to conquer one another, Israel and other small nations fighting for independence against Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and Egypt.

The argument is twofold. Morally, to conquer a foreign nation is to murder, steal, and destroy, to use force to make people submit; the prophets rebel against that ongoing carnage. Practically, the world is governed best when there are multiple nations free to experiment, with their own routes to God, their own moralities, their own forms of economy and government. When something works, it is imitated. The Dutch invent the stock market; the English see that it makes them powerful and adopt it. Since we cannot know a priori from self-evident principles what is best, it is best to have a world in which people try different things. Fridman raises the stain on the word: Nazi Germany. Hazony's answer is equally blunt. He uses nationalism as he inherited it, as a principled claim that the world is governed best when many nations are independent. Hitler is an imperialist. He hated nation-states. If you read *Mein Kampf*, Hazony says, the goal is for Germany to be lord of the earth and mistress of the globe. Independent nation-states look to Hitler like weakness—and, Hazony adds, like something Jewish.

Fridman turns the question personal. He grew up in the Soviet Union marching with a love of country that was not a reading of Marx. He now loves America. He thinks that love, in another decade, would have been used by Stalin, or in Germany by the Nazis, and that he would have died proudly on those battlefields as he would die as an American. Is the love of nation, from the standpoint of moral philosophy, a good thing? Hazony says ask first whether there is any way to live without it. National independence as a system of many states is a political theory someone invented, in the Bible or elsewhere, and sold. The nation itself is not an invention. Everywhere there is a record, people make families, families make clans, clans make tribes, tribes make a nation. The love of a Washington, an Alfred the Great, a biblical Saul—the leader who unites tribes, overcomes their hatreds, and rallies them around a language, a tradition, an identity—is, he thinks, ineradicable. Maybe a *Brave New World* of drugs could strip it out. Brook will not make that love primary. There are lots of people who do not love their nation because their nation is not worth loving. Love is conditional. He grew up in Israel when every song trained you to jump on a grenade; the flag made him teary-eyed; he bought it completely. Then he rejected that alliance. He still loves Israel, but it is not his top love, and he is not looking for the grenade. He fell in love from a distance with the idea of America, more than with America, and he can imagine falling out of love given where the country is heading. Children do not have to love their parents. Some parents do not love their children. The fact that an authoritarian can leverage patriotism is, he says, true of everything: children, money, guns. That is being human.

Hazony would rather talk about Brook's ideas than about Ayn Rand, but he has one thing to say. His children have read her books; his father read *The Fountainhead*. The novels are incredibly difficult for him, and painful, not because he rejects trade, business, creativity, or Rearden Metal—those passages move him. The pain is a thousand pages in which nobody is having children, nobody is having a stable marriage, nobody is running an admirable government fighting for a just cause. He feels the books focus on one aspect of flourishing and erase the rest. He is scared of what happens when you hand that story to teenagers who are already hormonally programmed to pull away from their parents. The book says, as he hears it, that you do not have to have a family, raise children, have a country, or fight for anything. You assert yourself and trade. He thinks that is destructive because it is not real.

Brook says he got none of that from Rand. You could write a Randian novel in which people have families; this one is a story with a particular limit. There is a family in Galt's Gulch and a short passage about the value of raising children. When he read *Atlas Shrugged* at sixteen, and in later rereadings, it never occurred to him that Rand was anti-family. He always wanted children. What changed was how he would look for a partner. Fridman tries another angle: even if love is always conditional, saying so often might corrode relationships. A romantic notion of unconditional love might be part of what holds people together. Brook says that notion is part of why there are so many destructive marriages. The culture treats marriage as a cruise: you marry, and then you relax. That is the Hollywood map. Marriage is work. Like all values, it has to be reignited every day. You struggle through real disagreements because the person is a value, and if after a real fight it will not work, you dissolve it. He is for dissolving only after you have fought for it.

Hazony says the rabbis have a shocking expression for the pain of raising children. Across countries and religions, he finds that young people do not know that the only way to make a marriage work is through a great deal of pain and overcoming; that raising children involves a great deal of pain; that helping parents toward the end of life causes a great deal of pain. Everything is a sketchy Hollywood glimpse, a funny breakdown, a divorce, a shooting. The reality of how hard it is, and how heroic it is to overcome and actually create something, is almost not discussed. There is no parallel to Rand for the heroic saving of a marriage that was on the rocks. Brook takes the point and turns it into a division of labor. The Talmud was written by many people over a long period. Rand was one individual. She wrote a series of books he thinks are true, and they are a beginning. There is a lot of work left: students who might write on relationships, a more detailed political theory, a fuller ethics. To say she did not do everything is a truism. She laid a philosophical foundation from metaphysics to aesthetics, original at each step, and she may be wrong in places he is happy to debate. If Objectivists present her books as the end of human knowledge, that is absurd. One reason he thinks Objectivism has not taken off is that this work of making the ideas relatable in every aspect of life still has not been done.

Late in the night Brook finds a limited peace with nations. He dislikes the word nationalism because of what happens when you put an -ism on anything, but he thinks the nation is a good thing and that a diversity of nations is a good thing. His ideal nation protects individual rights; the details of property in an internet world will be in reasonable dispute. Even in a future where his ideas had won, there would be multiple nations applying the principle differently. That is also the benefit of federalism: states can try different things because you cannot deduce it all. He hates the idea of one-world government because experimentation dies and a mistake is suffered by everybody. He likes people being able to choose where they live. He does not like a variety of nations if all of them are horrible. What he wants is a variety of nations practicing basically good ideas, then learning what is sustainable.

Fridman asks what gives them hope. Brook names two sources. One is history: in the very long run, good ideas win. You can go through dark ages, the good and the just do win in the end, even if it is bloody. He is pessimistic about the short run and optimistic about the long run. Under that sits a view of human nature. People can think, reason, figure out the truth, and learn from experience. They do not always do it; doing it is an achievement; over time, and when things get bad enough, they look for a way out. Human beings are amazing in their capacity to create, to think, to love, to change the environment to fit their needs. Hazony says that as usual he is moved, and that he hears scripture. The source of that hope, for him, is Exodus: the first time in human history a persecuted, enslaved people is shown as able to free itself and have a shot at independence and worth. In the tradition, God judges, but the Israelites are enslaved for hundreds of years before God hears them, and nothing happens until Moses kills the oppressor and goes into the desert. There is a God who acts, and often not for a very long time, and not until a human being stands up and says enough. He still hears Jeremiah, watching a nation destroyed and a people exiled: "Is not my word like fire, like the hammer that shatters rock?" That is the traditional way of saying what Brook is saying. It may take a long time. There is a truth, it has its own strength, and it will shatter what opposes it. The present trends are terrible and frightening. Human beings are also terrible at seeing the future. An unexpected turn, soon or much later, remains possible.

What is the meaning of the whole thing? For Hazony, productive work and creativity are at the heart of being human, and there are more arenas besides. To be human is to inherit a world that is terribly imperfect, created that way, and to stand up and say you can change its direction—to take the time and the abilities you were given and be a partner with God in creating the world, so that it does not stay as you found it, even if you only nudge it a little. Brook does not believe in God, so God plays no role in his answer. The meaning of life is to live, with a capital L: to embrace it. He agrees that human beings, unlike other animals, can change the world materially through production and spiritually through ideas, and that part of the joy of a family is creating a little universe. Wasted lives sadden him: people who get born in a place, never challenge it, live, die, and produce nothing in the largest sense. Eight billion people, even if the number never grew, living fully, would make an amazing planet. You have a short period on earth. Make the most of it. One present source of hope, he adds, is that some people still do this in some realms. He is inspired by Silicon Valley despite political disagreements, by people inventing technologies, by conversations about artificial intelligence and the boundaries of science. In a culture he thinks is in decline, those pockets suggest that the spirit of being human is not dead. Hazony says they inspire him as well.

Three hours in, the overlap is large enough that Fridman keeps pointing at it. Both men oppose communism and fascism. Both detest Kant. Both prize individual creativity. Both think groups and relationships are central to a human life. Both think marriage and children are extremely hard and extremely worth it. Hazony hears a Jewish current under Brook's arguments; Brook will take being told he was channeling Moses as a compliment. The disagreement that will not dissolve is empirical: can human beings live healthy and happy without hierarchical loyalty groups? Brook says yes, if the groups are voluntary, have an exit, and are judged by individual well-being. Hazony says no, because people are sticky, and once the guide rails are crushed they do not freely choose; they stop. Logic will not settle it. Brook has already said he is losing. Hazony does not think he is winning either. What they share, at the end, is a refusal to treat politics as the answer. Brook will not impose a new creed from above. Hazony's hammer is a truth that may take a very long time, and that still waits on someone who will stand up and say enough.