https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2C2gI7nL5GA
We have to show mercy in the micro and justice in the macro. I would say the system and mercy is the relational. Okay, so you can see this reflected at the level of personality and temperament, biologically. There’s two fundamental mediating principles that are instantiated in temperament that are social. So extraversion just means you like being around people. Forget about that one. Agreeableness. That’s compassion. That’s maternal care. That’s mercy. And some people are, by temperament, more merciful. Women, for example, particularly in egalitarian societies. So it’s a maternal virtue. And that makes sense because the primary orientation towards infants should be compassion. Because infants under six months are correct in everything they assume 100% of the time. And everything, in some sense, should be sacrificed to them. But it doesn’t work. So here’s an idea. Compassion doesn’t scale as you move up the hierarchy of complexity. So what happens is that you move from an ethos of agreeableness to an ethos of conscientiousness. And conscientiousness is judgment and rule following. And if you look at what predicts… And you could test this. You say, okay, if agreeableness is the fundamental ethos for large-scale social organizations, then more agreeable people should make better managers. And they don’t. They make worse managers. What makes better managers is conscientious people. And it also tends to be the case that conscientious, disagreeable people make better managers. And those people tend more often to be conservative. So I think the data on this is already clear. There’s no indication that the ethos of compassion scales. And so… So I don’t know if we really differ. No, I don’t think we do. I was just elaborating on your point. By the way, on your point about the six-month-old is always right, which I subscribe to. In a nutshell, part of our crisis is that a lot of people want to remain infants. Yes, well, I think part of… Here’s the world conceptualization view of compassion. It’s reflexive. There are three categories of creature. Infants, infant caretakers, and predators. And you’re in one of those categories. And so if you don’t differentiate your ethos beyond raw compassion, you regard yourself as an infant caregiver, let’s say. You regard those who you’re interacting with as infants, if you’re responsible for them. And everyone else is a predator. It’s like, well, that’s exactly what we have now. And it’s the attempt to increase the dominion of that feminine ethos that’s fundamentally predicated on compassion up to the hierarchical structure. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that that will work. So, yeah, well, that was Freud’s point, too. What did you mean by justice is only macro? Because surely… There’s justice in the micro, but in the micro, in my relation to my friends, my family, even my co-worker… Refuse the word personal. Like the word personal. Personal, that’s just fine. Yes, personal would be perfect. That is what I mean by micro, yes. And I want to treat the person I interact with on a one-to-one basis, primarily with mercy. I fully acknowledge that. Kindness. Kindness, mercy, all these things. But the society must be governed by justice. Well, it’s possible also. Look, conscientiousness looks like a cold virtue. A conscientious person will… It looks cold. It looks cold. Conscientious person, because you can have a conscientious, disagreeable person. That doesn’t mean that your relationship with them is based on liking. It means that if they say they will do something, so they enter into a contractual arrangement, they will do it. And so then you might say, and why wouldn’t it be the case, that as we move up in the complexity of society, so there’s more and more people integrated, that you have to move towards more abstract systems of rules, which is exactly what’s about to happen here, because the same principles don’t operate within the confines of a family that can operate in a state. Like Ben Shapiro told me, he’s a communist with his kids. It’s like, well, why? Well, it’s to each according to their need, from each according to their ability, which is, well, of course, that’s what you do with little kids. And so, but that doesn’t scale. There’s no reason to assume that something that works at the micro will necessarily work at the macro. Lots of times that doesn’t happen. That’s why we shouldn’t choose leaders based on whether they’re nice. At the same time, I think we have to be careful not to overly anthropomorphize the divine attributes. I mean, it can be merciful to show justice, and it can be just to show mercy. And ultimately, these attributes in the divine life can’t be inattention. There’s one unity to the divine life. And we see this with the Passover, right? Simultaneously in the same event, absolute justice and total mercy. And so, while I think these things are true in the micro and the macro, these are very important distinctions. I think if we’re talking about the principle of all things, we have to de-anthropomorphize the question. And when Moses, so Moses is sitting, let’s, we’ll start with 13 again, 1813. And it came to pass in the moral that Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood by Moses from the morning until the evening. So this is just happening non-stop here. And when Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he did to the people, he said, what is this thing that thou doest to the people? Why sittest thou thyself alone? That’s to your point, Oz. Alone might not be the right way to do this. And all the people stand by thee from morning until evening. And Moses said unto his father-in-law, being a conscientious person, because the people come unto me to inquire of God, when they have a matter. I love that word too, a matter. It’s such a weird word, matter, because it means mother and it means matrix. And we’re materialists, so we think things are made out of matter. But we also say, what’s the matter? And that matters, and there’s an implication there in that word that what’s the matter is real and that the fact that something matters is also real. And so we have an intimation within the word matter itself that there’s an element of reality that’s about what matters. And so when Moses says, when they have a matter, something’s come between them that causes conflict and it’s real. That’s why it’s a matter. And out of that matter, you can extract out the principle of order. You’re right to emphasize that, by the way, from the Hebrew, because this modern translation that I unfortunately chose to use my commentary on, and I correct it very often, the Hebrew is thing. And they translate it as dispute. That’s not correct. The Hebrew is the simple word. D’var means thing. There’s no question about it. So you’re right. That’s what it is. Yeah, well, it’s an open question whether what’s more real is the matter or what’s the matter. It’s really an open question. We don’t know how to answer that because in some sense, we can abstract and we can say the objective matter is the most real. But that isn’t how we act. We act as though what’s the matter is the most real. We’re most responsive to that. So for example, we’re very responsive to the cries of children because that’s about what’s the matter. And then you think, well, is that an ontological proposition? And I would say that’s a really good question because it isn’t obvious to me at all that matter in the reductionist sense is more real than pain. We don’t act that way. In fact, we’re not happy with people who reverse the order of priority. So anyways. And Moses said unto his father-in-law, because the people come unto me to inquire of God, when they have a matter, they come unto me. And I judge between one and another. He uses scales, you know, which is the heavier thing so that you can sequence them properly. And I do make them know the statutes of God and his laws. Well there, we know what’s coming because they’re what’s just laid out right in the text. I make them know the statutes of God and his laws. And so that’s what the proper peacekeeper does, because Moses is definitely keeping peace here. And it’s so interesting to me that De Waal, the Dutch primatologist, has shown that the alpha males, even in chimps, are the peacemakers, not the tyrants. That’s so cool. And Moses’ father-in-law said unto him, the thing that thou doest is not good. This will surely wear away both thou and this people that is with me, thee. Yeah, so you’re right, Oz, to emphasize that point. It’s like it’s dangerous to Moses because it’s too much. And it’s dangerous to the people because all the authority is vested in one man. Yeah, the Pharaoh. Perfect, perfect, yeah. So he’s being tempted by the necessity for authority is calling the potential Pharaoh out in him. And Jethro is the one who says that’s a bad idea. Yeah, so that’s so interesting. Thou art, for this thing is too heavy for thee, too material for thee. Thou art not able to perform it thyself alone. Harken now unto my voice. I will give thee counsel and God shall be with thee. Be thou for the people to Godward, that thou mayest bring the causes unto God. So he’s telling Moses to remember that he’s acting as judge, but fundamentally the judge here is God. And then Jethro is also pointing out that if Moses had any sense, he’d be distributing the responsibility. So that’s cool too because Moses is a prophet of God and guided by God, but even so it’s not up to him to do everything. He should be distributing the responsibility in as much as possible because everyone else needs something important to do and because if he takes all the responsibility unto himself and all the glory, then it’s Pharaoh time again in the desert. So this is such a key verse, right, because it has the very nature of mediation is always going in both directions, right? It has to come from above to the below and goes from the below right to the top. That’s part of the negotiated discussion that seems to be going on between the people and Moses, or no, the people and Aaron and Moses and God back and forth continually. So it’s a dialectical process and not a static condition. Which prefigures the more structured mediation that we’re going to see in the next few chapters. It struck me, you know, I think you were with me the day that I went to the UK Parliament when I was in the UK. I was in the lobby, which is where people lobby the government, so that was quite cool. And it’s the midst, it’s a chamber between the House of Lords and the House of Commons and you can come there to call on your representative. And so really I had this vision of the voice of the people coming into the lobby and then being represented by those who make the body of laws. And so that is the encounter with the people and the Brits have done an unbelievably remarkable job of managing that, I think better than anyone ever has in history. I think you can make that case and set the pattern for the US and the whole Commonwealth and for the world at large by formalizing the rise of the voice of the people, the inchoate voice of the people through their representatives into the body of law. And that’s, there’s a sovereign on top of that, obviously the Queen, but if that dialectic between the people and the Queen isn’t working, then the system isn’t hierarchically organized. It’s worth pointing out, and this is a famous point made by Edmund Burke in a speech to the electors at Bristol, that what the people are doing, it’s not as if there’s a kind of direct mediation of the voice of the people through their representatives. People select their representatives on the basis of their judgment. And that judgment may, during the course of their elected office, be exercised in a way that might cut against what the direct will of the people might be in that particular situation. But so what’s being mediated, as it were, is the sort of, is the collective sort of judgment, the sort of orientation towards justice in the people, incipient in the people, as opposed to what we might have. And they’re elected, which means, so the people aggregate together and agree, we will allow this person to be put up above us to represent us, right? So that, and that also helps protect the society. This is extraordinarily important and might be relevant to the breakdown of social media structures. It’s like, well now everybody has a voice all the time. It’s like, yeah, great, now we’ve got this clamoring rabble in the desert, it’s just a bloody catastrophe, and the narcissists are everywhere, and so are the psychopaths and the Machiavellians. There’s no hierarchical mediation. Right, it’s a principle that controls the cacophony that would break out if you had a direct democracy, as you would have, as you had, say, in the century. Which would be democracy by whim. Yes, effectively, it would become kind of, it’s a sort of incentivizes demagoguery, as Athens Thucydides describes so brilliantly in the figure of the thuggish demagogue, Cleon, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, and it’s one of the reasons the Athenian democracy, though it is often thought of as the cradle of democracy, disintegrates so quickly. It’s also partly why the left-wingers are worried about populism on the right. It’s because, well, they don’t want to see, to give the devil its due, they don’t want to see rule by whim, and neither should conservatives who are intelligent, because we should have enough sense, let’s say, or they should have enough sense to understand the necessity of these mediating structures and not to pull them down with casual complaints that they’ve become too corrupt to be sustainable. Although normally I think what they mean by populism is kind of code for the expression of the will of the people to press against their own. Right, but that’s why I said you have to give the devil its due. There is this, because people like to think, well, we should just have direct democracy, and isn’t it wonderful that we have a public marketplace where everybody can shout at the same time, which is really what social media platforms are. It’s like, yeah, no, that’s not so wonderful. It looks like it’s a very dangerous form of insanity. One of the things I just want to notice, one last thing about the notion of mediating structure, is that in the text, one of the things that are a little funny is that God, Moses is talking to God, he’s getting it from God, but it’s as if now every single person wants their individual law, right, based on their little problem, and those problems are indefinite. So there’s an indefinite possibility of issue or thing that pops up, and now they want to get their little law, so instead of, you know, there’s a million possible laws, and so the mediating structures are also there to aggregate possibilities so that you don’t need that. So you don’t need a million laws. Right, so you can think about like a family in a house where every time the children eat, they go to their mom and they ask, oh mom, what do I do with the glass? Oh mom, what do I do with this? And it’s driving her crazy, and so we set up systems, which is like, no, this is, when everything goes, you know, you make your bed, you do this, and it makes the laws aggregate the issues that could happen in the house so that we’re not having someone always asking their boss what to do. I mean, everybody’s had that experience if they’re in a team where things aren’t clear enough so that now everybody’s wondering every single time what they need to do. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening on the identity front right now, is that we’ve decided that everyone can be the categorical avatar of their own identity, independent of everyone else. It’s like, oh, I see, so every single identity that’s out there is now going to be paramount. That’s our solution. What it leads to is that every single human being in the end will have their own gender.