This is Democracy – Episode 136: Liberal Education

[0:00:05 Speaker 1] This Is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics in the world around a podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

[0:00:24 Speaker 0] Welcome

[0:00:27 Speaker 1] to our new episode of This Is Democracy. I hope you all enjoyed our new opening theme song. We’ve spiced things up a little bit, and we have a fantastic guest. This week we’re going to discuss a liberal education. What does it mean to get a liberal education? How has the concept evolved over time? And how can we do better as a democracy in providing a liberal education to our students and to ourselves as citizens? Were joined by an old friend and someone who is a prolific writer on the topic, as well as someone who has written a brand new book that I want to recommend to all of you. His name is Jonathan Marks, and he is a professor of politics at Arsonist College. He’s a blogger for Commentary magazine, and he’s the author of an earlier study of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The perfection and disharmony in the thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau. He writes extensively now, as I said, on issues of education, particularly the nature of higher education, and he lives in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where his university is located. Jonathan Thanks so much for joining us today.

[0:01:36 Speaker 0] Thank you. And by the first guest to appear after the newer, spicier theme music

[0:01:41 Speaker 1] you are, you are the new spicy guests for the new spicy theme music.

[0:01:45 Speaker 0] So that’s exciting. I just want to say this is a common mistake. It is Ursinus College.

[0:01:52 Speaker 1] I apologize. Ursinus College

[0:01:54 Speaker 0] mascot is the Bears, so just

[0:01:56 Speaker 1] think or

[0:01:57 Speaker 0] Sinus and you

[0:01:58 Speaker 1] can’t go wrong. Jonathan. I will never forget. Now I will think Bear and you and Ursinus College at all at all times. Very good before we turn to our discussion with Jonathan and his new book, which, by the way, is titled Let’s Be Reasonable, a conservative case for liberal education before we begin our discussion. We, of course, have our scene setting poem for Mr Zachary Suri. Zachary. What’s the title of your poem today? That man believes astrology. Let’s hear it. Mhm. It is a curiosity that man believes astrology, despite an eon of understanding and religions come and gone. We look up at the stars some nights, inevitably forsaken and wonder which one went wrong or which one wished for a different song. The Man in the Moon, The poet in his grave. They write the same elegy, though morning, a different age for the one who has seen an apple and wondered why it gleams and upon the brilliance of it, seems only right before they are forgotten to conclude the apple’s rotten for too many lives. Within a chapel of calculated parabolic curves, a numeric mind, a pile of nerves who die, they’re unhappy deaths and repent their math in final breaths. It is a curiosity that man believes astrology, that we might climb the heights of industry and cliffs far above the ancient sea and yet still watch with a twinkle in the eye for constellations to align the milky way to cry the boatman on the sea below the robber baron in all his heft, they whistle fourth, the same defiant tomb, though they hum in different cliffs. Faith and reason never toppled battle. Leave language for the rough and rabble. In our browbeaten thresholds, we find a way to speak a rhythm or a poetry soliloquy or a squeak beneath the sound in the heavens as the glaring twinkles meet, We shall chart our course through Desert winds, a chorus of rabbit’s feet. I love the wide ranging references there, Zachary and particularly the boatman on the sea. What is your poem about? My poem is really about the ways that reason often fails us and the importance of not just superstition but feeling and those things that we can. We can’t describe that we spend our entire lives searching for a way to describe and somehow classified. I like that. The limits of reason. Jonathan, Uh, you’ve spent so much time thinking about liberal education as a scholar, as a teacher, as a writer. What What do we mean by this concept? We obviously mean something different from liberalism itself. What does the concept mean when we talk about liberal education?

[0:04:55 Speaker 0] Well, we mean a lot of things, but liberal education, as I can see that, aims at the shaping of reasonable people. Liberal education has something to do with education for freedom. That’s the way we typically think of it and to be governed by unexamined prejudices, the argument goes is to be less than free. The two concepts

[0:05:19 Speaker 1] that seems central to that to me a reasonableness and freedom. So let’s maybe investigate them a little bit further also. What? What does it mean to be reasonable in your in your analysis, you have a wonderful chapter on this in your book. In fact,

[0:05:34 Speaker 0] yeah, I’m glad you asked that. Because colleges and universities often say that they’re teaching something called critical thinking. And what I mean by being reasonable is not so much, you know, the box of critical thinking tools you receive upon graduation. Those are important, but, you know, shills, hyper partisans, your social media frenemies. They all have those tools also. And when you kind of want to reach out and grab him by the scruff of the neck and say, Be reasonable, you don’t mean can you please leave through, um, logic textbook, right? Reasonable people think along with in educational and political writer who inspires this idea, John Locke, that there cannot be anything so disingenuous, insincere, so miss becoming unbecoming anyone who pretends to be a rational creature as not to yield to plain reason and the conviction of clear arguments This is a kind of human being who considers reason and authority rather than as a tool to get the better of others. When you’re asking somebody to be reasonable, what you’re really saying, I think, usually is Let’s stop fooling around. Let’s stop puffing ourselves up. Let’s stop hawking or wears. Let’s stop boosting our tribe and let’s see what valid conclusions we can draw from what we know and if we don’t know enough what more we might need to know.

[0:07:21 Speaker 1] So as I understand it, you see critical thinking is more form of sophistry, of developing tools to make arguments rather than finding a basis for assessing truth in some respects, right?

[0:07:34 Speaker 0] Well, I wouldn’t go that far, I think, though, that critical thinking, the way that it’s taught is taught in roughly that way how how to win an argument. And you know, often it turns out that that means poking holes in other people’s arguments, which I think were very good at doing right. We look at the prejudices of other parties as if we had none of our own. Um, we turn our reasonable skills on the arguments of other people, but we can’t be brought this is lock again fairly, to examine our own principles

[0:08:16 Speaker 1] and the alternative, then the reasonableness, the focusing on something beyond critical thinking. What does that look like in practice? Right? I think we can all understand what you’re criticizing. It’s the If I might say, it’s the senator Ted Cruz, I’m going to find some argument to explain why I did. What I did when it isn’t doesn’t seem reasonable at all at face value. What is the what is the alternative? What does it look like when you’re making an argument for reasonableness again? You go through this very well in your chapter, and I think there’s a lot of insight in this.

[0:08:46 Speaker 0] Well, you know, I think there are a couple of ways of looking at it, right? One way of looking at it is, what do we need to do? I’m in order to try to become reasonable. And then what kind of circumstances is it helpful to be surrounded with when we’re trying to be reasonable? Um, and maybe I can try to, um, speak briefly to both of those. Right? So, um, one thing I think we need to recognize when we’re thinking about trying to be reasonable is that we are partial beings and I’m going to make you sick of quoting Locke. But we see, but in part and we know but in part. And therefore there’s no wonder we judge not right from these partial views. And if that’s so we need to encounter views with which we disagree, we need to encounter people. Arguments, experiences, um, that are not our own right so that that’s one thing we have to be exposed to. What Law calls the opposite, argue ing’s of talented people. We’re also seeking what you can call comprehensive enlargement of mind, which means not only being exposed to opposing arguments but also being exposed to the many different ways, um, and methods. It’s possible to get at the questions that are important to us, for example, where both students and politics in some ways and sometimes the instruments the statistician help you with that. Sometimes the instruments of the historian help you with that. Sometimes the instruments, even if the novelist help you with that, so that’s what you’re trying to do. But it’s very hard to do right. Zachary’s poem, I think, points that out in some way. Our reason is relatively weak. Our tendencies toward to hold onto our partial. This are very strong. And so it’s helpful to be surrounded by a community that thinks of the praiseworthy and blameworthy above all in terms of our reasonableness, of our capacity to follow the argument where it leads in our willingness to follow the arguments where they lead.

[0:11:15 Speaker 1] So how do we read literature and the great works and the great minds of literature without making the same assumptions and taking the same conclusions as in the past? How do we make this old literature that has been red for centuries? How do we make it modern and uniquely relevant for our lives?

[0:11:35 Speaker 0] So I think that old books are almost essential for us to help us recognize the unexamined premises of our time and place as unexamined. That’s one way in which their fresh right we look back on every other time and place and say, Gee, those people were smart, but they were limited by the prejudice of their time and place. Good thing that we’re enlightened, but of course we have our own prejudices of our time and place, and that’s one of the many things that makes us partial being. So I think that’s important, too. Look at the best books of the past as far as we can ascertain what’s best to perform this function for us, but they are very hard to read. They are foreign right and we tend to approach foreign things by reducing them to something we’re already familiar with. So we pick up a 24 100 year old text and think, Well, what they’re really saying is we should stand up for what we believe in or we might find a reason to reject or ignore it. So what’s strange about it? I mean, so I think we have to fortify ourselves when we approach these books with patience, humility, a sense that that we don’t know. And that’s possible. We can get some help with our questions here, right and questions are important to us. So, for example, at Ursinus, nor core and in our first year seminar, we bring books to bear on questions like what should matter to me? How should we live together? How can we understand the world? What will I do? And I think that if we go into the work of reading these books with the sense that they might contain wisdom. Then we’ll have a much better chance of learning from them.

[0:13:33 Speaker 1] Is there a way to read literature still paying attention to things like gender dynamics and race without losing the beauty and the importance of that literature as a whole without getting too critical of the work?

[0:13:50 Speaker 0] Well, I think that the short answer is yes. But if we’re going to look at these texts with patience and humility, as I suggested, we can’t operate under the assumption that what we think about gender and what we think about race is the lens through which we should look at the book and make a determination as to whether it’s acceptable or not right, we might get there Eventually. We may decide to reject elements of the literature we read is foolish or mired in their time. But we have to at least begin by taking seriously the possibility that what we think about gender and race is itself, at least in part, um, prejudice to speak just of the American tradition. It might be useful for us, as we think, through whether there should be monuments to Abraham Lincoln to read, for example, Frederick Douglass’s aeration in memory of Abraham Lincoln, which may in some ways show us a more nuanced way of looking at Lincoln than the ways in vogue at the moment. So sometimes these books, I think, and teach us something about those matters,

[0:15:08 Speaker 1] right? It’s a great point, Jonathan. I think. Certainly we have a tendency, regardless of one’s politics. And I think it’s an undemocratic tendency to come into a work looking for a certain argument whether we want it to be an argument of greatness or degradation. And we impose that on the work. And I think what you’re arguing for is at least what I think. Historians would call a deep reading of the source, right, and you make the point about following the argument through following it to where it leads us before we pass judgement. Is that a fair assessment of your sense of how we should read these important works and avoid what you call the jump to usefulness?

[0:15:49 Speaker 0] Well, yes, I mean, in some sense, you know what we’re looking for. Something is of meaning and significance to us, so we can’t avoid hoping. I think that the book will be of some use to us in gaining some wisdom. But that wisdom might consist in learning, for example, that the problems there are most important to us are not the only problems or questions were thinking about. So we might change our mind about what counts his usefulness as we read. And it’s

[0:16:22 Speaker 1] when

[0:16:22 Speaker 0] we enter into the reading of really any work, but maybe especially an old and therefore strange work of literature or philosophy. We have to go in, not with some reading tool that we’ve got, like I’m going to perform a Marxist reading on the text. I’m going to perform a psychoanalytic reading on the text, or I’m going to view the text as a compendium of errors that we need to get away from. All those make the assumption that we don’t really have much to learn from these tax. And in that sense, you know, if we have gaining something from the sort of usefulness in mind, we have to have an openness to the possibly. There are conception of what’s useful might itself be partial and defective,

[0:17:10 Speaker 1] right? Right, so it’s often my suspicion that that people who have, um, very strong frameworks for understanding the text or not spending much time reading the text there, simply pasting their framework on the text. And that, of course, can be a problem, and that can occur from many different directions. How do you choose your text? You really speak very eloquently about the wisdom and the power that comes from reading text from another time and another place you have a wonderful section where you talk about how in your teaching you have found actually, that older texts are often better at addressing the concerns of students than newer text. I’ve certainly found that myself, Jonathan. So how do you choose which text to read? Because no one, not even a scholar like you and I can spend can read everything right? So how do we choose?

[0:17:58 Speaker 0] Yeah, well, I think there’s There’s some idiosyncrasy, um, in our choices. Always. What I look for is partly influence. I look for text that can help us understand the world that we live in today. So text that I suspect had some kind of formative influenced our way of thinking about things. So I write, read Maki Veli or John Locke, for example, because I think that, um, the ideas that you find in those texts go some way toward explaining the kind of world that we live in today. But you also look for alternatives to the matter in which we live today, which, which, which does mean reading text from outside the modern liberal Democratic tradition as well. I do try also to choose text that are in conversation with each other, um, in some way or another, so I don’t think it’s necessarily better, um, to read a Western text than to read Confucius. But these Western texts are also often incompetent in conversation with each other, so you can begin to see how an argument is made in response to some other alternative that’s been rejected and put aside. And that might be worth reexamining to understand what the costs and benefits of that kind of decision are. You know, the book is called the Conservative case for Liberal Education. I think that conservatives do tend to look at what’s been handed down to us, are recommended to us right as text that may be particularly fertile to look into that have some value that transcends the particular time and place that they came to be in. And that’s where we start. That doesn’t mean we accept those recommendations. I mentioned the book, for example, that Jefferson looks at Plato and says, If you take away from him as Salafism, his futility ease and incomprehensibility and and what remains? What’s going to be on our list of books is probably going to differ. But I think the sense that there are books that can speak to us as human beings, even from very different times, places cultures as long as you have that in mind, It doesn’t matter so much whether you choose to read Plato or Xenophon, who is now out of fashion. But Jefferson probably would have preferred, um, to play them

[0:20:49 Speaker 1] right, right? It does seem that one of the points you’re making that I think is crucial for thinking about democracy is that it’s it’s less significant to choose the text because of the politics of the text. That’s more important to choose the text because of some deeper humanity and deeper wisdom. It’s, you know, it’s an old argument. I think right that your mentor, Alan Bloom, made as as I think about our discourse and think about civic education today, which is a topic I know you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. How you put that into practice on a day to day basis, it seems to me, is very complicated, and it’s it’s something you begin to talk about in the book. I wonder if you have more reflections on that John.

[0:21:29 Speaker 0] Well, I think the relationship between liberal education and civic education is complicated. I’ve talked about lock a fair bit, but you know, Socrates isn’t away the patron saint of liberal education, the one who dispels the arguments and prejudices the people present him with. But Socrates wasn’t particularly good citizen in any obvious sense. Uh, he only served when he had to. He deliberately avoided public life. He tended to encourage other people to avoid public life. Because how can you be engaged in public life if you don’t know what justice is? If you don’t know what the best polity is? You know he didn’t organize marches. He didn’t produce commentary on the Peloponnesian War. So you know there’s a sense in which, um, the inquiry that soccer is engages and isn’t at least obviously useful, civically speaking. And, of course, Athens killed Socrates. But modern liberal democracies tend to think that it’s a good idea to have a place colleges, universities and maybe a few other places where inquiry, not the dispensation of wholesome political truths, is central. And in a way, I think they can’t both be central, right? You can’t on Monday say I’m looking into the fundamental question as to whether the contemplative or active life is best known on Tuesday. Say, Ha ha, Just kidding. What we really need to do is organize for action. I can’t an economics class on Monday say, You know, I think there’s a real question as to whether it’s rational to vote and on Tuesday say, Ha ha, just kidding. Get out there and vote And I think there’s some value to that. Whatever civic education is no liberal education context, it can take the form of Sunday school. It can take the form of proselytizing one form it can take, and I don’t want to go on too long about this. But there is some overlap between the virtues that you need in the community of inquiry and Democratic virtues and habits. I think right, if we’re trying to inquire into something together, we need a certain kind of humility, a sense that because we’re partial and don’t know, we have to listen to what other people say, Um, we shouldn’t be burning to the ground. Hyper partisans. We need a kind of patience to try to understand what others are trying to say. We need a certain courage to put forth even dearly cherished views out there to be scrutinized. And we’re engaged in a kind of community where we’re trying to set aside at least temporarily party, fashion, even interest for a kind of common good which consists in this inquiry in the direction of a truth that we all want. So I think there is some some overlap between the virtues of community, of inquiry and virtues. They’re desirable in a democracy. Um, I have a lot more to say about this, but maybe all at least pause there.

[0:25:06 Speaker 1] It’s a great start, and I do want to follow up Jonathan because one of the things I’m hearing you say and and that came to me from from your wonderful book as well is that Perhaps there’s too much emphasis in civic education on engagement. Uh, and you know, one of the reasons we do our podcast is to try to engage people around issues. But what actually really, I think makes the podcast and interesting form is that it allows space also for the credit for the sort of the deeper thought, the withdrawal from the world. And I think that’s one of the tensions here, right? If liberal education requires the contemplated space to go deep into a text and deep into a dialogue and ancient and contemporary dialogue and the pressure for civic engagement pushes us to get involved without the time and space for the thought, there does seem to be a bit of a contradiction there, one that we often don’t address is being reasonable. Is that Is that a way to work through that contradiction?

[0:26:08 Speaker 0] Well, you know, I think it’s it’s it’s attention, maybe more than it is a contradiction, and let me see a few words about that. So I I think although many colleges, including my own, have civic engagement as a piece of their mission, it is attention because, you know, as I said, if we’re saying, Well, we don’t really know what the answers to the fundamental questions are, however, right. We actually know that it’s important to be engaged. That is attention. It can be a fertile tension. I love programs that we have here at Ursinus, like the Bonner Leaders program, which focuses on service and Project Pericles, which does focus on civic and says an engagement, those programs, in a way can be quite helpful in bringing questions that sometimes might seem abstract. You know what is service? What is a good society? What kind of help do people need for me? What kind of human being do have to be, or to be helpful? Those questions are somehow made more concrete and high stakes. You know, if you’re engaged in kind of practice, and as long as those practices are engaged in in a spirit and enquiring spirit appropriate to liberal education, I think there could be quite fertile relationship between those two things. I also think that universities can’t be altogether. Socratic soccer is not being paid right. We, on the other hand, are receiving gobs of money from parents and governments and so on and so forth and So you know, in some ways it seems fair to suggest that we owe something. And how can that’s something we owe be consistent with the spirit of inquiry? I think one thing we can say we owe is is putting or giving pride of place in our inquiries into American democracy and its health and well being. That’s something that is worthwhile for scholars to inquire into, for philosophers to inquire into, but also for citizens to inquire into. Because how are citizens going to be able to make sensible judgments about when an official or government has overstepped its bounds? If they haven’t inquired into American democracy, its principles, it’s health and well being.

[0:28:49 Speaker 1] It’s exactly where I was planning to go in. The next question, Jonathan is you know, at some level, one of the most useful. If I can use that term useful elements of your book and your analysis is it reminds us how in working through this tension between contemplation and engagement, one of the best things we can do is to go back to our foundational texts in the United States. The constitution, of course. The Federalist Papers, the anti federalist letters, etcetera and and actually read them to try to understand rather than what generally occurs and what we can watch when we’re watching. For instance, an impeachment hearing is the cherry picking right where Alexander Hamilton seems to be quoted for every possible position for every possible purpose.

[0:29:32 Speaker 0] Don’t make me break into song

[0:29:34 Speaker 1] Exactly. I was hoping you would, and I think that’s I think it’s such an important insight that to bring to us that there’s something different between reading a few snippets of the Federalist Papers to substantiate your argument are actually spending a lot of time to work through the text and understanding the reasoning and the reasonableness about democracy that they provide to us.

[0:29:58 Speaker 0] Yeah, well, one of the things about or politics is it does make a kind of assertion that it’s capable of withstanding rational scrutiny. Jefferson says in his last published letter that the unbounded exercise of reason will do nothing but good for the spread of American or enlightenment principles. So in that sense, I think that our polity at least claims to have a very high tolerance for rational scrutiny, which means that the act of a sort of contemplative person the act of just a good and sensible system are drawn together in some ways, to be a good citizen is in part to reflect on the principles and and practices of American politics.

[0:30:58 Speaker 1] So bringing this to a closed Jonathan, we always do like to close on a positive, hopeful note. Um, that’s the engaged part of our contemplated mission. What can we do very practically at universities, but even beyond as citizens, to encourage reasonableness in this sense? Because I think one of the powers of your book is that we’re in an unreasonable moment, filled with unreasonableness of all kinds. So rather than simply staking a position and defending it ardently your argument, we need to do something different. We need to actually move to a more reasonable culture, more contemplated cultural culture that’s willing to follow the argument rather than defend the position. How can we do that? Practical matter. How do you do that as a as a scholar and as as a teacher and as a father? How do you think about that?

[0:31:49 Speaker 0] Well, at least starting with the university setting, we have to be mindful of the level of difficulty that we face here, not just in our society at this particular moment, but more broadly speaking, we are in many ways, partial beings. We are in many ways apt to have our understandings distorted by by fears, sometimes even bye hopes, even though hopes are nicer. And I think we have to try to recognize a couple of things and then try to put that into practice. You know, speaking of a narrower form of irrationality, some cognitive errors that we make. Daniel Kahneman, his book thinking fast and slow, says, Well, we’re not really very good at checking ourselves with respect to the mistakes we make. He suggests that we need to be having so to speak conversations around the water cooler, I think, is the way he persistently puts it in the book about the kind of cognitive errors that we make. And so I think the first thing that we need to think of at a university. It’s very difficult to do it at big universities. But even in small universities, we tend to get a little siloed. Is that you know we can’t take for granted that we’re a community of Reznor’s right? We have to talk about it right. Talking really does help, right in the statements we make both to ourselves and publicly. We need to remind ourselves of reasonableness and how difficult it is to be reasonable. We have to exhort each other. We have to put forward in understanding again of what’s praiseworthy and blameworthy that accords with a community that’s trying to be reasonable. So I think it is a cultural problem. There’s no great policy solution for this. It’s something that we do in our communities, whether we’re in an academic community, um, or in some other kind of of community.

[0:34:19 Speaker 1] So, Jonathan, I could ask you, What do you say when someone often out of goodwill

[0:34:24 Speaker 0] says something nonetheless unreasonable?

[0:34:27 Speaker 1] Stop being unreasonable. And how does Because it’s very difficult to break into our closed and provincial ways of thinking that don’t seem that way at first. It’s very hard to break into. That isn’t

[0:34:39 Speaker 0] well. I think it is very hard to break into it. In some ways, it’s probably easier college or university setting than elsewhere, and I don’t think I have a magic bullet for this except to say that Zachary started out by reminding us of the force of things other than reason in our lives and a 1 to 1 basis. I think I think we really have to be mindful of that, not not in a manipulative way. Just understand that when we’re dealing with our with our with our neighbors, that we have to try to understand where they’re coming from, not simply in terms of, you know, the argument that they’re making, but also why they might be attracted to that kind of argument and try to enter into some sort of empathetic relationship. The and here’s here. So I try to I try to to put it or or maybe to put the opposite end of it, I think we have to assume. And I think it’s reasonable to assume

[0:35:58 Speaker 1] that most people

[0:36:00 Speaker 0] aren’t going out there in an attempt to be unreasonable, right? So if you point out a difficulty in an argument that they leave them under direction of questioning their convictions, that’s distressing, right? They’re not just, uh, none of us, I think or or, you know, sort of proud ignoramuses who just don’t care right, whether we have good reasons for thinking what we think or not So That, too, is a motive that one can work with. We shouldn’t assume that the people were dealing with are closed to reason. So you have to be mindful of the obstacles to reason. And that’s that’s part of what Zach reminds us of. And even if things in our lives that are good, that shouldn’t be thought of as a mirror obstacle to reason. But we also, um, ought to be aware of the sense in which you know most people can answer and I think wish to answer to the call, to try to found their convictions on more rather than less solid ground.

[0:37:09 Speaker 1] That makes a lot of sense. It really it really does. It’s It’s actually a very reasonable position. You’re taking unreasonableness, Jonathan Uh, and it’s refreshing. I have to say, Zachary, your poem started us out, and Jonathan so well has put it your poem captured in some ways that the difficulties and the challenges here in being reasonable as human beings has this discussion helped. Do you see a way forward your generation of young, rising thinkers? I know you’ve been frustrated yourself at times in discussions about a variety of issues at the unreasonableness of your fellow well intentioned young thinkers. Does this help? I think it does help. I do think there’s this constant tension that has really gotten worse in recent years between those who can’t read a work of literature without throwing it in the waste basket afterwards and those who can’t read a work of literature without being immediately disgusted by the idea of studying literature at all. And I think that we’ve gotten to the point where what you read and whether you read or not, has become political. And I worry that that that that that that will create a gap in our understanding of our world. But I also think that those are the extremes and that really, in the middle of our generation is really getting to see the consequences of both of those extreme decisions. And then hopefully we can come to a to a more reasonable conclusion.

[0:38:37 Speaker 0] That’s a wonderful thought. Thank you.

[0:38:39 Speaker 1] Yes, yes. And I think, Jonathan, it’s the power of your book. I really do want to encourage listeners to read your book. Let’s be reasonable, a conservative case for liberal education and I’ll come out and say I’m not a conservative myself, but I found Jonathan’s argument, as I hope you all heard a taste of here, very thought provoking and actually very helpful. And working through this tension exactly articulated so well. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your insights with us.

[0:39:09 Speaker 0] Thank you. Jeremy and Zachary. I really appreciate it.

[0:39:12 Speaker 1] And And, Zachary, thank you for your poem. As always, and your wonderful questions. And most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us again. This is democracy. This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke. And you can find his music at Harrison Lemke dot com, Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy. Mhm. Uh huh. Yeah