Civil Disobedience III | Crises of the Republic

Hello everyone and welcome. This is reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Burkowitz, the podcast of the Hannah Arendt Centre for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in New York. The Hannah Arendt Centre provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, non-partisan thinking in a spirit of Hannah Arendt. Arendt published numerous books and in this podcast we read them with you. My name is Yada Mada and I'm the Director of Academic Programs here at the Arendt Centre. It's my pleasure to welcome Roger Burkowitz, founder and academic director of the Centre. Every Friday Roger Burkowitz hosts a virtual reading group for all of our members. Together we have been reading Arendt since 2014. This episode is based on what we are reading in our reading group. Stay on for more information at the end of today's episode. Our current book is "Crisis of the Republic" first published in 1972. In this work Arendt examines moments of political moral breakdown in modern democracies, analysing how power, authority and responsibility are tested during times of war, deception, civil disobedience and constitutional crises. Make sure to subscribe and follow us to not miss an episode. In now I hand it over to Roger who's going to close for it and analyse the next chapter for us. Welcome everybody. My name is Roger Burkowitz. I'm the founder and academic director at the Arendt Centre at Bard College and I'm thrilled to be with you today. We are continuing to read Arendt's book "The Crisis of the Republic" and we are in the midst of her essay "Civil disobedience." We talked about it last week and I thought we had a really great conversation. During the conversation and then after we had a question, a really great question from Burma about a letter that Mary McCarthy had written to Arendt shortly after this essay came out. McCarthy had seen an earlier version of it when they were in Italy and then I'd had given her some corrects, some comments on it. When it came out she said, "Look, I like it better than the original version but I still don't like it. I boil your essays. This is one of the essays that I don't really like." Criticised it, which is what friends should do if they don't like their essays. McCarthy's critique goes to the heart of what we talked about last week in part 1, which is that for Arendt, "Civil disobedience is a political act. It's not a moral or conscientious act." She wants to distinguish it from the Theroyan, "I wash my hands." My job is not to change the world. It's just to clean my conscience. For Arendt, "Civil disobedience is not about conscience. It's not a moral act. It's about a political group, an organised minority that dissents from democratically legitimate actions." McCarthy says to Arendt, "Look what you're saying flies in the face of common sense." This is actually a long-running conversation in the letters between Arendt and McCarthy about common sense. They both think of themselves as common sense thinkers. It's one of the things I love about Arendt and McCarthy is they're interested in common sense. McCarthy says, "Look, our models for civil disobedience are Socrates who chose to die for his convictions and Theroy who preferred prison to paying a poll tax, supporting an unjust government for slavery, and Gandhi who would rather starve himself than support unjust colonial rule." McCarthy says, "Just like all of these people, the civil disobedience in the 1960s are conscientious people who are upset about the war in Vietnam because it's an illegal and unjust war. They're upset about Jim Crow and they're upset about racism." She's saying, "I think you're wrong, Hannah." That to say that this is not about conscience. I think that it's an important point, but McCarthy also, I think there's two things. One is, I think McCarthy, I think Arendt would agree to some extent with McCarthy that it is about conscience on an individual level. Each individual who engages in civil disobedience may act out of conscience, right? And they may act out of a sense of strong individual affront at what the government is doing or about what another group is doing. So I don't think Arendt is disagreeing with that. What she's saying, however, is that in a secular plural republic, for me to say I'm not going to follow the law because of conscience is supremely dangerous because everyone has a conscience. And in a secular republic where you don't have everyone following the rule of some theocratic elite, the civil disobedience may be a motivated act out of one conscience, right? But someone else may be motivated to act out of another conscience, right? Which is that, you know, so the problem here is that one conscience acts against another. And so for Arendt, conscience really is something that belongs to the inner dialogue of the self with itself. Politics is different for Arendt, right? Politics begins and belongs in the public world of plurality. And once civil disobedience is in a secular world, in a world without clear truths, it has to be political rather than moral. It can't be grounded in inviable authorities of conscience. Conscience speaks in the singular, right? Politics exists in the plural. And if civil disobedience were to rest on conscience, Arendt says, then the question is who's conscience prevails and we're back in civil war? And so that's, I think, the radical force of Arendt's argument that we talked about last week. But I think Burma really did a good job of bringing out this problem and forcing us to understand that, Look, Arendt's argument is radical. And it's radical because of Arendt's understanding of plurality and her refusal of the idea that politics can be about conscience in our world. And as I think I said in our discussion last week, you know, it's radical because what that means is while justice is something that obviously Arendt thinks is important, social justice, right? The idea that we should actualize justice in the world is for Arendt a limited endeavor, right? Yes, we should politically argue for justice. But politically, that means understanding that our idea of justice and someone else's idea of justice may not be the same and in politics to enforce our idea of justice on other people's idea of justice is tyranny. I mean, this is something that is just so fundamental to Arendt that I think that is not grappled with, right? Arendt does not believe in progress. It is one of the constant bugabooes in her writing, right? She does not believe that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. And that is something anyone who wants to read Arendt and take her seriously, at least has to grapple with. You don't have to agree with her. Well, you've got to grapple with it. She doesn't believe it. For her, justice is not about imposing my conscience on others. It's about creating a political system, a spirit of the laws, which we're going to get into in a second, that preserves liberty, liberty of conscience, liberty of religion, liberty of opinion, liberty of speech, of minorities over and against majorities. Justice is about liberty for Arendt. And liberty means that we have to limit the liberty of the majority and the limit of those who would impose whatever view of justice they have in order to protect the liberty of the minority. Justice is for her a kind of political pluralism. And that is a very difficult thing for I think a lot of people today to accept. And it's one of the reasons I find her so provocative and such an interesting person to teach and read. You know, Martin Carthie says to Arendt, I think you're wrong. I disagree. And what I tried to write about in the Armour Mundi column last week, right, was, you know, I think when we ask these questions often of someone like Arendt, are you right or wrong, we get it wrong, right? She's a provocative, she's a provocative thinker. She makes makes us think. I think that, you know, some people may agree with her, some people may disagree with her. It's not that she's wrong. Right? You can disagree with her. You can agree with her. But she is, she's, she's helped, she's forcing us, if we take her seriously, to consider the dangers of making politics about morality. Right? And we're going to get into this in a second in part three when we move into it. But it's, to me, this is one of the, one of the dominant mistakes of modern politics. Right? We have moralized politics so that people who we disagree with are not people we disagree with, they're evil or they're wrong. I've written about this enough in a number of places, including an essay on politics and protest. But the basic argument that I'm making here is that if you're a political thinker, right? You don't think ethics belongs in politics. You don't think conscience belongs in politics. It doesn't mean we don't give up on ethics. It doesn't mean we give up on justice. It doesn't mean we give up on conscience. But they are not political ideas. They are personal ideas. They're individual ideas. But if you're a political thinker, right? You have to accept a much more radical idea of morality. And, and that's what I think in many ways is so brilliant about this essay. Again, whether you agree with it or disagree with it. So as we try and move into part three of this essay, right? Our end is going to make an argument here, right? That, okay, civil disobedience is political and it's a political movement of organized minorities, right? To oppose legitimate electoral majorities. Well, she says this raises some pretty serious questions, right? Well, shouldn't we obey the law, right? And why should we, you know, be able to break the law, not out of conscience, but politically, if the whole point of politics and a democracy is that the majority is right, has a right to govern. And she's, I'm going to, I'm going to take us through it step by step, but I just want us to know her ultimate argument, right? Is that the reason that we're allowed to break the law is not out of conscience. It's because there is in the American legal system, in the spirit of American law. And she wants to say, look, this is not true for every country. She's very Montesquieuian here, right? Every country has its own laws and its own spirit of the laws. And Montesquieu, you know, says that there are, in republics, you have virtue as the principle of your law. And in monarchies, you have honor as the principle of your law. And in tyrannies or despotisms, you have fear as the principle of your law. She goes, in the American constitutional republic, it's none of those, right? Consent is the spirit of the law. And by consent, she means the active support and continuing participation. Consent for her means that Americans see themselves as a plurality of people who are different with different religions, different backgrounds, no common rule, you know, they come from all over the world. And they don't try and unite into an ape, into a union sacre, a sacred union, right? So if you've read her book on revolution, which we actually just read prior to this in this reading group, she wants to argue that the mistake the French made was trying to say that the people of France have to have one opinion. Whereas the Americans said, no, we're going to be an aplorebus unum out of many one, but a one that respects plurality and respects not only individual plurality, but communal plurality. The states can be different, right? And religious groups can be different. And towns can be different. And we have what she calls restricted autonomy of groups of minorities. And she says, if you understand the fundamental idea of American law based in consent as a consent of a plural people, then you understand that in America in a way that almost no other country shares, again, this is her opinion, right? Consent implies dissent and not individual dissent, but collective dissent. And if consent implies collective dissent, right? Then dissent, and when you collectively dissent, you then imply consent. It's a circle. And one who knows they may dissent collectively also knows that they somehow consent when they do not dissent. And this is her argument for how civil disobedience can fit into an American theory of law, which seems strange because it's saying break the law that's democratically enacted. And she's saying it's actually fundamentally coherent to the spirit of American law. And at the end of the whole essay, at the end of this last section, she's going to say that it actually is fundamental to the American constitutional structure. Because as she understands the American fundamental constitutional structure, it denies sovereignty, right? For her, the great achievement of the American constitution was the was federalist principle that all powers contest each other. You not only have the separation of powers on the federal level, but you also have separation powers between the federal level and the states, what James Madison called the double security, right? This was James Madison's argument in federalist 51 that the great innovation over and against the English constitution was that the Americans created a double security, not just the separation of powers, but also the federal system. And Aaron takes that seriously. And she says the problem is that the Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility to prevent sovereignty through what's called the political questions doctrine. And we're not going to get too deeply into that now if you want to ask questions about it later, we can. But basically what it says is the court is not going to interfere with squabbles between the executive and the legislative branch. And as a result, if one takes over the powers the other, the court's not going to get involved in that. They have to fight it out amongst themselves. And if they don't, Aaron says the danger is, well, sovereignty and tyranny. And so she says we need an alternative to the Supreme Court, which has in a sense taken itself out of the fight. And she says it seems like the alternative is civil disobedience. And so she wants to make an argument that civil disobedience should actually be understood as a fundamental institution of the American constitution. And as a result, as you see at the end, she calls for a constitutional amendment, creating in the constitution itself the institution of civil disobedience as an alternative way to prevent or to seek to prevent one branch of government, either the executive or the legislative, primarily the executive, from becoming sovereign and taking on too much power. I've sort of tried to offer what I take to be the overarching argument of this section. And I think it's, I mean, I've told you this is one of my favorite of her essays, Contra Mary McCarty. And I apologize to Mary McCarty fans. But this is, for those of you know, I teach constitutional law. I have a lot of agree with some of you know, this is core to our ends understanding of constitutionalism. And it's one of the most, it's it's in a sense that an addendum to chapters four and five of on revolution. And one could read chapters four and five of on revolution plus this, this essay as one of the greatest constitutional thinkings and theories ever offered. Again, that doesn't mean it's right, but it's extraordinary. Okay, just to take us through the essay a bit by bit so that we, you have a sense of how it works, it begins with this idea that we end part two with of the essay where she says that change is here to stay, right? And things are changing faster and faster. And she says there's a problem, right? Because if change is going to happen faster and faster because we're living in this more technological age and everything happens faster and generations go faster and faster, change threatens liberty. I mean, this is just so obvious, right? If things are changing and then a democratic majority wants to incorporate those changes into law, it can do so, even if not everybody has changed, right? I mean, think about the abortion issue in the United States, or civil rights in the United States, or immigration in the United States, right? Just three mildly controversial issues in which either through democratic means, or through bureaucratic means, or through legal means, we legalized changes in the way we do things in the abortion laws and the civil rights laws and the immigration laws before there was a real societal consensus. And what she's saying is, as change speeds up, there will be an incentive for many to try and impose their vision of the new idea, their new idea of justice, what's right, as law, but many others and not individuals, but large minorities will experience those changes as tyranny. And she says, this could lead to civil war and it could lead to revolution. But the question really is, how do you survive the onslaught of changes that are in a common or new technological world, and somehow preserve liberty? And her answer is going to be civil disobedience, or she's going to say that civil disobedience is one potential answer to the question of how in a time of accelerated change, aggregates organized minorities can remain protected and liberty can be reserved over and against who would impose their change through either democratic, bureaucratic, or legal means. And so she says, given that, if civil disobedience is going to become an important part of our world as a fail safe for tyranny, right, is civil disobedience compatible with law, right? And this is the question I was also talking about before. And she says, well, you have to ask it not in general, but in is civil disobedience compatible with American law. And she thinks that even though civil disobedience is somewhat of a global phenomena, there's only a word for it in English. Again, I'm not sure she's right about this, but it's a claim she makes. I'd be loved to hear if there's people on the call who have other ideas of languages that have the theory in it. And she says that we have to do is develop a specifically American idea of civil disobedience, not a theory, but out of what she calls the extraordinary experiences of the early callists. And so the third point that I'm going to make is that she doesn't base this idea of law that will support civil disobedience in a kind of Kantian or Russoian autonomy where we give the law to ourselves or Russoian squaring the circle where we're free and legislating at the same time, right? She says, that's based on conscience, the relation between me and myself. That's a moral view of law, not a political one. So we put that to the side. She says that we can't base it on social contract because many have lost faith in the Constitution, whether it's because the Constitution has seen as a male constitution or a slave constitution or a white constitution or a Christian constitution, right? And because people have lost faith in the Constitution because we haven't enforced it in the 14th Amendment. And so she says, you know, there's going to be many people, especially black Americans, who don't see the Constitution as their constitution, right? I mean, this is what's going to lead her to say that one of the great failures of the civil rights of the civil war amendments, the 13, 14, the 15th, and up until when she's writing. And I guess even up until now is that she says, we've never taken seriously that the American Constitution wasn't written for black people, right? Now there are people who disagree with her, like Frederick Douglass says, actually, I can read the Constitution and say that it's actually written for black people. And he makes that argument, right? But it's a it's a minority argument. But she makes this argument. And she says more so than the equal rights amendment, right? Which says that women have equal rights. What we really need and what we should fight for is an explicit amendment welcoming black people into the American polity. She says they were excluded. They were never part of it. And they should be brought into it. And so she then returns to this question of what is the citizens moral obligation in a law and a society of consent. And again, she says, well, I'm not talking about a consent in a biblical sense, right? Where the laws revealed by God and I have to obey because I believe in God, that's not the world we're in. She says, I'm not talking about consent and the habeasian idea of the social contract in which each individual concludes an agreement with a Leviathan to ensure his safety, right? That's what she calls the vertical idea of the Constitution. But she says, I'm talking about consent in the horizontal sense, which she here refers to in lock, where people give up rights not to Leviathan to a government above them, but they make a mutual promise to the people around them, to their society. And they contract. And they say, we are a people before we have a government. And as a people, we can then contract with each other to bind ourselves together, not to Leviathan, but to a government that we in some sense still control. And we can always dissolve if it ever violates the terms of it's of our giving it its power. And so in this sense for her, in this horizontal sense, right, which she says has roots in the pre-revolutionary experience of colonial Americans, things like the Mayflower Compact where people on the ship got together and said, we have the right to create a society and limit the powers of government. She says, this kind of consent is based in active support, right? That people are actively engaged and continuing to participate in all matters of public interest. And this is what she thinks is the spirit of American law. It's helpful here, if you have the time, right, to go back and think about her discussion of on revolution of where she talks about how in the United States, the Constitution of Liberty, this is chapters four and five, creates what she calls a new American experience and a new American concept of power, right? This is what she calls this horizontal consent, which was a power without sovereignty, without a Leviathan, without any absolute sovereignty designed to preserve liberty and deserve power and thus to deserve the people's potential to act. And this is the idea of consent that she's developing here. Now, she says, consent is usually a fiction, right? But in America, dissent implies consent, right? This is her claim about the American spirit that one who knows that he may dissent, especially as a group, not just as an individual, knows that when he consent, that he, when he doesn't dissent, he consents. And thus consent is implied in the right to dissent, just like dissent implies consent. And this is, she says that when this is a quintessence of American law, she says one of the dangers, right? Today is that our representative democracies in crisis, right? This was a, this is again one of my favorite quotes at first. She says representative government is in crisis today because we've lost this active participation. We've largely given up our active participation in government to bureaucracy and to political parties, right? But she says we never fully give it up. And it keeps coming back, right? And she says look in the 1960s, it looked like we'd given it up. And yet here it is coming back. And it's coming back in the form of civil disobedience in, in the face of illegal war and an executive overreach and chronic deception and attacks on the First Amendment and the violation of the trust and the independence of universities. She says people took to the streets, not in violence, but in civil disobedience as collective organized dissent. What they affirmed was plurality. What they affirmed was the right to association of plural people, right? Who are not part of a single American union, a unity, but have, but a American which people, even people who are in the minority, have collective power and collective rights. That in America we know and what we care about is that democracy can become tyrannical and we put all these fail safes and breaks against the tyranny of the majority. But when they fail, civil disobedience is actually a quintessentially American institutional response. Now, there's one important aspect of this that I want to end with, right? Which is that for her, civil disobedience is a continuation of voluntary associations. And what she loves about voluntary associations is their practical. They're designed to prevent tyranny. They're not designed to impose one's own vision of justice on other people. There are response to a state or a government or a group that would impose tyranny on others. And they seek to achieve actual goals to make people's lives better. And so she says the great problem, though, is that we lose this American idea of mutual action when our civil disobedience, when our collective action is no longer governed by actual goals, but is governed by ideology. If we substitute ideology, political or others, she says, for actual goals. If we substitute racism for treating people equally, if we substitute Bolshevism, right? For making sure people have enough to live on. If we substitute post-colonialism for a kind of pity for those who are, you know, suffering. If we create an ideology that's no longer trying to actually help people, but actually wants to impose an ideology on society, we forget that the American spirit is actually about bringing together diverse and divergent minds rather than uniting the minds into one. And this she thinks is the great danger of many of the civil disobedience movements of the time. I think she's right, and I think it's still the danger of many of the civil disobedience movements. She ends with this idea that the political question's doctrine in the court has, has in a sense, neutered the Supreme Court as a way to prevent the executive power from taking too much sovereignty. And she says what we need is an alternative institutional space for the constitutional power for people to act together as organized minorities to resist the drive to tyranny. And she says civil disobedience is one maybe the best way to do that, which is why we need a new amendment guaranteeing civil disobedience. Susan. Okay, this is the first time that I've spoken here. Welcome. Happy to have you. I am California. So my question is I'm active with the individual movement as I'm sure other people are going out into new, new things. And it seems to me that the way of interaction now between indivisible and its allies and regime, the Trump regime is like waiting to be an illustration of what you've just been talking about. It really sits in in terms of the federalism, the checks and balances. I'm quite amazed at that. I'm wondering without getting unduly into current politics, to an agenda that you don't want to do and isn't common practice with the group, I just want to raise that. And I appreciate these hold on. Thank you. Thanks, Susan. Welcome to the group and you'll realize that while we try and welcome all politics here, we don't shy away from talking about politics, we just try and welcome diverse views. You know, my view on this is exactly, you know, is yes and, right? I do, I mean, I've written a lot on this and I think I've made it clear, the current actions of civil disobedience, right, around the country, whether in, I mean, Minneapolis was, I think it was an extraordinary example, but elsewhere as well. There are a lot of people acting conscientiously, right? But as a group, what you're seeing is people organizing. Not everyone has the same views. You're seeing, you know, Christians and Jews and Muslims together, right? You're seeing black, white and Hispanic and other people together. And people are organizing not because they all have the same conscience, but because they realize, as Aaron says, that there is a threat to the constitutional liberty and the prevention of absolute power in the country right now. And this is how aren't C civil disobedience. Now we got, we talked about this last week as well, but, you know, I think it's also important to understand that over the last 20 years or 30 years, many people in the country saw a kind of change in the laws brought about by lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, administrators, right, to them, right, was threatening their liberties and taking away their ability to the live the way they saw as a part of a free America. And what you saw were movements like the Tea Party and even parts of Maga movement, right? Which could also be seen as civil disobedient movements. Now, Aaron, we talked about this last week as well. The civil disobedience, as Aaron understands it, there are certain criteria. And one of the criteria is that you have to break the law openly, not in secret, right? You have to be willing to say, here's what I'm doing and why. And you can't use violence, right? And so obviously, to the extent that violence was inherent in it, the January 6th events, I don't think qualify in the end as civil disobedience. But I think it is important to realize that what you've seen in the last 50 or 60 years of American history since the '70s, let's say, is at different times on both sides of the political spectrum, civil disobedient movements arise in which people feel that their side a minority or an organized minority has been disempowered, whether by an elected majority, or by unelected judges or bureaucrats. And what you're seeing are eruptions of this American spirit of voluntary association. Obviously, some people like some of them more than others. Some of them are better organized than others. Some of them are more violent than others and less violent than others. And so, all I'm saying is that from an oriental point of view, I think you're absolutely right that, indivisible and other organizations and many of these organizations who are resisting the sort of weaponization of quasi-legal, quasi-governmental militias with masked people and not identified, which seem very opposed to any idea of a legal order, are, I think, very much civil disobedience in the oriental sense. But I think it's also important to realize that certain aspects of the tea party movement and even the make America healthy again movement and some of these other movements are also organized minorities, resisting what they consider to be unjust tyrannies of people who would impose their view of justice on them. So, I think it's an important distinction. But thank you for joining us and welcome to the group. Laurie? Yeah, thanks. I just like to bring your attention to the fact that in 1670, the UK with its unwritten constitution had an example of civil disobedience, which continues to this day, although the government is trying to roll it back, and bring up the issue of conscience, which I think -- Can you just tell me what you have in mind, Laurie, so I know -- And probably jury, part of the Magna Carta. In 1670, Charles was put back on the throne. And there was a law that forbids religious gatherings of over four people. Quakers gathered over a few hundred. The preaches were thrown in jail. They were put before a jury, and the jury found them not guilty. The judge flipped out, put him in the-- in prison for the night without food and water. The next morning, they came back and confirmed their non-guilty verdict. They, the leader of the jury was fined. One of the preaches of William Penn who then went to Pennsylvania. But I mean, that, I mean, the jurors used their conscience and I believe that the U.S. has a similar can jurors use their conscience to define the case. So your comments on aren't, we're helpful there. 'Cause I think people's morality and conscience is clearly, they bring it into the politics, but that is not the basis to form politics. But indirectly, it is. That's really it. But I mean, the fact that the, okay. So the conscious flows in indirectly, although there's a law, but I would think that if that happens frequently, it's clear that the law is no longer, is not seem to be legitimate politically or democratically legitimate by the populace. And I would expect over time, it would change, which again gets back to the, which shows the social push behind a law change. Thank you. It's a good question. It's a great question. I actually was just teaching this week, jury nullification, right? Which is, what we in the United States call it, when a jury simply ignores the law that it's told by the judge and decides according to, it's version of what's right against the judge. And it's a time-honored idea here in the United States, as well as, as you said in England. And I think you're absolutely right that the jury, in that sense, is one of the essential constitutional institutions that prevents tyranny in the United States. I mean, it's, you know, there's a reason that Alexis de Tocqueville said that jury is the most important institution in American democracy. You know, we've seen that just in the last month in the United States where, you know, I mean, I think it's not wrong to say that the president has sought to politicize the judicial branch in a way that is fairly clear. And what you've seen is a number of grand juries, which almost always indict. I mean, it's almost, it's very hard for a grand jury not to indict. A number of grand juries over the last month have refused to indict people that the Justice Department has sought to indict. We're not even talking about petty juries, right? Which have a lot more leeway in that regards than grand juries do. And, you know, I think a lot of people are rightfully worried about the weaponization of the legal system. And I 100% think they should be. But would I always try and remind my profoundly pessimistic and despairing friends, which I can have too, by the way, is that the jury system makes it incredibly difficult in this country to prosecute innocent people. All you need is one juror, right? And we've all seen, you know, 12 angry men and all these movies. And so the jury system is an important, is one of the most important fail safes. And it can be an act of civil disobedience. Although, again, I want to be a little careful, right? Because I think Lori is right. The jury is less about politics and more about law or conscience. And in that sense, it's not a political, usually if it's just one juror or two jurors, it's not a political movement, it's an act of conscience. And so it's more of a legal fail safe. Now, if what's happening now with the grand juries, which are much bigger and are refusing to indict, one could think that that actually is a response to a political movement. But I guess what I would say is that the juries are less about civil disobedience as a rent understands them and a kind of, in this sense, moral conscientious disobedience and legal disobedience. The last thing I'll say, Lori, is that I'm not an expert in England, but my understanding is that England, along with any other place in the world that is traditionally used juries, has radically limited the applicability of jury trials. I mean, again, I haven't looked at it recently, but I used to teach this fairly well on law school many years ago. And my understanding is that most cases in the UK now do not have jury trials. Quite different in the United States where the right to a jury trial is in the constitution. And the UK, I mean, is seeing the same push, but juries have found climate protesters non-guilty for non-violent protests, so I would say that civil disobedience that's being solidified because the juries are finding them non-guilty. And they just, they tried to name Palestine Support Action as a terrorist organization. And even three judges have come out and said that was unlawful. So any help? But okay, thanks. - Thank you, Lori. (soft music) (soft music) - Penny. - Hello, Roger, and everybody. Thanks for your time. When I was reading the civil disobedience chapters and also all the discussion we had about conscience and civil disobedience, I was thinking about an analogy which comes from philosophy of science. I thought the conscience as an individual hypotheses and civil disobedience like a scientific community. For example, hypotheses in science as proposed by an individual or a small group of scientists or people, it is super, super subjective, although it could be very close to truth or anything in the physical world. Similarly, RNC's conscience is an individual moral claim. It is not politically binding or it's not validated by public deliberation. And on the other hand, based on my understanding, she sees civil disobedience as a scientific community. For example, if I wanna talk about from Thomas Koon's perspective, knowledge emerged through collective validation. What counts as a problem is publicly structured. And we have three notions here. We call normal science in which we do scientific activity when there is no such anomalies or crisis. But when we see there are some crisis, we maybe change our paradigm. But there are difference between in a physical world, in a scientific activities and in society. There is a difference which is the power. For example, there are two groups of physicists who are working in different paradigms. They don't care about each other if how they see the physical world. But when they come to society, the power matters. For example, one group of people can have a domination or can apply power to the other groups. - Yeah. - So in a revolutionary time, this type of civil disobedience doesn't work. I'm talking about my country, my motherland in Iran. So we had lots of civil disobedience and anomalies are emerged and it is increasing. But it doesn't work in such a society. Yeah, this is my question. Thank you, Penny, and welcome. Yeah, I mean, really interesting points and I'm not sure if the two go together, the scientific point and the Iranian point, they seem separate or did you mean them to be connected? - I see you're on as a society in which there are lots of crises. I call them anomalies, which we cannot be solved by civil disobedience. any more. You need paradigm shift. Okay. Yeah, I mean, first of all, the bravery of people protesting in Iran should be fundamentally acknowledged and we should at least mention it. You know, I also have great respect for the bravery of people engaging in civil disobedience in Minneapolis, right? Very clearly. And while two people have been killed in Minneapolis and another one or two shot are injured badly, and that's a tragedy in the United States when that happens, one hopes there will be investigations and and criminal penalties. Again, I, you know, we'll see. And I think this is part of our end's argument that civil disobedience is at home in the United States because it's part of the traditions of the country. And it may be that there are countries, I don't think it's very likely that there are countries like Iran where right now it's not. And you do need, as you said, a paradigm shift if you're going to prevent sovereign absolute theocratic rule. And I think you're absolutely right. On the question of civil disobedience and scientific community, I found that a really productive question, one that I'm not sure I'm able to answer fully right now. You know, I think and I think it somewhat depends on the kind of science you're doing, right? And it goes to what we would call in the world of academia or science peer review. And it also goes to what Jonathan Roush and his book, The Constitution of Knowledge, calls the sort of, you know, the use of anonymous blind tested reviews from many different biased people over the world that check each other's work and come up with a kind of true science. I mean, part of the problem we're having in the scientific world right now is that people have lost faith in the Constitution of Knowledge and in peer review. I mean, certainly in my field, I think there's a pretty widespread that peer that peer review is an absolutely corrupt and unhelpful process. And, you know, because for the most part, you know, people don't have either don't have strong senses of what's true or untrue in the social sciences of the humanity or they impose their view of it and just say you can't publish this because I think it's bad because I disagree with it. And even in the sciences, I think there's a challenge to peer review. I mean, you're seeing this in most obviously the environmentalist debate where and in the, and even also in the the COVID and vaccine debates, right, where well-known respected accredited scientists are having their work isolated or rejected because people find it dangerous and wrong. And there's a question of whether that's meaningful peer review or corrupt peer review. And so the idea of civil disobedience in the scientific community is fascinating because I think what you're seeing, right? And I think, you know, in one subset, in two subsets of the current administration in the United States, whether it's environmental science or health and the make America healthy again movement, right? What you see are organized minorities of scientists and public people who are supporting those scientists rebelling against what has been what has been the consensus science for a certain amount of time on environment on and on the use of vaccines or or health or other things. And and there's a real debate about this. Now, you know, the question is should science be about politics? Should scientists be about organized minorities who resist who resist, you know, the majority? And I think it somewhat depends on whether the majority is scientific or political. And that's the challenge that I think your question brings up. And again, like I said, I don't think I have a full answer to it. I don't know enough about all of this right now, you know, about the environmental science or about the vaccine science to say, I mean, I generally support, you know, I've generally thought that the scientists arguing that we're in global warming and that it's leading to problems have been honest and right. But I do realize that some of those scientists have verifiably made false claims and tried just to suppress, you know, research that wasn't, you know, common to them and not sure exactly how important that is or what that means. And I do know that some very good epidemiologists have been suppressed and during the COVID debate and other things. And I'm just not always qualified enough to say, but but I do think you raised interesting questions and one could try and raise this ostensibly in a scientific debate, right? You shouldn't have questions as civil disobedience because it should be done through science, not politics. The question is to what extent that's possible today. So thanks, Penny. Glenn. Hi, Roger. For the record, a notable example of judicial review has intersected with our conversation. Part three today, when you're Supreme Court rule that your president overstepped his authority by invoking emergency powers to impose tariffs. So I would welcome any Arantian take on that. But my question is that I want to understand better what she means or what she understands, tokville to mean on page 98 when she says in that key paragraph, it appears to me that an association is no longer capable or willing to unite or when an association is no longer capable or willing to unite quote into one channel, the efforts of divergent minds and quote, it has lost its gift for action. She, she put divergent into italics or maybe she took that from tokeville. But what does she mean by divergent or what does she mean by action? Because it occurs to me that there's a lot of action being undertaken by associations of non-divergent minds and that that uniformity of mine is actually a strength of the association or movement you know, looking at you, Maga. What's what what am I where have I misstepped here? Where can I follow her thought again? When it comes to the importance, when it comes to that assertion that you have to keep divergent minds together to preserve the gift of action. So what she's what she's saying here is that if you unite people all under an ideological commitment, whether that is a political or a racial or religious ideology, then you don't have action. You have behavior. Right. I talked a little bit about this in the opening. I don't know if you got to hear it Glenn or not. But I was watching hockey games. Sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, much better than listening to me. So I appreciate that. Don't tell us who won. But you seem happy. So I don't know. The point is that for her, the civil disobedience, the organized minorities, right? And that's the voluntary associations that you're talking about here in Tocqueville, have to be organized around what she calls a little later down in the page. Actual interest as opposed to ideological ideology. They can't be, they have to actually pursue an interest like don't arrest my friends. Right. Or you know, don't tell me I can't use certain words. Right. Then, but if they go further than that and say, I'm not just interested in not arresting my friends. I want you to understand open borders as a part, you know, or I want you to understand that they're, you know, that that anyone could say anything and there's never a harm. And you go totally into like a strong ideology, right? Then she says we're not actually trying to organize for actual needs and actually makes people's lives better. We're not organizing people who are divergent minds who just think there's been an infringement upon the liberty of minorities. At that point, we're trying to impose a version of our justice on other people. And that's what she means by the substitution of ideology, ideological commitments for actual goals. And so she says what threatens the student movement, right? Which is the chief still disobedience group of the moment is not just that it was used vandalism or violence or bad temper, right? But the growing infection of the movement with ideologies, Maoism, Castroism, Stalinism, Marxism, and the like. So you know, I think it's easier for us to understand that, you know, today with certain of our political movements, right? It's one thing to argue against bombing people, whether in Gaza or somewhere else. And it's one thing to argue against acts of anti-Semitism, right? But it's another on both sides to argue that all Israelis are Zionists and guilty and all Palestinians are innocent, or all times when Jews are in some sense, you know, not privileged or something, that's anti-Semitism. The point is if you radicalize it into an ideology as opposed to simply saying, no, we actually want to protect organized minorities and protect liberty, that's the problem that she's here trying to address, and that these movements that start as civil disobedience movements often too quickly and too easily get caught up in ideological commitments rather than actually trying to achieve meaningful goals that makes people's lives better. That's the claim here. Thank you. On the tariff issue, I, you know, about 20 minutes before game time here this morning, by that I mean the RNC and a reading group, I happen to turn on my computer and see this. I started reading the first few pages of the Roberts opinion and the first few pages of the Gorsuch opinion. And so I have only, you know, I don't have a full thought out response to you. I do think it's interesting that, you know, the opinion was very much made on the grounds, the Gorsuch and Roberts opinions. So the majority and the concurring opinion, very much on the claim that the use of tariffs was an unjust extension, an unjust claim of delegated powers from the Congress to the president. And thus, in some sense, was a matter of the executive taking power from the Congress. In some sense, no one though invoked the political questions doctrine, interestingly enough. And I think good reasons. But, you know, here is a case in which you rightly said the court is doing something that aren't felt like it should do, which is serve as a check and barrier against the executive taking power from the legislative. And so I think from her perspective, this is something the court should do. Thank you so much for listening. 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