Last week on his podcast, Jordan Peterson had a long conversation with Senator Mike Lee. Senator Lee is a soft-spoken, generally nice guy, with a spine built on principles, and a very good working knowledge of what the US Constitution says and means. Dr. Peterson is a thoughtful, principled man, who likes to get down to the very bottom of what something means. And he happens to be Canadian, which means that many of the ways of thinking that come natural to Americans actually have to be explained to him.
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| Senator Mike Lee screenshot from here |
While he’s been living in the same world, nearby, and hears
much of the same news, he hasn’t had the same historical upbringing in school.
And actually that’s helpful here in getting the information out in the
conversation—because a large part of young adults today lack the same things,
but also lack Peterson’s willingness to come to fully understand.
So what we have is a very good elementary education in the
Constitution and the proper role of government—but for adults. It’s something akin
to my very purpose here at the Spherical Model. It’s a bit like reading Bastiat’s
The Law or Ezra Taft Benson’s “The Proper Role of Government” by way of
casual conversation.
So today I’m just going to share portions of their
conversation (and encourage you to enjoy it in full as well).
A few minutes into the discussion, they were talking about
the nature of government—as force, rather than a “benevolent provider of
goods.” I think that difference in how a person looks at government is key to
much of our disagreements. I believe Senator Lee is right, that government is
force, pure and simple.
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| Quote from Mike Lee |
It is, however, important to remember that that’s ultimately
what government is, is force.
The way government does things, the way it does anything,
everywhere, at least in our country, is that it collects taxes from the people.
We have a number of different kinds of taxes in this country, as they do in
many countries. But ultimately that’s how government operates. And, while we
call that a voluntary system, and in many ways it is, or is supposed to be,
ultimately we pay those—citizens pay those, because they know that if they
don’t pay them, force will be brought to bear. People will come, and there will
be penalties attached to it if they don’t pay them.
That’s why it’s so important to remember that government is
force. It uses force to do things that we need it to do. And, as you say, it
would be chaos, it would also be terribly inefficient, it would result in all
kinds of problems, if every one of us had to be our own sheriff, our own
department of defense, our own army, and our own navy. That would be
problematic.
Just the same, having delegated those things to a government,
we have to remember what government is, why we have it, and utilize government
for that which only government can do—and not attribute to it benevolence and
omniscience and an omnipotence that most people reserve for deity, if they
believe in God.
Lee speaks of the proper role of government again later, referring
to protecting life, liberty, and property. This is in response to a question
from Dr. Peterson about the Senator’s trust in government. Lee has mentioned—and
shown—that he carries a copy of the Constitution around with him; he reads it
and refers to it frequently. (I do that too. Instead of in a suit coat pocket,
I carry it in my wallet in my purse.) As an aside, there’s a lovely segment
where Lee talks about his growing up, and talking about deep things, including
religion and the Constitution around the dinner table. His father, Rex E. Lee,
was
a lawyer and a professor of law, later served as dean of
Brigham Young University’s law school, and as president of Brigham Young
University. For a few years when I was a child, he was Ronald Reagan’s
solicitor general… During his 61 years on this planet he devoted much of his
career to the Constitution.
Carrying the Constitution is not because, as Dr. Peterson
supposes, because he reveres and admires government so thoroughly, but just the
opposite:
I’d take exception to one thing you said, where you suggested
that I trust government as evidenced by the fact that I carry around the
Constitution and I seek to follow it. I’d turn that precisely on its head. In
other words, the Constitution reminds us that we don’t trust government
as an institution; we trust people, but not the government.
The Constitution is our key to making sure that we unlock
unlimited human potential, by recognizing the inherent dignity and infinite
worth of every human being, and that we show that respect by saying that, when
we use force on you—as we do whenever government acts—we will do so
respectfully, and in a way that’s measured, restrained, exercised at the
appropriate level, and is geared specifically toward protecting life, liberty,
and property. If it’s not those things, we won’t do it.
We need to have trust and confidence in human beings, because
they’re God’s creations, and because we’re all created equal.
When we put trust in government itself, we’re putting trust
in force.
Already you’re seeing religious overtones in this
discussion. These come up frequently throughout. You can’t revere the
Constitution without that. Early on Lee spells out the connection, that our
rights come from God, whether you believe in God or not:
I don’t believe that the Constitution requires, in order for
it to work, for anyone to cling to any particular religious belief, or for that
matter to any religious belief at all. In fact, by its own terms, it carves
those things out and makes clear that government can’t mess with those. But
government also may not establish those things. It’s important to have that
boundary….
It helps to understand these things, if—as was the case in
America at the time of America’s founding, and as I believe is still the case
with most Americans—when we understand that we are subject to an all-knowing,
benevolent, and all-powerful creator to whom we will stand accountable at the
end of this life; and when we understand that our rights and our existence come
from Him, and are a result of a bestowal of His blessings, rather than that of
any government—I think that helps inform the proper role of government and the
proper relationship between the people and its government.
There’s a section toward the end (around an hour and 14
minutes in), when Senator Lee talks about his concerns with the erosion of civil
society. Religion is part of that:
I tend to believe that the erosion of civil society is
concerning, meaning the voluntary associations that free people form when they’re
allowed to be free, and that they form in the absence of any government telling
them that they must, or that they may, or that may not. They just do it. And by
that I mean churches, mosques, synagogues, fraternal orders, charitable
foundations, universities, neighborhood watch associations—all of those things
that operate as an organized entity outside the force of government. Those are
things that have really helped us.
Those voluntary associations were noted by Alexis de Tocqueville
when he visited nearly two centuries ago, and the United States were just
beginning to thrive and be an example to the world. Lee adds,
I’ve often said that the twin pillars of human thriving—thriving
of the human condition, whether in American society or anywhere else—they tend
to be built upon robust institutions of civil society and free markets. If you
have those two things, human beings can thrive. They won’t always choose to do
so. Sometimes they will make choices that will put them on a path of self-destruction.
But, if you’ve got those things in place and people make the right choices,
human beings will thrive. You’ll lift people out of poverty.
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| Quote from Mike Lee |
Rather than two pillars, I look at the three spheres:
political (freedom), economic (prosperity), and social (civilization). I think
we’re not in disagreement; these three work together. We need limited
government to allow for free markets, and we need a righteous people—people who
can govern themselves.
But if you don’t have people who govern themselves, which
civilization requires, and freedom to make exchanges in the marketplace, then
you have savagery and poverty, or as he says, misery and chaos. Then force
steps in, and steps on people.
At one point (around 23 minutes in) Lee says this about the
relationship between people, their religion, and government:
I think once you unpack what government is and how it’s used,
and you understand human beings and their relationship to each other and to
their government, it becomes easier to see how this can work, and how it must
work.
In other words, for me at least, my belief in my relationship
with God is the most important thing in this world to me. It’s right there with
my relationship with my wife and my children. It’s something without which I
cannot imagine my existence.
And it is for that reason—and not in spite of it—that I don’t
want government touching it.
His love of his religion is how I feel about mine; we both
happen to share a religion: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But this discussion doesn’t touch on his specific beliefs. I’d love for him to
have a discussion about that with Jordan Peterson someday.
Back to the discussion of religion. He continues:
In other words, there is an increasing inclination in society
today, including among many Americans, that if something is really important,
then it must be something that the government does, promotes, funds, or is
otherwise officially involved in.
And I think this is a helpful example to all of us of the reasons
why it ought to stay out. It is because it is important that it must not touch
it. It’s not an appropriate place for the use of force.
There’s that theme again—that government is force. There are
places in our lives in which we human beings ought not to be coerced. Lee adds,
There’s a good reason why people have for many, many
centuries sought sanctuary in places of worship. People instinctively recognize
that force—the use of physically coercive force—is not something we want to
take place inside of a church or a synagogue or another place of worship.
And so too with many aspects of our lives that are
important—because they are important, you don’t necessarily want government in
charge of it.
Back to that later religious discussion. He mentions that
what we may be seeing is idolatry—not that dissimilar from Old Testament idolatry:
I worry that, in many cases, we have traded faith either in
an all-knowing, loving, all-powerful God who will judge us at the end of this
life—or even, if not that, faith in a set of principles by which we guide our
lives—has in many places been replaced and supplanted by an almost religious
faith geared toward government. This is, in a sense, the new idolatry, the
idolatry of our time.
Whenever I study the Old Testament, I’m struck by how much
they focus, almost obsessively, on idolatry, and I thought, well, that’s weird;
we don’t really see a whole lot of that here. In a sense we do. When we worship
mortal institutions—mortal institutions with immense military power, aircraft
carriers, government offices, $4 trillion in annual outlays—that’s an almost
religious amount of faith toward something that is not God, and that doesn’t
bring us closer together.
There’s a pretty good discussion on the separation of powers,
which Dr. Peterson admits is confusing to an outsider. It does seem natural to
us, but it isn’t typical around the world, and certainly not historically. Mike
Lee explains it this way:
A minute ago we talked about the federalism, the vertical
separation of powers, leaving a fairly stable pyramid-like structure: a few
powers at the top, most powers at the base close to the people. Most people
know their state legislators, their city council members. They interact with
them at the grocery store. They might recognize them at their child’s baseball
game. Fewer people know their federal legislators; that’s part of the reason
why we have fewer in power and trust at the top.
There’s also a horizontal protection in the Constitution, one
that says, once you’re inside the federal government, dealing with something
that’s a federal issue—you know, war powers, regulating trade or international commerce,
and so forth—we’re going to have three distinct branches. We’ve further
subdivided the king or the Caesar—the king or the queen, the monarch there—into
three distinct parts. We’ve got one branch of government, the legislative
branch—Congress, where I work—that makes the laws. This was designed as the
most dangerous branch. That’s why it’s made the most accountable to the people
at the most regular intervals, because we have the power to prescribe the rules
by which the rest of government operates. That’s the legislative branch.
The executive branch, headed by the president in our system,
has the power to execute, implement, and enforce the laws passed by Congress.
Then you’ve got the judicial branch, headed by the Supreme
Court, that has the power to interpret the laws and disputes about the laws, where
they come into conflict between two or more parties properly before the
jurisdiction of the courts.
When each of those branches stays in its lane, the
legislative power remains the most dangerous branch, but it is made less
dangerous by the fact that it’s the most accountable to the people at the most
regular intervals.
So, insofar as we follow those guidelines—the vertical
protection of federalism, and the horizontal protection of separation of
powers, this document really has helped us. And it’s helped us prosper. It’s
led more people out of poverty than any government program ever could or ever
will, because it unlocks unlimited human potential by restraining government.
That’s the good that’s designed into our government through
the Constitution. The bad and ugly is that Congress has ceded that power, mainly
to the executive branch. Lee illustrates this with stacks of paper:
ML: I keep two stacks of documents behind my desk. One
document is a few inches tall. It’s usually either a few hundred, sometimes a
few thousand pages long, and it consists of the laws passed by Congress in the
previous year. The other stack is, in some years, 13-14 feet tall. I keep it in
three separate bookcases in my office. It’s sometimes as much as 100,000 pages
long. And it’s last year’s federal register. The federal register is the annual
cumulative index of federal regulations, as they’re released initially for
notice and comment, and then later as they become effective.
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| Jordan Peterson screenshot from here |
ML: Yes. It is prescribing affirmative legal obligations.
JP: So that is the index of the relative power of the two
institutions, so to speak?
ML: Yes, in a sense. Now, it’s not a precise measure,
because some of that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. But a lot of it
really consists of lawmaking. These are new affirmative legal obligations
imposed as a generally applicable rule on the American people, enforceable by
the overpowering force that is the federal government.
The difference between those two stacks is that this small stack, one that’s only a few hundred to a few thousand pages long, made by elected lawmakers. The one that’s 13-14 feet tall, 100,000 pages long in some years, made entirely by unelected unaccountable bureaucrats. That’s scary.
Senator Lee ends this segment with a definition of liberty
and of tyranny that I find useful. So we’ll end with this:
In any country where there is a societal tendency to trust
the people and be skeptical of government, we call that liberty. In a society
where people are encouraged to trust the government and be skeptical of the
people, we call that tyranny.
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| Quote from Mike Lee |
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