Cross Word

Beyond the Body: What Defines Our Humanity?

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 140

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Contact the host of Cross Word, Michele McAloon https://www.bookclues.com

What makes us human? It's a question at the heart of today's most heated cultural debates, from abortion to artificial intelligence to gender identity. In this profound conversation, Princeton's Professor Robert George offers a compelling framework for understanding human dignity that transcends political divides.

The conversation explores how ancient philosophical errors resurface in modern debates. George identifies elements of Gnosticism – the belief that humans are essentially minds trapped in irrelevant bodies – in contemporary discussions about gender and personhood. He demonstrates how these philosophical premises, often unexamined, drive our ethical conclusions.

Perhaps most remarkably, George models respectful engagement across deep differences. Despite profound disagreements with colleagues like Peter Singer, he maintains friendships based on mutual truth-seeking and reasoned argument rather than personal attacks or political tribalism.

Whether you're wrestling with questions about AI ethics, the treatment of vulnerable populations, or how to navigate relationships in a polarized culture, this conversation offers wisdom that transcends partisan divides. Listen and discover why understanding what makes us human matters for everything else.

Michele McAloon:

You are listening to crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon. Finally, it is summer is over, it's September 1st, it is full force into fall. I've got to focus serious here. We've got some great books coming up. You can find out more about me at bookclues. com, where I have my website. If you have a book that you have read and you would like me to interview the author, please contact me on my webpage. All right, thank you and happy listening. We have an amazing guest today, a man probably a lot of people don't know, but they should actually know because he is probably one of the most insightful philosophers of the 21st century in intellectual America, and he is none other than Professor Robert George of Princeton University. Professor George, I can't tell you what an honor this is. Welcome to the show.

Professor Robert George:

Oh, thank you so much, Michele. I'm really delighted to be on with you.

Michele McAloon:

It truly, truly is an honor. Professor George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals in Institutions at Princeton University. He has served on so many commissions as chairman. He was US Commission on International Religious Freedom and the US Commission on Civil Rights, and this is actually very important to the conversation. He's been on the UNESCO World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, a judicial fellow at the US Supreme Court, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, holds degrees in law theology from Harvard University, has degrees in philosophy and literature from Oxford University. He is not only the smartest man, he's probably one of the most well-educated men in America today. So, Professor George, just thrilled to have you.

Professor Robert George:

Well, thank you, that's much too generous. You know I was born and brought up in the hills of West Virginia. I'm just an Appalachian kid, I'm a hillbilly. Both my grandfathers were coal miners, so I'm kind of giggling a little bit at that introduction.

Michele McAloon:

You and JD Vance right.

Professor Robert George:

Yeah, me and old JD Vance, that's right, that's right, all right.

Michele McAloon:

So, as my audience knows, I am a canon lawyer for the Roman Catholic Church, and how this happened is in the 1990s I started watching a series of films called the Terminator and the question that the Terminator asks these movies ask is what does it mean to be a human being? And I had to answer that question, ended up as a canon lawyer in the Roman Catholic Church. But your book that you have written, seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, put out by wonderful Encounter Books, you look at things that are very key, questions that have to be examined and looked at, and you actually do a brilliant job in this book by looking at basically any decent society looks at a person, a family and good governance. Let's start with this what is the human being?

Professor Robert George:

The human being is a creature with a rational nature, that is, an organism. We're an animal, really, but one with a special sort of organization, organized in such a way as to be capable of rational inquiry, deliberation, judgment, choice, action. That's really what distinguishes us from the other animals. We call the other animals brute animals, because they lack that capacity. They lack a rational nature or, to use the classical language, a rational soul.

Professor Robert George:

Now, we believe, as Christians, or as Jews and Christians, in the biblical teaching that the human being, though fashioned from the mere dust of the earth, mere mortal stuff, is nevertheless made in the very image and likeness of God, the very image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is. Well, michelle, ask yourself, what could it mean to say that we are made in the image of God, the very image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is? Well, michelle, ask yourself, what could it mean to say that we are made in the image of God? What could it mean that we're God-like? Well, it can't mean that God has five fingers on each of two hands and hair on his head and a nose.

Professor Robert George:

God is a spiritual reality. So how are we God-like? Well, we're God-like because, like god, in a much more limited way, very limited way, but nevertheless like god, god has chosen to share with us the power to envisage states of affairs that don't exist, to understand the point, to grasp the intelligible value of bringing certain states of affairs into existence, relationships, the pursuit of knowledge, the creation of beauty and so forth, and then to act, not on instinct or impulse about the human being. That's the essence of our status as rational creatures, creatures with a rational nature, and as such creatures this will be my final point here as such creatures, creatures with a rational nature, and as such creatures this will be my final point here as such creatures, we are bearers of profound, inherent and equal dignity.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, professor, george I know there's going to be those out there that say, well, okay, ration and rationality, basically the ability to think, to make choices, to understand, have a universal understanding of a tree is a tree, but all trees have certain properties and to be able to make those rational decisions that you know, from a embryo who is not a fertilized zygote and egg, to all the way to maybe at the very end of life when you're on life support. What about and this I think you do a brilliant job in your whole work, your whole life has shown this brilliantly of how the human being is a human being in kind or in its existence and its very being.

Professor Robert George:

Yeah, you might add to the list of human beings that we would raise those questions about severely cognitively disabled people, perhaps congenitally severely cognitively disabled people. If we treat rationality as the touchstone of our dignity and our very humanity, well then, what do we do with those who do not possess the immediately exercisable capacities for deliberation, judgment and choice, those basic rational capacities? This is why, michelle, when I was giving you my account a moment ago of the human person as a rational creature, I put the emphasis on the possession of a rational nature. We are creatures with a rational nature. The classic definition of a person is a being with a rational nature. If there is a God is a being with a rational nature. If there is a God, if God is personal, god is rational. God's nature is a rational nature. We human beings have a rational nature. Now, what exactly does that mean? Well, I said a moment ago that we're organized in such a way as to have the foundations, the basis for deliberation, judgment, choice and so forth. But then we have to ask the question is the basis of our dignity the immediately exercisable capacities for deliberation, judgment, choice, for rationality, or is it the basic natural capacity? If it's the latter, then all human beings, irrespective of their age or size or stage of development or condition of dependency or cognitive disability, are bearers of inherent and equal dignity. Our dignity is our immediately exercisable capacities.

Professor Robert George:

Then, those at the early stages of life, the unborn, the newborn, those who are severely cognitively disabled, perhaps congenitally, and those who are at the end of life and are suffering from severe dementias and other cognitive disorders would not count as persons, would not be bearers of dignity. We could treat them the way we treat things as opposed to persons. So, for example, you could use the body of a severely cognitively disabled people as a collection of organs to be harvested for transplantation, to save the lives of human beings we consider to be people. But by the same token, we could give no account then of the dignity and basic human rights of people who are asleep or in temporary comas or under anesthesia. People in all of those conditions lack the immediately exercisable capacities for mental activity, for deliberation and judgment and choice, and we certainly wouldn't want to say it's okay to kill a person when he's anesthetized or when the person is in a temporary coma, which should lead us to abandon the idea that our dignity consists in our immediately exercisable capacities.

Professor Robert George:

The position held, for example, by my colleague at Princeton, peter Singer, as a result of which Professor Singer says that cognitively disabled people, severely cognitively disabled people, while human beings are not persons and therefore don't need to be treated like persons. He says, of course, the same not only about the unborn, but about the newborn. He famously published an article in the Spectator magazine saying parents should have the right to kill their newborn infants if they want, up to 28 days after birth. And those positions of Professor Singer make perfect sense. If your view of the foundations of human dignity, of our very humanity, are the immediately exercisable capacities, what's that leave? The only alternative is that it's the basic natural capacity, it's our basic organization for deliberation, judgment and choice, which may still be in an underdeveloped stage or which may have been temporarily or permanently lost.

Professor Robert George:

Now you can do a little thought experiment. Let me suggest a little thought experiment which will confirm the point I'm making here. Michelle, if you were to somehow, by some magical technology, teach a horse to talk or make a horse talk, you would not be perfecting the horse as the kind of creature it already is. You'd be changing the nature of the horse Right Contrast if by some new technology or by a miracle, a severely cognitively disabled person has his cognitive capabilities restored. You would not be changing his nature. You wouldn't be changing him from one kind of thing into another. You'd be perfecting him precisely as the kind of thing he is, removing the disability that impedes the full flowering of his rationality. And that should be the knockdown that shows us that our dignity really does lie in our being a certain kind of creature, that is, a creature with a rational nature, and not in the immediately exercisable capacities that we may or may not have. That may come or go.

Michele McAloon:

I tell you, if you don't get this right in my opinion, as a traditional conservative, if you don't get this right, you don't get a whole host of things right and it should depend on whether you're a conservative or a liberal.

Professor Robert George:

I mean, the one thing that conservatives and liberals ought to share is the idea of the profound, inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. That's what certainly all of us who are American should share. That, after all, we all subscribe at least most of us, I certainly do, I know you do to that great second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. That's the one that says we hold these truths. We've all memorized it. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that basic statement of human dignity which we've always struggled to live up to.

Professor Robert George:

In our country we got off on a bad foot. We had a practice, namely slavery, poorly incompatible with that principle. And the man who wrote the words, thomas Jefferson, and who believed the words he really did, was nevertheless a slaveholder. So we've struggled to live up to that principle. But it is a true principle and it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or Republican, a liberal or a conservative. You should believe that, and most liberals and most conservatives say that they do believe it.

Professor Robert George:

None of us wants to bring back slavery, no right. None of us wants to treat a cognitive maybe the sole exception of a few outliers want to treat a cognitively disabled person as just a collection of organs for harvesting and transplantation. Now we have a big debate about abortion. I hope it doesn't become now a debate about infanticide. But once we've established a kind of common ground that we're dealing here with a human being, it is at least the instinct of most of us, formed in the culture we've been formed, in our American tradition and with the background in the classical and Hebraic traditions, the idea that man is made in the image and likeness of God want to say no. We've got to respect the inherent dignity of everybody, the weak, the vulnerable, the poor, the disabled, no matter the condition of the person. That person is an equal. We're not going to harvest a heart from a cognitively disabled child, even to save the life of a great scientist.

Michele McAloon:

Right, right, and I tell you, but it's something that we have to as human beings, as an American culture. We have to keep going over and over that again, and we see this with the accept, that basic understanding of the human person. Then it all starts, it all slips away, and now, as we face something called artificial intelligence, that I think again what is the human person? That has to be continually redefined? Not redefined but relearned? Do you agree?

Professor Robert George:

Yeah, I think we need to be careful in talking about artificial intelligence. There's a temptation to think that the machines are actually thinking.

Michele McAloon:

Right right.

Professor Robert George:

You know there's a temptation to think that, and that's not what's going on on now. That's not to say that the machines can't beat even the greatest chess master. At chess they've shown they can do that. The machines can do amazing calculations, certainly much more quickly and efficiently than even the greatest mathematician can do them. And yet there's a difference between playing chess even playing chess well and understanding the intelligible point of playing chess. There's a difference between solving a math problem and understanding that math problems are worth solving, that it's good to be able to solve math problems.

Professor Robert George:

The machines cannot make what Aristotle called the practical judgments, that is, the judgments of practical reasoning. By practical he means with a view to action, the normative judgments. Solving math problems is good, playing chess is good. It's a good exercise, it's a good thing to do. Having or being a friend is good. Pursuing intellectual knowledge of Shakespeare or the causes of the First World War or the makeup of a cell is good. Those kinds of normative judgments which human beings can make as rational creatures, exercising what Aristotle calls our practical reason, those kinds of judgments are not available to machines and will not become available to machines.

Michele McAloon:

Where's the best place to teach the value of the human being? And you bring this up as one of your pillars, and it is again. It's something we have to keep going over. We and we have to do everything we can to preserve it.

Professor Robert George:

It's the home.

Michele McAloon:

Yes, yes, thank you. People listen, listen to this.

Professor Robert George:

So let's look at it this way, michelle I you and I don't know each other well, but I do know that you are an honest person and that you care about other people and that you treat other people with dignity and respect and compassion, and that you're generous and that you're kind. Now, where did you learn those virtues? Did the political system give them to you? No, did the economic? Maybe capital? Hooray for capitalism. Did capitalism make you kind? Did it make you generous? Did it make you honored? No, how about? Did you get it from the court? Maybe a judge? Did a judge order you, michelle, to be kind, to be generous, to be loving? No, where did you get those virtues? From mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and teacher and pastor and coach and librarian, husband, husband. Yeah, you got them from the people who know you by name. Not from the political system, not from the legal system, not from the economic system, not from the courts, not from the corporations. Not from the economic system, not from the courts, not from the corporations, not from the White House, you know, and there's no substitute for what we call the institutions of civil society. This is the great lesson of the 20th century experiments with communist systems with collectivist systems where they try to displace the family and replace it with institutions of government, the institutions of the state. There's no substituting for mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and coach and rabbi and priest and minister and librarian and teacher. There's no substituting. The only way you're going to be formed to be a decent person, a virtuous person, is the people, by the people who know you by name, who know your sensitivities, who know your strengths, who know your weaknesses, who know where you need a little more of a push, know when you need a little pat on the head, know when you need a hug. It's those people who form us to be virtuous people. If we do get formed to be virtuous people, it's also those people, and not just the big celebrities and the big politicians and the heroes. It's those people who inspire us.

Professor Robert George:

I look at my own life. I'm sure you can tell a story from your life. We could pull anybody off the street and they'll be able to tell a version of the story. Who inspired me, my dad? They'll be able to tell a version of the story who inspired me, my dad.

Professor Robert George:

When I was 12 years old I saw my dad, world War II vet. I always admired my dad. My dad, by the way, was not an educated man, never went to college. My mom didn't go to college. I was the first in my family to go to college. So you look at lots of ways that my dad and I I've got three doctorates from Oxford. My dad didn't finish high school. They sent him a diploma but they had gone into the war before the senior year over. He was off there fighting in Normandy and Brittany. So they sent his folks a diploma. But you know, my dad and I have totally different educational backgrounds and so forth and yet I look up to him as really the greatest man I've ever known.

Professor Robert George:

When I was 12 years old I watched my father race across a three quarter of an acre field into a burning building, a ball of flame, to rescue a paraplegic man in a wheelchair. Wow, Wow. I watched that. I and the brother next in age were five of us, all boys. I was 12. My brother next in age was 10. He and I were there together.

Professor Robert George:

We watched my dad do that and he pulled out of that. My dad was about five foot nine, maybe 160 pounds. He pulled out a six foot plus man who must've weighed about 200, who was dead weight, he was paraplegic pulled that man out of the fire. Now that's who inspired me. Now, I also had, you know, boyhood like baseball heroes, like Roberto Clemente and so forth, and they were great and inspiring. But if you look at what I aspire to, even in the area of having courage, the kind of courage I am called on to display, to be very different from my dad's. I'm not asked to run into burning bills, at least not so far, but when I do need courage, it's my dad's inspiration.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's just what it's you know, we and you bring out so well. And I really go back to this it's we are not individuals. We are individuals, but we are not individualistic in our development. We depend so much on each other. We're born into situations that we have no choice of and that we make the best of it, and it makes us.

Professor Robert George:

We make them and it makes us Exactly make them and it makes us this or that religious tradition, this or that nation or culture. Those are not our choices. They were kind of formed by things that other people did, decisions that other people made, sometimes very specific people like mom and dad, sometimes larger cultures. I mean, there's a reason that I'm wearing what you see me I know we're not on video for your listeners but I'm wearing an ordinary collared shirt. I'm not wearing a toga. Now why am I not wearing a toga Right, as long as it would be my mode of dressing?

Professor Robert George:

This is a trivial example, but it's illustrative. My mode of dressing is basically determined not by me. I didn't get up in the morning and say should I wear a collared shirt here today, maybe a tie, or should I put on a toga? No, I didn't, because there are certain cultural norms that are put. It wouldn't be a sin for me to wear a toga. It wouldn't be bad. I'd look very peculiar in this culture if I went around in a toga. But it's just a little trivial example to show the way in which culture shapes our decision-making.

Michele McAloon:

And it really does. And we've seen over the past I would say decade to 20 years we've seen where people are choosing some really different paths. They choose they. You know, we're seeing the birth of Gnosticism. For some reason, that is a heresy that just keeps coming out again and again.

Professor Robert George:

Will your listeners, Michelle, know what Gnosticism is?

Michele McAloon:

No, please define Gnosticism, because it's an old one and it's around.

Professor Robert George:

We go all the way back to the second century after Christ. Christianity was doctrinally still taking shape. There were still the great early councils that were defining the dogmas of Christianity the Trinity, the incarnation and the virgin birth and so forth and there were many different sects, s-e-c-t-s. Sects that identified themselves as Christian, who thought of themselves as Christian. Now some of those sects came to be known as the Gnostics, that's spelled G-N-O-S-T-I-C-S. The Gnostics. And there were two really interesting things about the Gnostics. Now they came to be declared heretics. They lost in the battle to define the basic doctrines of Christianity.

Professor Robert George:

But there were two things about them that were interesting for us. One is their belief. They held the belief that genuine spiritual knowledge was not held by the great mass of people, the great mass of Christians, the ordinary laity of the church. Rather, true spiritual knowledge was held by a small elite, what might be called an elect, who had secret knowledge of religious truth. That's really where the word Gnostic, gnosis comes from. That's a word for knowledge. They thought that the elite had the secret knowledge.

Professor Robert George:

The second distinctive belief they had was the belief that human beings are not body-soul composites. They're not both body and soul what a human being really is what a human person is, is a soul trapped in a body. So the body is not part of the real you or me. Our bodies, our bodies are almost like prisons that the soul resides in. But the body is not part of the personal reality of the self. Body is a sub-personal instrument of the self, where the self is considered to be the conscious and desiring part of the self, the spiritual part of the spiritual reality. So if our bodies are sub-personal, they ultimately don't matter. Now here Gnostics divided, since they regarded the body as sub-personal and almost like a prison. Some Gnostics were highly ascetical, they deprecated the body and they rejected all bodily pleasure.

Michele McAloon:

They died out, they got out.

Professor Robert George:

They wanted free. They wanted the soul liberated from the body. Other Gnostics, though, took the opposite view, and, since the body really didn't matter, we could live debauched bodily lives without it infecting the purity of our souls, because our bodies really are us. So they were sexually promiscuous and libertine and didn't care what they did with the body. After all, it's not the real me. The real me is the soul, and, of course, what Christianity and Judaism opted for at the end was rejecting, actually, both those beliefs, both the idea that there's a secret knowledge that some elite or elect holds. That got rejected, that's declared heretical by the Christian church.

Professor Robert George:

Non-bodily persons, spirits, souls, mental substances occupying and using non-personal bodies. The body's not part of the personal reality of the human being. That's so-called dualism, gnostic dualism separating body and soul, and this helps to explain why both Christianity and Judaism went, in the end, for the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. It would have been much easier for those early Christians to say well, jesus's resurrection doesn't mean that his corpse was resuscitated or that he actually was physically raised from the dead. After all, who cares about the body? Body doesn't matter, so Jesus's body's rotting away somewhere in a tomb. It doesn't matter, though, because the real Jesus is not the body, it's the spirit, and the spirit is alive and the spirit is with us, and spirit went to heaven, and Jesus's resurrection is Jesus with us in spirit. And then, you know, at the end of the, our own lives will be liberated from our bodies, our souls will go to heaven or to the other place if we're dead, but our bodies will rot away and we'll never hear from them again.

Professor Robert George:

But christianity, like modern judaism, went for the idea that no, there will at the end be a resurrection of the body, that we will exist for as long as we exist, which is for eternity. In christian preaching, as bodies as well as souls, the body is not a mere extrinsic instrument of the self, it's part of ourselves. So we are our bodies, whatever else we are. We're not merely our bodies, because we also have a spiritual, non-material dimension to us. But the body is part of our personal reality, and therefore we're responsible for treating our bodies in a way that's consistent with our dignity as human persons. We neither deprecate them and eschew all bodily satisfactions, nor live in a way that's debauched.

Michele McAloon:

And this has, and again this Gnosticism has arisen again. I'm not real sure why. I think it probably if you really trace it back between science and breakup of the family and medicality and the belief that you can change your body, you can change your being, you can change your essence and it's why you have to understand what the human person is, because if you don't get it right, it's really tragic in consequences.

Professor Robert George:

Yeah, there's certainly a temptation of people to think that the real me is the mental part and the bodily part is just the extrinsic instrument that the mental part has at its disposal and can dispose of in any way it wishes. So you know, you might have a body. So again, take my colleague Peter Singer. He's a very good example of a person, a contemporary person, a thinker, who embraces the dualism that was characteristic of Gnosticism. So Peter says of a Professor Singer says of an unborn child, or of a newborn child, really up until several months after birth, peter says well, of course you have a human being there. It's not a potato or a rhinoceros or broccoli. Of course you have a human being there. It's not a potato or a rhinoceros or broccoli. Of course you have a human being. An infant child is a human being. But because you don't yet have mental functioning, you've got a body. Without mental functioning you don't have a person. The person is the mental thing. It's not a mental substance, it's not the body. Same, for a person who's severely cognitively disabled, professor Singer will say of course that's a human being, but it's not a person. And therefore, if we destroy that human being in order to harvest its organs. We haven't done any harm or wrong to a person. We've used the organs to save people who are persons because they've got the level of mental functioning that is required to qualify as persons. And you can go through all these issues, including the transsexual or transgender issue, and you can see the same thing. If the real me is the conscious and desiring aspect of the self, the mental self, and the body is the extrinsic instrument, well then it's at least conceivable that you could have a female mental apparatus, a female person that's inhabiting a male biology or a male body. So what do you fix? Do you fix the body or do you fix the mind? Well, you fix the body to bring the body in line with the real person being the mental substance.

Professor Robert George:

It's important to understand and I try to bring this across in the book it really is important to understand that basic philosophical judgments, whether they're implicit or explicit, whether you think about it and have a developed theory about it or not. Implicitly, one way or another, you're going to be making some judgments which will inform your ethical views about what a human person is, what it means to be a human being, and I want to get those judgments right and I want our young people to get those judgments right, which is why I've written this book not just for a general audience. So I hope everybody of all ages will will read it. It's not written for my fellow academics, I mean it's it's for general audiences, but I especially want young people to read it. So if you've got, you know, children or grandchildren in high school or college, I'd love you to get the book into their hands so that they can wrestle with the questions that I want them to be wrestling with, that they really have to be wrestling with, like the question what does it mean to be a human being?

Professor Robert George:

What are we? Are we just our bodies? Are we just our minds? What are we?

Michele McAloon:

It's such an important question to answer and I want to. It's a question, it's a really important question to ask and it's an important question to answer and how it's answered is so important. And I want to tell my listening audience out there that the book, in almost all natural law theory I find, is not hard to read because it is eminently logical. It really is. There's nothing fancy, there's nothing overtly technical about it, because it just it makes sense, it really calls to your human reason and this you do a really nice job. It's actually it's a very serious subject but a very easy read. I wouldn't say easy, but not a hard read, not an onerous read, and it you really your brain grows when reading this kind of book our future right.

Professor Robert George:

So you know there's some very bad directions that young people are being induced to go in these days. So that's why I wrote it at that level. You know, as an academic, I sometimes have to do academic writing. I've done quite a bit of it in my life and I know when I'm doing that kind of writing that I'm writing for 300 other professors in the field and that's basically it. But this is not one of those books. I've written those books, but this is not one of those books. I've written those books, but this is not one of those books. This really is for a general audience and, like everybody, has an interest in seeking truth and speaking truth and being a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker. That's what this book is about. It's not just for egghead professors.

Michele McAloon:

Let me ask you two things, Professor George. I've always thought your writing is extremely clear. I'm not one of your 300 academics, but I have always thought it's extremely clear in where I've been able to see it and where I've been able to find it. You talk about Professor Peter Singer as one of your colleagues, but you're also friends with him, right?

Professor Robert George:

Oh, absolutely right, Absolutely.

Michele McAloon:

How do you do that? And your book goes over this. And I think that's another really good, important point in this book of how you see things I wouldn't say disagree how you see things from different angles and how you respect that with the other person.

Professor Robert George:

I do not find this a challenge at all. I know some people do, and that's fine, but I've never found it a challenge to talk with people, engage with people, be friends with people I disagree with, even about fundamental questions. All I ask of anybody is that they try to get at the truth, which is what I'm trying to do, and that they give me their reasons for why they disagree with me and they will are willing to listen to my reasons for why I disagree with them. I think really, all we can ask of each other in this veil of tears you know we're all frail, fall, fallible, fallen creatures I think the most we can ask of each other, all we can really ask of each other, is that we do business in the proper currency of intellectual discourse. There's a currency of intellectual discourse. There's a currency of intellectual discourse just as there's an economic currency. It's dollars and cents in the United States and pounds and pence in Britain. Well, the currency of intellectual discourse consists of reasons, arguments and evidence.

Professor Robert George:

And Professor Singer or my friend Cornel West, with whom I disagree on most things in politics but with whom I teach and have a wonderful relationship we do business, they do business, Peter does business. Cornell does business in the proper currency of intellectual discourse. They don't shout and scream. They don't call people names. They don't question my motives. I don't question theirs. I don't call them names. I listen to their arguments. They listen to my arguments. Sometimes we'll persuade each other. Most of the time we won't, but we'll deepen our knowledge on both sides, even where we can't reach agreement. I've found my own knowledge to be really profoundly deepened by engaging with Peter Singer, listening to his arguments and responding to them.

Michele McAloon:

The very best of our Roman Catholic heritage, too, is Thomas Aquinas our scholasticism of being able to bring different sides of the argument. Listen to different sides of the argument. I just listened to a great interview with Arthur Brooks up at Harvard talking about you know what the first ingredient is listening, listening to the other person and understanding that the person's intent is good right, Arthur's a very good friend of mine and he's really great on this stuff.

Professor Robert George:

He really is.

Michele McAloon:

He really is Good. But you know what I mean. The United States is in great hands with great minds like yours and Mr Brooks and so many. There's more great minds than less great minds in the States. We just have to recognize that, I think.

Professor Robert George:

I conclude Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, michelle, with some profiles of, or tributes, in a way, to, some people that I regard as inspiring truth seekers, some from many decades or even a century or more back, and some from the contemporary period. So I talk about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was a great truth seeker, the German Jewish Christian poet, heinrich Heine in the 1830s, who foresaw the rise of Hitler. He didn't know that, a guy with a little funny mustache with the name Abel, but he foresaw, in the collapse of Germany's historic faith, its biblical faith, the dark future that would come, and it did come. I've got a tribute to my beloved late friend, rabbi Jonathan Sachs, who was chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and from whom I learned an enormous amount. We were very dear friends. And I've even got a tribute to my fellow banjo player. I mentioned that I'm a West Virginia.

Michele McAloon:

I saw that.

Professor Robert George:

And you know in West Virginia banjos are issued to little boys at birth. So I'm a banjo player and I have a tribute to Ralph Standley, who was almost a West Virginia and he was from the Western part of Virginia, and I have that in there because he combined his music with his spiritual life and his Christian faith in a really profound and very simple and childlike, almost in the best sense way, and I treat that as exemplary both for a musician and for a Christian believer. So those little tributes I hope will be interesting to people. I put them forward as examples of determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers who should inspire us.

Michele McAloon:

And you know what. You bring up the value of courage, and I know you learned that from your father, who was a Normandy vet who was rescuing people out of burning buildings. But we need that. We need courageous men and women that are willing to stand up and to seek the truth. Your book does a great job of showing us how to do this in our lives and I can't thank you enough. I know you have another meeting to go to, but to be able to talk to someone of your stature, I have to tell you it's truly probably the honor of my podcasting, really.

Professor Robert George:

Thank you, michelle. The honor is really mine to be on your show and I hope we can do it again.

Michele McAloon:

I hope so too, sir. Thank you so much, Thank you.

Professor Robert George:

Bye-bye now.

Michele McAloon:

If you've enjoyed my conversation with Professor Robert George, I really highly suggest you buy his wonderful book. It would be a great book for teenagers, young adults, for a good family conversation. It really is a phenomenal book by a phenomenal intellect. If you have enjoyed this interview, please like and subscribe. It helps me a big deal and go find out more about me on bookcluescom. Thanks, god bless.