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Benjamin Franklin: Jean Jacques, I want to start with something simple. In seventeen seventy six, a group of men sat in a room in Philadelphia and wrote a document that began with the proposition that all men are created equal. No king signed it. No bishop blessed it. It derived its authority from the people themselves. I would like you to sit with that for a moment before you tell me it meant nothing.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: I have sat with it for considerably longer than a moment, Franklin. I have sat with it for two and a half centuries, which gives me a certain advantage in seeing how the story ends. A document that begins with equality and proceeds to enshrine slavery in its companion constitution is not a triumph of reason. It is reason wearing a very convincing disguise.
Benjamin Franklin: I did not say the founding was perfect. I said it was different. There is a difference between a flawed beginning and a false one.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Is there. Every civilization in history has told itself it was the flawed beginning of something glorious. Rome told itself that. France told itself that, right up until the guillotine disagreed. What makes American flaws merely flaws, while everyone else’s flaws are evidence of the rot?
Benjamin Franklin: I will tell you what makes it different, since you asked, even if you asked the way a man asks a question he has already decided not to listen to the answer of. No hereditary aristocracy. No established church with the power to imprison you for your beliefs. A frontier that let a man reinvent himself if the city he was born in did not suit him. I reinvented myself roughly four times and nobody once asked which duke my father served.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Your father was a candlemaker, Franklin. I am aware. You have mentioned it in nearly every speech you have given since the seventeen hundreds, and I confess I find the persistence almost moving, the way one finds a man’s insistence on telling the same story at every dinner party almost moving.
Benjamin Franklin: It is a good story.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: It is the only story America knows how to tell about itself. The candlemaker’s son who became something greater. But ask yourself why that story requires telling so often. A people secure in their own goodness do not need to repeat the myth every generation. They live it quietly. The fact that America must constantly remind itself that it is exceptional suggests, to a careful listener, that some part of the national mind suspects it might not be.
Benjamin Franklin: That is a clever line, and I want you to know I noticed how hard you worked on it.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: I did not work hard on it at all. It arrived to me whole, the way truth tends to arrive to those who have suffered enough to recognize it.
Benjamin Franklin: Now see, that is the difference between us in a single sentence. I built a printing press, a postal system, a library, a university, and helped build a nation, and I did all of it without once describing my own suffering as a qualification. You have written entire books in which your personal unhappiness functions as a kind of philosophical credential. I am not mocking the unhappiness, Jean Jacques. I am questioning whether it tells us anything true about civilization, or only something true about you.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: That is precisely the kind of remark a comfortable man makes about an uncomfortable truth. You assume that because my observations arose from pain, they must be merely personal. I would suggest the opposite. Comfort blinds a man to the chains around him. I felt mine, Franklin, because I never had the luxury of pretending they were not there.
Benjamin Franklin: I felt chains too. I was indentured to my own brother as a boy and ran from it the first chance I got. The difference is I did not conclude from my chains that all civilization was a trap. I concluded that the particular arrangement I was born into was bad, and I went and built a better one.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: And there it is. The entire American delusion in one sentence. You did not escape civilization, Franklin. You simply built a more elaborate cage and convinced yourself the new bars were freedom because you had a hand in forging them.
Benjamin Franklin: A constitution that a man can amend is not the same thing as a cage, Jean Jacques. A cage does not generally include a provision for the prisoners to vote on whether to enlarge it.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: A cage with a complaint box is still a cage. I would have thought a man as clever as you claims to be could see the difference between genuine liberty and the mere appearance of participation in one’s own confinement.
Benjamin Franklin: Here is what I think is actually happening, and I say this with genuine affection. You looked at civilization, found that it disappointed you personally, and built an entire philosophy around the proposition that it must disappoint everyone, because the alternative, that perhaps it was you in particular who struggled to be happy within it, was too painful to consider.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: That is an extraordinarily convenient theory for a man who benefited enormously from the very civilization he is defending. It is easy to praise the cage when you have been given the most comfortable corner of it.
Benjamin Franklin: I was not given the comfortable corner, Jean Jacques. I built it, with my own hands, starting with nothing, and then I spent the rest of my life trying to make sure other men without inheritance could build their own corners too. That is not a small distinction. That is the entire distinction.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: And how many men, Franklin, building their corners on land that was not given to them but taken, from people who had a rather different opinion about who was entitled to build there at all?
Benjamin Franklin: Now you are changing the subject from whether civilization corrupts to whether this particular civilization committed injustices in its founding, and those are not the same question, even if you would like them to be, because the second one is considerably easier for you to win.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: They are not different questions at all. They are the same question asked at different scales. A nation that claims its institutions liberate the human spirit while building those institutions atop the bones of people it refused to recognize as fully human is not an exception to the corruptions of civilization. It is a particularly thorough demonstration of them.
Benjamin Franklin: I will grant you that the founding contained a moral catastrophe inside it, and I will grant you that I, personally, did not do nearly enough about it while I lived, which is a thing I have had a great deal of time since to sit with. But a catastrophe inside a structure does not prove the entire structure is rotten. It proves the structure was unfinished, and the question that actually matters is whether a society built on reason has the internal machinery to correct its own catastrophes, or whether it requires an outside hand entirely.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: And there is the actual disagreement, stated plainly for once instead of buried under your charm. You believe reason, properly applied, corrects itself. I believe reason is simply the language sophisticated societies use to make their corruptions sound inevitable.
Benjamin Franklin: That is the most honest thing either of us has said since this conversation began, and I confess I am almost disappointed in you for managing it, since I had grown rather fond of watching you dress your fury up as Socratic detachment.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: I notice you did not deny that I have a point.
Benjamin Franklin: I have not finished deciding whether you do. I find that men who arrive at their conclusions as quickly as you do are usually more interested in the arriving than in the conclusion itself.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: And I find that men who delay their conclusions as elegantly as you do are usually protecting something they would rather not examine.
Benjamin Franklin: Perhaps. Or perhaps I have simply lived long enough, in more countries than you ever managed to stay welcome in, to know that the answer to whether reason can build something genuinely freer than what came before is not going to be settled by either of us in an evening.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: No. It is going to take considerably longer than an evening. Which is convenient for you, since it postpones the moment when America has to actually answer for what its reason has built.
Benjamin Franklin: We have a great deal more ground to cover, Jean Jacques, and I suspect neither of us is going to enjoy covering it.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: On that, Franklin, for what I believe is the first time tonight, we are in complete agreement.
