Kevin Walsh:
Okay, good afternoon and welcome to this conversation with author Luke Burgis. I’m Kevin Walsh, Knights of Columbus Professor of Law in the Catholic Tradition here at the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of law. This afternoon’s conversation is sponsored by CIT, the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, and is offered as part of our project on judicial virtues. But this event is a conversation with Luke Burgis, a man of many talents who has invested them wisely, including to yield his authorship of this book we’re discussing today, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Welcome.
Luke Burgis:
Thanks for having me.
Kevin Walsh:
Well, let’s begin with a prayer. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Lead us Lord in your path that we will enter into your truth. Let our hearts be glad and that we may fear your name. Let us take joy in your law, meditating on it day and night, that we may be like trees, plants and near streams of water that our leaves may not wither. Come Holy Spirit and fill the hearts of Your faithful and kindle in them the fire of Your love. Send forth Your Spirit and they are created, and You will renew the face of the Earth. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Okay. Well, welcome once again and thank you for being with us. Now, any summary of a book can either be too easy or too hard, too short, too long, no substitute as all our students so for doing the reading. So we’re not going to do that, but a good way to begin is probably this. How about, can you locate your authorship of this book, sort of where it fits in the trajectory of your work and your prior writing and other aspects of your life? Why this book? How does it fit now?
Luke Burgis:
Sure. Well, I should start by saying, and this might be anathema to professors and students in the law school, but one of my favorite books, and I mean this sincerely, is a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by a Frenchman named Pierre Bayard. And it’s a fascinating book because he says in the act of reading a book, you have to be forgetting. You can’t remember every word. So what does it even mean to have read a book? And all of us bring a kind of inner book, which is a collection of the images and phrases and ideas that we’ve accumulated over the course of our life into the act of reading a book. So no two people ever read a book the same way. And I thought about that a lot. I highly recommend it. I’m not suggesting that anybody not read law texts or anything like that. But in general, this book, I had my own inner book that I brought to it. And Kevin, you had yours. And that’s one of the reasons I love having conversations like this is to find out what happens during those encounters.
So mine started when I wrote my first book in 2018, which was a book called Unrepeatable with a small Catholic publisher. And it was a book about personal vocation. My own struggles to discern my vocation led to my writing that book. And in writing it … When I finished writing it, I was somewhat unsatisfied because usually when we’re talking about vocation and discernment in the church, it sort of takes on an image of just me alone in a room with God trying to discern my vocation. And I began to take a deep interest in the ways in which things like that happen in the real world, in the historical circumstances, in relationships, in the social forces that are at work in everybody’s lives that shape all of their decision making, or at least exert a force on it from the first job that they pursue to romantic interest to the desires that they pursue.
And I realized that the kind of social dimension of discernment and vocation was really important. So that led me to step back and write a book about one of my favorite thinkers, René Girard, a Catholic philosopher who is famous for his theory of mimetic desire or the role that unconscious imitation plays in human life. And this book was for a broad general audience. So I was trying to kind of probe some of these questions, but the underlying theme that I was always interested in is how do people make decisions about the purpose of their life and what they’re going to devote their time and energy to? And it seemed to me that the kind of social dynamics had not received the kind of treatment that I thought that they should receive.
And then this book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, was a follow-up to that book. And it’s the second book in a trilogy of books. There’s one coming after this. It’s taking me three books to feel like I’m sufficiently probing the question. And this book kind of picks up where Wanting, my book on Girard left off. So Wanting was a book with one big idea, and the big idea was the power of mimetic desire in everyday life, the role in which unconscious mimesis affects the way that we make decisions. But I only had one job with that book, and my job was basically to explain to the world what mimetic desire is. This book was the one that I was most excited to write because I could finally apply these ideas to different domains of human life in applied ways. So to the education system, to the family, to religion and the spiritual life, to work.
So this book was kind of a tour de force in that sense, but it’s the one that even when I started to write Wanting, I started to write this book while I was writing Wanting. And my publisher kept pulling me back and telling me to stick with the big idea and that I could always write all of those other things later. So that’s where this one came in. And it’s part of me working out some of these complex social problems as they relate to vocation and discernment in my own life.
Kevin Walsh:
Well, it does cover a lot of ground and a lot of different literatures. I think it might be helpful to look at it from a structural point of view first before we … And we won’t go just beginning to end. But, it has a prologue and introduction, there’s 10 chapters in three parts. So I thought, all right, a three-part structure, this is not that remarkable. There’s lots of books with three-part structures. But then I started thinking a lot of people, a lot of Thomists, when they’re trying to find out where someone is coming from, and you think about what is the relationship among the three parts of the Summa, something like that. And there’s different accounts there. Well, what are the three parts of the book? How is it structured? Because this is a question we can’t ask Aquinas, where why is the structure what it is? So it’s supposed to be in some ways evident to the reader and to take you through, but I think if you could describe the structure of the book and the why of that structure.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. I’m probably more of an Augustinian than a Thomist, but I have read the Summa. I think that the structure is meant to be pedological too. It’s meant to have a natural order to it and the very structure should say something. It should be logical. I guess in the Summa, it’s sort of God, man, Christ. Exitus, reditus is the basic structure of the Summa as I understand it.
And this book starts with, it’s not that different from that actually, it starts with the tension between the one and the many. It’s the whole first part of the book, the tension between the one and the many. What does it mean to be myself, but also to exist in a world of social relationships where people have expectations on me? What is that fundamental tension? So just kind of describing the world and trying to help everyone identify and locate that tension within themselves. And this, by the way, the one and the many is one of the most fundamental classical questions of metaphysics.
And then it goes into the self in a fractured world. What does it mean to be a self? What is the selfhood of a human person in a very fractured world where ourself or our sense of self can feel holed in many different directions, especially with technology and a whole chapter on technology about the way that it’s sort of making us feel like we have 99 selves sometimes. We’re presenting a different self to the world in different ways.
And then the third section of the book is how to be a solid self and to build what I call a solid self, which is one of the key terms in the book, in real community. So the idea is that we are relational creatures and forging a self or a solid self as I call it, the kind of self that has like Thomas Moore, who is one of my heroes, St. Thomas Moore, who was not a selfish man, he’s a saint, but he was able to say when push came to shove, “I believe this. I believe this.” And even when his best friend came to him and said, “Well, wouldn’t you come along with the rest of us out of fellowship?” Said, “Norfolk, I love you and respect you, but I believe this and therefore I can’t. And when you go to heaven for following your conscience and I go to hell for not following mine, will you come join me out of fellowship?”
So it’s this idea of a personal conscience that’s always been inspiring to me. So the whole last part of the book is kind of the relationship between the self in relationship with others and the forging of a healthy sense of who we are that is other oriented and is able to be in communion with other people. And my fundamental message is that the best communities are formed, that they allow people to become who they are, and they’re made up of people who are able to exercise their conscience to live in the truth and to not be constantly making concessions or acting in ways that sacrifice their integrity.
Kevin Walsh:
That idea of becoming who you are is a core commitment of this university. It’s interesting. You look on the website and you say, “Who are we? What do we do? And what do we value and what are we trying to accomplish and why should you be a student here?” So it’s interesting that you put it that way. I have a sense of the structure.
Another thing I think it’s helpful to get out on the table is it’s an unusual book in that there’s different kinds of writing in there. It’s nonfiction, but it is … And so I would call these just different elements. So one would be the substantive content, just organized bodies of knowledge, systems theory for families or literary theory or the Rule of St. Benedict and different kinds of things. So that’s one type of content and that’s interspersed with historical narrative. Then there’s the narrative text, it’s a very personal book.
So there’s the narrative and then there’s these probes. I wonder if you could explain the decision to have these three different kinds of elements and why they were necessary in some ways to write this book, not a book that is just let me explain family systems theory, let me explain this, that or the other thing, but also let me show you in some ways parts of my life and parts of realizations I’ve come to together with these prose. Why are they all ignorant?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. I have a philosophy of books that I won’t have time to get into in this conversation, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it as a four-time author now. I started writing this book in the very month that ChatGPT-3 was released. So what is the future of the book, right? Nonfiction book sales, prescriptive non-fiction sales dropped by 80% since November of 2023. I also just think that what is a book? There should be an encounter and an event, not just a passive consumption of content. I really don’t have any interest in just writing things that are consumed. I want them to be truly engaged with.So yes, there is part of the book is kind of like a normal book, a non-fiction book, in that there are a bunch of interconnected ideas that I hope change a person’s mind or helps change their worldview in some way. Then there are the personal narrative sections that fit between each chapter. I did not think that I could write a book about the forging of the self and a question of identity without, in some sense, telling my own story and my own personal narrative and the different kind of rites of passage that I went through that helped me see in a personal way the very thing that I was about to write about in the next chapter. I thought that if you can see … And I shared, self-disclosure is always an interesting question, so I thought about it and prayed about it and you have a little tiny piece of my story. It is personal, but I thought I owed it to the reader to do that and you’ll never get that from an AI. These are very personal relationships for me.
Then the probe part is probably the strangest part of the book, Kevin, I don’t know if you’d agree, but it’s an idea that I got from one of my favorite thinkers, Marshall McLuhan, who’s the grandfather of media theory and media studies in the United States. He always liked to say, “I don’t explain things, I probe things. I like to probe.” A probe is a question or an image or something that dislocates the reader and kind of forces them to actively engage with something. It’s not an answer, it’s not an explanation. Quite literally, it’s me as the author probing and prodding the reader as best I can. So they exist before every chapter and they’re strange and they’re meant to sort of surprise you and make you ask, “Well, what is this?”
I actually had a large … You wouldn’t know this, Kevin, but I had a long note to reader at the beginning of the book explaining what a probe was, the philosophy of the probe, and at the very last minute, we decided to kill the whole thing so that you’re just reading along and you come to the first one and you’re not expecting it.
Kevin Walsh:
Right. Well, I thought that both the graphic elements, just the attention to detail in the graphics and together with the probes, and some of the probes are visual, and we’ll talk about some of them. We’ll look at them. I was going to start with our look at the graphics and the probe, but I want to go right actually to the first probe because I will report as a reader … Okay, so this is Probe 1 and Probe 12. And what’s interesting is first I talked about readers. Before I was a reader of this book, I was listening to the audiobook version. Okay. And that is interesting. You think as an author, actually, the probes don’t carry over the same way. And there’s a particular instruction that the audiobook gives, do not go, but I won’t say where, but it tells you, do not go to this place.
And I would say I found it annoying because I was like, “What does this even mean?” So I’m like, “I can’t go anywhere. I’m driving.” But it stood out. So the one, you used this word dislocating. It dislocated me because it drove me nuts sometimes you hear these otherwise very good podcasts and they say, “Wherever you consume your podcasts.” And you’re like, “No, but we don’t consume things.” But, it dislocated me. But it was annoying. And then when I read … Not annoying in the … It was, “What kind of book is this?” But then when I got the version, I was reading it said, “Do not scan this.” And then at the end, your turn to probe, and I’m just stubborn. So I did not scan that one. I was like, “Is this a test? I don’t know. How do you fail or pass the test?” But I didn’t scan it. And then your turn to probe, I’m like, “No, I’m done with the book.”
Did I do this wrong as an author or did this have their function even though those were my reactions?
Luke Burgis:
It’s a thing of beauty to hear, because it seems like they worked. They got you asking, “What is this?” And no, I’m not going to do that. So this really was not easy for me to pull off because a big publisher does not like stuff like this in books. I’m going to put a QR code in a book, and I fought for it because I wanted to experiment and take some risks with this one. So the original subtitle of this book was changed, was Coercion, Conformity, and the Courage for Truth.
So in the first probe, you have me, the author, telling you to do or not do something. So it’s actually-
Kevin Walsh:
It’s bossy.
Luke Burgis:
… putting into effect the very thing that the book is supposed to be about. You’re supposed to react to it and like, “What? Do not scan this.” And obviously I thought that most people would scan it. It’s also supposed to be funny-
Kevin Walsh:
It’s like Rick Astley or something or …
Luke Burgis:
No, no, it’s nothing that ridiculous. So this is supposed to be kind of playful. And I have been shocked at the number of people that have told me, “I did not scan that QR code.” People are really adamant. They did not scan it. So that was a total surprise. I would not have guessed that, and I won’t tell you what’s behind it. So you learn something about yourself, right? That’s the whole point of the probe, whether you’re a scanner or a non-scanner, that’s the whole point. So you’re actively engaged in the very concept thing that the book is about. And then the last one, there’s 10 in between, the last one in the whole book is I’ve been probing you this whole time as the author throughout the book. Now it’s your turn, I would love you to probe me or to probe other people.
So I will tell you what that one goes to. That one simply goes to a little form and a website where you’ve now seen me give you a model of what a probe is, and it just gives a text box where you can write a probe and I publish them on a website. And part of it is just for selfish reasons, I just want to see what my readers actually probe. Have you read the book? What do they actually think and what kinds of probes did they come up with? So that one has just been, frankly, both of them have been very surprising in these really generative ways.
Kevin Walsh:
Well, glad to hear that I didn’t do it wrong. Well, let’s kind of look at some of the visual elements as well and talk about some of the choices that you made as an author in addition to that one. And you all as readers, now you’re going to have to make … So you’re warned, are you a scanner or not? This book will not judge you, but it will dislocate you, and this is a good thing.
So let’s go to the cover of the book. So it’s called The One and the Ninety-Nine, and you have different people here, but The One and the Ninety-Nine, of course, refers to sheep, to the parable. And I guess one question here is why a parable about sheep? Why have a title tied to … There’s a lot of different ways about the problem of the one and the many, but this is about sheep. And how does that relate to the subtitle of Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion?
Luke Burgis:
The One and the Ninety-Nine is inspired by the parable of the lost sheep in the Gospel of Luke. It’s a parable that I’ve heard my whole life, and it always left me with questions. When I translated the sheep into humans, I always thought that there was more to that parable than its traditional theological interpretation. That the lost sheep is the sinner, good shepherd brings back to the fold and rejoices. I think there’s an anthropological or social way to view really most things in the scriptures, which is what René Girard did also, by the way, who’s one of my intellectual heroes. So I kind of took the anthropological lens to that parable, not discounting its theological meaning in any way. I thought what actually happened there when the sheep left, wandered away?
Isn’t this kind of a story of all of our lives, right? We’re in a fam born into a family, born into a community. We test boundaries, we leave, maybe we come back. Do we come back different than when we left? Are we transformed what happened to us while we were away? That is the fundamental question for me. I thought that the parable was a powerful image for social life in general. I think I decided to use it when I read the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which contains the same parable, but with a huge difference, which is why it’s a gnostic gospel. And in that gospel, Jesus finds the lost sheep and praises the lost sheep for being basically smarter and better than all of the rest.
Having some secret knowledge, you can now follow me closer. All of those other dumb 99, they don’t understand what I’m trying to do here. You’re the good sheep. I found that so fascinating. It’s kind of like it describes our own time right now where everybody’s sort of trying to be the outlier, trying to be differentiated for whatever reason. And that’s not the message in Luke and Matthew and the actual gospels where sheep comes back into communion. And yes, we’re all unique and unrepeatable in our own ways, but the goal is not differentiation for the sake of differentiation. It’s to become who we’re created to be for the sake of being the communion with other people.
Kevin Walsh:
And you mentioned that it’s from Luke and that is indeed the one that is in the epigraph or that you quote. Why the Luke version? I understand why not the Thomas but Matthew, that’s the first one that we have that’s listed, right? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Why the Luke one? Because they are different and how does the Luke one fit in a way that the Matthew one relates something different, I suppose?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. Somebody was like, “Obviously because your name’s Luke.” I was like, “I’m not that much of a narcissist.” That’s not why I chose it. It’s a very particular reason. In Luke, it is told as part of a triptych of three parables, and it starts with the parable of the lost sheep. The second parable told is the woman who loses a coin, 1 out of 10 coins, and cleans her whole house until she finds it. And then the last of the three is the parable of the prodigal son.
The hidden structure of the book is really the story of the prodigal son. So it’s kind of a bait and switch. You start with the parable of a lost sheep and it’s titled after the parable of the lost sheep. But as you read the book, you realize it’s very personal. It involves my relationship with my father who has Alzheimer’s disease, and it’s really a story about the parable of the prodigal son and sort of returning to a sense of who we are in and through our relationships with other people. So for that larger context is really the primary reason why I chose it.
Kevin Walsh:
Okay. Well, I think maybe we’ll try and come back to that idea because there’s also a shift by the end of the book in some ways to the shepherd perspective. In some ways, this refers to the sheep, but in the Luke inversion, he said, “Which one of you having lost the sheep will not go out?” In other words, this is what the shepherd does, this is what the father does. But that’s at the end of the book, so we’ll get there. I counted, there are indeed a hundred, there’s 99 and the one going off. And then in the back cover, this is an unusual author picture, but if we count that one twice, that’s 101. So I think that one sort of made it-
Luke Burgis:
I think it’s the same guy, same one. Yeah.
Kevin Walsh:
But are we sort of one that way? So this picture reminded me of the old cartoons where you had the angel, the devil, and this is a sort of wandering person. Is there any … And I know you said maybe it’s just a picture, but are we one and wandering this person or in some ways do we contain many because of the way we’re relational as persons, if that makes sense?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. Well, the art director did not tell me they were going to do that. The book showed up in the mail and I opened it up and saw that and I was like, that’s a nice little touch, but I did not know that they were going to do that or what the meaning is, or that was one thing I played no part in.
But I will say this cover, if you zoom back out, I think you’ve got another picture, it was originally just the front and then the back was just. There was nothing on the back. It was just plain green. And we became very clear that if the back had been missing, it really would’ve misrepresented what the book is about because it’s not about just leaving your tribe or leaving a community and going off on your own. It’s the opposite of what the book is about. So I said, if you insist on … Sorry, this inside baseball, but there’s always tension between an author and a publisher a little bit, and I don’t make all the decisions. And I said, “If we’re going to do that, we have absolutely got to show the path coming back and reconnecting because the whole theme of the book is that we go on rites of passage that do involve a separation or a feeling of aloneness where some things we have to do alone and we feel alone.
Our society’s lost healthy rites of passage, most of them in my opinion, but we need them. It’s part of how we forge what I call the solid self. When we do that, we can be reunited or we can come back and be part of a community in a healthier, more integrated way with a better sense of who we are.” So I said, “You’ve got to have that path reconnecting and at least leave it up to the reader, reader’s imagination, what happens next.”
Kevin Walsh:
Thank you. Let’s see. We’ve talked about the probes, we’ve talked about the structure, we’ve talked about the elements, and now I’ve been judging this book by its cover. Why don’t we go inside? I think one area I’d like to focus on is the third part, the part about existing as a solid self in the different communities. And this graphic that you have is in Chapter Eight on The Social Meaning of Work. We’re at a law school. Law students here are thinking about how their professional training is preparing them for the workplace and how understanding some of the messages you are conveying in this book might fit with that.
So The Social Meaning of Work, the four forms of courage, and this graphic appears in there, and the idea, as I understand, is there are four different relationships also that might exist between the self and the group. So the self can be totally outside the group or totally inside the group and you say, “The challenge of work mirrors our broader question, how to be in something but not of it. How to engage in healthy forms of association without becoming isolated or absorbed.” And you then ask again, the reader, “Do you see yourself, do you see your relationship with your workplace in each or in one of these four images?” And so this is one where as a reader, I thought, “How do I see myself in this?” And is that right? Or is there a best one?
Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on with the self and the group in these? So just full disclosure, I’m probably either a B or a C, but I sometimes worry actually about being an A or a D that is totally outside or totally inside.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. I mean, theoretically, I guess there’s an infinite array of possibilities here and I’m just showing four to illustrate the difference. And you’ll notice that if the square, the self in A, kind of a subtle thing, but it actually becomes a circle inside of a circle in D, showing total conformity and identification. And I think that D in general is usually a relatively dangerous place to be if we’re talking about something like work. Do you want to be fully and wholly identified with your work? I would say never, actually. I mean, when it comes to your family or the church or something like that, then D, it could make sense. So this is a thought experiment, maybe an attorney and a client look more like A, that is kind of an arm’s length relationship.
But I think that we can also move between A, B, C, and D in different aspects of how we’re in relationship to a community. So it’s not you’re one all the time. I mean, I’m part of a dad’s community in my neighborhood here in DC. The common link between us is that we have children that are the same age and all of their moms are friends. And so we’re in a dad’s group. They’re great guys, but I will tell you that there is a WhatsApp group with these 15 dads in it that is completely hyperactive. I cannot keep up with it. I know who’s going to what park at every hour of the day.
And I have decided that in terms of that community, when it comes to the WhatsApp group, I am an A. I am 100% an A. I have muted that thing. I am standing on the outside of the WhatsApp group because it would just turn it into something that I do not want it to be. But when we go to a birthday party or something like that, I’m probably a C. I’m in it. I’m there. I’m present. I’m part of the community.
So I think the idea here is that we should think about the ways in which we’re in relationship with groups in our life, whether that’s a school, a political party, or I’m describing a little community group that I’m a part of. So the point of the book is to help us think more seriously about the way in which we’re in relationship with the many rather than just drifting in and out of the relationships, to be more intentional about.
Kevin Walsh:
Well, that’s helpful to hear that it’s not static. And I was actually having a flashback to think, oh, how does this relate to my life as a lawyer? My students may not know. When I was in private practice, there was only one case that I worked on that went to trial. Most of the stuff was appeal. But when you’re on a team that’s trial, I was billing maybe 21 hours a day. So there you’re in D, you’re in D mode. But as a lawyer, actually, everyone has different jobs. And we discovered after we’ve made all the graphics for the closing and stuff like that, one of my jobs was to work with others to say, “If we win this trial, what’s going to happen on appeal? What are their legal issues?” And we identified one legal issue that we just thought, “You know what? If we’re the other side and they lose, this is what they’re going for.”
So they had to tell Junior here to go to the senior lawyer and say, “We’re taking that out of your closing. We’re doing that.” We did win the trial. I found out afterwards, he said, “I wanted to throw you out the window.” But I think I only could have done that in A mode. So it’s helpful to hear that you can kind of move back and forth. You had to stand up in certain ways. Actually, I alluded to also in law, it’s very hierarchical in some ways. And one of the images that you have is the St. Benedict’s 12-step descending Ladder of Humility. And I thought actually we might dwell on this one for a little bit. So this is in the next chapter, Chapter Nine, A Rule for the One and the Many: Lessons in Orders and Freedom.
And you talk about the creation of a culture of humility and how that’s tied to what is publicly recognized and rewarded. And I think law as a profession, including that occupied by law schools, law professors, law students is very status driven. Certain credentials, jobs, sometimes really sought more as status markers and prestige than even for income or some other goal. And so I thought actually take the opportunity of your visit to our law school to, how can we, in terms of creating a culture of humility, thinking about what’s publicly recognized and rewarded, how can we go about legal education both as educators and also as students on the one hand, recognizing this hunger for vocation and meaning, but coexisting with also a kind of hunger for recognition and prestige and all of those. How can we do better in law schools, both as teachers and students in creating the kind of culture that you talk about in Chapter Nine of your book?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about prestige for a second. Prestige action literally means illusion and it comes from a Latin word that means illusion. And that’s why it was a fantastic 2006 movie by Christopher Nolan called The Prestige about rival magicians. There’s always something illusory about prestige. Prestige is a 100% mimetic object, meaning that something is prestigious for social reasons. So there’s nothing intrinsically prestigious about anything that makes it very dangerous. Something that’s prestigious today could not be prestigious in tomorrow or next year, five years from now. So it’s something that you always have to be careful about it.
I have a friend of mine who describes getting into a certain law firm and he says, “From the outside, everybody wanted to get in, but on the inside everybody wanted to get out.” And he didn’t realize that until he got it. And look, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with seeking an employment by a prestigious firm. I majored in finance at NYU and I had my sights set on Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley because they were the two most prestigious investment banks when I was in school. They probably still are. And I worked at Morgan Stanley and then I couldn’t wait to leave. And then when I was 27 years old, I was 27, 28 years old, I started my third company, went completely bankrupt. I lost everything I owned and had to start from scratch. And within a few years I was happier than I’d ever been. So I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but I was in some sense humiliated or humbled by life in my 20s in various ways and started to develop a different understanding of what actually provided meaning and satisfaction to me in my life.
And obviously relationships became very important to me. I think in terms of I’m an educator, I’ve been at CUA for nine years now, which is hard to believe in the business school. And I think if anything, helping students to truly invest in people and understand how to develop good relationships will be the most important skill. I can never be taken away from you. These powerful AIs might be able to write briefs, but they cannot do what a good partner can do who truly understands me, who is able to strategize, who understands my life and my goals. Those kind of soft skills I think are really critical and they require a kind of attention. And attention does require some humility because there’s intellectual virtues that allow us, first of all, to learn patience, but also just being able to be attentive to people long enough to truly understand that and how we can serve that is a critical skill that I try to bring into my classroom and into my work.
And I think it’s hard to see the Ladder of Humility here, but in writing this book, I reread the Rule of St. Benedict and I did it because I was trying to find … The last part of the book tries to move into the solutions, not just diagnosing problems. And I thought, which communities have done the best job over the longest period of time forming selves who are capable of being in real communion with other people? And I landed on the Benedict of Monasteries and the Rule of Benedict. And I thought I should probably read the rule and understand how the rule has allowed this to continue to happen for 1500 years now. There’s something very lindy about it. And if you research and study the Rule, you will realize that humility is at the foundation of the entire thing. None of the rule really works without the cultivation of humility in the monastery. And I think humility is also an intellectual virtue that allows us to sort of realize what we don’t know and admit like Socrates, admit our lack of understanding sometimes.
Kevin Walsh:
We do read too a lot of appellate opinions, and at least in constitutional law or some of the others, you have majority opinions, dissenting opinions. And I will mention since today is John Marshall’s birthday, 200, gosh, 71st birthday, when you look at some of those things and you think, what was it? So his greatest biographers would say he identified himself with the court, the court with the Constitution, the Constitution with the people. In thinking about our conversation today, I thought, ah, there is something about the one and the many in the arc of his career. There is though, in a lot of these opinions, sometimes you read and you think, did they have to write that or did they … And I wonder, as you’re looking ahead to careers as lawyers, there’s something that you wrote on, I still call it Twitter, that I just wanted to ask you about because it gets to the idea of mimesis and arguing with people. And I also think about this in terms of scholarship.
So you were reacting to something that someone wrote, but I also think that this is something we’ll run into as lawyers. But, “I tend to think it’s never wise to write something when one is in a memetic entanglement with the subject, whether it’s one way or two ways. And that certainly seemed to be the case here.” In other words, you were criticizing what was going on and I sort of had a moment of recognition to think, ah, when I’m saying this scholar is wrong or when I’m responding to that side of the brief … And I just thought I wanted to ask you, what is wrong with or what is it bad? What is misleading when you’re kind of writing when you’re in a memetic entanglement? Can you just sort of unpack that a little bit, what that is?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. I mean, we’re sort of going back to Girard and wanting a little bit here. And by the way, just because we’re in a law school, I have to say, how many are familiar with René Girard in the room? Is anybody familiar with Girard? Yeah, and he’s famous for the idea of mimetic desire, which leads to rivalry, people wanting the same thing who become rivals, and which eventually leads to the scapegoat mechanism where one person is expelled from a community. And it used to happen in these crude ways where somebody would be led to the edge of a cliff and thrown off or one person would be stoned by a community. And Girard’s theories that the judicial field was kind of invented as the successor to the old scapegoat mechanism. The law actually provides a way out of the old kind of rituals by which one person would be expelled from a community.
There’s a due process, for instance. There’s a whole sort of legal element of Girard that I’ve rarely had a chance to talk about. We can’t get into it now. But I think the sort of second step in the process for Girard is rivalry and rivalry often driven from resentment and we can become sort of obsessive over other people who are our rivals. And this tweet, it’s always a little mortifying to see something I tweeted. I’m like, “Oh gosh, what did I say?” And some of this is quite old, this is probably … And if I remember correctly, this is commenting on a book that was written about somebody else. And in my view, the author of the book had a kind of a mimetic entanglement with the very subject of the book. Meaning, that I think that there was some resentment or some kind of rivalry involved there.
And I think that that distorts, first of all, you’re not objective. It can cause you to just be responding to the person and projecting all kinds of things onto an argument. It’s just a very kind of precarious place to be writing anything. And I think that one should kind of extract themselves from those relationships and try to reconcile or heal them or figure out what’s going on. I guess, I’m not an expert in the law, but I suppose when … I’d actually love to learn your thoughts on this. But when writing something like a dissenting opinion, I would think that they can come in different forms. One of them could sort of come in the form of excoriating how dumb the majority was or something like that.
And another form which could be driven by some kind of resentment or rivalry or power struggle or grandstanding or something like that versus just sort of this is what I, Thomas Moore style, this is what I believe about how to apply the law in this case. So it is a dissent, but it’s sort of a more sort of direct engagement with the facts themselves as opposed to let me explain why they’re wrong, where resentment and rivalry can creep into our lives.
Kevin Walsh:
Thank you. Because when you were talking about the cultures of workplaces, I realized it’s not just a workplace, but also the culture of a profession. And this was a kind of way into something that we’re reading that we all need to be aware of because the written word is so central with us. But I would return to the book on. So here’s some vending machines. We went from Chapter Eight to Chapter Nine and the threshold, so we talked about the sort of content, the probes, and the threshold involves this really, how to put it, powerful threshold moment that relates in some ways to this Ladder of Humility as well. And it reminded me of that one case I worked on that went to trial. That case actually involved cigarette vending machines. It was an antitrust case, Robinson-Patman Act, terrible law. But as you heard, we won. So that was a point of contact for the cigarette vending machines.
But I wonder if I could … So this threshold is you are kneeling on, as you say, a cold, hard floor and at the same time experiencing a certain lightness of being, a kind of freedom. And I just wonder if you could, in the flesh, tell us about that threshold and how it related to then the structure of the book. As you say, you were selective about what you chose to put in your personal narratives. And so on this one, what was going on and then how does that illuminate?
Luke Burgis:
Sure. So I started three companies, co-founded three companies in my 20s, and one of them was a healthy vending machine company, the opposite of putting cigarettes in vending machines. Back in 2005, we had the idea that we were going to replace junk food with healthier food, granola bars, protein bars. We put them in branded vending machines. We put LCD screens on them, unheard of at the time, and we did very well eventually putting these healthy vending machines in hospitals, school districts, airports, and grew the company quite large. But I was always embarrassed about essentially running a vending machine company. I left investment banking to … In the early days, I would stock the machines myself. We had five. I was going around LA literally stocking these machines. Like, “What I done with my life?” I would lie and say that I was in the food distribution business at parties and things like that. But the company ended up doing well.
Long story, I’ll jump to the end. I ended up walking away from it after many years, entered seminary formation, and I started this company in LA. When I approached the Bishop of Las Vegas and I think I might be at the vocation, I was like, “Just please don’t send me back to California. Please don’t send me back to California.” And of course, he sent me back to a seminary in Camarillo, California. During the first week of seminary, they … And by the way, nobody really knew about this company, none of the faculty formators. They just knew that I was a successful entrepreneur. First day of seminary, first week, they assign all the seminarians house jobs, clean the chapel, whatever, to put together mass programs. We were all given unpaid labor that we had to do while we were there.
And then we find out what our house job is one day by going to our mailboxes and there’s a little envelope and it says what your job is. I went to mine and it said, “You’re in charge of running the cafeteria and restocking the vending machines.” I found myself like, “You got to be kidding me.” I found myself on my knees late one night stocking Frito-Lays and junk food in a vending machine after I had started the healthy vending machine company quite a few years before. I didn’t tell anybody.
That was a very long time ago now, and nobody knew about this until I chose to write about it because it’d been long enough. There was a process of me truly … This was assigned to me. I didn’t choose it. I knew at that moment that there … And I’d been my own boss for 10 years, ran my own company, didn’t answer to anybody. And here I was, and I knew that being obedient to what was being asked of me, doing what the slip of paper said was my pathway forward. That was the right passage that I had to go through. I laughed, I cried, I just had to do it. I knew that that’s what was being asked of me vocationally at the time, and it led to me … I’m an only child, which probably has a lot to do with why I wrote this book, and I’ve always had kind of a contentious relationship with communities because I’m very independent.
Obviously, I didn’t stay in seminary. I’m married with two daughters now, but during the time that I was there, I truly learned to be part of the community. I threw myself into the community. I did my best to do what was asked of me even if I didn’t agree with it, and it was a form of obedience that changed me in very profound ways.
Kevin Walsh:
Well, that threshold ends, and this will take us to the end of our time, and so we’ll talk about the end of the book because that threshold concludes, it says, “There’s no major threshold in life that does not demand a kind of death.” So in some ways death to self. I was about to learn the shape of mind. So that then goes into Chapter 10, and Chapter 10 is called The Unsentimental Home: Communion After Differentiation. And this is the probe there. It’s a recliner in the sort of space and is a window and it says, “What do you see out there?” It then links to the concluding portions of the book, which I will give away, read the book. We said that at the beginning.
But I will say this much. For a book with a title about sheep, returning back to that shepherd perspective that comes through in the Luke version that this is based on, so much of the book is in some ways the sheep perspective, you’re the one and the many. At the end though, you turn to the perspective of a shepherd in some ways. And this probe, how does this probe kind of relate to that transition? Because there’s something you see that then says, “Ah,” and the shepherd perspective comes in.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. Obviously, it’s an image in a book and the probes don’t have answers. That’s the whole point of the probe. There is no answer, but it’s a printed image, but you’ll notice a window, and this scene features in the last chapter of the book, my dad looking out of a window because he’s a former skydiver, and I always think that he looks out of windows thinking about skydiving. And what is a window? You look outside and it represents something that transcends the community or the environment that you’re in. There’s something transcendent about it. It’s a window into a larger world, more context. The act of looking out a window has been a powerful metaphor for me.
This goes into the conclusion of the book, which I won’t tell you the story or the conclusion, but it comes down to the relationship between Love and Responsibility, which is fantastic book by John Paul II, freedom and responsibility, right? There is no real freedom or agent. Agency is a buzzword right now out of how can you be a high agency person? But agency always is exercised rightly in relationship. Agency for what? Freedom for what? Freedom for others. So freedom exercise in the context of responsibilities.
And throughout this book, which is really just the story of how I’d learned a lot of important lessons in my life that I wanted to share, there’s an element of me learning about responsibilities that I wanted to say yes to and that ended up shaping my life in ways that I didn’t necessarily choose. Just like stocking a vending machine. Saying yes to what I think was being asked of me at the time. And one of those things that has clearly been one of the most important for me in the last six years has been caring for my dad who has Alzheimer’s and being thrust out of a bunch of plans that I had and different things that I thought I was going to do to having to care for my dad.
One of the more profound reflections for me, and probably the reason that I wrote this book was seeing my dad, he needs very intensive around the clock nursing care. So he lives in the community in the VA that he didn’t choose and that I’ve seen him come to accept. Although he has advanced Alzheimer’s, he’s communicated to me in very few words, but in relatively profound ways about his own acceptance, not only of his disease, but of the circumstances that he really has been forced to accept and confront in ways that have been edifying, quite frankly, for me to see. I continue to learn from my dad even in his 80s when he can’t really speak anymore. It’s applying those lessons to my own life and hopefully helping the reader understand the relationship between the self and community as one of mutual responsibility, which is really why the Rule of Benedict has been so important for me. Order towards something that is greater than the community, towards a transcendent good that is not a rivalrous good, but a good that actually is better when it is shared.
Kevin Walsh:
Because the unifying virtue in that chapter is the shared pursuit of a common good. Well, we’ve talked about a number of different communities, families, workplace. We’re in the same university community, however, we don’t always cross paths. Thank you for saying yes to this time together, and can you please join me in thanking Luke Burgis. Thank you.
Luke Burgis:
Thank you.
