Observation, Smith, Tocqueville & Sartre…getting you up in the morning! | BRIght & Early

0:03 hello young people of the Internet it is Rachel with the Bill of Rights Institute and I’m here with my colleague scary and Kirk so let’s start with just check-ins Kirk how you doing don’t pretty good all things considered I think I think I’m starting to get a little bit more adjusted but things are certainly still odd that’s for sure

0:24 yeah how about you Gary yeah new things are definitely strange but they’re getting less strange it’s like what they say about a new normal right you can kind of get used to anything but I’m finding that you know I’m really getting to know my home and kind of near vicinity really well I feel the same way um I I did have to say that when when is

0:47 a governor north or came down with June 10th as the date right you know will open there is a there was a new reality cuz that’s a long time away yeah um but I think I think I agree that I I’m starting well at least in my neighborhood so I live in Washington DC and in my neighborhood I didn’t there are a lot more people kind of out and

1:09 about that I’m starting to get to know like neighbors that I’ve just never really seen because our schedules never overlapped right oh yeah yeah I think it’s been interesting for me just observing how people around me are dealing with with everything whether it’s you know people out walking their dogs I’m now I’m noticing the same

1:30 people when I go out in the morning or the afternoon or even talking to colleagues or other folks that we’re working with you know starting to notice some commonalities and some differences just and how people are are responding to this this you know really unprecedented situation yeah I’m experiencing that too it’s funny because it just because I’m seeing neighbors I’m

1:51 not interacting with them but it kind of doesn’t matter I feel like I’m still through like seeing them visually everyday you know and sometimes hearing music and things I’m learning a lot of details about they feel that I’m not actually directly interacting with in any way and I feel like I know them better and at some point I feel like I can almost approach them you know and say hey I’ve seen your your big red dog

2:13 every day I’d love to give it a pet I also think I’ve note I’m like noticing things about my home but I didn’t notice before like I wonder how many it’s like home improvement projects are being done good you know I just never paid attention that like that particular pink color the way that the way that this room is

2:35 arranged okay so I’m not only noticing things outside but also the things that are really close to me as well so and that’s actually what we wouldn’t talk to you all today about so we’ve been noticing lots of things and feeling like our observational tentacles are really wired and we want to talk to you a

2:56 little bit about observation and and some of the most famous observers and what they had to say throughout history so that you as you’re going through your days and weeks in this environment whatever environment you find yourself you have some techniques and some some strategies to think about how to observe historically and philosophically and internally and externally to help you

3:18 pass past the time as as you young people go through your lives in this in the next couple of weeks so to start we wanted to start with an author very dear to me and Kirk’s heart his name is Adam Smith and he has quite a few things to talk to say about observation yeah I think it’s

3:39 interesting Adam Smith was was absolutely at his core an observer and I think that that is something that really set him apart he was a part of something called the Scottish enlightenment and there’s a bunch of philosophers associated with that David Hume Francis Hutcheson among others but Smith and as

4:02 I’m observing the light changing in my room Smith was very much a person who would who would look at his window and observe how it is that people interacted with one another so you know things were Rachel in Gary and I were just talking about her sort of what we kind of formally call civil society but we call it that when we’re observing it right one more just living our lives we call

4:22 it interacting with one other or things I saw but Smith spent a lot of time thinking these things there’s bookies most famous for mom is often referred to as The Wealth of Nations but it’s actually the full title is in inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations right so even there you can see he’s not just looking at how it is that you know

4:45 things are behaving but he’s looking at the nature of them so what makes them up why is it that some nations have a lot of goods and other nations have less goods what is it that really sets them apart and what lessons can we take from that another famous book that he wrote is called the Theory of Moral Sentiments right that seems odd think of Smith is an economist and now he’s talking about

5:06 Moral Sentiments but Moral Sentiments are really what what what he saw as how it is that we come up with the things that we believe in what it is that we think and what it is them that we are concerned about and how it is it those motivations affect us and the first sentence of the book I think is is really interesting look into

5:27 what Smith’s project is it says how selfish so ever man may be supposed there are evidently some principles in his nature which interests him in the fortunes of others and render their happiness necessary to him though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it right so he’s saying look we’re all intrinsically motivated meaning we all do things

5:48 because it’s in our own direct interest typically but for some reason we really care about other people in how those people act and behave and go about their lives affects us and not only does it affect us but we’re actually interested in that in some way right and that’s very much at the heart of observing right and so he’s asking this question of why is there at this inherent

6:10 contradiction and he goes and starts to talk about to proximity and here’s another famous example in this text where he talks about how our immediate experience which we’re all going through right now becomes much larger than the experience of people who are further away from us and so he gives this example of an earthquake and he says you know if there’s an earthquake on the

6:31 other side of the world you would think less about that earthquake than you would if you were to stub your toe or he uses the example of cut off your finger right if you cut off your finger that would become me immediately big and now we’re gonna observe my dog and my dog being here is now the immediate thing that I’m dealing

6:52 with and yet the thinking about the earthquake becomes a secondary right so this is something that I’m immediately dealing with it so what we’re observing what’s immediately in front of us becomes our experience in total in dealing with that you know there’s implications from that there’s things that we need to be aware of because of

7:12 that and there’s things that we need to to work to be educated to make sure that we’re not totally absorbed by that – I mean Smith uses that example to say look you know it’s it’s frightening that we don’t think about all these people that are being affected in a faraway place but it’s also something that we should be that that that is just a part of our

7:33 our nature so I think I think that’s actually really interesting something I want to talk to you all about out there on the Internet what what is what are you observing about your own experience of what matters right now like have you noticed that you’ve gone more micro and that you’re caring more about what’s happening to your neighbors in your

7:53 community or are you going more macro and you’ve started paying attention to things way outside yourself and and things that you have not really paid attention to before so what is what is close to you right now what’s the equivalent of your finger versus what’s really far away right now what’s the equivalent of the earthquake on the

8:14 other side of the world for you and so Gary taught psychology for a long time and so he actually used to do a lot of observations with his students Oh Gary why and he talked about like like the theories of observation and how we can kind of put them into structures yeah no absolutely you know when Kirk was talking about that teaching history and

8:34 teaching psychology you know sometimes they overlapped a lot and that same concept you were just talking about with Adam Smith is what we talked about in psychology is the law of proximity you mentioned it before right that there’s there’s what is immediate in terms of time and geographic distance right so what’s immediate to me right now it

8:56 in my circle is I’m gonna feel more strongly good or bad about that than I am about something that is a few miles away what happened a long time ago you know the farther away in distance in time by the law of proximity just the less emotional impact it has but at the same time that can shift because of the

9:18 way things are going on you know you can connect now geographically or through time I’m I’m finding I’m reading a lot more this old national Geographics from a long time ago you know to find to connect to things that happen in the past or connect to things that aren’t far away from now and it’s funny if you’ve been watching this

9:39 series both looking at art and journaling both kind of put into this a little bit instead of looking at art though I’d like to encourage students to be home historians right so you can the activities that we would do is say can you be an observer with some kind of structure just like you were saying it does in a way oh goodness I’m going so

10:03 fast it doesn’t away require some kind of structure right so in psychology we call this naturalistic observation and it often is associated with nature itself but can be just what is in the setting around you what’s in the natural just world happening you’re not you’re not changing it you’re not doing an experiment you’re just seeing what’s that you might be a participant right

10:25 you might directly interact with somebody because it is your world that you’re observing but you might also be a non participant the Big Red Dog I keep talking about I’m not I’m not participating with that dog but it’s interesting to observe and to really pay attention and so what I encourage you to do at home if you are still journaling is to start incorporating some

10:45 naturalistic observation you might want to sample something like an event is there an event that happens regularly or happens frequently enough that is peaking your interest you might look at a time period journal down what’s happening from point A to point B in time everything you can observe for this part I often think about one of my

11:06 favorites so that I read a lot which is Sherlock Holmes all right and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s series is a really good one to catch up on right now but it’s an interesting thing in terms of training your brain to observe things all right here’s a quick example I’m gonna pose this one to Kirk Kirk what was on my mug I’ve been drinking from all of this whole time I

11:27 think it was a cupcake oh my goodness you’re so good it was a cupcake how about this one Rachel what was the topic of the magazine I’m reading the Arctic oh my goodness you guys are very very good how did you do that well I so there is something that I notice about my own

11:49 observations I read everything so anytime there are words on the screen I like to read them so I immediate was like what is this topic and I looked and it was the Arctic that’s good so yeah at home start thinking about what are you paying more attention to and what are others paying attention to you as well and and I encouraged recording it now

12:10 there’s one thing I do want to end with which is there’s an ethical part of this right these are human beings if you’re talking about other human beings and so we’re not saying do an experiment on somebody or trick somebody or be really creepy and hide out somewhere observing somebody what we’re saying is just use the senses that are there and be more aware and maybe this is happening you

12:31 know maybe the world outside our cell phones and our computers were starting to attention a little bit more to things and some of that really is important and so one person you were mentioning philosophers before this is a French philosopher that I encourage you he’s somebody you can read it’s jean-paul Sartre he talks about the look this idea

12:51 that proximity really is about yourself as a subject you are the only subject in your world everything else is an object in your world but not really everything else because we understand other people are their own subjects and they are observing so how we observe each other he calls this look this idea that I am seeing you as an object in my world but

13:12 you are seeing me as an object in your world and what does that mean ethically and it’s what does it mean for who we are and how we interact and I think it’s something you should contemplate in your journal in your journal or in conversation with others one of the things that we we we are all doing more I think is is reaching out and communicating with one another and being

13:34 in touch there’s this idea of the other and the individual is is a really interesting one that a lot of philosophers have actually struggled with a lot of historians naturalistic philosophers have have asked questions about what is the nature of my relationship to the other how do i form relationships and I’m gonna circle back around to Kirk because Smith in his

13:56 Theory of Moral Sentiments the reason he wrote that is because he he was trying to understand how we form the sentiments that we do about one another why do I think about you Gary the way I think about you about my mother the way I think about my mother about you know those in New York City the way I think about in those in New York City I’m so

14:16 Kirk you want to talk to us a little bit about the Moral Sentiments sure yeah so so Smith again Smith the observer he’s looking at the world around him and trying to figure out why things happen the way they happen right and the way that he did that for figuring out how it is that we believe and think was to think about something he called the impartial spectator so he says all of us

14:38 have this impartial spectator within us and so this is an imaginary sort of a thought experiment where he’s saying we judge ourselves based off how we think we ought to be judged in other words we want people to like us for the reasons

14:58 we want them to like us and we want people to respect us for the reason we want for the reasons that we want to be respected on so it’s our own projection out into the world and in through the the entire work he’s sort of wrestling with with this and and how it is that that informs why does we believe certain

15:19 things and ultimately he says you know the the place we want to be is is respected for being sort of this virtuous and well meaning and intention individual who is working on behalf of others but doing so intrinsically not doing so because we’re benefiting in some way and that’s kind of his his way of observing the world which which which is

15:41 which is interesting because I think you know there’s a lot of people that wrestle with Smith and the fact that he was wrestling with sort of this this core idea of what it means to be self-interested I think adds some some interesting depth to his project absolutely and so that idea of the impartial spectator that there is some some something that we are putting our

16:05 mind towards outside of the self that would judge us is something that I mean I think teenagers feel all the time right like you have a natural spectator who is you’re constantly thinking about what other people are thinking about you or your own behavior and so part of that part of what that does is that helps you

16:26 analyze your own behavior and and sometimes that can be really healthy that’s not so yeah I say another plug for psychology in psychology that’s called the spotlight effect if you are recording this at home this idea that everyone thinks they are in the spotlight and everything they’re doing is being observed and yet we all think

16:46 it so we all can’t be in the spotlight at the same time but psychologically that’s what it is exactly and so well we’re all well we all want to know what makes our observations unique and special a lot of people who have observed American culture have recognized unique and special things about American culture the one that’s most famous is a philosophy I’m a

17:08 theorist he was actually a kind of historian I guess named Alexis de Tocqueville and he wrote the most famous book he wrote was democracy in America and so he was he was here in the United States to actually observe in the 1830s about the American prison system but as he was traveling in the country he was noticing all these things about American

17:30 culture that were unique and different from the French culture and from the aristocratic cultures that he came from the thing that he noticed most was this idea of the association’s that Americans form so they Americans as we can see right now come together in these amazed in ways and that’s actually really

17:50 unique in culture so and he recognized so I’m just gonna read this aloud to you the inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must depend on himself in the struggle against the ills and difficulties of life he looks upon social Authority only with a defiant and uneasy eye and calls upon the power only

18:12 when he cannot do without it this begins to be noticed as early as school where children even in their games submit to their own rules and punish their own infractions the same spirit is found in all the actions of social life an obstruction occurs on the public road the way is interrupted traffic stops the neighbors soon get together as a

18:33 deliberative body out of this improvised assembly will come an executive power that will remedy the difficulty before the idea of an authority predating that of those interested has occurred to anyone’s imagination so I’m sure you’ve seen examples of that right now think about something in your community that people needed was it masks was it food delivery was its Oh what are some other

18:55 great examples um you know uh fostering jockeys and kittens I mean so and no one looked to the authority look to the I mean in obviously governments need to support these activities but in the immediate almost everyone was like what

19:16 can I do as an individual and that’s a unique characteristic in the United States and when we when we should honor and support and recognize and observe but so he finishes this sentence by set or this this paragraph by saying in the United States Americans associate for purposes of public security for Commerce

19:37 for industry for pleasure for morality for religion there is nothing that human will despairs of achieving by the free action of the collective power of individuals and so that’s our exhortation for this episode of bright and early is what is your power as an individual how you can access that power

19:58 is by observing your communities really recognising needs recognizing trends and then taking agency and action to support those around you Kirk arey did you have anything else you wanted to say before we close no I would love to hear about these things I mean we’ve talked about a nice connection of what you see but in what you are just talking about here at

20:19 de Tocqueville the they’re seeing and then there’s sort of a drive that happens sometimes from what you are seeing and if what you’re seeing can use your input your action there is that interesting drive that’s that’s possible so we’d like to hear about those things yeah absolutely and we’d love to we’d love to hear from you all what you’re

20:39 what you’re observing what you’re thinking about your own communities into just to go back journaling about some of these things can be really important too you know because when you when when we get beyond this in some day we will be beyond it looking back on these observations can be a really good lesson too you know I’m sitting here looking at my cracked and dried hands because I’ve

21:00 been washing my hands a lot because of everything going on and and I know that that might be something that fades away but but remembering back even to those minut details of what this experience is like can really bring forth a lot of lessons and a lot of appreciation for when we get beyond these things in appreciation for the people in our communities who are supporting us in helping us to get through these

21:21 challenging times and all those that are that are working hard to think of our health care workers all these folks that are that are working on our behalf but even simple folks out in the I say simple I mean just plain ordinary people out in our communities who are doing things like making sure that street lights and street lamps are working observing these things taking taking stock of it and journaling about it writing down there there’s just a wealth

21:42 of knowledge and information that can come from that right that’s what being a story ins about thank goodness we have what these people wrote exactly people behind me well thank you for your time and for your energy and remember that every individual one of you has a power to make a change in your community thanks

22:03 for joining us and we’ll see you next time on bright and early you