The Scalia School of Law is named in The Bob Zadek Show only once, in the host’s introduction of a guest. Bob Zadek describes Frank Buckley as a professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, adding that Buckley is a senior editor at The American Spectator, a columnist for the New York Post, and has written for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News, National Review and The American Conservative Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021). The school is not otherwise described: the excerpts say nothing about its founding, its curriculum, its faculty beyond Buckley, or its relationship to George Mason University beyond the possessive in that sentence. Everything the episode does contain belongs to the discussion Buckley came on to have, and it is that discussion the rest of this article records.
The introduction and the book under discussion
Zadek opens the episode by listing what he calls troubling developments in America: wokeism, what he describes as increased sensitivity to fear and risk, censorship by book publishers, television programs and social media platforms, polarization, and racism, which he says is profoundly on the decline even if the media does not report it that way. He says he could not find a common factor among these events until he read Buckley’s book, Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life, which he characterizes as not a how-to book and not a self-help book, but a book about curiosity and, one notch down, risk-taking and welcoming the unknown Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021). In the same introduction Zadek recalls Buckley’s earlier appearance, in 2015, when Buckley wrote a book called The Once and Future King, which Zadek says taught him about the merits of a parliamentary system. Buckley replies only with thanks and says it is great to be back.
Curiosity, cancel culture and the silencing of dissent
Buckley’s argument, as he states it, is that every advance in science, business or literature had somebody curious behind it, and that curiosity needs encouragement in America in 2021 because there has never been such an effort to silence dissenters, at least since the witch trials in Salem in the 1600s. He says the culture tells people to stay inside because of COVID and also to adopt received thoughts, and that departing from them means being called a racist and deserving to be canceled Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Zadek presses the point, asking whether cancel culture is anti-curiosity, and Buckley agrees, invoking Aristotle’s claim that philosophy begins in wonder and saying that curiosity is something you want to avoid in 1984. Buckley adds that the country is far closer to Orwell’s dystopia than at any time since its creation 250 years ago, and that this should concern people with an interest in liberty, because if you are not curious, liberty will not matter to you. Zadek offers his own formulation: he says he finds a stated opinion boring, but the reasoning behind it fascinating, and that without curiosity one simply accepts what one is told. Buckley agrees and says his book takes examples of people who made great discoveries and left the beaten trail, and that there is no single way to be curious.
Loneliness, friendship and ideology
Zadek asks about the phrase the epidemic of loneliness, which he says Buckley uses in the book. Buckley answers that it is not in the DSM, the psychologists’ bible, but that he thinks it belongs there, and describes a call-in program where the callers wanted to discuss the January 6th insurrection rather than his book. He says that for some people only a very narrow set of political issues matters, that this is deadening, and that breaking out of the received list of topics makes people angry; he says they tweeted afterwards asking why he was allowed on television Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
On friendship, Buckley says it is a basic human good and that it depends upon revealed confidences, where you confess something about yourself that might be turned against you, and that this is dangerous now, as is telling a joke. He describes a friendless society in which suicides are up and a majority of Americans describe themselves as unhappy. Zadek frames the same material as a quarantine of ideas, saying that censorship and wokeism keep people from catching another person’s point of view.
Buckley then calls the state of mind he opposes a form of sociopathy, defining a sociopath as someone who does not need other people. He says students at many colleges are encouraged or told how to report on their professors, that an idle comment or a joke can trigger a student and lead to charges, and that cancel culture involves a shifting set of misstatements and bad thoughts, so that what was innocuous ten years, ten months or ten days ago can quickly become toxic. He says it is getting to the point where you would want a tape recorder on whenever you talk to somebody, and that anyone who thinks that is a good idea has described a purely sociopathic society. His conclusion, in his words, is to say, “Stuff it,” get out there and do your thing, and not let the censors get you down.
Zadek asks about the Senate, which he notes has been called the world’s greatest deliberative body, and says he could not recall an example of a senator changing his or her mind as a direct result of deliberation. Buckley offers civil rights as one example and Senator Vandenberg, a Republican isolationist, changing his mind after Pearl Harbor, though he notes Vandenberg changed because of circumstances rather than persuasion. He contrasts this with Parliament in England, citing May 1940, when the Chamberlain government fell and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister after a series of speeches in which Chamberlain was ripped apart, with the result that about 70 members of the majority Tory party decided not to support the government. Buckley says real deliberation can happen, but that any deliberation in Washington happens offstage Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021).
Zadek asks whether opinions, once formed, can always be changed. Buckley attributes the difficulty to partisanship, saying that when you are taught the other side is poisonous you have no responsibility to listen, and to the growth of ideologies, naming the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which he says would have it that we are irredeemably a racist society. He calls an ideology a mental shortcut, like a key supposed to unlock all doors, and says that buying into one avoids the need to look at conflicting evidence. He argues that curiosity about other people and how they are affected is the foundation of a good part of our morality, and that the deeply incurious person is also a deeply immoral person.
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts mentions the Scalia School of Law, and it does so once, in the host’s introduction; the excerpts therefore show no development in how the school is treated across the show.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Scalia School of Law was founded, where it is located, what it teaches, who else teaches there, or what relationship it has to George Mason University beyond the possessive in Zadek’s sentence. They do not say whether the school was named for a person, or when. They contain no discussion of the school’s curriculum, its students, or any controversy involving it. The episode’s substantive content concerns Buckley’s book and his views on curiosity, cancel culture, loneliness, ideology and deliberation, not the institution that appears in his credential.