Ep 15 | Dr. Stephen Hicks | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Let me start with

questions that I don't think the average American can give you a good answer on.

Three of them.

All right.

What's socialism?

Now you want me to answer that.

Well, socialism is partly an ethos, partly it's a politics.

The ethos is that you belong to a social unit, not an individual self,

that your allegiance, your values, and in some cases your identity comes from being a part of that social unit.

Politically, as far as

pure socialism go as far as anthem

or

we?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yes, that's right.

Yeah, that you are born into a social unit.

You are shaped by that social unit.

You're a cog.

Well, you can become a cog, absolutely.

And your job is to perform a function in that social unit.

Now, that's an ethic, but then if you politicize it, then you say whatever authorities are that wield the power in that society, they can use you and direct you for social ends primarily.

The individual doesn't exist or exists only to the extent that he or she is performing a social role and so can be used by the political authorities for that purpose.

So the political formulation usually, it's just the standard is to say the collective ownership of the means of production.

But the core means of production is a human being.

That is to say, the human being is owned by the collective and should be used by the collective.

What is capitalism?

Well, capitalism is a more variably defined thing.

If you take capitalism as the opposite of socialism, and I think that's one legitimate usage, then you say it is an individualistic ethos that I

make myself, I am responsible for myself, the values that I pursue in my life should be mine, and then I enter into social arrangements, family, friendships, business, sports, voluntarily, and that the purpose of the power institutions in society is to protect individuals as they pursue their lives.

And so that would then imply the economic portion of that, which is an economic free market, and that typically is capitalism.

Now, capitalism is more slippery here.

Sometimes capitalism is meant only to refer to an economic system where we have private property and free exchange and so forth.

Sometimes it's used more broadly to mean liberal individualism, and then that's the contrast to socialism.

Between the two of them, it's

easier to sell socialism

because

we have,

as

Jonathan Haidt would say, we all share the care-harm

platform or pillar together, that we want to take care of people.

Capitalism kind of just leaves you out there in the cold.

And socialism is about making sure we all make it across the finish line together.

Right?

Well, I think socialism is, in its political form, a perverted version of the care principle that you talk about.

So care, I think we do have this.

I think we do have a natural benevolence, benevolence,

but it's not automatic.

Infants, right from day one, they size up people they are interacting with.

And if the person is a basically decent human being, then of course we form positive attachments and we want to work out mutually beneficial whatevers.

On the other hand, if the infant senses that this person is not treating me appropriately at my infant level of understanding, then we start putting barriers up and the care doesn't happen.

So, I think most of us as human beings want to give people initially the benefit of the doubt.

And so I'm open to care, open to forming relationships, but it does have to be earned at some sense.

So what socialism I think wants to do is

it can start this way.

There are many roads to socialism, but it can start from I'm a nice person and I want everybody to get across the finish line, as you put it.

And I am afraid of what might happen to me if I fail in my life.

And I can also then empathize with other people who are not doing well

with their lives.

And so I just want the problems solved.

And in many cases, socialism is just a knee-jerk.

I want this problem solved instantly.

And the best way to solve the problem, if it's an economic problem, is to take money from people who have it and give it to the people who don't have that.

Now, I think that's

a plausible explanation for some avenues towards socialism, and it can come out of that care and a healthy benevolence.

What's the difference?

Is Canada a socialist country or a capitalist country?

I don't think it's socialist.

I think the way to do this is to say any culture is made up of any number of sub-sectors.

So you can say, you know, here's the economy, here's how we do family, here's how we do

religion, here's how we do our leisure activities, here's how we do our politics.

And so an overall label like capitalism or socialism is going to try to capture each of those.

And I think for the most part, Canada would then be an individualistic, freedom, capitalistic country.

We make our own.

I'm born in Canada, raised in Canada, so.

I heard you say oat.

Yes, that's right.

Now I'm down here in the south.

So just throw that out there.

So

there's no socialism with respects to your dating life or your love life.

You're perfectly free to date whomever you want and to get married or not, whomever you want.

So that's perfectly liberal, individualist in the proper sense of the word.

Religion is done entirely liberal individualistically.

Make your own choices, start your own church, do whatever you want.

People in their artistic lives, you can consume whatever media you want.

If you're a poet or a filmmaker or a writer, you can do pretty much anything that you want.

So all of those things are very much free market, individualist, liberal capitalist, and so on.

Then if we thus focus on the economic sector of society, there, of course, the record is a lot more mixed.

And I think you would have to say Canada is a mixed economy.

It has a significant number of capitalistic elements, but it also has a significant number of socialistic elements as well.

The same with Sweden.

The same with Sweden.

And the point about both of those is that we are talking about by most indexes, so there are 190 or so countries around the world, and there are all these wonderful now, in the last generation, social science indexes that come out and measure this, that, or the other thing.

On economic freedom,

Canada and Sweden are all in the top 10 percent of nations right around the world.

They got there by largely being free market capitalist-oriented nations.

But because they have become so rich, they can now to some extent afford some redistribution, some more

interventionistic and in some cases outright socialistic measures.

Aaron Powell, what is the difference between that and state capitalism like like China?

Yeah.

Well, I think state capitalism is a misnomer that comes out of a corrupted intellectual tradition.

So if we go back and say that capitalism means

individualistic

track records of most socialist regimes is part of the saying that they weren't really socialism is to then assign all of the corruptions corruptions and the things that go wrong to capitalism, whatever you mean by that.

So the move that they're making, though, is to say if you put economic concerns at the top of your

social hierarchy, this is what we are about.

We're about money, we're about capital, we're about economic production,

then that scale of values makes you a capitalist.

If you're prizing that rather than some other social thing that you're trying to achieve.

And then from that categorization scheme,

if you then say, well, individuals can do this money-making, then you're

free market capitalist.

If you think the government should take care of the economy and money-making, then you have state capitalism.

But I think that's a miscategorization from the beginning.

Difference between socialism and communism.

Communism is a subspecies of socialism.

So it's a bit like saying someone is a Christian, and then immediately you've got

Presbyterian and Eastern and so forth.

So the broadest version is socialism, where you say people belong to society, people should serve society, and society's organizers, the politicians, should be managing all of society.

Communism is one particular subspecies of that.

So Marx's name for it was scientific socialism, right, or communism, and those are equivalent.

Now, what he means by the socialism and the particular version, or sorry, the science in the scientific socialism, that's another

avenue that we can go down.

But he is contrasting his version of socialism with earlier, say, religious forms of socialisms, where, say, we are monks and we hold all of our property communally.

We sleep communally, we eat communally, we don't have any personal possessions.

So, those would be religious socialisms.

And then earlier utopian socialisms from Saint-Simone and Proudhon and

Rousseau to some extent.

Right here in Dallas.

Dallas

is the first socialist experiment in the United States.

If you take away Jamestown and

even some of the pilgrims.

I'm not familiar with that one.

I'll have to say that.

And of course in the upper Midwest, there was a whole number of socialistic experiments as well, New Harmony, Indiana, and others.

So Marx and Engels were trying then in the middle part of the 1800s to distinguish their version of socialism, which they thought was more materialistic and more scientific from the other earlier versions of socialism.

Aaron Trevor Barrett,

any time this has ever worked?

Depends on what you mean by

death and totalitarianism.

Well, I think

if you think that monasteries and convents are a kind of communalistic or socialistic experiment, then you could say that they can work.

In a country-size.

Ah, okay.

Right.

Then where you're not all volunteering to go serve God.

I think, right.

I think, you know, I'm a Christian, so Jesus comes back and rules over the earth.

It probably will look very socialist.

You know, we'll all be putting our money in a big pot, and everybody will only take what they need because we'll all be honest.

That is a great utopian idea.

But when you actually put men in charge and you're dealing with a large society,

anytime it's ever worked?

Well, I don't think it's a great utopian idea.

So I do think it's bad in theory, but your question is about whether it's worked.

And no, it has never worked on any large scale.

Why do we keep trying it?

Well, that's because it has got nothing to do with economics.

It's really got nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with historical understanding.

The thought experiment I like to do, and I've done this experiment myself, is talking with socialists over the years, is no socialist ever comes to socialism by studying economics deeply.

No socialist says, I have studied the history of socialism, I've figured out what the flaws are, and I know it's going to work this time.

None of them have done a serious study of political governance.

What it is, is morality.

They think it is moral.

Many socialists of my generation, I'm now a middle-aged guy, but when the Soviet Union fell and in the lead-up to that, most

socialists of that time would say, no, it's not going to work practically, but I think it's moral and I still believe it.

Maybe we have to make some moral compromises with capitalism and allow markets to some extent, but we are going to rely on some socialistic ethos as our

guiding principles, and we are going to try to forge a middle ground.

So for the practicality, yes, we will have to deal with the capitalists, but for the morals, we're going to get that from socialism.

So, I think it's they believe in a certain conception of justice, fairness, decency, and it's very different from the individual, liberal conception of justice, fairness, and decency.

So, it's a moral collision, and that's where the battle I think really has to be fought.

All right, so I think I'm going to get there in two questions.

First,

the

socialism would be

the exact polar opposite of we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

Correct?

Well,

yes, if you take what the founders meant by those principles, yes.

Correct.

What they meant was we all are born, nobody's a king over anything.

Nobody Nobody has a right that somebody else doesn't have.

That's a political equality.

Right.

Yes.

Right.

So socialism is the exact opposite of what we have?

Or what our founders were striving for in our mission statement in the Declaration?

Yes.

Well, the founders were individualistic.

So all of the rights that they hold to be inalienable inhere in the individual.

And from that, they're largely drawing on a Lockean tradition.

So each individual, according to Locke, should be free in his own person, in his conscience, and in

his property.

So all of those are individualistic rights, but we all hold them equally.

And when you're in a socialist society,

who is the grand holder of rights?

Or the bestower of rights.

Yeah.

Well, I think rights language ultimately has to go out the window, because

You can't say you have a claim against anybody else.

To say that you have a right is to say that

something belongs to you, and then that puts a boundary against everyone else, including the State.

So the Bill of Rights, for example, is a limitation on what States can do to the individual city.

No, let me finish this point.

So the Socialists are saying you have no rights with respect to the community.

There are no boundaries that you can put against the community.

So you don't have rights.

Instead, you have obligations, you have responsibilities to society.

So when a democratic socialist says, look, we're just looking for some common sense tampering down of rights, that's dishonest.

I don't know.

I think if,

you know,

I'm inclined to give younger people always the benefit of the doubt because they don't know the history, they don't know the economics and so on.

But I would say if you are a college graduate and

you are now intellectually mature and you are going to make public political claims,

if you don't know what you're talking about and you're still saying things, then there's a kind of dishonesty there.

You just haven't done your homework.

But then I think most socialists who are more articulate, in their heart of hearts, they know that they want power.

They say, yeah, it's going to be democratic, but I'm going to be the one who gets elected or I'm going to be the wiser person who's going to be wielding power on behalf of the community.

Define freedom.

Well, freedom is a negative.

Political freedom is to say I'm not subject to a higher authority.

And that then comes down to saying I have zones in which I'm free to think and which I am free to act.

Now, that's to define freedom in terms of freedom, but that is to say whether I believe something, whether I say something, whether I do so is as a result of my initiative, not because of compulsion by some other authority.

When you are in that state, then you are free.

Now the political freedom rests on a kind of understanding of what it is to be a moral human being, because rights are a kind of moral claim.

to say that politically we can't do certain things to each other.

And that's to understand that we want human beings to be able to act a certain way, that we want people to be moral agents.

And that moral agency, which is pre-political, also requires a notion of freedom.

Because if we're just being pushed around by forces beyond our control, we're not moral agents.

So a deeper understanding of freedom comes down to a kind of volition, that I have a capacity that many other species do not have to regulate my own thinking, to regulate my own behavior.

And because I have that capacity, I can be held responsible for it.

I'm a moral agent.

And because I'm a moral agent, then that has social implications.

And one of those social implications is we have to respect people as moral agents and not try to treat them like animals.

So there's Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.

Yes.

The problem, I think, that we have now is nobody's read the first volume of

moral sentiments.

Yeah.

And can you

have freedom that lasts?

Can man

rule himself?

Can you have capitalism where the individual, where the invisible hand doesn't choke everybody to death?

If you don't have a set of,

I would call them Judeo-Christian values, but values that help self-governance.

Can you have that?

No, absolutely not.

Because if you think about it, a free society has to be the society that is most moral.

Because what you're doing is you're giving people huge amounts of freedom to say you can do basically whatever you want.

And your assumption really is an optimistic one.

The optimistic assumption is you think most people, as individuals, can get their act together and make a go of their lives.

That if you leave people free, that they can work out together without their moms and their dads or a nanny state telling them what to do and doing oversight.

So you do have a very optimistic assumption that is built into any sort of free market capitalism or liberal individualistic society.

And this is why, while socialism often has a reputation, I think, for being an optimistic utopian view, I do actually think it's based on very pessimistic assumptions about human beings.

Socialism typically argues that there's so many people out there who are just so incompetent.

they can't run their own lives and they need everybody else to chip in and look after them.

Or if we leave people to their own devices, they're just going to be at each other's throats And we need then to have a big state to protect people from tearing each other apart.

And all of those are very pessimistic assumptions about human beings.

But then to come cycle back to your point, no, absolutely right.

If you are going to give people a lot of freedom and behind that a lot of responsibility, the assumption is that they're going to be able to develop some sort of a moral code that will keep them going in the proper direction.

Now, I'm much more of a fan of the Greco-Roman tradition than the Judeo-Christian tradition on this point here.

Which is what?

Well,

the core virtues there are, in the Aristotelian tradition, a kind of prudence or practical wisdom that individuals are capable of exercising their minds, figuring out the world around them, understanding their own appetites, regulating their own appetites, and then thinking in terms of principles so that when you and I start interacting with each other, we can figure out what principles going to going to work for us.

Courage is another important one

in the tradition here.

Life is challenging.

There's always the risk of failure.

And so developing your capacity to be willing to think about the hard problems, to be willing to, in many cases, say that you've made a mistake, that's an act of courage to change your mind, to deal with other people who have different views,

and to be willing to let them criticize your views.

If we're going to have a free society, we're going to have to have lots and lots of conversations, because we're going to have to work out our differences through conversation, hopefully not through violence.

And so being willing to speak in public, to challenge other people, including people who have more authority, that's an act of courage, and so on.

So the virtues of practical rationality, courage, temperance is another big one, being able to regulate yourself, also prized in the Greco-Roman tradition as well.

Tell me about Ayn Rand.

I know I consider myself,

I'm kind of all over the board, libertarian for the most part.

But I read Ayn Rand and I love

her philosophy.

I love her writing.

For instance, Anthem is one of my favorite books, but at the very end, Ego, I'm like,

I don't connect with that.

But

she has this view that,

you know, I don't,

the charity is not necessarily

a virtue

and wanting to give to others unless you choose to, et cetera, et cetera.

It seems very selfish.

Can you debunk debunk that or

sure?

Well on the on the ego point

think about you know what makes

what makes your life meaningful

if you

let other people choose your core values for you

Just from simple things.

What your musical tastes are going to be

what foods you like what your clothing style is going going to be, who your friends are going to be, what your career is going to be, whom you're going to date.

None of these things, if they're going to be meaningful, can be done for you.

And if you kind of shut down your ego and just let your mom dress you and your dad choose your spouse for you.

I think of royalty.

Yeah, or you like music just because everybody in your social crowd likes that same kind of music,

then you will not have a meaningful life.

So, I think one of the points that Rand is insisting is on all of the core values, including all of the social values, the things that are socially enriching - friendship, love, business acquaintances, and so forth,

the precondition of those things working is that each individual involved has to see the value of it and choose that value for himself or herself.

Correct.

Okay.

So, I think that's the ego point.

Now, the second part of your question, though, is about charity.

And I think according to Rand, charity is a minor situational virtue.

And certainly one of the things that's outstanding about her is she's downgrading it from being a major virtue.

And in some traditions, of course, it's the primary virtue.

But I think the reason for that is that Rand does have a rather optimistic view about human beings, that human beings don't need to be treated like charity cases.

And if you think about it, that is a kind of pejorative thing.

If I go go around in the world saying I'm looking for ways to find people who need my charity,

that's, you know, and I think for most of us who have some measure of self-respect, under what circumstances will you accept charity?

It's got to be pretty desperate situations, and you've tried everything that you possibly can not to be putting yourself in a charity situation.

So I think part of the assumption is that most human beings

can,

with effort, make a go of their lives, and they don't need charity.

And if you start from that assumption, then you say, what is it that's going to make it possible for people to make a go of their lives?

What skills, what habits, what attitudes do we need to encourage in ourselves and in other people?

That's going to be

the focus of your ethics.

not on how can I assume that certain people just can't solve their problems and fix their problems.

So, of course, there are going to be some people who fall between the cracks.

They have bad luck, they make bad decisions, they're orphans, the zombie apocalypse happens, or whatever.

And in those cases, absolutely.

If you're dealing with a decent person who's had a run of bad luck, that person's your friend, or there's some sort of a nonprofit charity out there, sure, charity out there.

You're crippling people.

You're crippling people when you don't allow them to fail.

I mean, Benjamin Franklin.

Oh, absolutely.

Benjamin Franklin said the best thing you can do is make someone uncomfortable in their poverty.

And I don't think that is

that would be,

I think they might stone him to death if somebody said a politician said that today.

Yeah, well, certainly the political ethos has shifted.

No, but that point about failure is right.

Failure is part of life, and you're not going to be actually living

a meaningful life if you're not putting yourself out on the edge and accepting a certain measure of failure.

So if from the get-go we say there's not going to be any failure no matter what happens to you, you're always automatically and instantly going to be bailed out, well, then you're setting people up for the more general failure of not putting together their own life on their own terms.

That's where we're at.

We're at a place now where the world is saying, you know, too big to fail or too little to fail.

Guaranteed jobs, guaranteed houses.

These are all the things that democratic socialists are now talking about, which I think is just corrosive to the soul.

Absolutely.

But it's kind.

It's so warm and fuzzy.

How do you get

a group of people that

really haven't had to work for anything?

I mean, we are the first generation.

I am.

I'm 54.

I'm the really first generation.

I haven't had to really, I didn't have to fight for something.

I didn't have World War II where we were fighting good versus evil.

The Soviet Union didn't fight that.

Politicians fought that.

So I haven't had,

nobody's picked me up by the jacket on political philosophy and thrown me up against the wall and said, what do you really believe?

We now kind of just expect it's always going to be this way because it always has been this way.

How do you get people

to value what we have

before we lose it when everyone will go, oh, crap, that was pretty good, actually.

Right.

Well, that's the big problem, and it's a parenting problem.

It's an education problem.

I think there is great value to being in such a successful culture as we have, and we have been successful in so many, being able to take that for granted and then just get on with the business of enjoying your life and doing something.

But it's also important to realize where that came from and what the preconditions of that are, that there is real evil out in the world, that success and progress are not automatic, and that all of the goodies that we are able to enjoy don't just appear magically right from heaven.

And so I do think there's a lot of traction to the kind of criticism that I think he was making, that we do have now probably two generations of people, our generation included, who haven't had it that hard, where we've not had to get down to the fundamentals and really think about what we are willing to die for, and then conversely, what are we actually living for?

So that value clarification at a very fundamental level probably

hasn't happened.

Can you be a fulfilled human being?

I look at this as

this is the luckiest time for people to live right now, I think.

Not only because it's really good, but because it has the potential of being very, very bad as well.

And if it goes that way, we are going to have something that

I haven't had my whole life, and that is I get to find out for sure

who I am.

The best or the worst of me is going to come out.

And that

I'm an alcoholic.

I would not be here if I hadn't had my crash and decided to get back up.

Can you be a full person who you really are without

that crash, without that real pain?

Well, I think I'd have to say I don't know, but I think we can live the best life without necessarily having alcoholism

or war force it upon us.

I think all of us do recognize in most areas of our lives that if we are are going to make them meaningful, we do really have to put ourselves out there.

Relationships don't work, for example, if you're holding back.

And so we might all go through heartbreaks in our teen years and go through divorces, and those test your mettle at a very deep level.

And the same thing can happen in careers.

If you really have some business aspirations, you start a business, you have to put yourself out there.

And most entrepreneurs do go through failures several times before they achieve a success.

And because they have really put themselves into their business, it is a soul-wrenching experience to go through.

No different than, I think,

a failed marriage or a

serious relationship.

I think it can also happen in religion.

Where if you are going to make your religion or your philosophical views serious, you can't just be formulaically going through things.

You have to put yourself out there.

And so going through a philosophical crisis or a religious crisis is another variation on that.

So

it may not be the actual bottom or crisis.

It's just the risk.

Well,

the risk always has to be there.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

But the crisis doesn't have to be there, but you have to be willing to.

And you have to be aware, right, that the risk, and if you're putting it, you have to be,

the bankruptcy, I could get my heart broken, I could find out that I'm believing in something doesn't exist.

That has to be there.

I don't think that.

Or artists, I think as well, is another good cultural example.

If you're going to be a real artist,

you're out there.

Yeah.

And I think that's where,

I think that's the courage that we may be missing right now is I think we as a society,

we're not all that sure

that we as individuals, that there's anything in there.

That there's anything great in there, that there's not sure.

And so many people hang on to their pain or their troubles or whatever.

And that defines them.

Because what, at least for me, when I started really,

really starting to want to learn,

you have to, you come to a point to where you say,

if I take this step and this is true, that means I'm going to change here, here, and here.

And you're not sure.

It's why people sometimes don't read things.

They don't want to necessarily know that because they don't want to change.

Exactly.

Sure.

Right?

So there's a laziness, right?

Or a lack of ambition that's characteristic of lots of people.

Or a lack of courage

because you don't think that that's going to be any better.

Or you just don't want to do that because kind of you like this over here.

Sure.

Yeah.

Tell me

one more definition, and then I want to talk to you about postmodernism.

Tell me

the difference between

the actions

of

Antifa

and

the Nazi brown shirt.

Great.

So

if you just let your eyes go out of focus just a little bit and you're looking at the two groups, you don't see very much difference.

You have to toe the line.

Yes.

They will beat you in the streets if you don't.

It's their way or the highway.

They're against whatever the other totalitarian

idea of the time.

What's the difference?

Yeah.

So you do have a

shutdown of rationality.

They're past the point of saying discussion matters.

So they've rejected at a very fundamental any sort of liberal, democratic, republican approach to politics.

So they've bought into into a view that only forceful action is going to do so.

At the same time, they have people divided into groups.

There are people who are in the in-group and people who are on the out-group.

And anybody who is in the out-group is dehumanized from their perspective.

You have to have a strongly dehumanized perspective on other people if you are willing to punch them in the face, hit them with a stick, and so forth.

There also is a kind of cowardice that you wear your uniform and you are losing your individuality by merging into the group.

You don't go out as an individual person, you travel in a pack, and everybody's wearing the same group, and you're letting that group social psychology take over.

And then you are

deliberately putting yourself in situations where you're trying to incite violence.

And there's

the game of street fighting chicken, who's going to hit first.

And you might hit first, they might hit first, but you know somebody's going to hit first, and it doesn't really matter to you.

And

whoever hits first, you're going to just use the excuse that they were asking for it.

That's right.

So

I don't see a significant difference.

The only significant difference, and I think this is on a second order, is that Antifa is, in its intellectual origins, it's not particularly ethnic or racist.

It's just a more generic approach to collectivism or some sort of socialism.

But of course, the Brown Shirts were socialists as well.

So it really does come down to gang street fighting, and that's their political model.

And would you put the,

I mean, nobody, everybody calls them the Nazis, but National Socialists, that's what they were.

Do you put them,

I think in the European right, perhaps yes, but in America, are they on the right or the left?

Left-right doesn't work.

It hasn't worked for a long time.

So, I mean, I think it's fine to say we're going to define some political spectrum, and then we can say there's a left position and a right position here.

But the first thing you have to do is say what are you trying to measure?

Are you trying to measure individualism to collectivism?

Are you trying to measure

democratic procedures versus authoritarian procedures?

What is the left and what what's the right here?

The way we use left and right now are just there's this bundle of beliefs over here, this bundle of beliefs over here.

There's not necessarily any internal inconsistency in those bundles of beliefs, so it's purely a journalistic labeling that's just slapped on.

So I think the important thing to say then is if we want to categorize the National Socialists,

then I think they were truth in labeling.

They were nationalist and they were socialist.

They did take the racial/slash ethnic identity of human beings to be a fundamental.

They were not at all individualistic.

You are born into a nationalistic group.

You are born into an ethnic group.

That gives you your identity.

You belong to it.

Your national ethnic group is in competition, if not outright conflict, with all of the other national and ethnic groups that are out there.

So it's a collectivism plus a conflict.

So there's zero individualism, zero understanding that you and I, if we are on different ethnic groups or different national groups, are both human beings under the skin.

We have the same values, that we can work things out in a win-win way.

So all of that very strong nationalism, they believed it.

But that's one kind of collectivism.

The socialism

From them, that meant a kind of an economic collectivism.

There was no,

we favor private property, we favor free trade,

we favor the free movements of people across borders, right, and so forth.

All of it was very,

should be government management of the economy as a whole.

Goebbels loved Marx.

And if you read through the original Nazi Party program, 1920, when the party was formed, 25 points in the program, arguably 14 of them are just straight socialistic demands.

Confiscation of profiteering, organization into cartels, government management of this, that, and the other thing, government redistribution of wealth in this way and the other way.

So, those 14 points, no socialist has any disagreement with any of those 14.

Those were formed in 1920, all through the 1920s.

They didn't change any of that.

When they came to power in the 1930s, they put them into practice.

So, theory and practice, it's a species of socialism.

Let's talk about postmodernism, and I want to talk to you about it

in this framework.

I don't think most Americans know.

I think

if we're not there yet, we're very close.

That we are not in the progressive era.

We're in the postmodern era.

The progressives,

have been eaten by the postmodernists.

And most people get up every day and they hear a new term or a new name or a new thing that they have to do or say or call somebody

and they hear how bad they were or some group was

and they don't know where this is coming from.

And

without understanding,

we're playing into their hands, I fear.

So understanding postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a thing.

It is an important thing.

But you are also partly asking a demographics question.

If we try to say, here is our era, so as we take our era to be

just, say, North America, just to keep it relatively simple.

Then I do think you have to go and ask what are the main beliefs that most people believe.

And I do think there are a lot of progressives out there.

There are a significant number of postmoderns, and we'll come back and say what that means.

But I do think,

you're very precise with words.

You're very much like Jordan Peterson.

I don't know what it is about you Canadians, but you're very precise.

All right.

Maybe it's the nerd element.

So,

what I mean of a postmodern era, that

what's controlling the dialogue is that.

Yes, Dan.

I would say that we still are largely a modernist enlightenment culture.

But as we were talking earlier, a lot of that is taken for granted.

And so it has a lot of cultural staying power, but it's in our bones, and we haven't necessarily articulated what those principles are.

So what is important then is that postmodernism now for two generations is the most articulate, the most vigorous, and they to a large extent are setting the terms.

So since they are loud, since there is a lot of momentum there, it is tempting then to say we are now into a postmodern era.

Again, meaning just that we are all being forced to live under this rule from a very small number of people.

Yes.

But they are dragging us into this, and we don't even know where it is or what it is.

Yes, okay.

That is fair to say.

Yeah, the most active voices and the ones who are setting the terms of the discussion are coming from an alien philosophical and cultural framework.

And that's the one that we call, yes, postmodernism.

And since it is relatively new and since it is coming from

some intellectual and cultural sectors that a lot of people never interact with, it does take them by surprise a lot of the brazenness and the extremity of some of those views.

Now, of course, this is a huge topic.

Anytime you're talking about postmodernism, then you have to say something about modernism.

And what the postmoderns are doing is reacting against and rejecting what they take to be the core beliefs, the core institutions of basically the last four or five hundred years of

modern history.

Or the Enlightenment as the most articulate, mature expression of the values that have come to dominate in the modern world.

Empirical data, science, reason, technology, individualism, tolerance for people, respect for the Industrial Revolution and its achievements, a kind of universalism that all human beings should have the same rights, and so slavery is a moral abomination, the second-class status of women is a moral abomination.

Who actually believes those things are bad?

How did they get there?

Well,

now we have to have arguments about kind of five or six major philosophical issues.

So if if they're not, if this is a

waste of time, but I just can't imagine how someone could see.

I understand lots of problems, but if you actually look at the world and you understand history, it's getting better every day for people all over the world.

So, how do you get there?

Yeah.

Well, I think you can get there from a number of routes, but let's just talk one.

Suppose that we take a kind of political route.

Suppose we say we're going to have a kind of democratic republic.

We're going to say that all individuals have equal rights, life, liberty, property, right, and so on.

And

we're going to do a lot of things democratically.

Then what does that presuppose?

Well, partly

it means that you believe that there is such a thing as universal human nature.

And that's going to be one point of attack.

Is there such a thing as universal human nature?

Can we even articulate universal principles or not?

And if we become skeptical about our capacity to think universally and in terms of very broad principles, then we're going to start thinking smaller scale and start focusing on smaller groups.

And that's going to be one dynamic.

But if you just think about democracy, why do we do democracy?

And we say, oh, that's a very messy process.

And we say, well, the ideal of democracy is going to be every adult is going to participate in the process.

Every adult is going to have a say.

And we want people to vote, and we want them to vote in an informed way.

But how are they going to become informed?

Well, we expect them to do a lot of thinking, a lot of reasoning, that they can think about very complicated issues, foreign policy issues, environmental concerns,

problems in the third world, and so forth.

That they can gather a lot of data.

They are willing to listen to arguments by people who have different political positions.

We can can run experiments, and this is the science part coming out.

We're going to give power to these people for a little while.

We're going to assess the results.

Is it working or not?

If we say, I made a mistake four years ago in voting for this guy, I'm going to change my mind and I'm going to vote for these other people over here as well.

That's a very optimistic pro-reason view of human beings.

And it's an amazing thing that it has worked as far as it's going to be.

That's right, that's right.

So democracy is in part

coming out of the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment had a very optimistic assessment of the power of human reason, and that it was by and large universally distributed across all individuals, and that with the right kind of education and the right kind of freedom, we can

make people politically competent, and you're going to get good results out of that process.

Now, if you don't believe in reason,

And all the postmoderns stand at the end of a long skeptical tradition that came out of my discipline philosophy,

that by the middle part of the 20th century said, reason really is impotent.

Reason really is a fraud.

And that is not what drives human beings.

But we'll come back to the how in just a question.

But then the question is going to be: if you don't think that people are rational or that reason is particularly competent, then your understanding of how politics has to be done has to change.

It has to be done non-rationally.

If at the same time, on the individualism, if you don't think people are able to understand

and respect universal principles of tolerance, universal principles of dignity, universal principles of rights, if you think that people are really narrow-minded and that what they believe is really shaped by more local,

more selfish in the negative sense kinds of concerns, then you're going to say it's impossible.

that we can educate all human beings to believe in universal rights, that we're all brothers and sisters under the skin.

That's just too pie pie in the sky.

What's real is that people are parts of groups, that's where their tribal loyalties are, and once you start believing that, you're going to take politics in a very different direction.

Now, the question about why so many philosophers and then people

who were philosophically trained in literary criticism, in law, in historiography, came to be skeptical.

Well, there's a long counter-enlightenment story that starts

also

back in the late 1700s, early 1800s.

There are important philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant, in my understanding of the story.

And there's a long discussion that the philosophers are having.

And the way I read it, and this is in my book, I'm glad that it's on the table so people can see it.

Thanks for that.

Is that

things move slowly in the academic world, but the skeptical arguments about the power of reason lost by the time we got to the middle part of the 20th century.

And then for a little generation or so, philosophers and philosophically educated people were kicking around.

And we didn't have a positive philosophical framework that grounded science, that grounded rationality, and that left a vacuum for various non-rationalist movements to gain some traction.

Explain the last part of that.

I'm not sure I know what a non-rational

since we're talking about

collectivism, socialism, antifa, and so forth, these are all movements that come out of the left, right, broadly speaking.

So by the middle part of the 20th century, that's when the big shift is going from the old left to the new left.

So

people who are of our age now, we are old enough to remember when the new left really was new and it was vigorous.

But what was the new left all about?

Well, it was about a splintering of what had been a kind of monolithic, quasi-Marxist, neo-Marxist movement.

Marxism really was the only game in town for the left for about a century.

But when that came widely to be seen as a failure, including by people who were fellow travelers on the left, there was a lot of soul searching on the left, and the left did splinter into a lot of new factions.

And that's what the new left was all about.

But a lot of it was anti-rational.

So for example, if you think of Maoism, which became very popular in the 1960s,

well, Maoism is a much more irrationalistic version of Marxism.

And it's explicitly to say we're coming out of our Marxist traditions, but we think that Marxism was too wedded to rationality, to logic, to science.

And what instead we need to do is not wait for rational industrial, logical change and the march of history to occur.

What we need to do is have strong assertiveness and will, and it's going to be these non-rational political energies that are going

to cause the right kind of revolutionary change.

You have people in the Frankfurt School who are explicitly saying that what has happened is, and so Herbert Marcuse is an important person in the 1960s, a thinker of the new left, that capitalism and science and technology have succeeded in taking over the world and normalizing things and giving us all of these goodies so that we're comfortable working our nine to five jobs and then watching the TV and doing whatever it tells us and we're bought off by all of the gadgets and so on.

That if you're going to retain any sort of humanity, you have to become an outcast and you have to try the drugs, you have to try the crazy sex, you have to be willing to engage in the criminal activities, you have to go in the fight club direction, thinking of the movie.

That's the way that we have to break out of what is too rational, too logical a system, and in the chaos, then we just hope some sort of new form of collectivism, socialism, or whatever our idealism is going to emerge.

So it's an explicit embrace of non-rational or irrationalist techniques.

But that's given space by the failure of the intellectuals to say that no, we can understand the world rationally and logically and scientifically.

So take me back to,

I think it's Foucault that is over in Paris in 1968, and

they look at postmodernism

a little differently than it had been looked at, correct?

Who's they?

The French?

Yeah, the French philosophers, yeah.

Yeah, well, again, postmodernism is a bit like saying Christianity.

So immediately you do have to say there's Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox.

So there is a Foucaultian strain that is, I think, properly categorized as postmodern.

So yes, Foucault and his followers do look at things differently than the American versions and some of the other strands that are prominent in the subsequent generations.

Absolutely.

So tell me, because I can't find a good reason, because it's all really about deconstruction, right?

Well, deconstruction is most associated with Derrida, and it comes out of literary criticism.

It's a way of reading texts.

Right.

Yes.

But isn't, I mean, basically, that says, I can put that text,

basically, I can put my words into that author's mouth if I can draw the storyline together.

Yes.

Right?

Well,

the idea then of deconstruction is to say when we are reading texts, there is no such thing as an objective reading of the text.

That the text amounts to evidence, that we can come up with hypotheses, consider various hypotheses, and reject ones that don't fit with all of the evidence and come up with one that is the right or the best way to interpret a text.

What they want to argue, and this takes us into lots of technical issues in language and epistemology, semantics, and so forth.

It says we think that language is much too fluid, much too indeterminate, much too subjective, so there is no way to say there's a right reading of a text.

Also, there's technology.

Even if you have

the author saying,

this is what I meant.

Sure.

And then, well, of course, then one of the things we can just say is, well, authors can lie.

Right.

That's right.

I mean, there's a famous painting.

I think it's a painting of.

It's a famous painting

of the Americans defeating the British.

Maybe it's, I can't remember.

And there is a black man kind of hiding behind a white guy.

Well, the black guy is Peter Salem, who was a very important player in the American Revolution.

The painter at the time is on record saying that's Peter Salem.

He's a hero in that battle.

The way it's now this art is being taught in

universities is: no, that's a slave.

He was a free man.

That's a slave.

And it doesn't matter what the artist said at the time.

Right.

Now, here we should say something about Freud, though, because one of the things that

feeds into postmodernism via the Frankfurt School is the idea that surface pronouncements in our minds are not necessarily the real agenda.

Right.

And they can also be invisible to the speaker.

And so only the specially trained psychoanalyst or the specially trained critical theorist is the one who can know what's really going on.

So I don't know this particular interpretation of the Peter Salem issue, but the argument is certainly going to be that there's a kind of false consciousness.

We know better than the artist does himself.

If there was no nietzsche and no freud

would there have been

the uh struggle of the 20th century the way it was

ah that's an interesting question

what if-if question yes nasty toxic brew yeah of about 40 years with all kinds of stuff mingling and mixing yeah absolutely well i think nietzsche and and freud are justly read

for the reason.

They were geniuses.

They were brilliant.

I think we would have gotten there anyway.

It just may have been different rather than saying that there's one towering genius like Nietzsche who put it all together.

Effectively, it may have been worked out by four or five individuals of second-tier status.

But there is a logic to the way the intellectual discourse was going.

Nietzsche put the package together.

We would have gotten there, I think, anyways.

Do I read it right?

You know, God is not dead.

I mean, God is dead.

Meaning, good luck.

What are we going to do next?

Because you're going to replace him with something.

What are we going to do next?

Kind of a warning in a way.

It's not a celebratory God is dead, is it?

Well, I think it is.

Yeah.

No, now we're talking about Nietzsche's interpretation.

Yes, yes.

His interpretation.

Yeah, I think Nietzsche is ultimately seeing that as an affirmation.

So his view is that God is dead, but he has, of course, a very negative view about religion.

That he thinks religion is a matter of

saying we are not going to take charge of our own lives, and so we are expecting a higher being to legislate for us, to keep us in line, and so forth.

Isn't he also worried, though, about, okay, but people are people.

You have to be careful on what you fill.

We will fill that God thing in with something.

Yes.

So, isn't he saying?

Well, some of us will.

He's saying most people, when they lose their faith, they become less religious, they don't know what to do.

I think he believes that actually he's kind of pessimistic about the broad range of human beings.

They don't have what it takes in order to actually put together a meaningful life for themselves.

So they're just going to wallow in some sort of mediocrity and ultimately nihilism.

So he does see the 19th century that he's living in as an era of, this is a little bit anachronistic, kind of bad faith, where people don't really have the old style faith that gave meaning to their lives, but they haven't really abandoned it.

And so they kind of sort of go to church, they kind of want to believe in religion, or they go to socialism and say, you know, the state's going to look after us.

So he does think, since we've relied on religion for so many centuries, that it can't just be an instant, oh, we don't believe anymore, and that's okay.

But he does think for people like him and other stronger spirits, as he would call it, that this is a liberating movement, or

that realizing that there isn't a God who's got his eyes on you all the time and is telling you what to do, and you're just here to do God's will, that you're a free agent, although freedom, we have to say more about freedom in Nietzsche, that that is a kind of liberation.

So then you are free to go and live your life on your own terms.

But he does think that's only a realistic option for a small percentage of the population.

We go into World War I and it's a mess

and

you get the Dadaists in and

you have kind of this toxic stew, and then I think the

Dadaists are making fun of the elites, really saying, I can do anything.

Nothing has any meaning at all anymore.

Is this part of postmodernism and the modern

interesting?

Do you see what I'm saying at all?

Because it has no life, has no meaning, and it kind of just

kind of works its way into

all of the nastiness that comes in the next 10 years

without a recognition, I think, of what they were actually trying to say.

But maybe I'm wrong.

Well, I think it's fair to say that you can see the seeds occurring culturally among then high culture before World War I.

Although World War I certainly is extremely important.

So Nietzsche is doing his writing in the 1880s, and he's becoming a thing before his death in 1900.

So that whole end of the century transition, particularly in high culture, you can see a lot of proto-Dadaist nihilism, despair, and so forth.

And so just at a purely intellectual cultural level, if you are a well-educated person and you're a sensitive person the way an artist is,

you're channeling the zeitgeist or the spirit of the times,

And you have things like Darwin, right, saying, and this is not Darwin, you know, nature read in in tooth and claw, and we're all just animals, and it's instinct, sex, and aggression.

And you've got scientists developing theories like entropy, and it's going to be ultimately the heat-death of the universe, and there is no God, and happily ever after.

If you are channeling all of that, you're looking into the abyss to use Nietzsche's language here.

Well,

one reaction of that, of course, is just to become profoundly depressed.

But I think another is

to go in a humor direction.

To find

life is ultimately just absurd, and again, anachronistically, to go in a kind of Monty Python, play around with the absurdity direction.

So, Dada, I think, is coming out of that.

It is an embracing the absurd in a somewhat whimsical, but nonetheless, at the same time, serious way.

So, it's coming from a deeply pessimistic place, but nonetheless, you've got some creative energy, and you're not just going to

go totally into nihilism.

Now, then you add to all of those intellectual currents World War I, and I think that must have been psychologically devastating.

All of the allegedly civilized nations of the world just engaged in total brutality for four years.

And in the way I read it,

the churches pretty much said, Oh, God's on our side, on both sides.

And it kind of was that final collapse of the lower class of the faith in God.

And

you had nothing.

And they started turning to occultism,

looking for any heritage, anything to hold on to, right?

And the only reason World War I would be

if you're of troops, right?

One of the millions of troops, and you're not...

an educated person, you're just an ordinary working person or whatever, and you've got standard religion, of course, the problem of evil or the theodicy problem is going to be real for you.

God is on my side, and I'm doing this to other men, and they're doing this to me.

And

this is not part of God's plan.

It can't possibly be.

And that, of course, how can there even be a God if this is the world that he's put us in?

So, yes, absolutely.

So, my line of questioning here is really: I think that there are patterns that repeat, and it's not exact, but

they are the same general tune.

We have the same kinds of things happening with us now, where

society is collapsing.

We've had shocks to the system, not like World War I,

but we don't really know what we're doing.

The great American empire is seemingly coming undone.

Nobody has an answer.

There's nonsense from postmodernism.

There's a hundred different genders.

And it's just all fraying the way it did,

you know, 1920 Europe,

Germany.

Am I reading too much into that?

Well,

that's a big picture assessment.

I think

things are actually better.

I'm less pessimistic.

We do have a lot of things to worry about.

Absolutely.

And, you know, crystal ball gazing, we can't go too far down that road.

In one sense,

I am not worried because I do think in American culture, Canadian culture, broadly Western culture, which is now becoming global culture, we have huge cultural reserves that are very good.

I think the vast majority of people are basically decent, basically rational, and so on.

But we do have a problem with the fringe, with the edges.

And I don't have good demographics on whether that's 3 percent or 7 percent or whatever.

The latest study shows

8 percent,

which is really insignificant.

Now, then

it is insignificant in a quantitative demographic sense, but then the qualitative issue is where are those 8 percent?

And if they are in important cultural institutions like universities, where

all of the future professionals and teachers and journalists and so forth and politicians are going to be educated, then that 8 percent matters a whole lot more.

So there has got to be a qualitative measure as well.

But at the same time,

if you think about what people were struggling with in the first half of the century, you mentioned World War I,

the Depression, World War II, the Holocaust.

I don't think we are dealing with cultural and political enemies on that scale.

We are dealing with postmoderns, yes, and they are mostly intellectuals.

We are dealing with Islamists who are politicalized versions of Islam.

We are dealing with

political tensions in Russia and China and so on.

But I don't think those are on the scale of

World War I or World War II.

I agree with you.

So in a certain sense,

our enemies are much smaller.

So let me just say this.

Part of my job is to see a little bit over the horizon and to map it.

And, you know, as soon as the star field rolls starts rolling the other way, great.

But as long as the star field is rolling that way,

okay, what do we do now to prepare in case those things happen?

You have global economic collapse, which is

somewhat of

a pretty good chance that that could happen in the next five years.

So we have to identify all the possible apocalypses in different sectors and have a reasonable plan, sure.

Yes, reasonable ones.

What we have to do right now is start to come back together.

Because what happened in the 1920s, after all those things happened, then you had the Great Depression.

Morals meant nothing in the 1920s.

People started getting rich.

They started, you know, finding.

I'm talking about Germany.

They start to get rich.

The morals kind of go out the window, et cetera, et cetera.

Then somebody comes and says, I'm going to reset it.

And people were ready, at least 30%,

ready to have that.

And the rest just kind of went along.

It was too late.

We are having political enemies.

We're starting to

enter a time that could begin to resemble 1968 America.

We have to learn how to have dialogue with the people we've been trained to hate.

Yes.

Or we're going to go down that road that has happened before.

So I want to talk to you about postmodernism in that framework here.

Because

most people get up and they hear, oh,

I have to now accept this gender too, or I now have to say this.

And yesterday that was okay, but today I could lose my job for saying that.

They don't know where that's coming from.

Nobody's recognizing it.

Nobody is, you just comply.

And so there's a large...

Well, the problem is the compliance element.

I have no problem with us having a vigorous national discussion about how many genders and so forth there should be.

That's absolutely right.

The biology is complicated.

The psychology is complicated, right?

Absolutely.

So we should exactly have that discussion.

So we might then say the fact that there are some cultural sectors that are very loud that are forcing these discussions on us and it's all very bewildering, that actually is fine,

as long as we can discuss it.

And that's the issue.

The problem is the politicization of the discussion.

I don't think anybody, look, I don't know what the reality is, but I don't know anybody that looked at Bruce Jenner and did anything but, oh my gosh, you felt that way your whole life?

Why did you say something?

We don't want you to feel that way.

Nobody was like, oh, well, you're a freak.

I think we're beyond that for the most part.

I think we're beyond that.

Well, again, we've got the 3% or whatever.

Right.

So

I don't think we have that problem.

The problem is, is that half of the country is being told you're stupid, you're racist, you're a bigot, and then that half now is starting to say to the other side, you're totalitarian,

you just are going to gas us all.

The vast majority on both sides, neither of those are true.

Yeah.

But we're not talking.

So how do we do it?

Right.

Well, this is where I think postmodernism is dangerous because we all, I think as human beings, we have these frustrations that when we are arguing about various things.

We don't necessarily like our views being challenged, and we always have to

go the extra effort to open ourselves up to that.

We are good at challenging, not challenging ourselves.

Right.

And in many cases, we are not good at challenging constructively.

So, being able to learn how to do that.

So, all of these are emotional skills, all of these are cognitive skills.

And I think it is part of the human condition that good thinking, good civil discourse takes a lot of work, and there are always temptations to engage in shortcuts.

Even if we are people who have thought about various things and we know we are decent people,

we have thought things through, we have various views, it is hard for us to want to open ourselves up to having to rethink things through again.

So at a certain point, it is easy for us to close the door.

So I think that is a part of human condition.

But what good parenting does and what good education does is gives people the intellectual, the emotional, and the social resources to be able to do that throughout their lives.

So the real danger is that what we now have is

an elite in universities who are not teaching those skills.

They have come to believe, this is the postmodern position, that rational discussion is not where it's at.

Emotional tolerance and a willingness to engage in civil discussion is not where it's at.

And when the

teachers of the teachers stop teaching those skills and start to model different things, then you're on a slippery slope.

Steve, wait, wait, before you go any further, unless you think you need to complete that to complete the whole file.

Well, go ahead.

I can come back to that.

All right.

Again, I don't.

How can a

teacher, an honest teacher who thinks they're doing the right thing

say,

no,

you're just going to listen and take it and you're going to repeat it.

And if you step out of line

and use some sort of rational thought, I don't.

Well, you used the word honest, and I think that's the problem.

Yes, okay.

I think there are two things here.

There are lots and lots.

We always have these in any generation of teachers who are not honest about being teachers in the sense of liberal education.

That we're supposed to train people to think for themselves, give them all of the arguments, right, and so forth.

There is always a temptation, once you have a position of power, you become a teacher, you can mold young minds, you have your agenda, and you become an indoctrinator.

So every generation always has that, even in the most gung-ho liberal education context

that is possible.

People, though, who know that they are doing that, they know that they are being dishonest.

And they might mouth certain liberal education platitudes, but they know that in their heart of hearts they really are just in the game for indoctrinators.

And so part of what universities should be doing is policing themselves against people who are just ideologues and not giving them tenure, right, and so on.

So,

we don't do that as well as we used to.

But then, I think there is another subspecies here that I don't think that they are dishonest, but they have convinced themselves that rational dialogue is impossible.

This is why I think the philosophy is most important.

We have to have good epistemology that shows, in fact, we can identify facts, that there is something to scientific method, and that each of us, even if we are not professional scientists, should know something about evidence, argument, refutation, be able to follow a chain of thought.

And as long as we don't have a significant number of philosophers, first-rank philosophers, teaching that, it is not going to trickle down into the other disciplines.

What you will then have is a lot of people who are semi-educated, but what they will learn is: well, as with deconstruction, deconstruction, you can always make up a story, whatever story you want.

You can lie with statistics, you can lie with words, and the distinction between truth and lie doesn't mean anything.

Once that becomes the widespread intellectual ethos, then people will say, well, I'm not being dishonest if I'm just making up my own narrative because it fits my value framework and using whatever social power I have as a teacher to get my students to believe that.

I'm just doing what everybody else does, I think.

That's where we are.

And that's where we are.

So you mentioned deconstruction earlier.

There's an interesting point here.

That's Jacques Derrida, who is most associated with that.

But Stanley Fish, who is a very famous professor at Duke for many years, then he came to my home state of Illinois.

Interestingly, he was the highest-paid public servant in the state of Illinois, making more money than the governor

for a while.

He was a superstar professor who was recruited.

And one of the quotations I like from him, I don't agree with it, but he's

deconstruction basically saying there is no truth, there is no objectivity, there's no such thing as a right interpretation of text.

He said, this is very freeing.

I don't have to worry about what the right interpretation of text is.

All I need to do is just be interesting.

So I just be playful.

And then if I'm interested in some strange reinterpretation of a given painting or a given Shakespearean text, as long as someone reads that, oh, that's kind of fun, or a new way of looking at it, that's fine, because no one can say I'm wrong.

But once there is no such thing as a right way to interpret things and we shouldn't be arguing about things, then what are professors supposed to be doing when they're doing with their students?

If we're not training their minds, if we're not training them to look at both or all sides of an argument, you have power.

And if you are a politicized person at all, you will use your power for indoctrination purposes.

And so the connection I make here is Frank Lentricchia, who is one of Stanley Fish's colleagues at Duke.

And he's speaking for a whole generation.

This is a book published by a University of Chicago Press, very prestigious press.

He was saying, look, and I'm paraphrasing now,

the task of a professor is to train political activists.

We live in a horrible, horrible regime where basically capitalism, industrial revolution, everything is awful.

Sexism, racism, the whole shebang, that's taken as axiomatic from that perspective.

But people are being indoctrinated by the major cultural organs that are out there.

My job as a professor is to the extent I have power over these students to get them angry about the system as it is.

And we know what comes out of the anger is a sense that I need to go out and do something, and that will be the activism.

So the lineage from Derrida, right, Two Fish and Lentricia, is well worn out.

Derrida in the 60s, Fish and Lentricia writing in the 80s and 90s, and now we are one generation where those very bright individuals have influenced a whole generation, and now we have a more significant demographic who are exactly doing that.

So how do we

get it back?

How do we not embrace our anger and punch back?

Well, I think we should be angry, because I think this is a betrayal.

So I think the anger is there, but then we go back to the Greeks and anger management.

The stakes are high, and anytime we have a major injustice and an anger assault, we should be worked up about it.

I find it very difficult to talk to people because when I say we cannot strike out,

they think they interpret that as you don't have a reason to be angry.

This is righteous anger.

This is

my culture, I feel, my country, the Enlightenment.

Facts have been stolen.

And

they have trained a new little army to enforce it.

So you damn right were pissed.

That's right.

But now we have to be smart on how we feel.

Exactly.

That's right.

So your

anger has to work with your reason.

Your passions have to work right with your mind.

So we

should be activists ourselves

in the cause of truth and justice and the American way in the American context.

Those values are legitimate values, and they should be fought for vigorously.

But right now, the battle is not World War I, World War II.

It's an intellectual battle.

And so,

and this is not just me as a professor saying,

you know, I'm a hammer and everything is a nail.

This is the most important battle.

It is an intellectual battle, and it has to be fought in the universities.

Who's fighting it?

Well, I'm a little bit optimistic at this point because my sense is that most people who were first-rate in the academic world in the 80s, 90s, and the first decades of the 2000s, they were off doing good work, whatever it was that they were doing.

They are aware of postmodernism in various manifestations, and they're just saying, that's just a bunch of fringe people.

I don't need to take them very seriously.

Who can possibly take that seriously?

And it doesn't make any sense to me anyway.

So

that then did leave a vacuum.

And part of postmodern strategy or sub-strategies is the long march through the institutions to capture those institutions.

So they are playing the political game.

They are capturing those institutions, but then once they are

in enough of a position to become a more serious nuisance, then I think the first-rate people start to pay attention.

And so for the last 15 years or so, there has been an increasing number of people in all the major disciplines, right, in psychology, in history, in law, in my home field of philosophy, who are taking postmodernism seriously.

And so the intellectual debate is being joined.

And that's a good sign.

Yes.

And I think also a very good sign is that postmodernism is in part an activist strategy.

And so now that it's done well in higher education, it's stepping out into other cultural spheres.

And so the more general public, who's also out there doing good work, are starting to become aware of it.

but we're also starting to see engagement on other cultural fronts as well.

Now, I don't think there are any shortcuts.

It's going to be unpleasant.

It is going to be nasty.

And I think, as you are suggesting, in one sense,

we have our, or at least one hand tied behind our back because we are not willing to initiate certain tactics that they are willing to.

We are going to take the high road, and I think we should take the high road

to use physical force only as a last resort and in self-defense.

Right.

And wouldn't if it is about creating chaos and dismantling by

and not using reason, by allowing yourself to be angry and reacting

and creating more chaos, aren't you just hastening what they're trying to do?

Yes, absolutely.

That's right.

And

this may be a cheap shot, but I do think the postmoderns and a lot of the activists, they recognize that if they have to come up with evidence,

they're not going to win that game.

If it's a matter of logical, rational, scientific, they're not going to win that game.

So they are using the tactics that they have, and that is street fighting.

Just as in other branches of the military, if you can't compete on traditional tactics or high-tech or whatever, you use guerrilla tactics.

And so I think what we have is an intellectual guerrilla strategy that is being mounted here.

And we do need to be willing to use force in self-defense and to keep that contained.

There is a legitimate role for security forces and police forces.

Martin Luther King

asked for a permit to carry a gun.

He was denied.

He asked for it.

That's right.

But at the same time, we have to make sure that we are reacting only legitimately in a self-defense fashion.

And at the same time, paying more attention to

the cultural institutions, the issues of civility, what really liberal arts education is about, what proper rationality and respect for human dignity and human rights requires, and all of the arguments and understandings that go into having a decent rational philosophy that can support a Democratic-Republican polity, we need to reinvigorate that.

To a large extent, the postmoderns

are operating in a cultural vacuum.

We have taken a lot of things for granted and not defended them very well for several generations now, so we need to up our game.

Would you come back and help us

with that?

I would be happy to help to teach some of the arguments that I don't think people can

people haven't thought that deeply about things for a long time.

Yeah, one of the sad things I'm noticing, I'm now old enough to have been on several hiring committees and I'm at a smaller liberal arts institution and so I interact with faculty is and I hope I don't just sound like an an old person at this point here, but an increasing number of people who come out with PhDs and they really have not gotten a full education.

And it's not just that, you know, in the first generation or so, obviously we can't all read everything, but most of us have made an effort to read all of the greats and to know something, to have some working.

But an increasing, I noticed this about 15 years or so ago, people just say, no, I haven't read that and there's no need for me to read that.

And it's one of the giants

in the literature.

And sometimes it's just a matter of, well, I'm only interested in this.

But also, it's just, you know, that's from an alien tradition, and

no point reading that.

Stephen has written a book called Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism, and Socialism, from Rousseau to Foucault.

It is well worth your time reading, and I hope to have you back.

All right.

Thanks for the plug, and thanks for the invitation.

Thank you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.