TRIGGERnometry - Postmodernism Explained by Professor Stephen Hicks

Episode Date: January 17, 2021

Stephen R. C. Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society. Join our exclusive community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And it does not get better than the guest we have for you today. He's a philosopher and author. Professor Stephen Hicks, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks, Francis and Constantine. Honored to be with you. It is a great pleasure to have you here with us. I have so many questions for you. Francis has a ton as well. but I thought we'd start actually by telling you a little bit about our journey, which is we're two comedians, and about three years ago,

we started to feel something in the water. There was something going on where, you know, Francis is an old school lefty. I'm somewhere in the centre with a few classically liberal views. And we started to notice that the Overton window for things you could joke about was shrinking. Suddenly, the idea that comedians are supposed to challenge the mainstream narrative was no longer true. you would be punished, you would be criticized for making jokes about things. Identity became a huge part of our world.

And we started trigonometry to talk to people to try and understand what has happened and what is happening. Can you explain to us what's been happening and why we've spent three years of our lives dealing with this? What has been the transformation that has happened in our societies in the West? I think there are a couple of human constants at work. One is you guys are comedians and all. of us should have a sense of humor, but we do know that there are lots of people who have

absolutely no sense of humor. Whatever is going on in their life, they take it seriously, they can't joke about it, they don't like jokes about that. And as you know, humor in several of its main forms is subversive. And so they feel it as an attack and they want to shut it down. So the connection to the Overton window is precisely good. From a comedian perspective, everything, There should be no window. Anything is fair game. But the shrinking of the Overton window is an indication of context in which some things are just not allowed to be said. We do know people have a very narrow Overton window, some of them.

The second thing is that whenever a group of people gets into positions of power in whatever institution they're talking about, it can be a family, it can be a business, it can be a college or a university, there's a philosophical commitment they make. Are they interested in each person as an individual, and that person being cultivated to add their challenge, to develop their talents, or are they an authoritarian, that they have their vision and they want to impose it upon anyone using whatever tools are at their disposal? And certainly in higher education, this is a prime area where this happens,

because then you have teachers with students. And there's a big power differential. So the philosophical commitment of the teacher comes out very quickly. So there is a constant there about the choice that we all make about what kind of person we're going to be in interacting with other individuals whom we know we're going to have different views, different tastes, different values, and so on in life. And it's either going to be a mutual respecting and perhaps ultimately tolerating go our own way if we can't agree. atmosphere or one person is going to try to do a power play and dominate. Now, what often happens, though, in these institutions is you have a plurality of positions available, and so whether the authoritarian type likes it or not, they have to put up with

dissenting views, alternative views, they're being vigorous debate, and so on. But when the plurality stops being a plurality, and you have one position, with a large number of people who are in position to dominate then any pretences about civil discourse and debate and Overton Windows and so on goes out the window, and people start to use authoritarian methods in a social context. So that's what's been happening in universities. Now, you guys are comedians. I've noticed the examples at my own university as well. We always had two or three comedians who would come through each year and,

and give a routine for the students. And you could see the shift. The kinds of comedians who were being brought in started to be funny within a narrower range. Certain kinds of comedians just stopped getting invited. And some of them started to become controversial in the sense that, oh, should we really be talking about that sort of thing? So it's not just you guys. It's also over here, but probably you already know that. Now, those are the, Those are the constants. Why that has happened, why there has been this shift just in the last 10 or 15 years, there's a longer story that would have to be told because these philosophical shifts and the changes in demographics to one viewpoint, becoming dominant and able to enforce itself, or at least thinking that it's able to enforce itself,

those things develop slowly. Stephen, tell us more about that longer story before Francis takes over. He has loads of questions for his well. what has been the philosophical, because I feel like there's a philosophical shift that underpins a cultural shift, that underpins a political shift, and now everything is political, comedy included, and we experience this in our industry. So tell us more about all of that. How has that happened? Right. So probably the best word here to use is liberal in its generic sense. So we talk about liberal democracy or liberal societies, in which we're trying to maximize the amount of freedom that individuals have.

And then we think of education and schooling and raising children as preparing them for living a certain kind of life as free, self-responsible, competent individuals who can take on the world. So there is the concept of liberal education, which has a close cognate or an end of close application there. So the question then is going to be what is education about? and since human beings are a smart species, we have a big brain, instead of education and schooling being a matter of a couple of weeks or a couple of months,

as it is with other animal species, and we typically spend 12, 15, 16 years preparing young people for adult life, and it's not until, say, they are 18 that they are ready to go. So what are we doing with that 16 to 18 years? And this is a certain amount, of course, physical health development and so forth, But the vast majority of it is cognitive. And one aspect of that cognitive development is not only self-regulation, but social regulation. How am I going to interact with other people?

What are the mores going to be? What are the explicit rules going to be? Are we going to teach students that they need to be able to enter into that process, say, in a liberal democracy and have their own ideas for how things should be done, be willing to listen to other people's ideas, have arguments, but hopefully productive arguments, being willing to trial and error, do experiments, and so on. And that whole ethos requires a cognitive development and the cultivation of a certain set of principles. Now, what underlies that is, and why liberal education and liberal democracies are characteristic of the modern world,

is that the modern world embodied a brand new philosophical set of commitments three, four, five hundred years ago where you put those dates. And all of that, what we call modernity, has come under attack from a different philosophical perspective that wants to basically blow up or replace the entire modern project with something else. So if you think, for example, about liberal democracy, what are the assumptions there? Well, the assumption there is that we are individuals, that we are self-responsible, that we can think about very important political, cultural matters, that everybody should have a voice. They should be free to put their ideas out there, even to offer themselves as candidates.

Everybody should have a vote. And the way we're going to decide very important matters is by counting up the vote. votes and doing what the majority of people say. And that then is to say, we have confidence that the vast majority of people have the intellectual capacity to do all of these things. And they also have the moral capacity that they're going to respect other people's having their own ideas and debating. And if I happen to lose a given election and I can expect to lose the elections

frequently, I'm going to go along peacefully and then re-enter the debate on the next round, and hopefully it will be a self-correcting process. So that's a long way of then of saying that we respect people in the modern world as individuals. We think they have their own mind, and they should be free to accept it. And so a certain amount of diversity and tolerance becomes very important. Think also about how we do religion in the modern world. And again, we go back to say the 1500s, and we tell the story about the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. But what came out of that was a new ethos about religion,

again, that we're all individuals. We should be free to think and practice or not at all practice religion in totally our own way. That we should get the state and government out of religion because the state is an incident of coercion and religion should be something that people freely adopt or freely reject and we need to respect and tolerate all of the difference. So that then is to say on this very important set of issues, we think it's up to people to work it out for themselves and we're going to give people a lot of individual freedom to do so. So again, we're back to individualism and freedom and people being rational able to govern their own lives. Now, all of that has implications for science. If we are rational beings,

it has implications for how we treat women and members of other races because they're human beings. who have their own minds and their own values. They're also individuals who are rational. So the whole modern world has been extraordinarily revolutionary in all of these dimensions, political, economic, scientific, religious, in the treatment of other races and so on. Now, what the postmoderns are doing, and this is for deep philosophical reasons,

is they're all very smart people in the first generation, people like Michelle Foucault and Jacques Derry Daug and Richard Rorty and so on. is their first-rate educated people. All of them are PhDs, all of them in philosophy, my field. And they have this big perspective on what has happened in the grand sweep of historical development in philosophy, in culture, and politics, and so on. And all of them are convinced that the modern project is a failure. And it's a failure intellectually.

And they believe also that it's a failure culturally. that it is based on individualism, but we are not individuals. It's based on the idea that we have rationality, that we are rational animals, and they don't believe fundamentally in rationality anymore. And then as a result of that, they're not going to believe in liberal education. It's going to be a different kind of education that they are entrusted in, and fundamentally, they're not going to believe in any sort of liberal democracy. And so the political manifestations are going to be very different as a very different.

well. And Stephen, what you're talking about is really, really, really fascinating. One thing that I want to touch on is you've mentioned authoritarianism. Now, to me, it seems that these types of people that we're discussing about, they very much want to reintroduce authoritarianism. If you look at the example that you used about comedians, well, I don't like this particular comedian, therefore we shut them down, therefore we don't listen to them. I don't like this type of thought. I don't like these arguments, therefore I shut them down. Isn't this just a rather grandiose way of reintroducing authoritarianism back into our society? That's exactly right. That is the political manifestation. Now, authoritarianism means a certain kind of social power or

political power, right, that rather than listening to you and letting you speak and perhaps entering into an argument with you, which has its own ethos, instead, I try literally to have you physically removed. And if you start to speak, then I try physically to intimidate you or to overthrow you. So authoritarianism is about the use of physical power. And of course, political dictators, whom we call authoritarian, that's exactly what we do. So, yeah, and this is the deep question, am I going to treat you as a free agent? agent and have to respect that and perhaps tolerate that, or am I going to try to threaten you and physically shut you down? And that latter is the authoritarian move. Now, the thing that's

different about the modern authoritarianism historically has always come in two forms. I mean, one kind of authoritarianism is a kind of, I would call it a pretense, objectivity kind of authoritarianism, that I think that I am a special individual, that maybe I have been endowed by God with special moral character or special insight. And because I have this objective... I'm definitely one of that. Yeah, I was going to say that.

Yeah, so because I have this objective source that is granting me and authorizing me to use power over you lesser beings, then I am morally justified in you, using power to stop you from saying the stupid immoral things that you otherwise might say. Now, that, of course, can come in religious form. It can come in secular forms as well. What's different about the postmoderns, though, is in addition to being against the modern world, they're also against what we typically call the pre-modern world, where that kind of religiously based,

or, you know, if I'm the king and I acquired power on the battlefield or through political machinations, that demonstrates my superiority and gives me the right to use my power to shut other people down. They also believe that those are, veneers of objectivity are also faulty. So what they are left with is a deep belief that everybody is in a subjective perspective. We don't get our values from God. We don't get our values from nature. We don't get them from our own biological needs. Instead, all values are just subjective.

We make them up or they are conditioned into us by random social forces. So nobody really knows what's true. Nobody's in a better position of knowing anything more. There is no such thing really as truth or knowledge. everyone's values are just a subjective set of emotional commitments that they have. So the postmoderns will say, you know, I might try to have a veneer of saying, oh, no, really, my values came from God and yours didn't, but that's just a veneer. So they will not buy into any of that.

So all we are left with is different people have different belief systems, different value commitments, and we can't reason about them. We can't find out which ones are better, which ones are. are worse because all of that's just as subjective as well. So really all we are left with is a social power struggle. And you might as well just jump into that power struggle and use any strategies or any tactics you can to have your subjective value commitments prevail. So it's an authoritarianism, but based on an explicit subjectivity. But it also seems to me, Stephen, that it's an authoritarianism mixed with, I don't know the word for it, but with a desire for a utopia,

which has never existed. And they believe that if they assert themselves in this authoritarian manner, they will achieve nirvana, utopia, where everybody's equal, as long as we do these particular steps and you shut up and you don't and you're not allowed to speak. Yeah. Well, I think there's a split then within postmodernism. On that issue, and that's nicely said what you've said there. I think some of the postmoderns don't believe in utopia at all. Because what would utopia be? Utopia would be the idea that there is an ideal reality that is proper for human beings,

and it should be the same for all human beings. And I have genuine knowledge about how to get human beings from where we are now to that utopia. If you start to go down that road, then you are not a postmodernist in the sense of a subjectivist or a relativist. You have become an objectivist, small O, and a universalist again. And you're starting to sound more like an old-fashioned authoritarian. But I think you're right that there is a generational shift. And when we use very broad labels like modern, pre-modern, post-modern, and so on, they are at a very high level. of abstraction. So a standard analogy is to say, you know, someone can be religious, and there's a big

difference between people who are committed to being religious and those who are naturalistic, purely in their thinking. But religion is a very broad label. And as we know, religion then divides into many major religions, and each of those major religions has lots of subspecies. And not all of the members of all of those subspecies, even though they will share some general traits, will agree on everything. And they will disagree on some pretty fundamental things. You know, we know there are some religious people who believe in heaven and a happy ever after for everyone, some people who believe in religion, but they think that most people are going to go to hell and only an elect few are going to go.

Other people believe in religion, but they don't really focus so much on heaven and hell. They focus on just living a moral life in the here and now and so on. So I think your utopian version of postmodernism, in my taxonomy, it's a sense. second generation of aspect, those who will commit to the idea of postmodernism that were not individuals, were members of groups, and that these groups subjectively construct our values. But what these ones do is they convince themselves in some way that their group's values really are best for all human beings. And those other human beings, if only they were reshaped appropriately, they could come to adopt my group's values and the world would be a better

place. Whether it would be utopia or not, I don't know. So there are different political versions of postmodernism as well. The historical point is that postmodernism first developed out of the left, out of the far left. Now, the left also is a big tent with many subgroups as well, but there was a subsection of the far left. And that left did have a certain set of values that it used to believe were universalistic values to be imposed on everyone in society. And a certain kind of making everybody equal across all social dimensions was part of that far leftist package. So one of the ways of getting to your utopian understanding, or at least of the utopian types, is to say that they've retained that certain kind of very robust egalitarianism. Everything must be made equal and that's

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the proliferation, I would say, of the idea that words are violence, the words cause harm. Where does that come from? Because that's such a revolutionary concept. If we think back to even five years ago, in our political field or in comedy, that did not exist as far as I remember. I don't remember anyone telling me a university word. of violence, and yet here we are 15 years later, and now that is like the motif to our whole conversation about everything. Where did that come from? Well, again, there's two long stories that need to be told here that come together. One comes from linguistics and from more broadly speaking epistemology, and the other one comes from your understanding of human natures and

human cognitive capacities in general. Do you think of individuals as individuals or collectivities? So let me start with that, start with the latter one. So if you take the debate between individualism and collectivism, so then we ask the question, am I an individual who has control of his own mind? And so I shape my own character. I choose my own values. I develop my habits and I accomplish something in my life as an individual. Or do I understand myself as more like a lump of plasticine that has been born into the world, but I was born. born into a certain social context and all of these external forces shaped and manipulated and developed me into the kind of being that I am. So physically, I might seem like a unique individual, but really I'm just a vehicle through which all of these social forces are developing in me. So hold that in mind. If you are going to believe on the positive side that words are a form of speech, the traditional view that is now being attacked, then what we typically say is, well, I as an individual, I can take the word, I can think about it for myself, what it connects to

in reality, or if I don't think it actually connects to anything in reality, and that when I choose to use a word, I am choosing a specific meaning, and I'm trying to communicate to you as a particular individual, and if communication is going to work, then I really have to listen to you to see where you as a unique individual are coming from. And so explain myself right and so forth. So all of that individualistic understanding presupposes that individuals are the operative cognitive units. Now, if you shift to seeing individuals as vehicles through which social forces are acting, that changes everything, including your understanding of how language works. So the assumption here is going to be that languages already exist before you come into existence.

And now these are all the controversial things, but I'll just put them out there, right? That the meanings of language are all socially constructed. They are not a matter of individuals in cognitive relationship to the world. Instead, we absorb a language from our social group. that shapes our mind. And languages, again, I don't agree with this, but I'm just putting this out there, come with a certain grammar, and that grammar builds in certain metaphysical assumptions about the way the world works in its syntax. And so different language groups then have different philosophies built into their languages.

So the end result of this then is going to be, if you follow this linguistic route, that you have different social groups, each of which has a different. different language, but that language has been conditioned into them to think about the world in very different ways. What that means is that there's not really any way for people of different language groups to communicate with each other. And that means that we can't have rational individuals engaging in conversation with each other, and they both have a common reference in reality to check what their words mean, so ultimately with some work they can come to agreement. instead you're just left with these different social groups and their languages are evolving in

different directions. Their thinking is involving in different directions. So any disagreement between those social groups is unresolvable in principle. Well, this is what I was going to ask you about. So basically, to put what you're saying into simple language, if human beings are infinitely malleable and if language is the method by which those people are changed, then when I'm on stage, performing a comedy show. I'm not actually trying to communicate something for the purposes of making you laugh. What I'm really doing is trying to use the power of the microphone and words to shape you

to take a certain worldview. And if that worldview is wrong or bad or evil, I am causing literal harm to millions of people around the world. But the more troubling thing about your analysis, essentially what you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is this worldview, if applied to society inevitably leads to irresolvable conflict. Exactly. And it really is irreversible conflict along group lines. And so that's why what you've found in the last 10 years especially is when you go up on stage, they don't see Francis.

They don't see Constantine as an individual who's expressing his own ideas and his quirky sense of humor, whatever that is. They will see you as a male. They will see you as a white guy. They will see you as, I don't know what your sexualities are. But immediately you stop being seen as an individual and you just seem to come to be seen as a member of a group. And everything that those groups do is flowing through you. And if I'm a member of a different group, then immediately we are in an adversarial circumstance.

And I treat it as an adversarial circumstance. Now, another aspect of this becomes more directly psychological on the words as violence theme. Everybody recognizes that words can have a harm. And violence is a certain kind of harm. But there's been the standard thing to say there's the distinction between physical harms and psychological harms. And so if I take a stick and I start beating your body with a stick, well, that is a is a physical harm, but also your body, you don't have any control over the way your body responds to what's happening there, right? Because gravity and biology work independently of your choices.

But on the psychological side, if your assumption is that you are an individual, that you are in control of your mind, if I start saying harmful words to you, I start insulting you in various ways, well, you have a choice, right? You can say, you know, he's saying that I'm a single. I'm a stupid idiot, right? And those are harmful words, right? That's what those words mean. And they are intended as an insult, but I am not necessarily a passive vehicle. I don't have to let that hurt me. I can say, he thinks I'm a stupid idiot. Well, what does that really mean? Am I a stupid idiot? And I can think for myself and for my own judgment, I don't think I'm stupid. I don't think I'm an idiot. So really, what your attempt to insult me is going to fail. And I'm going to think, oh, he's just

attacking me, right, for some reason. So the point is, my response to those harmful words is up to me and I'm in control of the process. And that's what the individualist will say. So then they say, sticks and stones will break my bones, but right, words will never hurt me because the words and my response to them are up to me as an individual agent. But if you get rid of individual agency, then you start to just say words like any other thing. I'm not in control of them. They shape me. They form me. And if you are a being with some power, then words are a form of violence on me and I then become a victim of your words. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you. Easy DNS is the perfect

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triggered as well and you will get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. And Stephen, it's very interesting they're talking about the way that we perceive words. But there are some words that have very, very real power and it's used again in the authoritarian, way in order to shut down arguments. Yes. You know, and the way that these words are used as tools, for instance, racist, big a trans, we all know what they are. Right. Sure. Yes. Well, I would agree with everything. They are used in the authoritarian way, but then I, at least as a liberal individualist, will be able to recognize that they are using those words in a certain way. So, and this is, of course,

part of the ongoing linguistic power struggle because, yes, words are a tool. Language is functional and one of the things we try to do is not only understand the world using language, but try to communicate with other people and influence other people. And if I'm an authoritarian, I will try to use words in an authoritarian way and I will try to use them as weapons as well. But I would reject. You're true that there are authority, you're correct rather, that there are authoritarian people who use words like fascist, racist, sexist, and so on in an authoritarian fashion to try to shut down debate. And they try to use them to get inside your head and to put you on the defensive. So, oh, my God, the guy called me a racist and we know that's a big button pushing word. So I become

jangled up emotionally inside and maybe and we know that people don't function as well when they are emotionally jangled up and i don't know how to respond to this i'm all confused and so uh that puts the person who's using those words in a rhetorically advantageous purpose so i would say i would agree with you that yes rhetoric in the postmodern linguistic framework is used as a weapon explicitly so But I think what we then need to do is just not only engage in the philosophical debates about language and cognition and so on, is to refuse to let them get away with that particular tactic. So if you want to take racism, which does have a precise meaning, it is a real problem and broaden it into this all-purpose weapon that you're going to use on anyone, we have to fight back against that and say that is an illegitimate extension of the word,

racism. And unfortunately, at that point, we either have to have a discussion about what the word properly should mean, or you just have to say, this is not someone I can have a meaningful conversation with and just walk away from the conversation. See, the trouble there is that we come back to this point that we came to earlier in the interview, which is we are in a position of irresolvable conflict. And so the question that's been worrying me and us and many of our former guests, people like Douglas Murray, something that he feels strongly. What is the end game for this? If we can't reason ourselves out of this position, because there is no reasonable, rational-based discussion. How does this get resolved?

Yeah. Well, if you can't reason your way out of it, then it does become a power struggle. Right. And it's become a matter of physical force. Absolutely. You know, if you're dealing with with an animal that wants to eat you, you can't reason your way out of it with the animal. Then it does become who's faster, who has the better physical weapons in that confrontation. If it's to switch to human animal context, you are being mugged in a dark alley and someone is using physical threats against you. You're not going to be able to reason your way out of it. Then it does come down to, can I physically?

overpower this person or physically run away from this person. And that's what the debates are. So then it does become a philosophical issue in an institutional context for the leadership of that institution, whether that is a principal at a high school, or the dean at a university college, right, or the CEO at a business. That person has a responsibility to say, if we are going to do these, run these institutions on a broadly liberal basis, that this is going to be a voluntary set of relationships that we are entering into, and people have the right to have their own ideas and to express those ideas,

and we're going to have civil debates, and we're going to settle these things by reason. If in the midst of all of that, we have people who are fundamentally committed to authoritarian physicalist methods, then we do need to remove those people. So if I'm a professor in my classroom, for example, I will let the debate between the liberals and the authoritarianes go to a certain point. And as long as it's a debate, that's fine. But if I have an authoritarian in a student in my class who wants to physically intimidate non-authoritarian students or threatens violence with them or is talking constantly and won't stop talking to give other students a chance, then I do have to use my authority as professor. in the liberal sense to remove that student from the classroom, because they are undermining the liberal ethos of that particular social institution. I would then say more broadly at the level of deans and presidents of universities, they have to make a decision.

Am I, as the president of this institution, committed to a certain worldview, a religious worldview, or a utopian leftist worldview? And the assumption is that all of the students and professors at this school are here to, discuss only that worldview, that's fine. But if you are deciding as a president of your institution that it's going to be a liberal education institution, then once students cross the line and start becoming physical themselves, or professors cross the line and start becoming physical themselves, they need to be removed. And Stephen, you were, in a former interview that we were watching,

you were discussing about the terms left and right and how they have essentially become meaningless. I've somebody who's always seen myself as being on the left. I used to be a school teacher for 12 years, viewers and listeners of the podcast for a regular. You can have a drink now. But kindly explain to people, why is it, do you feel that these terms in 2021 now really have very little meaning?

Ah, well, I think they've for a long time had very little meaning because it was somewhat of an arbitrary designation. So part of it is the power of media, and media needs to have more simplistic labels for the broad mass of people who want information packaged in certain ways in digestible chunks. So if we think, and I'm going to speak from the Canadian and the American context, we've got some very big, broad spread out countries. And the same thing, of course, would apply in Britain with millions and millions of people. And the way political competition works out is it typically gets winnowed down to a few packages. Now, for me, as a philosopher and anybody who's an intellectual about these things, we're going to see these packages, given the complexity of society, are always going to have about

100 elements in them. And what you want to do is you want to take each of those elements and consider it on its own and look at the arguments for and against and so forth, and then very carefully pick and choose what elements in those packages. But if you have 100 elements, then I don't know what the exponent would be. You could have all sorts of combinations of packages that arise as a result of thoughtful individuals working their way through the packages and forming their own sets of beliefs. But we do know that, you know, as with cars, as with VCRs, and I'm dating myself, but various kinds of electronic devices, things typically devolve themselves into bundled packages of things.

So it becomes Apple versus Android. It becomes VHS versus beta. It might become Ford versus GM versus Chrysler or Nissan versus Rec, whatever. And these are big bundled things. And the same thing has happened in politics. So what we end up with is parties, which are retailers of political ideas. And, you know, the intellectuals and so forth are the wholesalers working out various, discrete elements, but then they get packaged by the retailers and then sold to the broader market.

And it's then much easier to put together, here's our package of 100 ideas, here's our competing package of 100 ideas, but there's no necessity that it had to be that package of 100 ideas versus that package of 100 ideas. And then the media sells them or extends them out to the broader public and the labels then come to stick. So one encouraging thing, though, is about the polarization. And I think polarization does have its social and psychological costs, but I think it is a cognitively healthy thing because one of the things the polarization does is rather than say, I don't come back to the American context, say, instead of you have to choose between being a

Republican and being a Democrat. in my entire lifetime, everybody who's a Republican or a Democrat or neither is unsatisfied with all of the elements in the package. What the polarization does is to push things to an extreme. And then people think about the extremes. And then they think about what the alternatives to the extremes are. And then they start to put different packages together. And so then we start to say, well, let's take the Republicans and then we're going to divide them into the religious right and then say that the free market right. And it will do the same thing.

with the left. Here's different segments of the left. And that polarization then pushes things in a breaking up fashion, which I think is intellectually healthier, which shows that more people are thinking for themselves instead of just accepting, I'm a leftist or I'm a rightist. You start adding all of these adjectives. And so you have a better understanding of what the political landscape is. And to the extent that that's happening in the broader population, I think that's part of improved political education. And Stephen, when is it? So, again, I'm on the left. And it seems that the left have undergone this transformation where they care more about identity and identity groups than they do about disparity in wealth between rich and poor. Why has that happened? And how long has this been happening for? Well, again, a long story. Part of the book that I think got me invited to you guys, my explaining postmodernism,

skepticism and socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Much of that book is a history of the left, right, or history of socialism over the course of the last two centuries, and it has gone through, right, multiple iterations and branchings and splittings and mergers and remergers and so on. So it's all some very, very complicated territories. But yes, on this point about exactly what you're saying,

the shift from caring about wealth inequality and gaps, there to identity groups. There's a very important marker in the history of left politics in the 1950s, but especially in the 1960s and since then, because for the first century and a half or so of modern left politics, it was primarily an economic differential issue, rich versus poor, and we are, perhaps we hate the rich, but we are primarily supposed to be motivated. by concern for the poor and getting them elevated. And the main criticism of capitalism or whatever the alternative is was that it does not look after its poor members very well.

They fall behind, rich get richer, poor get and all of that sort of stuff. But that argument came to be seen as untenable by the time you get to the 1950s and the 1960s. Of course, you still hear some leftists who make that argument. But it's very hard in the modern world to argue that capitalism does not improve the material standards for the vast majority of people. If you say, I'm concerned for the workers. And then you go and you look at 80% of the workers and the workers have two cars and air conditioning and big screen TVs and they're going on vacations. Now, they might not be going on vacations like Bill Gates goes on vacations.

But you can't say, oh, these impoverished poor workers. who are victims of capitalism. By the 50s and 60s, that argument wasn't flying very hard. And also the idea that if we have a socialistic system, it's going to care about its workers and elevate the workers. By the time we get to the middle part of the 20th century, there have been quite a few experiments in socialism, and they had never done that, they had never done anything close to that.

They had, in fact, impoverished. So there was a shift then from primarily economic concerns to another strategy. And the new strategy was that the different groups in society, again, there's a more collectivism that's built into left politics are not being treated equally in society along other social dimensions aside from economic dimensions. So maybe different racial groups or gender groups or and then we shift to second. or maybe other animal species. We're not treating them equally and we're driving them to extinction and so on. So the economic arguments get put on the back burner on the left and other dimensions of inequality and group identities come to the four. I was just going to say my final point in this, but what we've seen now with the present young generation is a generation that are actually going to do, less well financially than their forebears. They're less likely to own property. They're not going to earn

as much and so on and so on and so forth. Don't these arguments about inequality and added to that the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Aren't these arguments now suddenly coming to the four again, or shouldn't they be? And aren't we wrong to be focused on the identity stuff when, like I said, the inequality between rich and poor is ever more increasing? Yeah. All right. Well, I'm a philosopher by training, but I do know, I think, enough about economics to be dangerous on this point. But also, I know the history. So I'm going to make an economic prediction here. The next generation of young people are going to be richer than I am, and they're going to be richer than you are. Now, partly I'm going to make that. That's not very hard, Stephen. Believe me. Well, okay, maybe so. Your generation on average, I'm sensing that you guys are younger than I am.

And partly this is for historical reasons. So I've read a lot of the history here. And Francis, the argument that you are making, that's exactly the argument that was made in the 1990s. And it was made in the 1970s and the 1950s and the 1920s and the 1880s, that this generation's young people are going to have a lower standard of living than the previous generation. At some sense, whatever we're doing has run its course. We are depriving them of opportunities. There's a wealth gap. It's an argument that gets repeated over and over again. But I think it's driven by the same fundamental assumptions about opportunity and freedom and technology. And those

are some very seductive assumptions, but they also are very deep. So we are pushed back to what what intellectuals say about economics, what intellectuals are saying about those philosophical assumptions. So if you want to say, for example, that you are a representative young person right now, and you look at your opportunities for the future, and you compare your opportunities for the future now with the previous generation, young people now have more economic opportunities than people did in the in the past generations. And I think what, of course, we have to start looking at the data. But yes, absolutely, this is, this is the case.

I mean, for example, suppose I'm a creative person in the visual fields and so on. And then 20 years ago, I want to get into making movies. What are my options for getting into movies 20 years ago? Well, I need to have about a quarter million dollars worth of capital. equipment in order to be able to do so. Right. And then we fast forward one generation. If you're a young person right now with some creative movie making talents, what's your

capital investment that you need in order to be able to make good movies? Maybe a few thousand dollars. So that then is to say more younger people who are poorer now have more opportunity to be successful in their fields. And that's just one example in computers. There are more professions that are being open. up as a result of the new technologies that are coming. It's not only that there are more technologies making more professions and more kinds of creativity

possible, they are also leveraging us in a way that they make us more productive. And that's what well fits, becoming more productive, creating things that are more valuable to people. On top of that, they're also becoming less expensive so that more people more easily will be able to afford them. Now, another example is, you know, step outside of our own immediate context. You know, think about, you know, the average person in a poorer part of the world, you know, in, I don't know, Peru or, you know, Nigeria, right, or Vietnam. Does that person have more opportunities now for wealth creation than an equivalent Peruvian, Nigerian, or Vietnamese person a generation ago?

And the data are astounding about how much more opportunity people have. Stephen, no argument on that point whatsoever. But let me interject. The one issue in this country that is animating a lot of resentment intergenerationalally is what we call the housing crisis, which is it is ever more difficult for people in this country, young people, particularly to get on the housing ladder. And that means their opportunity for accumulating wealth is significantly diminished versus previous generations. What do you say to that? Well, I don't know very much about the housing market

in Britain, so it would be a bit difficult for me to pronounce on that. I can speak to the housing market in Toronto, my hometown. And of course, there are going to be market pressures. The countries that are sexier in the world are going to attract more people, the countries that are prosperous, their babies aren't going to die and they're going to live so their populations are going to grow, you naturally then expect that there's going to be increases on the demand side. So London, England, Toronto, San Francisco, these are sexy places, lots of people want to go there. So the question then is going to be on the supply side. And my understanding in Toronto is that Toronto and San Francisco, it's pretty much the same story, made it very difficult for

new development to happen. Yeah. Yeah. We have the same problem here. Yeah. So to the extent that you then say, we want to attract lots of people and we have a rising population, we want them to have housing, then if you at the same time are preventing people from building housing, then you have a cognitive dissonance.

The problem there is than a political problem, how the zoning people are thinking. Yeah. That is the fight that has to be happening. Fair point. So let me... By contrast, we'll say one more thing. You probably have a city like Houston, which has had huge population growth, but housing is very affordable in Houston. They've solved the political problem, actually, by not having that those oppressive set of zoning and other kinds of restrictions as well.

So I think it's a political problem. I hear you. So in summary, what you're saying is that's not the housing pressures in this country or else, but not a reflection of the capitalist system. They're reflection of certain quirks of the political and administrative. state, which I accept completely. So let me come back, Francis' previous question, because what we're really trying to get out of you is, you know, it's like with jokes. When we rewrite a joke, we may write a joke that we think is funny, but you go on stage and you try it out, and sometimes it lands and sometimes that joke doesn't, but another one does, right? So why have these ideas, this postmodernist

worldview, why is it landing so damn hard right now? What is the reason that people look to it and embrace it with such vigor. Yeah. Well, I think it's because human beings are a smart species and the philosophical framework that they adopt when they are young is decisive. We all go through the soul searching teen years, particularly if we're reflective, what kind of person am I going to be? What do I want my life? And then we make a commitment to a certain set of value. So what we learn from our parents, from our teachers, and then particularly if we are very thoughtful about these things and we go to into higher education, that becomes decisive. People live what they believe. And so then it comes back to the arguments that have been developed and have prevailed in universities over the course of the last two generations. What happened in the 60s and 70s was an anti-modernist philosophical framework.

We call it postmodernism, came to positions of significance and dominance in the humanities. And that's very important because what is it to be a human being? That's what the humanities are all about. And we go to literature. We try to learn from history. We take courses in anthropology and political science. So the philosophy that prevailed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s is decisive. And universities are very important here because that's where the next generation of teachers goes for their training.

So they take those humanities courses, and then they go off and they become teachers to millions and millions of students in the next generation. That's the philosophy they teach. Journalists go to university, and they get their training. That's what they teach, and then that shapes their journalistic approach. Lawyers go to university, and then they go off into the legal profession, and they try to influence and change the laws and so on. And, of course, most politicians come from a background of being lawyers or some sort of university education. as well, so the political landscape changes. So what we are seeing is high theory that was developed in the 60s and 70s in universities by some very smart individuals that prevailed. That then taught

a next generation of intelligent people in the professions, and then it has spilled out into the culture as a result of that broad cultural education. And Stephen, do you think, and this is where I'm going to more and more my own thinking, do you think that these big institutions, whether it's a university, whether it's the justice system, whether it's the education system, whatever it may be. They should be utterly apolitical. It is not their job to push their own political views and opinions on the minds of the employees or the people who work there or the people who go there to study. Apolitical in the sense that I think there should be a separation of education and politics. So that's why we have the institution of tenure and academic

freedom, for example, that the people we think are dealing with the controversial ideals need to be insulated from political pressures. So in that sense, yes, absolutely. And I think this is the harder argument, but it does mean separation from educational funding from politicians, because politicians have a terrible track record of he who pays the piper calls the tune. Now, to the extent that the liberal education ethos has been strong and the idea of action, academic freedom for fearless truth seekers to be able to speak anything they want has been strong. We've been able to marry some level of political funding with academic freedom. But we're entering into dangerous territory to the extent that the liberal education thing is gone.

But then if we ask apolitical in the sense that the people who are inside the institutions, like deans and professors and so forth, should they be apolitical? Or should the CEOs of corporations and managers, should they be a political? should they be apolitical as well. And here I would say, no, I don't think so. I think education should be about everything, including political education. So an important part of life is politics, and we need to be able to prepare young people to enter into political life. But if I'm committed to some sort of liberal democracy, then what that means is I have to ask,

what's going to enable my students to become good participants? in a liberal democratic process. And for me, that means they need to be able to learn how to think, how to think about very difficult issues and about controversial issues. And so part of my responsibility then is to train them on all of those cognitive skills. And the emotional skills, because all of these things push our emotional buttons and we get angry and frustrated. So emotional education about developing a thicker skin and the tolerance requirements and so forth,

all of those are feeders into politics. And then in terms of my discipline, I'm a philosopher, so I only bump up against politics occasionally. But if my job is to teach British government or comparative political systems, then of course, that's a legitimate academic field and it should be taught, but should be taught in a liberal education fashion. So be political, absolutely. As for CEOs, I do think they need to be political. And part of the problem is that many CEOs have not had political education. In our tech society. A lot of them were engineers and they just, you know, were fascinated with their, with their, the things that they're able to develop and they didn't think about very much,

but then suddenly they're in charge of a $50 million company and they're dealing with people with all of these ethnicities and they are entering into a global economy. They don't know anything about politics. So they typically then will fall back on just grabbing an off-the-shelf politics that they've not really thought through very much and that leads to problems. So I do think CEOs, they are going to be political animals. Your businesses are social and they are political. And also you are dealing, particularly in the modern world, with your own government, so you need to know how that works and you're dealing with international government. So it should not be a politicized education, but it should be political education. It's got to be in there.

Yeah, that's a very good point. Stephen, before we ask you our final question, Let me ask you this. When you did your interview with our mutual friend, John Anderson, when you were in Australia, you finished that interview by talking about how optimistic you are about the outcomes of some of the things that we've been talking about. And I imagine you would have recorded it somewhere between 12 and 18 months ago. Are you still optimistic now? Well, yeah, I am overall optimistic. I think in the near term, the next five years are going to be pretty ugly.

Because, you know, this is a philosophical battle. It is a philosophical battle, and those ones move slowly, but it has become a cultural battle. And cultural battles always become politics. But politics is in the final analysis about police, guns, military, and so forth. And that's the, that's the ugly part. And we do have a generation of younger people who've not been trained in good cognitive skills and good civil discussion skills. So it will be ugly, ugly in that sense. Now, why I'm optimistic is I do think there are certain human constants. I mean, we are a smart species. And one of the things that has happened is that this upsurge of irrationality and inscivility has taken most people by surprise.

and most people, though, are decent, civil, rational beings. And once they get up the learning curve about what they're dealing with, they will enter into the debate, and there will be a retraining of civility and rationality from the broad mass of people. I'm also optimistic because, you know, in institutions of higher education, there's a huge number of smart, smart people all over the world. And mostly they, as academics, they like to be siloed. They like to just focus on their own thing. But increasingly over the last 10 years, they are looking around, realizing that something

is rotten in the state of Denmark, and they are starting to reenter into the debate inside their own institutions and to clean house. So I do think there's a case to be made for self-reform within the institutions of higher education. There is a political element. We do have a significant amount of state funding of education. however jaded and cynical we are about our politicians, they do recognize that they have a responsibility to make sure that those education dollars are actually spent on education and not on politicization. And so they get pressure from their constituents and they do then put pressure on presidents and

chancellors and so on to clean house inside. And I think that cleaning house will go in the direction of a reinvigoration of liberal education. But I think I'm most optimistic because young people, young people can be subject to indoctrination in education, but most people recognize, even as young people, when they are being indoctrinated. And they just start to tune out the indoctrinators. And they have all kinds of sources of information and values available to them now that people did not. So the indoctrinators will have limited effect increasingly. And also young people, I think it's built into human nature that we grow up. We want to make something of our lives.

We want something real. We want something genuine. We want love. We want our careers to be meaningful. So any sort of worldview that is very jaded and cynical and adversarial and says everything is shit and just attack and hate, that's only going to be attractive to a subset of the younger population. Most young people will gravitate naturally to the healthier disciplines, the healthier teachers and professors, and go on and make something of their lives. I think that's a human natural.

Well, thank you very, very much for that, Stephen. It was an absolutely brilliant interview. Appreciate that. Thank you, by the way. Oh, thank you. We have one final question that we always end all our interviews with, and that is, what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should be? Yeah. Well, I just completed a manuscript called Eight Philosophies of Education with my co-authors, a younger Canadian philosopher of education, Andrew Colgan, where we look at the many different philosophies that have been operationalized in education. And then all of that. All of them are there.

So we have a kind of chaotic education system right now with a mixture of all sorts of elements and nobody is, nobody is happy with. But I think the thing that we are not thinking about the most is there's a disjunct between our idealism about young people. So all of us, when we become parents or we become teachers, we are idealistic about here's this baby and all of the possibilities. for this child, and we're just excited and jazzed for it. And we want this person to have the best possible life.

And then if we think about, you know, before we send the child to school, how we educate this person. We give this kid lots of opportunities and toys, and we're encouraging, and the kid can explore and experiment, and the kid basically plays for five years. And all of that is beautiful and wonderful. And then what do we do? We send kids to school. If we just pause for a moment and just form an image in our heads, what does school mean? And I bet 99% of people are going to say rows of desks, kids sitting at the desk, listening to the teacher, writing it down, or reading from the textbook. And everybody is reading the same pages and working on the same problem. And the assumption is that the answers are already known. and you have to just memorize this and you better not fail the test or and if you want to go to the bathroom you have to ask permission to get up and move around so we have this very regimented authoritarian one-size-fits-all school system that we have developed and we put our kids in there

for 12 years and what is 12 years of that kind of schooling going to do to those young people Now, most of us, I think, also went through schooling systems like that, and we know how boring and how vaguely dehumanizing it is. So to my way of thinking, the one thing that we should be thinking a lot more is, why is there such a disjunct between how we raise kids for the first five years of their lives to what we then do to them for 12 years? And then, of course, we say, you know, once you're out of the education system, you're free. You can do anything you want. Dream big, solve problem, be an innovator, be a creative person and so forth. But that 12 years of education has the opposite of all of that. Now, we are smart.

We know the history. We know about Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein and all of the great musical performance. And somehow lots and lots of people survive and keep their creativity and their humanity intact, despite the school system, but to some extent we are still highly tolerant of this kind of school system. We need to do better, and we know that we can do better. So what we're not thinking about is how seriously to experiment with different kinds of schooling. We all know it's important, but we're complacent. So that's what we need to be directing our energies to. Stephen, that is a suitably fascinating end to what has been an absolutely brilliant interview.

We really thank you. We wish you all the very best for the manuscript. And hopefully when all of this stuff is over, next time you're in London, we'd love to have you here on the set and have a proper chat face to face. Great and you guys. Brilliant questions. Absolutely timely topic. And I will see you in London at some point. We really look forward to it. And if you've been watching, make sure you check out Stephen's work. And we will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or an interview. Take care. And they all go out at 7pm UK time, whether it's an episode or a live stream. See you soon, guys.