The Art of Manliness - #628： The Rise of Secular Religion and the New Puritanism

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.080 There's been a lot of civil and political upheaval lately.

00:00:13.620 What makes the atmosphere particularly disorienting is that beyond the more obvious, proximate

00:00:17.820 and commonly discussed causes for the turmoil, it feels like there are even deeper cultural

00:00:21.760 currents and contexts at play that are yet hard to put one's finger on and understand.

00:00:25.880 There's a fervor in these debates and conflict that almost seems religious.

00:00:30.200 My guest today would say that's exactly the right word to describe the tenor of things.

00:00:33.560 His name is Jacob Hallin, he's a recently retired professor of philosophy, and the currents

00:00:37.140 at play in today's world are things he spent his whole career studying, from Plato and

00:00:41.020 Aristotle to the Hebrew Bible and Kierkegaard, with a particular emphasis on the political

00:00:44.980 philosophy of the ancient Greeks.

00:00:46.520 Hallin draws on all these areas to weave together a kind of philosophical roadmap on how we arrived

00:00:50.940 at our current cultural zeitgeist.

00:00:52.380 In particular, Hallin makes the case that what we're seeing today is the rise of a kind

00:00:56.000 of secular religion, a new puritanism that worships at what he calls the Church of Humanity.

00:01:00.600 This new puritanism based the idea of moral purity around one's views on issues like

00:01:04.320 race and gender, and seeks to purge anyone who doesn't adhere to the prescribed dogma.

00:01:08.400 Jacob walks us through the tenets of the dominant influence of the secular religion, a strain

00:01:11.820 of modern thought called critical theory, and offers a kind of philosophical genealogy

00:01:15.740 and what led up to it, which includes the ideas of Descartes, Rousseau, Marx, and Hegel.

00:01:20.360 We discuss how critical theory contrasts with classical liberalism, and approaches people

00:01:24.100 as members of groups, rather than as individuals, and as abstractions, rather than particulars,

00:01:29.000 and how this lens of the world leads into identity politics and cancel culture.

00:01:32.460 We then delve into Kierkegaard's prophecies on the leveling of society, and how the modern

00:01:35.900 tendency to make man the measure of all things can leave us feeling spiritually and intellectually

00:01:39.800 empty, and looking to politics to fill an existential void we can't ultimately satisfy.

00:01:44.620 We end our conversation describing the sustenance which can.

00:01:47.040 And after the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Howland.

00:02:01.340 Jacob Howland, welcome back to the show.

00:02:03.620 It's great to be here, Brett.

00:02:04.980 So you are a professor of philosophy, now retired from the University of Tulsa, and we

00:02:10.620 had you on the show, I think it was two years ago.

00:02:12.860 I think it's been two years, or has it been a year?

00:02:14.840 Either one or two years, I actually can't remember.

00:02:16.720 Well, we had you on the show to talk about your book, Glaucon's Fate, and it was, it's

00:02:20.800 a really, we got a lot of great feedback on that episode.

00:02:23.280 The whole premise of Glaucon's Fate is you make this really intriguing case that one of

00:02:28.080 the goals that Plato had when writing The Republic, right, trying to answer what is justice,

00:02:33.880 is to persuade his brother, right, Glaucon, to embrace the life of philosophy and turn away

00:02:40.380 from political ambition, or become a tyrant, right?

00:02:43.960 And it was, you know, like I said, we'll link to that show in the show notes.

00:02:48.240 But I wanted to bring you back on because a few months ago, back in April, you wrote an

00:02:51.520 article for a website called New Discourses, called The New Calvinists.

00:02:56.640 And you make this case that modern society in the West, and you've seen this in the United

00:03:02.320 States, is experiencing a new form of Puritanism, but it's a secular, godless form of Puritanism.

00:03:08.940 So, what are the signs?

00:03:10.800 What are the signs of this rising secular Puritan culture?

00:03:15.080 Yeah, well, so I take my bearings on this question by Max Weber, and in particular, his

00:03:20.500 classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

00:03:24.400 And in this book, Weber argued that industrial capitalism springs in large part from the attempt

00:03:30.940 of 16th and 17th century, what he called Puritans, in particular, Calvinists, to work out

00:03:36.760 their salvation anxiety. Now, this is a very radical thesis, so what did he mean by this?

00:03:41.700 Calvin taught a doctrine of double predestination, and that means that God decides from eternity

00:03:48.360 that a few human beings are saved, but the vast majority are damned.

00:03:53.940 And this produced, Weber understood, anxiety in the believer, because, of course, the overriding

00:04:01.460 question is, are you among the damned or the saved? And so, the question was, how could

00:04:08.100 a believer be assured that he or she was among the saved? And the answer lay in achieving worldly

00:04:14.960 prosperity and success, because it was taken as an article of faith that no one can prosper

00:04:20.640 in the world without the grace of God, and God would not show God's grace to the damned.

00:04:26.140 And so, the Calvinists promoted, of course, habits of hard work and frugality and so forth

00:04:34.480 that would, in many cases, lead to prosperity and power. But this was a way, right, of proving

00:04:42.020 that you're among the saved and of assuaging this, what I'm calling salvation anxiety.

00:04:46.620 Now, according to Weber, Calvinism resulted in a basic transformation of the traditional

00:04:55.860 religious ethos of Christianity. And he writes, in place of humble sinners, Calvinism bred

00:05:01.540 self-confident saints, right, people who were assured of their goodness and rightness with

00:05:06.700 God. But the thing is that the quest for certainty didn't stop there, because although Calvin

00:05:13.680 himself argued that everybody had to worship God, it didn't matter if you're damned or saved,

00:05:20.120 you've got to go to church and worship God. Inevitably, perhaps, people started saying,

00:05:24.940 well, the minister needs to be among the saved, you see, and the church administrators. And

00:05:30.500 ultimately, even this proved insufficient, and there was a kind of movement of purification.

00:05:35.000 The congregation came to be viewed as a community of the elect, right, community of people who

00:05:41.000 were manifestly saved. And that means those who met the criteria of wealth and power and so forth,

00:05:45.440 right? So there was a gradual process of purification, and that resulted in a kind of echo chamber in

00:05:52.340 which believers were able to authenticate their claims to salvation within a mutually reinforcing

00:05:59.820 social framework, right? They're surrounded by people like them. Now, how does this bring us to

00:06:04.980 today? Well, one of Weber's great insights is that religion continues to operate in context where it

00:06:10.660 is not obviously visible, or even where it's been publicly repudiated. And I argue that his analysis

00:06:19.340 of this puritanism and salvation anxiety helps us to understand what you might call the social and

00:06:28.040 psychological economy of secular salvation today. And what do I mean by that? Well, I'm considering in

00:06:33.760 particular successful, politically progressive men and women. Most of these people no longer believe

00:06:40.420 in the doctrine of God, okay? But they do take their bearings by a kind of decayed residue of biblical

00:06:47.940 categories. So like their puritan forebears, the American elite value worldly success and methodical

00:06:55.380 and purpose of work, instrumental reason, and so forth. But unlike the old elite, their good fortune and

00:07:03.600 power suffuses them with liberal guilt. And unlike the old elite, they don't confess and repent their

00:07:12.760 sins to God, but to man, to fellow human beings. I think it's fair to say that in the elite universities,

00:07:20.260 and not just the elites anymore, they learned to commit themselves to socially transformative moral

00:07:27.420 action, right? And so the imperatives that they heed are not the imperatives of the Bible, but of

00:07:34.380 contemporary social consciousness. And the salvation that they seek is not bestowed by God, but by

00:07:40.680 congregants in what I'm calling the Church of Humanity. And so this, it seems to me, is the inner

00:07:48.000 meaning of what's now called virtue signaling, right? It's an activity that is meant to elicit public

00:07:53.720 approval from like-minded people. In addition, the psychological and social economy of secular

00:08:00.240 salvation develops along lines that are familiar from Weber. In practice, the Church of Humanity

00:08:06.800 offers salvation to all, right? It elevates humanity as such into sort of an object of worship.

00:08:14.400 But in practice, it exhibits purifying impulses. So some of the earliest converts to this sort of

00:08:20.720 social justice church of humanity were found in the academy, where the need for social validation of

00:08:25.980 its doctrines eventually resulted in an almost, what is now almost a complete purge of conservative

00:08:31.880 voices, and in particular, intellectual traditionalists. And that is now happening, especially recently,

00:08:38.760 in sort of multiple institutions across the political spectrum. And that phenomenon reproduces

00:08:44.880 something that has been happening for years now in social media and in news outlets and so forth.

00:08:51.840 And that is that those institutions are becoming sort of tribal echo chambers, if I may say, where

00:08:58.880 people only talk to those who affirm their own convictions. And it's a kind of dangerous attitude

00:09:03.700 because the attitude, whether on the right or the left or whatever, is that we are the saved,

00:09:08.140 right? We are saintly and righteous and justified. And everyone else is damned and somehow polluted.

00:09:14.340 Gotcha. All right. So just to recap here. So you make this argument that, okay, based on

00:09:19.400 Weber's idea of the Protestant work ethic, Protestant, whatever, that we've just replaced it. Instead of

00:09:24.800 being anxious about our salvation with God, we're anxious about our moral purity, right? Whether we

00:09:31.460 got the right ideas, whether we're for certain causes or not. And if you're not, then you have to do

00:09:37.340 these things to show that you are. So that's what we're seeing now. So let's talk about how we got here.

00:09:43.000 So you mentioned, because I want to do sort of like a genealogy of this secular puritanism,

00:09:47.660 because you talked about Calvin and sort of the Protestant work ethic and the sort of salvation

00:09:53.160 anxiety as part of what's going on. But there's also more going on because you make the case that

00:09:58.260 this stuff that's been happening, it didn't happen overnight. It's actually several philosophical

00:10:03.960 strains merging together to create this ascendant ethos. So let's start from the present,

00:10:10.360 right? And then kind of work our way back. So in this past month, I think a lot of people

00:10:14.860 have been hearing a lot of talk about what's called critical theory when it comes to issues

00:10:18.620 to race, particularly gender, sexuality, can also be used critical theory to talk about

00:10:24.020 disabilities, mental health. What is critical theory and who are the originators and why do

00:10:30.060 they think it was necessary to develop this critical theory philosophy?

00:10:33.800 Yeah. So critical theory originated with German philosophers and social theorists in the Marxist

00:10:41.120 tradition. And we're talking the 20s, 30s of the last century. And I would say that proponents that

00:10:47.100 your listeners might recognize are people like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas,

00:10:54.280 Herbert Marcuse, if those names are meaningful. According to Horkheimer, a theory is critical to the extent

00:11:02.380 that it seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. That's the way

00:11:07.240 that he put it. So the assumption behind critical theory is that human beings are dominated and

00:11:14.000 oppressed by social conditions. But here's the thing, social conditions that we ourselves have

00:11:19.300 created. And critical theory attempts to ferret out the mechanisms of oppression, right? So to identify

00:11:27.420 them with a very practical purpose, that is to eliminate them, okay? And therefore, enslave us.

00:11:33.760 So it sounds good intentions.

00:11:36.120 Right. Okay.

00:11:37.020 Exactly. And in fact, speaking of good intentions, so for example, the huge and in my view, deplorable

00:11:43.360 wealth gap between the wealthiest Americans, you know, we're talking people like Jeff Bezos and,

00:11:48.760 you know, Mark Zuckerberg and these guys, and the poorest Americans might be subjected from the point of

00:11:56.420 critical theory to a Marxist critique, right? That explores the exploitation of labor. But of course,

00:12:02.980 critical theory can be and has been applied to other areas of inequality based on race or sex,

00:12:10.020 you know, sexual orientation and so forth. Now, one way to look at this, since you mentioned Plato

00:12:15.600 earlier, is to sort of think about it in terms of the image of the cave in Plato's Republic. And

00:12:20.380 as your listeners surely know, Socrates in the Republic compares the situation of human beings to

00:12:26.260 prisoners chained up in the bottom of a cave. And what they're looking at, which they take to be

00:12:30.220 reality, are just shadows on a wall cast by hidden puppeteers up behind them. The light strikes,

00:12:37.100 the light from the fire strikes the puppets and creates the shadows. So the cave image presents a

00:12:43.100 system of deception and manipulation. And the thing is, and here's, this is crucial, the prisoners

00:12:47.640 don't even know that they're enchained. They don't know that they're enslaved. And I should say that part of

00:12:54.700 critical theory is, is trying to show people that, you know, you may think you're free, but actually

00:12:58.840 you're enslaved. Now, the enlightenment, and I want to talk about the enlightenment because

00:13:04.240 Horkheimer and Adorno, these two sort of original critical theorists, wrote a book called The

00:13:08.780 Dialectic of Enlightenment. And they criticized the enlightenment. Well, what's the enlightenment

00:13:13.700 about? Well, go back to the cave image. We live in darkness, but there is a sunlit upland outside the

00:13:19.280 cave. This is the world of reality, right? And there's the light of the good and so forth.

00:13:22.520 And the idea is to get out of the cave. One way to look at the enlightenment is through science and

00:13:28.580 through social rationality and so forth. We're going to bring everybody out of the cave into the

00:13:34.520 light, okay? And we're going to liberate the prisoners from domination and oppression.

00:13:40.440 Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the enlightenment actually failed. And in fact, it made things worse.

00:13:45.640 It produced, for example, a very narrowly instrumental conception of reason that resulted in even greater

00:13:51.160 enslavement and exploitation. And by the way, there's a lot to this, okay? I mean, I think it's

00:13:56.040 really important to understand what is good and significant, even in theories whose sort of general

00:14:03.520 application or orientation you might reject for other reasons. Horkheimer and Adorno were both Jewish,

00:14:10.760 Germans, and they thought a lot about the Holocaust. And they said, hmm, this is very strange.

00:14:16.140 We have a technically advanced, culturally enlightened, right? One might say rational

00:14:22.120 society that engaged in massive acts of murder and theft and enslavement, right? So there's a lot to

00:14:28.360 that. What I think we want to talk about today or what's on the minds surely of many people today

00:14:35.600 is the way that critical theory or social analysis plays a big role in public life. And that has moved

00:14:43.400 far away from the original critical theorists who were part of, I should have said earlier,

00:14:47.440 something called the Frankfurt School, okay? And I'm thinking especially of identity politics,

00:14:54.180 right? And what's called intersectionality. And intersectionality is the idea that interlocking

00:14:59.700 structures of power, right? So you might be female and black and gay and what have you. And those

00:15:07.680 those different characteristics, which puts you in a minority, an oppressed minority, combine to

00:15:14.640 marginalize and oppress certain social groups while maintaining others in positions of power and

00:15:19.660 privilege. So actually last year I came across in the Xerox machine up here at the University of Tulsa,

00:15:26.220 a document called Intersecting Axes of Privilege, Domination, and Oppression. And I just want to give

00:15:32.060 listeners an idea of the sorts of categories that are now applied that have grown sort of out of

00:15:37.760 critical theory to understand oppression in the United States. So according to this chart, there was

00:15:42.620 a whole list of oppressors, right? People who are male and masculine, female and feminine, male, white,

00:15:47.740 European, heterosexual, able-bodied, credentialed, young, attractive, upper and upper middle class,

00:15:53.520 anglophones, light, pale-skinned, Gentile, non-Jews, and fertile. And there's no question that this list

00:15:59.400 has expanded since then, right? You can find characteristics that differentiate people in ways

00:16:04.760 that someone who wants to find them could, say, actually produce, you know, oppression.

00:16:09.640 Got it. All right. So just to clarify here, so the original critical theorists back in the 20s and 30s,

00:16:14.320 they were looking at oppression in terms of economics primarily.

00:16:17.620 That was where it came from initially.

00:16:19.560 That's where it came from. And then it's just, it's morphed over the decades into,

00:16:23.660 we're going to not only look at income inequality, but we're going to look at how power dynamics

00:16:28.420 can be influenced by things like race, gender, whatever.

00:16:33.520 Yeah, exactly. And I mean, you know, even the original critical theorists weren't simply limited

00:16:38.800 to economics because, as I say, they developed a sort of powerful critique of modern rationality.

00:16:43.300 But this definitely has a Marxist origin because Marx was sort of, you know,

00:16:49.140 like the grandfather of critical theory.

00:16:52.000 Right. Well, let's talk about Marx because I think a lot of people here, you see thrown around,

00:16:55.920 well, this is Marxist. And I don't think a lot of people, sometimes I'm like, what does that

00:17:00.300 actually mean? What is, what is something to be Marxist or like neo-Marxist? Like, what does that

00:17:04.400 mean? So let's talk about how, what was Marx's idea and how did he influence critical theory?

00:17:10.540 And I think we also have to talk about probably Hegel too.

00:17:13.800 Well, we have to talk about a lot of philosophers.

00:17:15.580 So we're going backwards. So we're going backwards. So we talked about the originator is a critical

00:17:19.120 theory. We're seeing this, what it's turned into now, where you look at different parts of your

00:17:23.400 person's identity that can give you privilege or make you oppressed. And then Marx, we'll start

00:17:29.820 with, let's go with, so let's go to Marx. What was Marx's idea and how did that influence what we're

00:17:33.340 seeing today?

00:17:34.960 Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd like to put Marx sort of in a larger context, if that's okay.

00:17:40.820 Yeah, let's do that.

00:17:41.500 But since you mentioned Marx, let me start with him and maybe work backward. Marx wrote in the

00:17:48.020 Communist Manifesto that communism is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be

00:17:54.500 such. Okay. And one thing I want to point out here is that history is conceived by Marx. And again,

00:18:02.100 this is a trait that we find in critical theory and identity politics and intersectionality and so

00:18:06.920 forth today. It's conceived to be a riddle or a problem with a solution. And in the case of Marx,

00:18:15.380 that solution is provided by Marx's scientific analysis of the relations of production, right?

00:18:21.740 So he writes two volumes of Capital. Actually, I guess there's a third volume that's incomplete.

00:18:26.100 You know, he's got all this economic analysis. And I want to point out that business about conceiving

00:18:31.740 of history and in general of human social existence as a problem that has a scientific solution. Okay.

00:18:38.200 I'll come back to that later. But another point about Marx is that he wrote in a little piece of

00:18:44.420 writing called Thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to

00:18:50.960 change it. The point is to change it. And this is a very important modern idea. And again,

00:18:56.940 the emphasis is on transformative action. Okay. Now, I mean, we can talk about Marx a little bit

00:19:03.480 more, but if you like, I can go back and sort of try to situate him in a larger philosophical

00:19:07.160 context. Yeah, let's do that. Because I mean, it sounds interesting because like Marx seems like he's a

00:19:09.780 product of the Enlightenment using scientific reasoning. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So, you know,

00:19:15.840 with respect to the Enlightenment, I mean, people like Horkheimer and Adorno were very critical of the

00:19:20.020 Enlightenment. But those early critical theorists themselves took a characteristically

00:19:24.900 modern orientation toward philosophy and in many respects, exemplified sort of enlightenment

00:19:32.160 principles and understandings. And, you know, I can talk about a couple of people who, this is,

00:19:39.700 let me just say, sort of in self-defense, this is not meant to be, what I'm going to say is not

00:19:44.140 meant to be a kind of complete genealogy of critical theory. I want to point to a couple of thinkers who I

00:19:50.280 think had decisive influence and who kind of exemplify what you might call the ethos of critical

00:19:55.700 theory and the kinds of things that we're seeing today. The first thinker is Descartes. Now, why do

00:20:00.700 I start with Descartes? Well, you know, Descartes, first of all, was first and foremost a mathematician.

00:20:04.420 We owe analytical geometry to him, right? So, you can create algebraic equations to map curves and

00:20:10.660 solve all kinds of problems and so forth. Descartes wrote a book called The Discourse on Method.

00:20:15.260 And in this book, famously, in part six of this book, he argues that if we base all of our knowledge

00:20:24.260 on mathematical science, we can become, quote, the masters and possessors of nature.

00:20:32.360 And this is a definitively modern aspiration, right? I should say, based on a mathematical science

00:20:38.660 in order to come up with applied sciences, what we today call technology. A definitively modern

00:20:44.660 aspiration. It really represents a fundamental sea change, if you will, in the orientation and the

00:20:52.100 intellectual and spiritual attitude toward the world. What was it before? Okay. How would you

00:20:56.140 describe that? Well, I'll start with modernity. Modernity wants to remake the world because it's

00:21:02.960 dissatisfied with the world as it stands. So, it seeks knowledge that's going to be useful,

00:21:08.240 as in the case of Descartes. Descartes in reshaping things materially and constructing new forms of

00:21:13.280 society. In general, and of course there are going to be exceptions, but in general, pre-modern thinkers

00:21:18.860 in the philosophical and religious traditions recognize the basic order and goodness of the

00:21:25.240 given or created world. And I'm using the words given or created because I want to get the Greeks in

00:21:29.420 here as well as the biblical tradition, right? They sought to know the natural or created order

00:21:34.660 and to bring the soul into conformity with it. So, this was an opening of the soul to a reality that

00:21:40.800 transcends it, right? To a pre-existing divine reality, right? And I think the word divine, I mean,

00:21:46.500 you know, Plato kind of reinterprets Greek gods and the highest divine principle is the good,

00:21:53.480 right? This is sort of what she compares to the sun. Or like the Stoics, you know, you want to live

00:21:57.780 your life in accordance to nature. Exactly, exactly. Modernity reverses this. It changes our very

00:22:03.780 experience of the world. So, I'll give you one example. A medieval Christian might look up at the

00:22:08.200 night sky, right? And that individual might see an animated cosmos of bright heavenly bodies

00:22:15.420 embedded in spheres of increasing size, right? So, the planets, each planet has its own sphere and the

00:22:20.300 stars have the spheres and so forth, of increasing nearness to God. And in the words of C.S. Lewis,

00:22:26.380 who wrote a wonderful book called The Discarded Image, they would see a lighted, warmed, and resonant

00:22:32.060 with music cosmos, right? The cosmos that was that. Moderns look up and they see cold, empty space.

00:22:39.240 Not a cosmos, but space, right? Pascal describes the universe as a sphere of infinite size whose

00:22:48.000 center is everywhere, right? The infinite, empty sphere whose infinite silence so disturbed Pascal.

00:22:55.600 So, for Descartes, right, it's a very abstract notion is what I'm trying to get at compared to the kind

00:23:00.900 of concrete richness of a pre-modern conception of the world. For Descartes, matter, the very stuff

00:23:07.780 of the world, is drained of concrete richness. Why? Because he sees it simply as what he calls

00:23:13.800 extension. Now, what is extension? It's a purely mathematical abstract concept. It can be measured,

00:23:19.880 right? It can be reformed, and it can be imprinted by human beings at will. So, the world is not something

00:23:25.000 we attune ourselves to. What happens from the Cartesian point of view? And this is really decisive

00:23:30.060 for all of modernity. To be masters and possessors of nature is to reshape the world in accordance with

00:23:36.940 human needs and desires. And it's these needs and desires that produce what Descartes calls problems.

00:23:44.420 Descartes is the guy who told us to begin with, break everything, break every problem into its parts,

00:23:49.180 you're looking for solutions. So, for example, for Descartes, man suffers from mortality. And in

00:23:55.160 the discourse on method, in the section where he says we can become masters and possessors of nature,

00:23:59.180 he says, mathematical science in the medical field may in fact help us one day to overcome

00:24:04.940 the infirmities of old age. That means to make us immortal.

00:24:08.740 So, this is Promethean.

00:24:09.860 Yep, it is absolutely Promethean. And I might mention in this connection, we were talking earlier and you said

00:24:16.420 you had just read in your reading group Descartes' meditations. It has six parts. The discourse on

00:24:20.880 method has six parts. Descartes scholars understand this to be a deliberate imitation of the six days

00:24:27.060 of God's creation. To be masters and possessors of nature is to recreate the universe, right? And by

00:24:34.100 the way, so I should say here, right, the Cartesian project of rendering us masters and possessors of

00:24:39.920 nature turns us into what Sigmund Freud, writing in 1930, calls prosthetic gods, right? We have

00:24:46.340 all this equipment and materials and radio beams and all this kind of stuff. And if I may mention,

00:24:52.540 if we can make man immortal through medical science, heaven and hell become irrelevant.

00:24:59.120 God is increasingly irrelevant. Now, let's talk about the critical theorists. The critical theorists

00:25:04.880 take over the Cartesian perspective of world-making in response to problems generated by human desire,

00:25:10.940 and they apply it to the mastery of the human social world. See, Descartes was interested in

00:25:17.500 technology. He's not particularly concerned with political questions or oppression or anything like

00:25:22.060 that. The critical theorists see social and political life as a set of structural and moral problems,

00:25:30.900 problems of justice and so forth, to be solved. And one of the problems is, I mentioned the abstractness

00:25:37.640 of the modern view, is that that inevitably results in considering human beings only in the aggregate.

00:25:44.100 That is to say, formally and abstractly. Why? Because the relevant structures that produce the problems

00:25:50.420 and have to be adjusted have to do with large-scale relationships between groups divided by class and race

00:25:57.400 and ethnicity and religion and sexual orientation and the like. And maybe we should talk a little bit

00:26:02.460 about liberalism, classical liberalism, and then come back to see how…

00:26:06.920 Right. Okay. Yeah. So, let's talk about… Okay. So, what you're saying is that the critical theorists

00:26:12.120 took this idea of Descartes of abstraction, where you can solve problems through abstraction,

00:26:17.220 applied it to sociality, right? So, instead… And so, in order to solve the problems,

00:26:22.400 you have to treat individuals as part of a collective. So, it's like you're not just… Right.

00:26:25.600 You're not just Jacob Howland. Like, you're a Jewish guy. Like, that's all that matters.

00:26:29.240 All that matters is Jewish. That's what this… And like, so you abstract… So, let's talk about

00:26:33.060 liberalism. It seems like liberalism goes the opposite direction. It tends to focus on the

00:26:37.000 individual. Yeah. And so, I might say some things about liberalism, and then I want to return and

00:26:42.860 mention Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who's the other thinker besides Marx and Descartes that fit in here.

00:26:49.440 So, there's a lot to say about how critical theory and identity politics relates to liberalism.

00:26:57.880 I want to focus on a couple of essential differences. And to be absolutely clear,

00:27:03.640 by liberal… So, words change their meanings. And today, if I say, Brett, you're a liberal,

00:27:08.660 I mean, you're pretty far left on the political spectrum.

00:27:10.960 That's what we're meaning today.

00:27:11.780 Right.

00:27:12.540 Well, we're talking about classic liberalism, okay? The foundational idea of the American

00:27:18.300 Republic. There's some things I want to say about this. Every regime, even those that sort of

00:27:24.200 purport to be neutral, right, incorporates an understanding of the human good, okay? And the

00:27:32.840 founders of the American Republic, these classic liberals, had, I think, an extraordinarily broad-minded

00:27:37.500 and expansive understanding of the good life for human beings. And as you know, in the Declaration

00:27:41.880 of Independence, right, it's based on inalienable rights given by the creator, life, liberty,

00:27:47.760 and the pursuit of happiness. Note, by the way, not happiness, but the pursuit of it, right? The

00:27:52.100 individual will pursue it. And the founders of liberalism emphasize individual freedom and

00:27:58.100 dignity, right? The incomparable worth of the single individual. By the way, this is something

00:28:02.640 we find in Judaism and Christianity as well. And that classic liberalism values the education

00:28:10.120 and development of the peculiarities of mind and taste and character that make each of us

00:28:15.220 distinctive individuals and, so they thought, that enrich the common store of humanity, right?

00:28:22.180 These are, you know, if we have people developing their peculiar talents and tastes and capabilities,

00:28:29.080 it gives us this varied and rich context in which we ourselves can think about the possibilities

00:28:36.280 of life and the sorts of things that we might be capable of. Classic liberalism and the American

00:28:42.160 founders, for sure, are uncompromising in their opposition to the tyranny of the majority and the

00:28:48.140 defense of the political value of freedom of speech, right? So the founders' belief, for example, that

00:28:53.940 good policy and intelligent decisions can be arrived at only through public debate and deliberation.

00:29:00.580 The articulation and consideration of multiple points of view. We see this, for example, in John

00:29:05.000 Stuart Mill's brilliant short book on liberty, which from my point of view should be required

00:29:09.100 reading for all high school students. Critical theory in its current form of identity politics

00:29:14.760 focuses not on the group, not on the individual, but on the group. In fact, it's highly critical of

00:29:19.340 American individualism. It takes American individualism to be a kind of myth created by

00:29:25.140 dominant groups to help support their social positions, right? And to maintain oppressive structures

00:29:33.080 of power. So from the point of view of critical theory, one's identity does not derive,

00:29:39.000 as you said earlier, Brett, from individual characteristics, like the content of your

00:29:43.220 character, but from certain traits that may seem accidental, but that critical theory considers

00:29:48.460 to be essential, right? Male, white, European, things like this. That's one thing. Another thing is

00:29:54.060 that from the point of view of critical theory and identity politics, society is a zero-sum competition

00:29:59.540 between groups. And what I mean by zero-sum, of course, is one group's gain is another group's loss.

00:30:05.100 Zero-sum is a pie. I get a bigger piece of the pie, you get a smaller piece.

00:30:09.220 And more important, the professed goal is not individual freedom and dignity, but complete

00:30:13.480 equality between the groups. That's how the human good is understood. You see, the liberal idea is

00:30:19.060 the human good resides with the flourishing of the individual. The idea from the point of view of

00:30:23.920 identity politics is the good is the achievement of equality between groups. It doesn't consist in an

00:30:30.000 individual's free and conscious choices, right? Or in an individual conscience and thought and

00:30:34.600 character, but in a certain sort of relationship between groups. I think this is a fundamental

00:30:38.700 mistake. It's a mistake that became quite apparent to Soviet authors, that is the best Soviet authors,

00:30:47.900 like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and so forth. Vasily Grossman wrote a book called Life and Fate,

00:30:53.560 and I think he expresses the liberal idea really well in a particular passage. I just want to read it to you.

00:30:58.880 Human groupings have one main purpose, to assert everyone's right to be different, to be special,

00:31:04.300 to think, feel, and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this

00:31:10.820 right, but this is where a terrible, fateful error is born. The belief that these groupings,

00:31:15.720 in the name of a race, a God, a party, or a state, are the very purpose of life, and not simply a means

00:31:22.460 to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual,

00:31:27.640 in his modest peculiarities, and in his right to these peculiarities. This is the testimony of a man

00:31:33.580 who suffered great oppression in the Soviet Union.

00:31:38.340 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:31:40.360 And now, back to the show.

00:31:44.300 Okay, so let's just kind of highlight the difference here, recap. So, liberalism,

00:31:48.740 it wants the individual to flourish, and it wants as many individuals to flourish as possible.

00:31:54.240 Yep.

00:31:54.660 It doesn't guarantee that you'll flourish. You have the right to pursue happiness,

00:32:00.380 but not necessarily mean you get it, but the idea is that if you have as many people pursuing their

00:32:04.760 happiness, we'll get all this great stuff, and sort of this more interaction going on,

00:32:09.460 and stuff will pop out, right?

00:32:11.220 Yeah.

00:32:12.000 But then in critical theory, the idea is like, no, it's not the individual that matters.

00:32:15.760 We want to make sure that groups as such, they're all just equal.

00:32:20.640 Mm-hmm. Exactly. And, you know, it's... Let me comment here.

00:32:24.380 And that's tough, because it sounds like a great thing. It's like, oh, who doesn't want equality?

00:32:27.700 Right, right.

00:32:28.160 But like, what happens when you...

00:32:30.800 Right. So, and I think we have to distinguish here between equality of opportunity,

00:32:35.560 which is absolutely essential. I believe that's what the founders meant when they said,

00:32:39.920 you know, all men are created equal, right? And obviously today, men and women. But equality

00:32:45.080 of outcome is a different thing. And so, we're now seeing, for example, certain calls of, you know,

00:32:50.820 we need 50% of the employees to be in a certain oppressed category, and so on and so forth.

00:32:55.960 But let me also say something about the liberal idea here. I just watched Hamilton. I don't know

00:33:00.740 if you've seen it, the musical.

00:33:01.740 I have not.

00:33:03.100 It's terrific. It's really terrific. And one of the things I like about it very much is it

00:33:07.860 sort of presents the mystery of Alexander Hamilton for us. You know, here's a guy

00:33:12.160 just came from very disadvantaged circumstances and so forth, and he became this sort of brilliant

00:33:17.320 genius. And what's crucial is that he was educated, largely self-educated. His mother had like 35

00:33:25.180 books or something. They were good books, Plutarch's Lives and things like this, and he read them.

00:33:28.400 I think the idea of the founders was that if you develop individual potentialities, right? If you

00:33:36.440 educate minds, if you develop characters, if you give them powerful models, good books from the

00:33:43.440 tradition so they can see the range of human possibilities, you will get good leaders, right?

00:33:49.400 Leaders who are capable of adjusting themselves to sort of ever-changing circumstances and making

00:33:57.880 wise and prudent and good decisions, right? So, you know, for Plato, everything comes down to

00:34:06.080 education. And I think that's extremely important.

00:34:10.000 Okay. So, let's continue this genealogy. So, let's talk about next. You mentioned Rousseau.

00:34:14.680 Yeah, yeah. So, you know, maybe I can just point out that understanding human beings in terms of these

00:34:21.240 large groups, right, based on certain kinds of characteristics that are deemed to be essential,

00:34:25.200 which may or may not be viewed as essential by the individuals within that group. It's not a

00:34:30.080 particularly liberal viewpoint. In the first place, of course, it doesn't take account of the

00:34:33.380 individual but only of the group. It abstracts from the individual and from the quality of

00:34:40.940 individual. It tends to replace qualitative considerations with quantitative ones or like

00:34:46.040 averages, aggregates, least common denominators, and so forth. But the second thing I want to

00:34:51.420 mention, this goes back to Descartes as well, is that liberalism doesn't see politics as problems to

00:34:58.060 be solved by some sort of social science or by an analysis that, you know, asserts itself with

00:35:06.460 great and perhaps unmerited conviction, right, as unimpeachable knowledge, but as a kind of art,

00:35:14.660 as I suggested earlier, of dealing with a constantly changing reality.

00:35:17.640 And again, to recapitulate, that relies on the existence of educated individuals who are capable

00:35:23.760 through debate and discussion of collectively setting a course for the society, right, by

00:35:28.960 exercising well-educated judgments. The founders understood that there are no permanent solutions

00:35:35.700 to political problems. You know, an analogy that has sort of come home to me living in Oklahoma,

00:35:40.980 as you know, Brett, we have something called dry rot in this state.

00:35:45.220 Right. It's not like you can paint your house and your window sills and all the wood surfaces that

00:35:50.860 are exposed to the harsh conditions of Oklahoma weather and say, it's painted. Problem solved.

00:35:56.640 No.

00:35:56.800 Can't do it.

00:35:57.960 I actually have this issue. There's this window frame. It's just falling apart.

00:36:03.340 I mean…

00:36:03.900 And I painted it two years ago.

00:36:05.060 Yeah, exactly. And so you have to go back and deal with the rot of wood and cut it out and fix stuff,

00:36:08.860 right? Let's go to Rousseau. Another milestone on the road to critical theory is provided by Rousseau.

00:36:15.360 Now, prior to Rousseau, pretty much the entire philosophical and religious tradition believed

00:36:21.600 that man was a depraved animal, okay? Plato had no doubt about it, the theme that human beings are

00:36:27.060 sick, there's something wrong with us, our acquisitiveness, our insatiable desires, and so

00:36:31.300 forth, and obviously the biblical tradition as well. Rousseau argues that we're good by nature. He's got

00:36:37.460 this idea of the noble savage, right? But we're corrupted by society, which is a construction of human

00:36:44.580 beings. And you see, if that's the case, then all of the bad things, criminality and injustice and

00:36:52.300 inequality and so forth, could in principle be solved by deconstructing and then reconstructing

00:37:00.360 society.

00:37:00.860 And by the way, Rousseau, this view very much encouraged the French revolutionaries, and

00:37:06.060 it seems to be an article of faith among critical theorists. I say, seems to be because I'm sort

00:37:11.320 of giving them the benefit of the doubt that it's not just a question of a continual sort

00:37:16.160 of critique, but something that's going to get us somewhere. That was the Marxist vision,

00:37:20.400 right? Because communism is the solution to the riddle of history, so we're going to actually

00:37:24.720 solve these problems.

00:37:26.820 So this is interesting. So Rousseau introduced this idea that man, by nature, isn't depraved.

00:37:31.120 In fact, in some mythical time, everything was fantastic. We lived in common. There was

00:37:37.060 no oppression. And so we're trying to get back to that. How did he propose we do that? Was

00:37:41.780 it through large scale, just burn the thing down and then get back?

00:37:46.760 That's a really interesting question because Rousseau presents us with two very, very different

00:37:52.860 pictures, if you will. We might think that we should get back to the noble savage. And

00:37:59.660 that's not the route that he himself suggests we should follow, although it is the route that

00:38:05.920 some who have read Rousseau suggests we should follow. So in the early 90s, I was teaching

00:38:10.560 a philosophy class. This was the period of the character called the Unabomber. And as you may

00:38:15.080 recall, the Unabomber mailed bombs, in particular to people who were sort of involved in high

00:38:20.920 technology, because he literally wanted to sort of bomb us back to the Stone Age. His

00:38:25.960 view, and it was influenced to some extent by Rousseau, was that human beings, like other

00:38:31.500 animals, you know, our, not happiness, but we ought to be occupying our days subsisting.

00:38:39.960 Other animals forage, squirrels forage for nuts and stuff like that. All the animals are busy

00:38:44.640 all day just providing the conditions of their existence. The problem with human beings is when

00:38:48.300 technology allows us to rise above that. We have free time, we have boredom, we get into

00:38:51.940 all kinds of trouble, right? But going back to Rousseau, the, oh, so I should say in my

00:38:57.540 class, I mean, I don't know if it's relevant, but I, we were reading Rousseau and other philosophers

00:39:01.640 and I said, let's try to figure out the identity of this guy, right? Because he's obviously read

00:39:04.720 this stuff. But going back to Rousseau, the other vision that he offers is a kind of total

00:39:11.880 or even totalitarian state. He loves Sparta. Sparta is the state, one of the states in human

00:39:19.480 history that exercise maximum control over human beings. You know, it's not like you say,

00:39:24.540 what am I going to be? I'm a Spartan. What am I going to be when I grow up? You're going

00:39:27.580 to be a Spartan. You're going to be a warrior. And if you're not, you're done. You know, you're

00:39:32.040 not part of the society. And there are, and, and so there was a high degree of regulation.

00:39:36.520 And so Rousseau sort of presents that as an alternative. In other words, if we don't want

00:39:41.120 the arrogance and the pride and all these other kinds of problems, we have to have really maximal

00:39:45.740 educational and let's say indoctrination and control over human beings. And so you're left

00:39:52.000 with Rousseau. I should say, by the way, I'm sure that many listeners who are more educated

00:39:56.360 on specific matters than I am may say, oh, this isn't quite right about Rousseau. But my impression

00:40:01.220 as a kind of amateur reader and teacher of Rousseau is that he gives us these sort of two alternatives

00:40:05.380 and says, well, guys, choose, you know, like, what are you going to do? You're going to

00:40:08.860 be Spartans or you're going to be living in a cave?

00:40:11.040 Yeah. Right. You know, and the latter is not really possible for us.

00:40:14.820 Right. So this, so Rousseau introduced this idea again, you can think of people in terms

00:40:18.880 of a collective. It's not, the individual doesn't matter. It's like what you do in the group.

00:40:23.540 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:24.560 And I just said that inspired the French revolution. The Jacobins really took this idea and ran

00:40:29.240 with it and just said, hey, we're just going to round up all the bourgeoisie, kill them

00:40:34.700 all. And maybe we'll, we'll go back to this wonderful, beautiful, blissful state of nature.

00:40:38.480 Yeah. I mean, you know, they, they, they wanted to promote liberty and equality and fraternity

00:40:42.160 and, and they did apply this group analysis, right? They said, you're bourgeois or, you know,

00:40:47.540 priests and monks and so on and so forth. These people are in classes. That's what, that's

00:40:51.800 what matters, right? It's not a question of, I'm going to find out who Brett McKay is and

00:40:55.260 decide whether this guy, you know, has a place in our society. It's, oh, you know, Brett's

00:41:00.340 a priest or Brett's bourgeois or Brett's aristocracy, right? That the French revolution

00:41:06.340 was the first and most decisive revolution because it sort of set the model for all subsequent

00:41:10.160 revolutions, the Soviet revolution, you know, Maoism and so on and so forth. And, and certainly

00:41:15.100 fascism. I mean, we can find these characteristics, right? You can look at the Nazis, you can look

00:41:19.540 at the communists. Group analysis is the big thing.

00:41:22.780 It's funny. It's interesting. You see this idea of, of going back to some mythical prehistory,

00:41:28.380 even like in Islamic jihadism, it's the same idea. It's like, well, if we can just destroy

00:41:33.980 everything, we'll be able to raise this caliphate like the way it shouldn't like, but it's, it's,

00:41:38.920 it's a very, they think it seems like ancient and like primitive, but it's actually a very

00:41:43.700 modern idea that you can, you can just destroy everything and then start up from scratch.

00:41:48.380 That's a really important observation, you know? And the thing about the modern era is we

00:41:53.400 excel at criticism. I mean, you know, if you want to, I think Marx, he's got, you know,

00:42:01.640 theory of surplus value and a number of accounts of capitalism that are, that are really very

00:42:08.040 persuasive. Uh, you look at Nietzsche and you know, he, he's, his, his, his reflections on problems

00:42:15.940 in modern society are outstanding. I could go on, but then we say like, okay, well, what does Marx

00:42:20.780 offer? Well, and I, I've read, I haven't proved this myself, but that Marx talks about the communist

00:42:26.220 society, like what it's actually going to be like for about six pages in a shelf of writings,

00:42:33.000 you know, Nietzsche, he's got a screwy idea of the Superman, the Ubermensch, you know? Um, so we're

00:42:39.500 really, really good at saying, what's wrong with this? What are the flaws? What are the problems?

00:42:44.440 How can we deconstruct it? But we're not so great at positive thinking. And part of the reason is

00:42:52.080 that I don't think we're attuned to the organic character of human life. You know, human, human

00:43:00.040 beings, this is a theme I'm going to come back to perhaps in our discussion, but let me just suggest

00:43:03.580 now we grow up in local circumstances. We speak different languages. We live in different regions

00:43:11.620 with different plants and animals and, you know, flora and fauna and climates and so on and so

00:43:16.440 forth. We inhabit local spaces, particular traditions, places with customs and habits and so forth. And

00:43:24.460 those things grow organically. They're not planned by some bureaucratic agency or something like this,

00:43:31.200 you know, but that kind of central planning is, and construction is really a character of the

00:43:38.160 moderns and it doesn't tend to produce very good results. Yeah. Like pretty much every, I mean,

00:43:42.580 you look in America, we've had utopian experiments. They've all failed. Yeah. None of them have worked

00:43:49.100 out great. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So, so Rousseau, this idea that, uh, okay, we want to

00:43:54.680 see individuals as part of a collective and we can use mass scale, use the government basically to

00:44:00.540 enforce that. Marx picks up on that idea. It sounds like in his, in his ideas that we can, and the,

00:44:05.700 and that the problem he's trying to solve is the inequality between the proletariat and the

00:44:11.060 capitalist. Right. Exactly. And, and, you know, so Marx is, let us say the child of Rousseau and

00:44:17.960 Descartes, right? Right. Because Marx really believes, right? I've got a science. It's economic

00:44:23.560 science, right? And, and economic science is the fundamental social science because the conditions

00:44:29.760 of our existence come from our material relations, right? And I can explain the material relations and I

00:44:34.340 can show how, if we change means of production and stuff like this and the relationship of ownership

00:44:40.180 and workers and capitalists and so forth, we can change the, the, the conditions in which human

00:44:45.740 beings relate to each other. We can overcome the alienation between human beings, the sort of, uh,

00:44:51.200 dog eat dog world of struggle to make money and so forth. And we can have a kind of brotherhood of man

00:44:56.340 and that will restore us to a kind of, you know, that, that, that scientific approach,

00:45:02.600 Cartesian analysis and approach applied to society will restore us to something like a Rousseauvian

00:45:08.040 world in which we can hunt and fish in the morning and read philosophy in the afternoon and have lots

00:45:12.740 of leisure time and so forth. But so like, I think maybe this is a good point to talk about Hegel

00:45:17.460 sort of his like thesis and thesis and sort of the, his idea is like, Hey, you can come to a solution

00:45:22.960 to these problems by having these like contrast. And then there's sort of a synthesis that's supposed

00:45:29.960 to happen at some point, but it never seems to happen. It just seems like it's just a lot of

00:45:35.540 wailing and gnashing of teeth.

00:45:37.720 Yeah. So Hegel's interesting here because first of all, he, he picks up on Hobbes in a very particular

00:45:45.320 way for Hobbes. If you look at his discussion in the Leviathan of the reasons for conflict between

00:45:52.980 human beings, I think he's often misinterpreted as saying it's a matter of scarcity, right? You and I

00:45:59.480 fight in the state of nature because there's not enough food to go around or something. No, it has to

00:46:05.480 do with human pride. Human beings are vainglorious, right? And when two people meet in the wild, one is

00:46:12.440 bound to insult each other or, you know, the other and to impugn the other, right? Hegel picks

00:46:17.160 us up. Very important part of the phenomenology of spirit is his notion of the struggle for

00:46:22.040 recognition. And he makes recognition that is respect, right? My view that you have a place in

00:46:28.820 the world. You are equal. You are somebody who has rights as well. I can't, I can't step over a certain

00:46:35.800 boundary, right? I don't, I, you know, I can't murder you. I can't, that's absolutely crucial. And Hegel

00:46:41.120 builds that idea of respect into his view of what human beings are looking for, like what's going to

00:46:47.880 make us happy. He uses the word satisfaction. Part of the problem with that is that it puts human

00:46:55.700 fulfillment entirely in a social context, okay? But he has to go beyond the social context in order to,

00:47:04.020 to believe in or see his way to a kind of equilibrium of, of mutual respect.

00:47:10.660 So later in the phenomenology, he talks about a disagreement between what he calls a person of

00:47:16.500 the beautiful soul who kind of doesn't do anything, but wants to maintain his or her moral purity,

00:47:22.360 doesn't descend into politics because politics is filthy and so forth, right? But considers himself

00:47:26.460 to be beautiful. And then the active person, right? Who rebukes that beautiful soul for saying,

00:47:30.600 you're not involved, you're not trying to change things, right? And so they get in this fight

00:47:34.300 because one of them doesn't do anything and the other accuses the other of, you know,

00:47:38.200 violating principles of justice. It's resolved by a kind of agreement on both sides that they're

00:47:43.700 both wrong, a kind of understanding of humility. And you see, from the way I read Hegel, that's really

00:47:50.540 only possible if you have a kind of moment of transcendence, a kind of light in which you can see

00:47:57.100 that human beings are fallible creatures, that we should be humble. That I think involves an

00:48:03.700 understanding of something above us, some conception of the divine, some conception of beings or the

00:48:10.080 possibility of being wiser than we are. So Hegel's interesting. I think he puts us on this road where

00:48:16.080 respect, recognition, which is what all this stuff is about today, right? The race and sex and all

00:48:22.240 these things. It's all about, you know, I'm here too. I'm important. Give me my recognition.

00:48:29.140 It's not clear to me, and I wouldn't actually put it more strongly. I don't believe, I believe that's

00:48:34.080 important for human beings, but it's not the be all and end all. It's not going to satisfy us

00:48:39.560 fundamentally.

00:48:40.840 Is that pretty much it? So Descartes, Rousseau, Marx, and so it seems like it's all leading up to

00:48:47.540 critical theory, this idea that instead of seeing people as individuals, you see them only as

00:48:53.740 abstractions based around a particular part of their identity. And we can make changes in our society

00:49:00.660 by sort of toying with or messing with these different parts of identity.

00:49:05.600 Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, I think this perspective of raising human beings

00:49:15.760 to the place that, let's say, was previously occupied by God, right? Making humanity as such

00:49:21.080 an object of adoration. This tends to warp behavior. Maybe we could-

00:49:25.540 Yeah, how do you think it warps behavior? So I mean, and this is, we've replaced God,

00:49:29.800 and this could, I mean, even if you're not a theist, you can say like, there's an idea of a common

00:49:33.480 good, like Plato's idea of, you know, truth, justice, beauty, right?

00:49:37.820 Right, right. So let me go back to look at critical theory again in the context of religion,

00:49:42.160 right? First of all, making humanity as such an object of worship is, biblically speaking,

00:49:48.020 idolatry, right?

00:49:49.180 Right.

00:49:49.520 Which, by the way, that was the greatest of all sins in the Hebrew Bible. You know,

00:49:52.600 the Christians have the idea of original sin and so forth, right? But the sin in the Hebrew Bible

00:49:57.220 is idolatry. And if humanity has been elevated to the level of God, then there's nothing

00:50:02.820 above man. There aren't any divine measures that transcend our everyday existence in time.

00:50:09.840 I can sort of put it this way. The worship of humanity inflates the human world to such an

00:50:14.280 extent that we begin to lose the possibility of transcendence. To go back to Plato's cave,

00:50:19.760 it's as if the cave, the mouth of the cave were closed off, right? And we couldn't access truth or

00:50:25.080 being beyond the cave. Because it's all politics. This is what absorbs everybody, right?

00:50:31.360 Right. Man becomes the measure of all things. And as the sophist Protagoras said, right? I mean,

00:50:37.360 well, that was his remark, right? That man becomes the measure of all things. And metaphysically

00:50:41.220 speaking, if you like, we're without stars to steer by. And here's the really frightening thing

00:50:45.580 about all this. If man is the measure of all things, the problem is that the measures of man

00:50:51.000 are always changing. And they do so with incredible rapidity in a revolutionary age like ours.

00:50:57.040 And so what was respectable opinion a year ago or maybe even a month ago is now condemned. And

00:51:03.740 that's a kind of chaos. What's especially noteworthy to pursue the religious theme about the deifiers

00:51:10.660 of humanity is that they justify their action in accordance with Christian principles of compassion

00:51:17.940 and charity. This is something Dostoevsky understood. In the Brothers Karamazov, he's got this character,

00:51:23.100 the Grand Inquisitor, right? So Jesus comes back to the world. The Grand Inquisitor has him arrested.

00:51:27.040 He says, I'm going to burn you at the stake tomorrow. Why? And after 90 years, he pours out

00:51:31.860 his heart to Jesus. And he says to him, he accuses him of loving only the few strong human beings who

00:51:39.320 can follow him out of their own free choice and free love, but not caring for the great mass of

00:51:46.640 humanity, right? Who are too weak and childish to follow him. In other words, the Grand Inquisitor says

00:51:51.920 to Jesus, you're insufficiently compassionate, right? That's a kind of anti-Christianity that turns

00:51:57.380 Christianity on its head. I want to say the Church of Humanity abstracts from particular human beings

00:52:03.280 in order to produce this infinite abstraction of human being as such, humanity as such. That's a reversal

00:52:11.140 of the Christian story of incarnation, right? Because in that story, the universal, infinite, awesome creator

00:52:15.800 of the universe becomes a particular human being, which by the way, I find to be an absolutely

00:52:22.180 tremendous and beautiful expression of the worth and dignity of the individual. But the Church of

00:52:27.400 Humanity goes the other way. It says, humanity is such, humanity is such. And these particular

00:52:31.660 differences that add richness and meaning to our lives are then turned against us because these are

00:52:38.600 your male ways or these are your white ways or these are whatever it may be, right? There's one

00:52:44.060 more very important thing, really important. The identity politics of the Church of Humanity actually

00:52:49.580 divides human beings into opposed groups, right? Victims and oppressors, you know, the pure and the

00:52:55.240 impure. But here's the problem. The impurity can't be washed away. Go back to Christianity, you know,

00:53:01.380 Catholicism. Confess your sins. You get absolution, right? But the impurity in this case is

00:53:08.600 so to speak, ontological. It's inherent in who you are. Say you're white, you're male. You can't do

00:53:13.240 anything about these things. So here we are. We've kind of done this genealogy of this

00:53:17.820 secular puritanism. So I guess like the orthodoxy is influenced by critical theory, right? You look at

00:53:25.460 humanity as abstractions and your goal is to make everyone feel equal, but you do that by ignoring

00:53:33.960 the individual. You just look at sort of these identity groups. And I mean, it sounds like it's just

00:53:38.420 like, it's almost like it's like just pure power, right? It's like, it's just will to power. Who

00:53:42.240 can, who can dominate the conversation, right? And then that's why, well, you know, we're just going

00:53:48.160 to completely eliminate your point of view because you are an oppressor. Yeah. And it seems like

00:53:54.640 liberalism, one of the, I guess the benefits of a liberal view, and by liberal, we talk about

00:54:00.300 classical liberal, is that it, there's a, it sets in place a process where you can figure out these

00:54:06.960 problems without resorting to just pure power plays. Yeah. I mean, that's the idea, right?

00:54:15.020 Yeah, right. And look, you know, I don't deny that politics and, you know, much of society

00:54:21.840 has a heck of a lot to do with power. I mean, there's, there's no question. And so, but there

00:54:27.620 is a sense in which the inflation, so to speak, of politics and social relations kind of eclipses

00:54:35.160 these other concerns. So yeah, I mean, if there are power relations that prevent people

00:54:42.080 from having equality of opportunity, then these things need to be addressed. But there

00:54:47.500 is a sense in which today, going back to the Hegelian idea of respect and recognition, that

00:54:52.440 our politics today is hugely symbolic, right? Like, you know, we have, we are represented in

00:54:59.060 certain spheres, right? And so this, this issue of who gets enough respect and recognition

00:55:05.860 in certain sort of representational contexts, right? What shows are on TV or what voices are

00:55:12.500 heard or what kind of music is played or what sort of paintings are put up on the wall, who

00:55:16.160 produced them and so forth. It, it, it eclipses sort of other concerns, which are what is the

00:55:23.380 quality of the art that is produced, right? What is the richness of the voice that is singing?

00:55:29.780 What are the prospects that are opened up by this kind of thinking, right? It, it produces

00:55:35.060 a kind of uniformity, you know? And incidentally, it inevitably sort of leads, as I said earlier,

00:55:41.500 to echo chambers and to a kind of tyranny. And this is rather old. I mean, Plato knew about

00:55:49.800 this. Take someone like Socrates. He, he occurred to me in this context because the liberal vision

00:55:56.340 is a vision of educated, developed, intelligent individuals, you know, active, reflective centers

00:56:04.400 of moral responsibility who speak their mind and profess their faith in public so that everybody

00:56:10.780 can hear it. And if there are things that are wrong with it, it can be corrected. That's Socrates.

00:56:16.000 Socrates is executed.

00:56:17.340 He got, he got canceled.

00:56:18.300 Yeah, he got canceled. He was put on trial for corrupting the young and for impiety. And

00:56:23.720 so he goes into his trial and one of his accusers, Meletus, he drags him up and he starts talking

00:56:30.700 with him in the trial. And he gets Meletus to say that Socrates is the only person in Athens

00:56:38.220 who corrupts the young, that he is, and Socrates describes his accusers, and this is borne out by

00:56:44.620 this whole conversation, as considering him to be most polluted, most polluted. He's got to be

00:56:50.320 purified. Okay. And when Meletus says, you're the dude, you're the one, if we just get rid of you,

00:56:55.500 we're good, right? This is classic scapegoating. And what did Socrates stand for? Well, one of the

00:57:01.900 most common adjectives applied to Socrates in the Platonic dialogues is atapos. It literally means

00:57:06.640 out of place. You could translate it strange. That's the problem with Socrates. He didn't fit in,

00:57:12.200 right? Now, if you've got these big group ideas, you know, you've got a conception. So you run into

00:57:18.640 these difficulties and, you know, it produces its own kinds of cancellations, not quite as severe as

00:57:23.900 Socrates. Right, right. And going back to like, you know, this idea isn't new, this idea of what

00:57:30.220 we've been talking about, these things we're seeing in the modern world, that you can see this in

00:57:32.780 Plato. Maybe as I was, before this conversation, I was thinking about the sophists. And the sophists are

00:57:37.680 kind of, you kind of see sophists today. There's people out there who will, you know, you can pay

00:57:41.880 them. So, you know, like the right things to say and like how to present yourself so that people will

00:57:47.820 give you the, it's just like the sophists, like the sophists, you pay the sophists back in ancient

00:57:51.240 Athens, tell me the right things to say, the right arguments to make, but you're not really doing

00:57:55.280 anything. It's just, you're just sort of, I don't know, parodying stuff and it doesn't mean anything.

00:58:00.640 Yeah, exactly right. And Protagoras, you know, he was sort of the most famous sophist and

00:58:05.520 he went around and basically what he's doing is he's coming to, he actually traveled around

00:58:09.780 to the Greek cities and he advised people. And essentially what he's doing is saying,

00:58:14.500 ah, these are the rules of the game here in Corinth. Okay. And if you want to get ahead,

00:58:20.380 I can tell you how to play the Corinthian game. Now that doesn't, that's a kind of internal

00:58:26.300 troubleshooting, right? You have a mechanism. No one's standing here and saying, are Corinthian

00:58:30.400 values good values? Should we all be Corinthians? Is there a better way? No, it's like, you want to be

00:58:35.440 a Corinthian? Here's what you do. Here's how you present yourself, right? And that's a kind of

00:58:39.560 neutral attitude that, again, doesn't open up a possibility for gauging yourself by sort of

00:58:48.680 transcendence, you know, by looking at things in the light of the good or of the divine light of God

00:58:56.580 or whatever it is that is not simply time bound, finite passing, you know, but eternal and perhaps

00:59:04.800 universal and infinite in some way that's beyond us. So you can encourage a moral relativism. It's

00:59:11.220 like whatever's in Corinth, I'm going to do that. Or like whatever is the invoke, like going back to

00:59:14.540 the idea, whenever you get rid of the idea of God or like a larger transcendent good and you're just

00:59:21.220 looking at humanity to get your moral bearings, one of the dangers of that is just moral relativism.

00:59:26.540 It's like, well, this, in this situation, you're going to, this is good, but in this situation,

00:59:30.180 it's bad. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, I would, I would sort of go on here. Man does

00:59:35.600 not live by earthly bread alone. And we need, you know, intellectual and spiritual nourishment.

00:59:44.840 And I actually think, Brett, that a lot of the dissatisfaction today in our, you know, I mean,

00:59:52.880 this, this includes affluent Americans, you know, who have lots of, so to speak, earthly bread. What

00:59:58.160 do I mean by earthly bread? Food, you know, clothing, shelter, plus entertainment, physical

01:00:02.600 amusements, and so forth, bodily stuff, right? But why are they dissatisfied? Because they're not

01:00:07.800 getting that intellectual and spiritual nourishment, which I think one primary vehicle is, you know,

01:00:14.580 the tradition and how is the tradition handed down. It's handed down in particular communities

01:00:20.580 of teaching and learning, faith congregations, meaningful connections between human beings,

01:00:25.920 reading groups like the ones that you're in. And the other thing about we're not living by

01:00:29.880 earthly bread alone is that we, we long for, I think we long for something to devote ourselves to,

01:00:38.220 something to, to give our lives a kind of higher purpose. Now, today that's, that position,

01:00:44.580 is occupied for many people by the Church of Humanity, right? And so you can see people who

01:00:50.240 maybe, in fact, had a religious upbringing, but now that's kind of been transferred over to

01:00:58.500 moral imperatives, right, of equality and stuff like this. And so this is another way in which,

01:01:07.240 going back to Max Weber, religion continues to imprint us and to guide us, even in our highly

01:01:13.540 secular society, right? There is a kind of religious devotion to certain kinds of moral

01:01:20.140 principles. And there's another sense in which there are articles of faith because people will

01:01:24.160 put them today beyond debate or discussion, right? So if somebody asks you, like, or calls into

01:01:30.980 question certain kinds of fundamental principles, the response might be, that's not a legitimate

01:01:35.860 discussion. We're not going to have that discussion. These are off limits, right? And even maybe your

01:01:41.500 speech, your questioning, is itself a kind of violence. And it makes me feel unsafe and so

01:01:46.760 forth. You see what I'm getting at? So, but the problem is that that's not the real spiritual and

01:01:52.740 intellectual nourishment. I think these are kinds of ersatz substitutes, you know? And we're bound to

01:01:59.540 be disappointed. We are not the highest thing in the universe. And if we worship ourselves as stuff,

01:02:04.520 you know, we're just bound to be disappointed.

01:02:09.780 No, I mean, I think that's a good point. Like, I think it's good. I think a lot of people,

01:02:12.600 they want to feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves. I think that's an innate

01:02:17.340 human drive. But like, I think you're making this case is that we're basically, we're substituting

01:02:24.620 humanity for something transcendent.

01:02:27.220 Yeah. And, you know, actually I can make this point with respect to the philosophical tradition

01:02:30.940 as well. Okay. So this was a big part of the appeal of fascism and communism in the 20th

01:02:36.660 century. Marx, in effect, promises heaven on earth and the communist society, right? This is an

01:02:42.980 observation familiar to many people. He translates into human history, right? A kind of millenarial

01:02:50.100 divine history. And we're going to have this on society. We're going to have this Eden.

01:02:54.980 Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger was the son of a sexton and he originally studied theology before

01:03:01.600 he switched to philosophy. And he infamously argued in his rectorial address in 1933, after

01:03:07.840 Hitler had come to power, that Nazism would be a new revelation of being with a capital B. And

01:03:14.840 for Heidegger, being is God, right? In other words, Nazism would be a new revelation of being

01:03:20.840 for the German people. This is why I kind of think of Heidegger as a sort of prophet, right?

01:03:25.260 These are religious impulses. Heidegger is expressing the idea that what's happening here

01:03:31.360 and now is like world historically relevant because it relates to being, not just to events,

01:03:39.200 but to this highest thing that is his understanding of sort of philosophical translation of God.

01:03:44.660 This is a natural human tendency. We want to see our lives in connection with something higher,

01:03:54.620 more important that we can devote ourselves to, that we can bow down to. And if there's going to

01:03:59.920 be a vacuum, it's going to be filled. Yeah. And I think another thing too,

01:04:03.940 you've written about Kierkegaard before, and I've been rereading him. I'm actually reading this book

01:04:09.080 called The Existential Survival Guide, written by this really fun professor who was a boxing

01:04:14.640 trainer, but now he's a philosopher. Gordon Marino. Gordon Marino. He's a good friend of

01:04:19.080 mine. All right. So yeah, I'm talking to him on the podcast next week. Oh, terrific. Yeah. Say

01:04:23.280 hi to him for me. I will. Good, good. So Gordon, you know, Kierkegaard's like his guy. He loves

01:04:29.620 Kierkegaard. Yeah. And it seems like Kierkegaard was also a prophet of this modern age. Like Kierkegaard

01:04:34.400 was a, he's, you know, the first existential philosopher seen as that. And he was, he came from a

01:04:39.520 Christian perspective, but he was, he thought modern thinking, like he saw how it could

01:04:43.940 lead to corruption. And one of the insights that he had, and you've written about this,

01:04:48.280 is that modern thinking and the democratic ethos can lead to this leveling. Right. That's sort of

01:04:53.980 the natural, and this leveling for Kierkegaard was like, everyone just ends up the same.

01:04:57.760 And that might seem good, you know, like, hey, equality, how can you be against equality? But he

01:05:03.700 says there's some dangers in that leveling process. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know,

01:05:08.700 Kierkegaard defended the freedom to judge for oneself and to speak and act for oneself and,

01:05:15.480 you know, to, to come to be oneself in the fullness of one's individual particularity.

01:05:21.540 But he warned in an incredibly prophetic book called Two Ages, which was published in, in 1846

01:05:27.520 against the danger of exactly what you said. He called it leveling in the name, by the way,

01:05:33.800 of democratic equality. Now, what did he mean by leveling? He meant the destruction of organic

01:05:40.420 communities of human beings, right? Families, congregations, nations, and so forth. And

01:05:46.840 there's a sense in which modernity, and I should also mention in this context, capitalism. Capitalism

01:05:53.400 has been described as a kind of creative destruction, but one thing it does, it comes in and it's like,

01:05:58.060 in this town, they used to have this industry, no more, boom, goodbye, right? So it wipes things

01:06:03.160 away and so forth. But Kierkegaard sort of understood that human beings are local creatures.

01:06:08.600 You know, again, they, they have these organic communities and there was something very disturbing

01:06:13.300 about modernity. And so he made this incredibly prophetic remark. He said that, he said, and this

01:06:20.360 is basically a quotation, the abstraction of leveling is related to a higher negativity, pure humanity.

01:06:27.720 He used those words, pure humanity. He already understood in 1846 that there was going to be

01:06:34.700 this movement of focusing on pure humanity. And again, if you're going to have pure humanity,

01:06:40.080 you got to get rid, you know, you.

01:06:41.800 No differences.

01:06:42.600 Yeah. Right. You can't have particularity. By the way, the only thing that he saw that was good about

01:06:47.100 this was that with all of these organic communities gone and so forth, we would be standing in an

01:06:55.080 unmediated relationship to God, right? Just you and God. There's no, so, but he predicted

01:07:01.660 that nothing, and this is terrifying for me. He predicted because he was such a prophet, you know,

01:07:07.140 that nothing would be able to stop what he calls the spontaneous combustion of the human race.

01:07:13.300 He said, it's going to happen. It's going to happen.

01:07:16.720 So it's all leading up to that, the spontaneous combustion of the human race.

01:07:20.200 Gone. What does, what do you mean by that? Just like, we're just going to wipe ourselves out?

01:07:24.100 Well, I think he was foreseeing something that Dostoevsky foresaw as well. Maybe I should make

01:07:29.760 a little remark here. I've, I've come to, to understand the claims of the medieval philosopher

01:07:35.700 Al-Farabi and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides that philosophy and prophecy are identical. And what

01:07:43.440 I mean by that is people who really, I'm going to say this is philosophy, people who really,

01:07:47.740 really understand the human world, understand us anthropologically, metaphysically, and so forth.

01:07:55.740 They can predict things. They can understand what's going to happen. So Dostoevsky in his book,

01:08:00.820 Demons, you know, he actually predicts that this kind of nihilistic, socialistic revolutionary

01:08:08.820 tendencies would kill a hundred million people, which is the total in the black book of communism

01:08:14.540 of the deaths in the 20th century, owing to communism. How does he do that? Because he

01:08:20.760 understands the forces of nihilism, these sort of destructive forces. Kierkegaard, I think,

01:08:28.720 understood in some vague way, the things that we saw in Nazi Germany, in Maoist China, in the Soviet

01:08:36.060 Union, in Pol Pot's regime of the Khmer Rouge. And in, you know, other places where there's just

01:08:42.940 this kind of destructive rage that comes through and clears away all these structures in the name

01:08:49.740 of a higher good, of making the world better. By the way, the Nazis thought this too, right? They're

01:08:55.620 like, we're going to serve all humanity by getting rid of the infection of these untermenschen,

01:09:03.160 right? These lower species of human beings, Jews, Poles, you know, et cetera.

01:09:08.640 I mean, that's a good point. I think sometimes when we think about Nazis or communists or Stalin,

01:09:12.020 we think like the way we portray, the way they're portrayed in the media is like they know they're

01:09:16.300 bad guys. And like, no, they actually thought they were the good guys, right? They thought they

01:09:21.180 were doing something good. I think, you know, going back to C.S. Lewis, you got to, he had this quote,

01:09:24.900 it's like, you got to be careful. Like the tyrants, you have to be most on guard for the ones who want

01:09:29.200 to do you good. Yeah. Because they're just going to keep going and going and going until they think

01:09:34.540 they've done you good. Vasily Grossman, whom I quoted earlier in his book, Life and Fate,

01:09:39.400 he's got a letter from a guy in, in actually it's in a Nazi camp. It's a huge sprawling book and he's

01:09:45.680 got stuff all over. And the guy says that more evil has been done in the name of good with a capital G

01:09:52.260 than has been done by people who simply are pursuing evil. I think that's really interesting. I mean,

01:09:58.980 and see all of that gets accelerated by modern technology, right? I mean, if you've got a means

01:10:06.560 of disposing of 10,000 people a day in a gas chamber in crematoria or whatever, you know,

01:10:11.380 you can really go to town, but also electronic means, surveillance, internet, and all this kind

01:10:17.700 of stuff, you know, those things kind of amplify the potential for leveling. All this stuff's happening,

01:10:25.780 right? So we, there's a lot of changes going on in our culture. And I think a lot of people might

01:10:31.460 feel disoriented. And I'm hoping this conversation we've had can kind of give people an idea of how

01:10:37.840 we got here. You're a philosopher. How do you think studying philosophy can help people manage or

01:10:43.880 understand and navigate this, this current age we're living in? Yeah. So navigate is the right word.

01:10:49.440 And, you know, I, being alive today is like being in a flood. The currents come along,

01:10:56.860 they wipe out the landscape, they sweep you up, they spin you around, and you don't know where

01:11:02.260 they're going to deposit you, right? And so I think we need more than ever to have some compass points

01:11:09.920 to orient ourselves. We got to be able, at least like Hamlet, even if we don't know where two

01:11:16.120 north is, as he says, he can reckon north by northwest, right? Like, and those compass points

01:11:23.980 are not to be found in the flood itself. That's not going to happen. For me, that orientation has

01:11:31.680 come from a study, not just of philosophy, but of Western literature and history and science. And,

01:11:39.100 you know, this, this is, uh, the original idea of the university was a place where the best that had

01:11:47.600 been thought and created and said could be passed down from generation to generation, could be preserved

01:11:55.040 and developed and extended and passed down. And, you know, tradition is just absolutely fundamental

01:12:02.960 for giving us a sense of how to find our feet and, and how to orient ourselves in a rapidly changing

01:12:11.000 world. And, you know, I, I think that, I mean, this is why for me, the study of the classic books

01:12:19.020 of, of, of the great books needs to be maintained. I think people, you know, students read a lot of

01:12:27.760 books, but not necessarily the, the really important ones that are going to endure. You know, if you've

01:12:33.760 got a chance to read Dante's divine comedy or some recent book by some professor on some subject and

01:12:41.140 you got to choose between them, I know what the right choice is. Right. Well, Jacob, this has been

01:12:45.660 a great conversation. Is there someplace people go to learn more about what you're doing? Yeah, actually

01:12:50.440 probably the easiest thing is to go to jacobhowland, one word.com. And if you go there, you can see

01:12:57.320 some information about me and so forth. But for listeners of this podcast, I would especially

01:13:02.020 recommend you click on the word more, right? You got like, you know, publications, whatever,

01:13:07.980 and then click on more. And there is a button that shows up called links. If you go to that,

01:13:13.680 you can click on articles that I've written that pertain quite directly to the kinds of things we've

01:13:18.660 been talking about on that podcast. So I would, I would begin there. Fantastic. Well, Jacob Howland,

01:13:22.640 thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much, Brad. Always great to be with you.

01:13:26.080 My guest today was Jacob Howland. He is a now retired professor from the University of Tulsa.

01:13:29.620 You can find out more information about his work at his website, jacobhowland.com. Also check out

01:13:33.560 our show notes at aom.is slash Howland, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve

01:13:37.660 deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website

01:13:49.280 at artofmanliness.com. You can find our podcast archives, as well as articles we've written over the years

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01:14:18.180 continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you not only listen to the AOM podcast,

01:14:21.900 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#628： The Rise of Secular Religion and the New Puritanism

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