The Fourth Political Theory: Part Two | Guest Michael Millerman | 4⧸13⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
176.28793
Summary
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a conservative nonprofit dedicated to educating the next great American. They understand that conservative and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses and compelled to defend their reputation and dignity while seeking to carve out a brighter future. On all issues, both economic and cultural, they want their students to know that they're not shying away from the problems facing our country because letting the left win is a pathetic way to watch civilization die.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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We're here bright and early today to make sure that we got and made this stream happen.
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So many of you really enjoyed the previous stream on Alexander Dugan and his fourth political theory,
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but we only made it through three chapters and so many people wanted to hear more.
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I figured it would be great if we could continue to do the series.
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And luckily, Michael Milliman is back and has agreed to go ahead and continue looking through the work
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So like I said, we're going to be picking up where we left off.
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We were on Chapter 3, so we'll just pick up where we were from there on Chapter 4 here.
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But before we dive back into Dugan and the fourth political theory, let's go ahead and hear from today's sponsor.
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This episode is brought to you by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a conservative nonprofit dedicated to educating the next great American.
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ISI understands that conservative and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses
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and compelled to defend their reputation and dignity while seeking to carve out a brighter future.
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ISI has a variety of different content, events, internships, and fellowships geared towards helping students and opening up career opportunities.
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ISI offers graduate students and entry-level journalists the opportunity to receive fellowships and secure internships.
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Nate Hockman, who's been a guest on this show multiple times, got his start on National Review through ISI.
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And he's just one of many journalists and academics who were able to start their careers with the help of ISI.
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This spring, ISI is going to be hosting a debate between Michael Knowles and Deidre McCloskey
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on the subject of transgenderism that will be live-streamed on YouTube.
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In the fall, everyone's favorite Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, will be giving the keynote address at ISI's annual gala.
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On all issues, both economic and cultural, ISI wants their students to know that they're not shying away from the problems facing our country
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because letting the left win is a pathetic way to watch civilization die.
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You can follow the link down below in the description of this video.
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All right, so in Chapter 4, Dugan steps in and talks about time.
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It's just a few pages, but it's a very interesting few pages.
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And he starts by talking about the reversibility of time versus the idea of progress,
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which I think is probably some jarring language for some people.
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But he kind of sets the stage by saying the idea we have of time, the concept that we have of time currently,
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is not one that has been the case in all societies.
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It has not been throughout history the way that many different cultures and peoples have understood time.
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And so he says that kind of the understandings and the writings of Hegel
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and the concept of social Darwinism have changed the way that we view time.
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And we see it almost as some kind of monarch that rules us, that drives us in a particular direction,
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And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this idea of how time has transformed,
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how we see time has transformed through kind of these ideologies that now kind of animate the way
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that our political thinking in the current paradigm.
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Well, for Dugan, it's a key question because the idea of the end of history
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already implies some notion of a directionality to time,
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of an arrow of time, of a motor of historical progress that comes to an end.
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But what he says is that common to all three of liberalism, communism, and fascism,
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or all three political theories, all three modern theories,
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is the idea that time is unidirectional and progressive.
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And so at a very simple level, we could say that,
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well, what would other models of time look like?
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So for example, that time is regressive rather than progressive,
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or that time is cyclical, or that time is not homogenous,
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that it consists of these sort of distinct heterogeneous moments that are epochal
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or somehow that shift the spirit of the times without it being a clear unidirectional march
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So because one of Dugan's tasks in this book, let's put it this way,
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his dual task is to understand the state of affairs right now from an ideological perspective
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and to begin to open up the prospects for ideology construction,
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or, you know, to open up a new philosophical space for thinking about politics.
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So he's able to do that here in this way by showing number one,
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the shared thesis of the unidirectionality of time,
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that gives us the analysis, the descriptive analysis of the three political theories,
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or as he puts it, my restatement here of it is sort of the political variability of time.
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Time varies as a function of political decisions,
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In other words, time is not so unproblematically given as something self-evident.
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And therefore, Dugan is very much trying to force us back into the question
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of the nature of time, of the meaning of time, of the sociology of time,
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and just thereby to enrich our conceptual arsenal for thinking about things like the meaning of history.
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To contest the idea that history is unidirectional,
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that it culminates in a final moment like an end of history type thesis,
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doesn't mean to reject completely, and in all cases,
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the idea that history is unidirectional, because, as he says somewhere,
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if, for example, we relativize history to civilizations,
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then a certain civilization might be at the end of its history,
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while another civilization might be at the beginning of its history.
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So this idea that we're going to pluralize our conceptual understanding of time
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is, for him, as he puts it, one of the fundamental conceptual building blocks
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Yeah, and to give an example, you know, people might say,
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One of the examples he gives would be that, you know,
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And so it's one of those things that this process is supposed to be one-directional.
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It's supposed to be part of kind of the dialectic and human progression,
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but instead we see a reversal of what was supposed to happen in that way.
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but he just makes it clear that progress is kind of relative
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to the situation and to the goals and the understandings
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And so he's not completely getting rid of the idea of progress,
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in the context of the civilization that's kind of observing it.
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That's right, because in part, when we think about progress,
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we have implicitly the valuation, what is progressing?
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To say we're progressing means we're getting closer to a vision of the good
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or a standard of the good, or we're implementing more justice or more truth,
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but truth, justice, and the good are contested concepts,
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and therefore progress is going to look different in different places.
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In one place, it's going to mean more transgenderism,
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in another place, it's going to mean less transgenderism,
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depending on how you've evaluated the phenomenon of transgenderism,
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for example, you know, so on with the other possible contestable social phenomena.
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What he doesn't mean, unless anybody's confused about this,
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he definitely doesn't mean that you're going to, you know,
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become younger or something like that, that, you know,
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the biological aging process is going to be reversed
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in the direction of a fountain of youth or something like that.
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So he's not talking about the reversibility of time
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in the sense that instead of getting older, you get younger.
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But the problem is that time is something that we interpret,
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and the interpretations of time are what he's really looking at to a certain extent.
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And in modernity, time has been interpreted in this way,
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that it tends towards improvement, that the future is going to be better, and so on.
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Whereas, clearly, as I'm sure people know who have studied, for example,
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cyclical theories of history or catastrophic theories of history,
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That's not the only way of understanding social time, on one hand.
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There's no guarantee, there's no obvious guarantee
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that history is always going to be progressive in that sense.
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And then, like I said, the key values themselves are contested.
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So, by shining a spotlight on all of that in this chapter,
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he's able to expand the field of ideological analysis, which is his goal.
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So, one of the other things that he talks about,
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and this is so often the case with Dugan, from what I can see so far at least,
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is the need to basically allow each culture, each region,
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and each people to experience and understand time in their own way.
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So, he talks about, you know, ethnic particularities are going to vary the way in which time works.
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Not assuming, you need to make sure that you're not assuming a particular destiny for mankind as a whole,
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and understand kind of individual groups as their own particular set that will move towards,
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you know, something that is defined by their culture and their understanding.
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And then, of course, as we've often kind of pointed to with him,
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political pluralism, reintroducing the idea that, you know, everything doesn't have to be liberalism.
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We don't have to have a global hegemony of a particular political system,
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we can actually alter the way that time is conceptualized inside those societies.
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Yeah, I would say that political pluralism is comprehensible, I would imagine, for a lot of people.
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This idea that there shouldn't be one model that dominates,
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people should be allowed to go their own way to a certain extent,
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local characteristics, particular characteristics, ethnic, religious, historical, cultural,
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What is maybe surprising or unique, as you've mentioned,
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is that for him, that is indissociable from metaphysical pluralism,
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from a pluralism about the big questions and the key concepts of even the sciences.
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So in one place, he says that in a civilizational multipolarity,
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there would be different sciences, okay, like a Russian science, Indian science,
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I think today, when we hear that, it's often the case that we're familiar with, like,
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you know, the attack on 2 plus 2 equals 4 by people who relativize it
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or that, you know, Western white man's ways of knowing
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have been oppressive to the Aboriginal-type ways of knowing or something like that.
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So we're familiar, more or less, with some, like, version of that.
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But Dugan's model tries to be much richer and much more sophisticated
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So he takes an interest in the constitution of the sciences
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and why it is that we've inherited certain models of understanding and knowledge.
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In some cases, it's a reflexive, like, anti-colonialism, right,
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where people just say we're going to reject Western ways of knowing
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and they sort of embrace what seem like foolish alternatives
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that don't really stand the test of serious reflection.
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Maybe some do to a certain extent, but for the most part,
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So Dugan's model tries to combine, I would say,
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but with being rooted intelligently in the thoughtful, deep sources
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of all of these intellectual tendencies, intellectual, yeah.
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For example, he had a lecture course in Russian,
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on a school of thinkers called the phenomenologists,
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where he went into detail about sort of phenomenological interpretations
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So he's not just buffoonishly rejecting Western colonial imperialism,
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but it does follow from his political pluralism
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that our intellectual models of the world should also be plural.
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And time, our interpretation of time, would be a part of that.
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that these arguments are completely opportunistic
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kind of his understanding of kind of how the world should be.
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But I want you to understand that these ideas precede Dugan,
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and they were often advanced by people who weren't anti-colonious.
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For instance, Oswald Spangler spends lots of time
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in Decline of the West explaining that art, math, and science
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He talks about how the Greeks could not do certain types of math
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simply wouldn't allow them to grasp certain mathematical concepts.
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these disciplines that are supposed to be objective pieces of knowledge,
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are still inextricable from the cultures that practice them.
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you could see this as an attack on kind of American empire
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it is something that has been advanced by people
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So while you might say he's only picking it for that reason,
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if you're kind of thinking he's nefarious in this way,
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Yeah, I think we could even take a step further
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which is that some of the people who recognized
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the difficulty of rooting objective mathematical science
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who has written about this in the Crisis of the European Sciences,
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not only was he not anti-colonialist, let's say,
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maybe there's still some anti-Western position from the right
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Okay, there are right-wing anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalists,
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in its philosophical roots and philosophical fruition.
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not only for people who are criticizing the West
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and obviously he uses this as kind of a working thing,
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is completely uncoupled from time and progress?
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So yes, in the sense that you're getting closer
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there's two different meanings of the word progress
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because one is you're getting closer to the goal
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And another one is that you've interpreted time itself
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where the further along you are in time and so on,
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a scholar of the history of political philosophy
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which is kind of the Western liberal democratic empire.
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you know, free markets, democracy, human rights.
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that is prosperous and benefits from the empire
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while not caring much about kind of the outside world,
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And then there are the kind of the multilateralists
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who are those who kind of want to bring everyone along
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Could you talk a little bit about his understanding
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Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.
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postmodern situation so what makes neo-eurasianism
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trying to do civilizational multipolarity using
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if you go to michaelmillerman.com or duganbook.com
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by i know it's really early so i appreciate your