Humour is the best weapon in politics
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Summary
Travis Smith is a professor of political theory at Concordia University in Montreal. He completed his Master's and PhD in Political Theory at Harvard University and was recently a guest on The Candice Malan Show. In this episode, we discuss the role of comedy in politics and why we should all use it.
Transcript
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What can we learn from studying political theory and how can we use wit and
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humor to persuade people but also to save our society from the march towards
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the woke tyranny? I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
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Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. If you're watching this video on
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enjoy your podcasts, don't forget to subscribe to The Candice Malcolm Show and
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if you like the show, please leave us a five-star review. Okay, so sometimes when
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you're watching the news and this happens to me so often, I'll see a headline on
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the CBC or I'll read a report and sometimes it's just so absurd, so
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ridiculous, so offensive, you don't know whether you should laugh or you should
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cry. Well, my guest on the show today says that you should laugh and that when
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we look to political teachings, when we look to the ancient Greeks, people like
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Aristotle and Plato, when we look at the New Testament, when we look to philosophers
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and writers like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Hobbes, Mark Twain, or even modern day
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comics like Norm MacDonald or Jon Stewart, they all use humor and wit as a helpful
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tool to navigate the world, to warn us on the dangers of tyranny, and to persuade
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an audience. So my guest today on the podcast is Travis Smith. Smith is a
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professor of political theory at Concordia University in Montreal. He
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completed his master's and doctorate in political theory at Harvard
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University and he was recently a guest on my show. Now, while I was preparing for
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the show, while I was prepping for the interview, I came across an amusing essay
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that Travis wrote called Thomas Hobbes Comedian and I really enjoyed it. When I
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reached out to him to ask him about it, he sent me another essay that he wrote
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called An Introduction to the Politics of Wit, a Symposium, which was also a great
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read. And so I've invited Travis back on the show to do another deep dive into
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political theory. So Travis, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back to the
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show. I'm really glad to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show today,
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Candice. Okay, so let's talk about comedy. Let's talk about the use of comedy in
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writing about politics and thinking about politics. Can you first tell me about
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these essays and just basically the idea of wit as a political virtue?
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Right. So whether or not there's any sort of humor in our politics is maybe a sign
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of its health, right? When politics becomes absolutely humorless, we know that
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things have gone horribly wrong. And tyrants in particular are renowned for
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lacking a sense of humor. So when we see parliamentarians, you know, getting their
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jabs in, when we see, you know, op-eds written with some wit, when we have, you know, media
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personalities and comedians who are able to sort of help us not only stick it to the people we
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disagree with, but also help us, you know, understand things a little bit better, make
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us think twice about things. Those are all signs that things are going a little bit better for our
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polity. And when things become too dour or too angry, it's a sure sign that something is really
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amiss. Well, and we see that, I would say, especially in the last 10 years or so, the rise
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of the sort of nighttime comedy, it was really big and powerful, say, in the era of George
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Bush when he was president. Then Barack Obama came around and I feel like comics had a tougher
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time with him. They didn't really know how to make fun of him. And part of it was because so many
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comedians are on the political left and they saw Obama as an ally. They see Justin Trudeau as an ally.
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So you don't see them poking fun as much. And the same thing can be said about Joe Biden today. We
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still see so much of the political humor being aimed at the right. So when you had Trump come along,
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in some ways it was easy for them, but in some ways it was also the bar was so low that you just saw
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so many comics kind of going out of their way to bash Trump that it wasn't funny. It was like
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watching amateur pundits that didn't really know what they were talking about. So is it possible
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sometimes that humor can be used the opposite way and it can undermine political discourse?
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Sure. Right. Well, I mean, with President Obama, there were humorous things about him. Some comedians
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got really good at doing impressions of his very particular peculiar cadence. You're right. Previous
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president was a target of a great deal of comedic attack or late night comedy sketches and bits.
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there is a lot of memeing going on about the current president as well.
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But right during the past past little while I would I would I tend to think really was the sort of the
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downfall of a lot of this was the Jon Stewart style of comedy in which almost every Jon Stewart joke
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for years had the same punchline and the punchline was some version of can you believe these guys
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or what a bunch of idiots or look how stupid they are with always being the sort of think about how
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smart we are being the joke night in night night out nonstop and it's tiresome and it's and it's cheap
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it's easy stuff. And that became the mode of of of that kind of comedy. Now, a lot of late night comedy
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is also what they call punching down that kind, right? We have contempt for the people that you are
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making fun of. And you're just, as I said, trying to show how stupid they are, how bad they are.
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And, you know, when you look at a classical conception of the role of wit in politics,
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there's an understanding that there's something very unseemly, you know, very base, vulgar about just
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punching down, you know, taking the targets that you think are contemptible and just showing how
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contemptible they are. And so it's a it's a sign of, again, the health of things when you have a kind
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of respect for the people that you're also poking fun at. Or, right, I mean, on the other hand,
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punching up can also be something that you need to do when you have, you know, something that's gone
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horribly awry. And you've got people who are behaving oppressively when the wit can be used in order to try to
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take down the very powerful when you have almost no other weapons. When you have no, almost no other
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weapons, sometimes humor is the thing that you can make recourse to, especially in order to get people
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to, to realize that things are, are need to be called into question.
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Well, and so reading, reading some of your essays on the use of comedy and wit throughout sort of some,
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some of the classic political theorists and contemporary political theorists, uh, a lot of
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it seems to be, uh, aimed at sort of the, um, aristocracy or the religious leaders. Like for
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instance, with Benjamin Franklin, that he, he poked fun at the, the ideas around religion, not because
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he wanted to abolish religion, uh, but sort of because he wanted to save it. So can you walk us
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through a little bit, either, either of the classics or, or the more contemporary thinkers, uh, some of the
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best uses of, of comedy to, to help, uh, persuade an audience or prove a point?
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Right. Well, that's, that's, that's sort of the, what I was saying before about when, when the people
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make fun of those in power, uh, if sometimes that's the only sort of weapons they might have,
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but also it can be effective for, uh, piercing, uh, their conceits, uh, and exposing to people that
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they aren't quite as smart or as virtuous or as righteous or as pious as they pretend to. And
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therefore you might use wit in order to call their legitimacy into question. And so, right. In
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early modern times when the democratic revolution was really getting underway, a thinker like Thomas
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Hobbes was, you know, had lots of fun pointing out how, uh, ridiculous, uh, aspects of, uh, the regime
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of the aristocrats or the rule of the church had been. Uh, and so that was an important sort of
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weapon in his philosophical arsenal. Hobbes is famous for claiming that he's just offering
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you know, a purely scientific mode of thinking, uh, purely rational, purely materialistic. Uh,
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but despite those claims, he is constantly using literary devices, rhetorical devices, especially
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wit in order to communicate and, and persuade people of the claims that he's making the accusations
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and the criticisms that he's offering. And wit is something that, um, you know, is one of the
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things that Aristotle and classical political science recognizes one of the highest social
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virtues. Uh, he puts it in his list of virtues just before, uh, justice. So it's not, it's not
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higher than justice, right? Justice is sort of the pinnacle of the political virtues, but it's the one
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he, he discusses right before justice to indicate how important it is. And my interpretation of that is
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he knows that because we don't ever actually live in a condition of perfect justice and the natural
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reaction to injustice is anger, but excessive anger is itself a condition that's unlivable,
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uh, that we need something to temper anger in order to render living in an imperfect world tolerable,
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right? And wit is one of the things that we have in order to help us cope with and also cope with
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injustice, but also help us fight for greater justice, especially in the face of abuses of power,
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uh, in the face of, um, people whose, uh, uh, claims to expertise, wisdom, righteousness,
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so forth are exaggerated and pretentious and in deserving of, of ridicule.
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Okay. Let's take that, that sort of idea from Aristotle and try to apply it to today's political
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left because some of the themes you were talking about the sort of excessive anger, like sometimes
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the left will, will criticize something and you kind of say, okay, they have a point, you know,
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this, that they, they found something that is unjust. They, they, they pointed out something
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about our society that, that can be true, but, but it's just that their, their solution to the problem
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is usually, um, you know, either, either completely changing the system and, and, and proposing
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something that's impossible and never been tried. Um, or, or you just see their sort of righteous
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anger where you see it in the environmentalist movement, um, in this sort of woke left and,
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and the, uh, quote unquote anti-racist movement, uh, but, but, but also that, that aspect of
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humorlessness, like they don't, they don't use humor. They, they, they cancel people for trying
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to use humor, hence why comedians don't even bother to, to go to university campuses anymore. So
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I, I, I want you to try to help us, um, understand what, what the left perhaps could, could learn from
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using more, more wit and humor and what they could learn from, uh, trying to pick up on what
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Aristotle is, was trying to, to teach. Okay. Uh, I'm going to, I'm going to be sort of, uh, less ready
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to just accuse one side of the political spectrum of being guilty of this problem, uh, myself, Candace.
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Uh, but that said, let me say, uh, that, right. The, you, you mentioned something about designs for
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trying to transform all of society as if we could through sufficient reason, sufficient willpower,
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sufficient imagination, we might be able to impose ourselves upon the social system and re-engineer
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it and reconstruct it in accordance with what we know to be right and true. Uh, and we could fix
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everything and treat society and treat human beings as an engineering project, uh, to be reconstructed,
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overhauled, recreated, uh, and what it, what it requires are, as I said, the very virtuous and the
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very wise to take charge and repair it. Uh, and this isn't something that I'm willing to sort of accuse
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any particular movement of being exclusively guilty of. This is something that dates back,
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concern that dates back even to Plato's Republic, uh, in which the idea of philosopher kings was first
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pitched as what would be necessary in order to achieve the just society, uh, with an understanding
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that Plato knew that we actually could not do that. Any effort to try to manufacture the just society
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would be something that, uh, would not only be monstrous, but humorless. Plato's writings are full of humor,
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and he loves telling stories and, and, and using irony and jokes. And, uh, and so, right. Part of
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why there's the susceptibility to this in modern times, however, is that, uh, you know, you've heard
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people talk about seeing modern times as a kind of secularization of Christian ethics or a Christian
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conception of history. And that put human beings in the role of imagining that we could save ourselves,
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so we could manufacture a heaven on earth. As I said, if only we had enough willpower, enough
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imagination, enough material means and powers at our disposal and sufficient righteousness and wisdom
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in those in charge. Uh, and that's an attempt to, uh, imagine that we could use our reason
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to manufacture what is actually a comical outcome, right? Comedies are always when there's a happy ending.
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Comedies are when, despite all appearances, things go well. And even people who are not really up to
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the task succeed, you know, beyond belief, and people who might not even deserve great happiness
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all get it, right? And that's, that's comedy. Uh, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a reader of comic books. Uh,
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I wrote a book on superheroes a few years ago, uh, and comic books are rightly called comic books in some
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ways because, you know, the superheroes triumph over super villains that try to take over the world and
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impose themselves on us all. Uh, they, of course, the super villains tend to often believe that they've
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got some very rational design. If only everybody did what I said that they should do, and I had all the
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power and I was in charge and I imposed my will, then, you know, the world would know all the love and
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joy that only I can bring to it. You know, as soon as somebody thinks like that, they're a madman,
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they're crazy. They are deserving of ridicule. Um, and so, you know, we have a society that loves
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our heroes that, you know, defeat our, uh, super villainous types. But in politics, we have this
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idea that maybe some great extraordinary leaders might be able to transform the world and, and, and
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abolish all the injustice. If only they had all the power and all the trust of the people. Um,
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this idea that we can manufacture comedy through the imposition of technological reason
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is, however, from a classical point of view, uh, prone to tragedy. That's not, that's not something
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that, that works out happily, like, you know, the victories of superheroes in comic books.
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That's something that we could, uh, the classics would tell us that, uh, we should fully expect
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to go entirely awry. And so, um, right, uh, we've, we've seen efforts of a great variety of kinds,
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especially over the last hundred years in which people have believed that on account of their
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nobility, on account of their wisdom, on account of their piety, on account of their righteousness,
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on account of their virtue, uh, they could fix the world. Uh, and, uh, I ended that book I mentioned
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with a claim that, you know, global governance is for supervillains. Anybody who believes that,
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you know, they could fix the world in that way as somebody we should, uh, not trust and, and, and
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ridicule. Well, uh, I, I appreciate you, uh, answering the question that way, because you're,
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you're right that the, um, the, the anger, the righteous anger, it doesn't just come from one
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side of the political spectrum. We see, we do see it on both sides. It's just that to me,
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particularly that the side that I'm concerned about right now, um, is left, but I, I, I, I agree
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that when you, when, when you think of the world in terms of, you know, who, what the biggest threat
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is, um, to us, the, the, the ideas you mentioned, I, um, I have a son and he's reading a little, um,
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Spider-Man, um, kids comic book. And in it, the bad guy is just named evil doctor, the evil doctor.
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And, um, you know, it's kind of weird, Travis, because, you know, in today's world,
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we're told to trust doctors that doctors are good. Doctors are, are the, the, the, the authority
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that we should trust. And then yet, interestingly in this, and it's an old Spider-Man book, it's
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probably from the eighties or something. Um, you know, it's the, the, the idea that the, that the
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villain is, is an evil doctor, which I sometimes chuckle at when I, when I see the latest, um,
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you know, news of some doctor, um, imposing these ridiculous, um, rules and, and, or advocating for
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endless lockdowns. And, and, and I kind of chuckle about the idea of a, of an, of an evil doctor.
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Um, I, I, I want to change gears a little bit and, and just take, take a step back and talk
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about the purpose of political philosophy. I remember when I was a undergraduate at the
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University of Alberta, my first day walking into a political philosophy course or a history,
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political philosophy course, and my professor saying, you know, why should we bother reading
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the Greeks? What could we possibly learn from a bunch of old white dead guys? And, uh, you know,
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the point of the course was to, was to show that there was some purpose
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in, in reading someone like Plato or Aristotle. Um, this is what you do day in and day out.
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So maybe you could, uh, talk to us a little bit about the relevance of, of, of reading political
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philosophy and what we can learn from, from that today.
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Right. Maybe I can tell you about how I approach it when I'm teaching undergraduates.
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Um, and so I, I started off as an engineering student, right? And so when you, when you go
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into, uh, engineering classes as an undergraduate, uh, you're going to be treated to, you know,
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calculus and organic chemistry and heat transfer and fluid dynamics and that sort of thing,
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uh, where the professor is the expert back when I was there, they're still sort of throwing up black
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boards, endless black boards for 75 minutes straight. Um, in which, you know, uh, matters
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regarding which there's, we reckon no dispute are authoritatively put in front of you. And you are like
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a student, like a machine to figure out how to add this knowledge to your toolkit to solve future problems.
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Uh, and you are measured on your ability to acquire certainty and exactness, precision,
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and the application of this kind of knowledge. Um, and every student that's in an engineering
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classroom is someone you are training to be an engineer, even if they don't end up being an
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engineer and end up, you know, working in sales for a technology firm, you know, you still train
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everyone to be an engineer. That's not how you teach political theory. You don't, you don't look at a
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room of a hundred students who've been, uh, put into your intro to political theory class, uh, because,
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you know, it's a requirement for their degree as if they're all going to become professional
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political theorists. Uh, you know, even when I get one student who says, I'm thinking of going into
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political theory, can I get a letter of reference for a graduate school letter? You're going to,
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can I get a letter of reference? I'm like, why do you want to go into political theory?
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And they'll give me some answer. Often it's because, well, I want to spend my time reading
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and writing, right? I really love to read. And I like to say, well, if you really love to read,
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get a job as a night watchman or something, uh, you know, if that's what you really care about,
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uh, you know, study, the study of it from a professional standpoint is one thing, but what is it
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for as part of, you know, citizen education? What is it part of the liberal education, human education?
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That's how I sort of tend to think of it. And part of it is when you are, you know, fortunate enough,
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lucky enough, privileged enough to get to be in university, you know, in the prime of your life,
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when your mental sort of abilities are at their, at the prime, when, when you actually are still,
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you know, uh, capable of, uh, you know, uh, thinking quickly and absorbing new ideas and, and, uh,
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and still adapting to the world, uh, exposing students to, you know, ideas that are in some
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ways familiar, but also different and, and should get them to think a bit more broadly
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and gain some historical sense and get some theoretical breadth so that you're not just
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caught in the politics of the day and the news cycle and the Twitter verse and the hashtagging
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and the us versus them and try to be able to sort of step back and try to perceive things,
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uh, from, uh, perspectives that are altogether foreign, not only to you, uh, maybe, but to the
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discourse that prevails today, uh, the, and the back and forth between the parties that are
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reeminent presently. And to be able to sort of, you know, reflect more, uh, on, on the human condition
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more broadly and your place in society and your place in the world and the, and the status of,
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uh, the things that you care about and the things that you value, there's a real luxury
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to being able to do that. And so unlike the sort of the training for an engineering career that, uh,
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undergraduates in that program are engaged in and, and rightly so, I mean, that makes perfectly good
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sense when you get to be in a course in which you're assigned old books to read.
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Um, this is not to train you to solve a problem, right. Or to fix anything or to become the expert
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that will dictate to others what to do, but it's a, it's a, it's a human activity of just, um,
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becoming, uh, more self-aware and thoughtful. And, and part of that is what I really like to emphasize
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in the classroom because we don't do this in politics. We don't do this on the Twitterverse.
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We don't do this, uh, uh, on, on YouTube even very often, which is, uh, learn how to, you know, uh,
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really, um, give a generous reading to the people that we disagree with, try to understand why they're
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coming from where they're coming from and, uh, abstract away from yourself a little bit.
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Uh, and to gain those kinds of skills. Now, of course, those kinds of skills can be practically
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useful because you can always criticize something, uh, more convincingly if you do it from the inside,
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rather than just have a straw man that you attack and caricature and, and, and so forth.
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Right. If you really ridicule something to go back to saying, but wait, before you can really ridicule
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something, if you, you know, explode it from the inside on its own terms, rather than just lob grenades
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at it from the outside. And so there are practical benefits for an education in, in, you know,
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philosophy, rhetoric, literature, and so forth. But I still, I guess I'm a bit old fashioned in
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this way that I think that politics is not actually the most important thing and politics is not
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everything. And that we're human beings before we're citizens, uh, and that we're neighbors, uh,
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before we are, um, members of parties and that there's an essential purpose to be filled by, uh,
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retaining, maintaining, uh, communicating education in things like, uh, philosophy, literature, old books,
00:23:51.940
that's humanizing and reminds us of that, uh, we're more than our party identity and we're more than
00:24:02.020
our, uh, uh, our, our commitments and our sides and one or another, uh, debate of the day. So that's,
00:24:11.700
Well, uh, that's excellent. I mean, there's so many things that I could pick up on there,
00:24:15.540
but that the idea that sort of politics in some ways has crept into every aspect of our lives,
00:24:19.780
and this is more of a U S phenomenon, but you see politics, um, infused now things like hockey,
00:24:25.300
you know, hockey used to be something where you would go, uh, to escape politics and, and, and,
00:24:30.660
and just go and enjoy something lightheartedly. And now it's like, you know, we hear the woke
00:24:34.660
hectoring, uh, throughout sports, entertainment movies. It's, it's, it's sort of nonstop. And,
00:24:40.580
and that's, that's also part of a problem. And then the idea of social media, it, you know,
00:24:45.300
in some ways it's an opportunity to use wit, you can, you can reply to someone, you can say
00:24:48.660
something funny, but at the same time, it's, it's also set up for straw man arguments and, and, and
00:24:54.180
really, um, putting the worst possible spin on what your political opponent is saying. And for me,
00:25:01.380
I've taken a little bit of a break from Twitter because, you know, you could find yourself getting
00:25:05.620
too, too, too deep into that. But my, my, my final question that I wanted to ask you, Travis,
00:25:10.420
is, um, so back to myself as an undergraduate reading, uh, political philosophy in Edmonton,
00:25:16.340
I, I remember I was carrying a copy of Alan Bloom's Plato Republic and a security guard in,
00:25:22.580
in the building, um, not, not at the school, the apartment where I lived. Um, he, he, he asked me
00:25:29.220
what I was doing reading that. And he, the security guard was from India. He was a political philosophy
00:25:34.340
teacher in India. He just moved to Canada and he was working as a security guard. And I said,
00:25:38.820
you know, that I'm a political philosophy student or actually just political science. And this is
00:25:42.980
a requirement. And he was like, well, you know, you're too young to be reading that book. You
00:25:46.580
don't understand it. He's like, teachers should be assigning books about philosophy for you to read.
00:25:51.220
You shouldn't be reading the original text yet. You can read that later. Um, and, and I thought that
00:25:55.140
was kind of interesting. And sometimes I did feel like I was reading it and I wasn't really computing. I
00:25:59.220
wasn't really understanding what I was reading, but, um, I, I, I appreciate it nonetheless. And I,
00:26:04.340
I like reading about political philosophy as much as I like reading or trying to read, uh,
00:26:09.940
political philosophy, although I'm pretty slow when it comes to reading philosophy. But all that is just
00:26:13.540
to say, Travis, is, is there a book that you recommend someone who doesn't really have a
00:26:17.700
background in this stuff? What's a good, what's a good place to start? Who's a good thinker, um,
00:26:21.780
to start in a journey of, of trying to read and understand, uh, political philosophy?
00:26:25.860
Can I just ask, did you, did you get to take a class on Plato with Leon Craig?
00:26:35.300
Oh, I remember Heidi. Um, um, what book do I recommend? Um, you know what? Let's just go with
00:26:47.300
ones that everybody used to read, even just in high school, and maybe they aren't anymore. Um,
00:26:52.340
um, if you haven't read your brave new world, read your brave new world right now.
00:26:57.780
In late 2021, that's not a bad start. I'll go with that is, uh, is, is something that everybody,
00:27:06.020
if they haven't read it, they should read it. And if they have read it, they should reread it.
00:27:10.660
Okay. Well, that sounds good. That's our, uh, required Christmas reading here on the Candace
00:27:14.820
Malcolm show. And, uh, Travis, we'll have to have you back in the new year and you can,
00:27:18.020
you can talk or we can, we can, we can do a little book review on it. Sure. That sounds great. Candace,
00:27:22.660
thank you very much for having me on the show today. All right. Thank you so much to Travis
00:27:26.660
Smith for joining the show. And thank you everyone for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm,