Dr. Stephen Blackwood is the founding president of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, and author of The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy. With a main focus in the history of philosophy, Dr. Blackwood also founded the Inner City Youth Program in Nova Scotia, Canada, and hosted and moderated further soul-feeding conversations with my dad, Sir Roger Scruton, and Slavoj Zizek in the past couple of years. He also hosts and moderates lectures and specializes in the History of Philosophy, especially the Stoic philosophy of Julius Caesar. He is a regular guest host on the RALTON College podcast, which has featured guests including Douglas Murray, the physicist Freeman Dyson, Andrew Doyle, the online satirist and author, and Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote Our Culture, What's Left of It? Among many other books, he is author of Our Culture? and Our Culture: What's left of It, among other books. He is also the founder of St. George's Youth Net, an educational mentoring program for inner-city youth in the North End District of Halifax, Nova Scotia and was subsequently a teaching fellow in the Foundation Year Program at the University of King s College, which is one of Canada s finest undergraduate institutions. He's also the host and moderator of The Happiness, Capitalism vs. Marxism Debate, hosted by the Cambridge University, which moderated the debate with Slavoj Zakizek and I at Cambridge University in 2018, and is the debate between Slavoj and I, and I. . Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of philosophy at RALston College, a newly founded university in Georgia, which was founded in the early 2000s. and hosted a conversation between me and Dr. Slavoj in November 2018. I hope you enjoy this episode, and that it s a good listen! and that you ll enjoy it. Jordan - Dr. B. Peterson is a wonderful humanist, philosopher, writer, thinker, and philosopher, and writer, who is a friend of mine, and a great humanist and philosopher of all things good. - and I hope that you enjoy it Thank you for listening to this episode of The Jordan B Peterson Podcast, my dear friend! - Mikayla ( ) Jordan B Peterson ( . ( ) ( ).
00:03:42.060That is right. I think that is right. Yeah.
00:03:44.340So it's two years ago. So maybe I could ask you, first of all, about the inner city youth program in North End of Halifax.
00:03:52.940I don't know that story, so that might be a nice place to start.
00:03:55.660Well, I grew up in eastern Canada and a place that you would know, but perhaps not all of your listeners know,
00:04:05.380in Prince Edward Island, in a sort of pastoral, quiet, sleepy, very rural place on a small family farm.
00:04:14.660In a huge, well, comparatively by historic standards, by contemporary standards, rather,
00:04:20.080a huge family of seven younger brothers and two younger sisters, my parents, a milk cow.
00:04:27.800I don't want to paint too idyllic a picture.
00:04:30.300Everyone knows family life and farm life is all kinds of ups and downs.
00:04:35.620But the point I'm trying to make is that I had a very kind of intensely wonderful and rich and very actively busy childhood.
00:04:50.240And it set me up in many respects for the discovery of philosophy when I went to college
00:04:56.740and I had the immeasurable gift of meeting some teachers who just opened worlds to me.
00:05:04.360I mean, you know what a teacher can do and be, having had them yourself and having been one for so many people.
00:05:12.560And I really fell in love with trying to think deeply about, you know, fundamental matters.
00:05:21.780And not that I was particularly good at it by any means, but just that it was eye-opening for me to see
00:05:28.720that things I had perhaps intuited in my childhood about the nature of things in some deep sense.
00:05:34.660We all have these intuitions, whether through nature or music or love or family life or whatever,
00:05:43.140that there were ways of thinking about those things.
00:05:45.800And I spent quite a long time with some wonderful teachers, particularly in the ancient Greek and Latin and then medieval tradition,
00:05:54.820thinking about things and particularly about the nature of the human individual, what it is really, what its realization is.
00:06:04.860Anyway, I mention all that because when I came to the end of my master's degree, I'd gone straight through, you know, doing a lot of, you know, thinking work
00:06:13.620in a wonderful community, it needs to be said.
00:06:16.320And I just, I had kind of, in a way, had my fill of ideas and I had kind of tapped out.
00:06:25.360I'd gone as far as I could in the theoretical at that point.
00:06:29.360And I needed to re-engage in the, not, I wouldn't say the real world, but in the more, you know, the world of activity and action.
00:06:40.060And I had a dear friend and mentor of mine named Gary Thorne, who was the priest at an inner city parish called St. George's Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
00:06:52.900And he had been with others, including one of my sisters, had been working in the inner city thinking about, which was, I should say, a very rough and highly dysfunctional place at North End of Halifax is, that is, or was, and in some respects still is, not least because of a absolutely catastrophic civic decision.
00:07:17.920There was a place in Halifax called Africville, a Black community that, though perhaps was not entirely up to contemporary standards in terms of technology and things, was a vibrant place.
00:07:35.280Anyway, the city wanted to build a new bridge and part of the foundations of the bridge, they wanted to put in Africville.
00:07:43.280So at least it's the story I've understood from my own reading about it.
00:07:47.100And they uprooted this entire very vibrant community out of the place that had been called Africville and resettled them in pretty dismal inner city housing in the North End.
00:07:59.240And that was not by any means, I think, the only factor, but a very significant moment in the devastation of a community.
00:08:08.340And when I was there in the early 2000s, mid-90s to early 2000s, there were very many pretty serious problems from drug and alcohol abuse to prostitution, devastatedly broken families.
00:08:33.740And my friend Gary Thorne and others had been thinking about what modest, you know, one doesn't think one can solve these really very serious problems, you know, simply walk out and solve them.
00:08:49.020But what could the parish, let us say, this community do that might be meaningful?
00:08:54.720And so I was with a group of people involved in setting up a small, very small, this is a small community, but small youth mentoring and life skills program called St. George's Youth Net.
00:09:07.420And the idea was to be a kind of network that would help pick these children up when they fell and to give them, well, our observation, Father Thorne's observation had been over many years that if you wait until someone has already fallen through the cracks, it's in many respects, and this is a terrible thing to say, I know, but in many respects too late.
00:09:30.520It is very hard to reach people, not that it's impossible, I believe in redemption, I believe in the whole possibility of things being turned around, right down to the most, you know, tiniest fibers of my being.
00:09:44.200But the point is, is that it is very, very hard to do that with someone who's 16 or 17 or 18, already fallen out of, you know, dropped out of school, you know, had a baby, whatever.
00:10:00.520We thought about what we could do to, to expand the horizons of these children and youth of all ages, you know, really, but starting with them as young as, as, as school age and working with them and I won't go on at length about this, but what I.
00:10:17.820Learned was a couple of things that are still really, really with me today.
00:10:21.160The first is that human, the realization of the individual has to come down at a very fundamental level to the individual, like no one else can live your life for you.
00:10:35.380You know, no one else can kind of come in and just do it for you that that would, that would, that would, that would, that would deny all of the agency that is at the heart of human, you know, fulfillment.
00:10:43.840And, and, and, and, and, and the driving force of this is me, this meanness of life has to come from me.
00:10:50.660Um, and in a way, I think that's a standpoint that, that at some loose level, you know, people would call the political right seems to understand that, you know, there has to be agency is fundamental.
00:11:02.340And yet that is a totally incomplete standpoint at the same time, uh, because, uh, you know, we don't simply throw children out into the woods and say, you know, all right, come back when you're fully formed, you know, you know, writing books and playing the, playing the flute and, and, and, and, and, and fully able to take on the complexities of life.
00:11:20.380One of the things that's so striking to me is that it, as people have ability, one of the things they will throw all of themselves into is the raising of their children.
00:11:36.560And so damn well, they should, uh, my wife and I have not been blessed with children, unfortunately, but I, I, as the eldest of, of a big family and having observed in my friends and many others, you know, they will just give everything they can to carefully.
00:11:50.380Tend to this, to the development of each individual.
00:11:53.580And they're not all the same, even in a single family, you can only have two children or three, and they can be very different as day and night.
00:11:59.460And yet they will give everything they can to these.
00:12:01.460And so well, they should, but what this points to, I think is a really fundamental question, which is, you know, what are the conditions, the external conditions for human realization?
00:12:10.580And what we found with these beautiful, often, you know, children in very, very, very broken circumstances is that on the one hand, we had to have high expectations for them and their agency.
00:12:25.740We had to insist that they'd be there on time, that they, that they, that they treat others with respect, that they be attentive and to anything less was to betray their own dignity and potential, what they could become.
00:12:39.200And yet, on the other hand, we found that we had to move heaven and earth to make those opportunities possible for them.
00:12:45.220We would go around in the, in the mornings and pick them up at their home, because they didn't have people who would get them there on time.
00:12:52.580And we would make various other kinds of, let's say, accommodations to make things accessible for them.
00:12:59.900And, and, and, and, and, and lastly, I will simply say that, you know, it's not enough just to keep people busy, you have to give them ways that open up their own understanding of themselves.
00:13:11.740And so we, we took them wilderness camping.
00:13:14.580Many of these were kids who'd never been outside of inner city Halifax.
00:13:17.660We took them to, to, to Cape Shed Necto, a beautiful park on the Bay of Fundy.
00:13:22.880And it was three days, you know, hiking through unbelievably beautiful terrain.
00:13:29.160And, and, and we, we, we'd had music programs and, and art, fine art programs.
00:13:37.520And, and later on, they, they were teaching them Latin after I left.
00:13:41.100And the point is, is that I don't overestimate what good we did for anyone, but insofar as we did any good for them.
00:13:50.720I think it was in, in, it was in believing that, helping them believe that they mattered, that they mattered at the highest plane of existence, that they were, that they belonged to that highest plane of existence.
00:14:15.120It wasn't just enough to, you know, learn technical skills, or it as important as those are, or to know that you needed to come on time to have a chance in life.
00:14:24.500But that you were made, the highest and best things there are, were made for you.
00:14:31.660So anyway, I've gone on rather long, but that's a, it was an important part of life.
00:14:35.620And I came to see things that are still groundingly important.
00:14:39.340It's an interesting conclusion to draw from that kind of work, because the latter part of that in particular was spoken like a true believer in the humanities.
00:14:49.900And I suppose we can transition our conversation to that.
00:14:54.400I mean, the first thing I'd like to ask you, though, before we do that is, you grew up in this rural community, you went off to college, what sparked your interest in philosophy?
00:15:04.880I mean, how did you come by the interests that you have?
00:15:07.040Well, I think it would be so interesting when you think about childhood and what really is formative.
00:15:19.540You know, you don't make a kid a philosopher by reading him Aristotle at six.
00:15:22.900My upbringing in my parents and my siblings were unbelievably important to my sense of the world, to my sense of what a human individual is, to my sense of what's good, to my sense of the possibilities of redemption, and so on and so forth.
00:15:41.980So I would say in a very deep way, my earlier childhood opened me up to be able to then later think about things in a more abstract or philosophical register.
00:15:58.700But, you know, philosophy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
00:16:00.520I mean, it's not for no reason that, you know, Plato and Aristotle are after Homer, and the things that you can only really think about things that you already, in some sense, intuit.
00:16:14.940You don't just sort of abstractly go off and, you know, discover things that the deepest thinking is about.
00:16:26.920You have to already have them in some form.
00:16:30.520You know, you have a sense of, well, you can take anything.
00:16:34.300You can take the difficulty of life or the beauty of a sonnet or the beauty of nature or the horribleness of suffering.
00:16:48.460And it's very hard to think about these things in the abstract.
00:16:51.840If you've never suffered and never seen suffering, of course, most human beings at some point do in pretty serious ways.
00:16:57.500But the point is, is that one of the things I think we absolutely need to think about very seriously as a society and as parents and as educators and so on and so forth are what are the deep forms, the deep things that form, that shape an individual in such a way as to open up that horizon later in life.
00:17:20.320And, you know, I know you've done a lot of work on early childhood development and reflected at length on things like a play in Piaget and others.
00:17:28.280You know, everything in its own time in a way that is right for the stage of development.
00:17:34.920But what I'm saying is that I had some very deeply formative encounters with things that I think are of a very, and I think these are not exclusive to me, they're universal human realities.
00:17:50.820But I had the privilege of encountering some of them in my youth, in a way that then when I went to college, I went to this place called King's College, founded in 1789 by loyalists who went north from New York at the time of the American Revolution, from an earlier university in New York called King's College, which at the time of the Revolution was renamed, or just after then, renamed Columbia.
00:18:17.060But the Loyalists went to a more northern colony at that time, of course, this is all pre-Canada, and they set up King's College.
00:18:25.180And King's had been failing after it relocated to Halifax in the early 70s, and teachers of mine founded a place called the, or a program called the Foundation Year Program.
00:18:41.680Well, it is really just a crash course introduction to principally Western, the history of Western culture, not exclusively Western, but going back to, in fact, to very, very back from Mesopotamia up through the ancient Greeks, the medievals, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and the contemporary world.
00:19:04.620And you'd simply read, and think, and hear lectures about, and discuss books.
00:19:10.300And that was a kind of introduction to those things.
00:19:12.760And then I realized that the teachers who'd set up that program were in the classics department at Dalhousie University, some magnificent teachers.
00:19:22.100And I then spent the next three years doing a bachelor's in classics, and then a master's there.
00:19:28.600But that classics department, I should add, was particularly strong in the philosophical, let's say, the big ideas that were moving in that period.
00:19:39.580Not that learning languages and things didn't matter, but they were particularly strong in those careful readings of texts that really can change your life if you attend to them.
00:19:51.780So I, in my early days of my undergraduate degree, I encountered people who were reading these texts and saying things about them that enabled me to understand the things that I had perhaps intuited when I was younger, in a more self-conscious, rationally universal frame, which is, of course, what philosophy is.
00:20:18.380This week's episode is brought to you by BioOptimizers.
00:20:21.600If you struggle with falling asleep or staying asleep throughout the night, one of the best things you could do for yourself is to start getting enough magnesium in your system.
00:20:30.300I recommend you guys try out Magnesium Breakthrough by BioOptimizers, the only organic full-spectrum magnesium supplement that includes seven different forms of magnesium.
00:20:40.160Getting all of them in means that you'll get to experience calming, stress-reducing, sleep-enhancing effects.
00:20:44.880I like it because there are no synthetic additives or preservatives, not like those other not-so-great products you probably find in your drugstore.
00:20:54.280So if you're taking magnesium, try this one.
00:20:57.620A lot of people are low in magnesium, and this is a high-quality product.
00:21:02.020For an exclusive offer for our listeners, go to www.magbreakthrough.com slash jbp and use code jbp10 to save 10% when you try Magnesium Breakthrough.
00:21:13.320For a limited time, BioOptimizers is also giving away free bottles of their best-selling products P3OM and Masszymes with select purchases.
00:21:26.000So go to magbreakthrough.com slash jbp now to get your exclusive 10% discount plus the chance to get more than $50 worth of supplements for free.
00:21:35.200Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:21:41.780Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:21:49.540In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:21:54.660Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:21:58.600you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:22:04.000And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:22:07.180With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:22:14.560Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:23:11.480Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
00:23:21.320Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
00:23:25.580From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
00:23:32.340Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:23:39.940With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools,
00:23:45.900alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
00:23:52.180Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:24:00.540No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
00:24:06.300Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:24:12.920Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.
00:24:39.300As the number one prayer and meditation app, Hallow is launching an exceptional new series called How to Pray.
00:24:44.720Imagine learning how to use scripture as a launchpad for profound conversations with God, how to properly enter into imaginative prayer, and how to incorporate prayers reaching far back in church history.
00:24:56.880This isn't your average guided meditation.
00:24:59.400It's a comprehensive two-week journey into the heart of prayer, led by some of the most respected spiritual leaders of our time.
00:25:05.920From guests including Bishop Robert Barron, Father Mike Schmitz, and Jonathan Rumi, known for his role as Jesus in the hit series The Chosen,
00:25:13.980you'll discover prayer techniques that have stood the test of time, while equipping yourself with the tools needed to face life's challenges with renewed strength.
00:25:21.940Ready to revolutionize your prayer life?
00:25:24.220You can check out the new series, as well as an extensive catalog of guided prayers, when you download the Hallow app.
00:25:30.000Just go to hallow.com slash jordan and download the Hallow app today for an exclusive three-month trial.
00:25:42.280So, I've been thinking while you've been talking about something that I've been writing about, and I've been working on this for a long time.
00:25:49.040So, I'm a behavioral psychologist, and so behavioral psychologists are eminently practical.
00:25:56.060We tend to break things down to the smallest applicable unit of action, right?
00:26:01.760So, if you're trying to help someone move somewhere better, well, you want to figure out what better is.
00:26:07.980But then you want to decompose that into actions that are likely to be undertaken, and those might be very, very small actions.
00:26:16.080And I've been thinking about the question of the meaning of life, and the first objection, I suppose, that arose in my mind was an objection to the question itself, because there might not be a meaning in life.
00:26:29.800There are places where people derive meaning.
00:26:32.540And you can list them, and it's useful practically if people are thinking about how to organize their life if they're unhappy, and they want to know how things might be better.
00:26:44.500I mean, my observation, and obviously not only mine, is that people generally need to have a career or a job to keep the wolf from the door, but also to engage them productively with others, which is a primary source of meaning for conscientious people and for creative people alike.
00:27:00.540You need to pursue your education to flesh out your intellectual capacity.
00:27:08.300You have to take care of your health, physical and mental.
00:27:15.280You need intelligent use of your leisure time.
00:27:17.900You have to regulate your susceptibility to the temptations that might lead you astray, drugs and alcohol and perhaps pornography and those sorts of things.
00:27:27.680But then there is a core to all of that around which these more practical endeavors arrange themselves, and that's something like attention to the spiritual or the philosophical domain or the religious domain.
00:27:42.080I think you can, in some sense, put all those together.
00:27:44.880And that might be, well, it might be the attempt to answer explicitly or at least to address the question of, well, what is all of that practical life in service of?
00:27:56.720And you said, for example, that when you were working with the inner city kids in Halifax, you were trying to help them realize that they were meant for the higher things and vice versa.
00:28:10.780And someone might ask, well, why bother with that when you can just bother with the skills?
00:28:17.720And it seems to me that the answer is something like, well, we all have to make decisions about how we're going to behave in life and how we're going to act ethically.
00:28:26.040And if you help people understand their relationship to what's ultimately noble, then you can help them fortify their resolution to do good in the world instead of to do harm.
00:28:41.240It seems to me to be, I mean, I think we're always deciding with every decision that we make whether we're going to do good or do harm by action or by inaction.
00:28:51.980And whether we should do good or harm or nothing at all, I think depends to some degree on who we think we are and what we're capable of.
00:29:00.380And it seems to me that the humanities, when they're properly taught, are the study of who we could be, each of us as individuals.
00:29:08.900And we need to know that because otherwise we'll be much less than we are.
00:30:26.960The first is that my father's a medical doctor, and he worked in the ER for many, many years, and has seen many people die.
00:30:35.580And he has remarked to me that no one on their deathbed looks back and says, gosh, I wish I'd spent more time at the office, or I wish I'd accumulated more riches for myself.
00:30:52.840And so, I really do think you're right to say that there is nothing more important than how we understand ourselves.
00:31:03.940I mean, human life can't be lived for some other end.
00:31:08.760I mean, you can do all kinds of things for certain ends.
00:31:11.460I mean, you might work hard to get a qualification in order to get a job, in order to make money, in order to provide a home for your family.
00:31:26.400It's for the lives of these people that I am living, my life, and for the lives of the people that I am seeking to live in relation to.
00:31:35.740Those are then not for something else.
00:31:37.600And so, the point is that our self-understanding, I mean, you can regardless even, you can even look at this, I think, Jordan, from an evolutionary standpoint.
00:31:51.540I mean, human beings are evolved as creatures that are self-conscious.
00:32:02.880And you may think that all of the ways in which they regard themselves or the things in relation to which they understand themselves, whether it's truth or beauty or purpose, you may say all those things are just constructs of the will to power, which, of course, is what the dominant nihilism would have us believe, and which I do not accept and which I think we can show to be wrong, very clearly, rationally, philosophically.
00:32:24.540However, even if you think they are constructs, you still do not escape the fact that human beings are evolved in this way, such that how they understand themselves is absolutely fundamental to their nature.
00:32:43.000Like, that is what we are, as an evolved species.
00:32:48.560And so, any culture that does not enable human beings to understand themselves in a way that they find to be richly meaningful, and I'm not saying meaning is just a construct, but if it does not do that at the end of the day, it has failed.
00:33:13.260So, now, let's go after this power idea.
00:33:16.960Okay, so you seem to agree with something that I've also concluded, that what's at the root of our current cultural malaise is this idea that human social institutions, and then also by implication, primary individual motivation, that human institutions are predicated on power.
00:33:41.180And so, the more I've thought about that, the more wrong it seems to me to be.
00:33:46.720And I've also been thinking about truth and lies some more.
00:33:50.860And, you know, there are those lies that you tell when you just skirt the truth a bit.
00:33:55.760So, they're maybe the ones that are most easy to get away with, and often most effective, but not always, but often most effective, because maybe they work the best.
00:34:05.660You take a truth and you bend it a little bit, and that's still a lie.
00:34:09.740But then there are statements that are antithetical to the truth.
00:34:17.980And I think that the idea that human social institutions, especially the functional social institutions of the West, that they're predicated on the drive to power, I think that's an antithruth.
00:34:30.940I don't, and so, so let's see if we can take that apart a little bit.
00:34:35.460I mean, the first question might be, well, what exactly is the definition of power?
00:34:43.220Who's making these claims, and what's the definition of power, and why are they making the claims?
00:34:49.260So, let's start with who's making the claim that our social institutions are predicated on power.
00:34:57.740Well, it does seem to me to be a claim that comes pretty fundamentally out of the academy.
00:35:01.820I mean, one of my constant refrains is that the academy, the university, that is, is upstream of absolutely everything else.
00:35:10.200You know, culture, policy, politics, art and architecture, family life, you know, media, just go down on through the list.
00:35:19.140And I think that these narratives or frameworks are proceeding fundamentally out of certain forms of really 19th and 20th century philosophical critiques,
00:35:34.080many of which were important and even necessary and illuminating in their, their, in their original form,
00:35:43.920but which have been made into very reductive, totalizing forms of seeing the world.
00:35:52.400And so is it reasonable, do you think, to, I mean, I've talked about postmodern neo-Marxism,
00:35:58.440and, of course, people who are critical of the way I think point out that, well, postmodernism hypothetically is predicated on the idea that all grand narratives are to be questioned,
00:36:09.220which you would assume would include the grand Marxist narrative,
00:36:13.720which presumes that the most appropriate way to view human history and human social institutions is
00:36:20.980by positing the existence of an oppressor class economically and a subordinate class economically,
00:37:25.840It was the manifestation of the power drive, let's say,
00:37:30.240that keeps people who are in positions of power above the rest and who have at their disposal the means of compelling those people to do what they would not do otherwise against their will.
00:37:44.300That's an expression of power as well.
00:37:46.540I mean, do you think, do you think there's something, am I wrong in that formulation?
00:37:51.200I mean, I've tried to understand this.
00:37:52.580I'm not trying to be, what would you say, biased or blinkered about it.
00:37:58.080It's just, that's the way it looks like that to me.
00:38:01.280I mean, people like Derrida and Foucault, they were Marxists to begin with.
00:38:06.680And so, and isn't it the case that the notion that our social relations are structured as a consequence of the expression of arbitrary power,
00:38:16.300isn't that merely a transformation of that initial Marxist presumption?
00:38:20.120Or am I, am I barking up the wrong tree here?
00:38:25.080The first is that I'm very far from a scholar of these, you know, complicated intellectual movements from the late 18th century through to the present.
00:38:33.900But in my reading, certainly in the main, there's, in the main, I think you are right about Marx.
00:38:46.600And again, I'm not a philosopher of Marx, but if you read, for example, the introduction to his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right,
00:38:57.140you know, he outlines very, very clearly this, this dynamic of focusing all of the force of one part of society against another as an essential kind of material dialectic.
00:39:11.300And that does seem to me to be fundamentally what is, you know, that is the, that is the logic of the power alone revolution.
00:39:18.800I think that is fundamentally what we're facing in the, well, that leads to a war of all against all, of course,
00:39:25.740but it certainly leads to, to identity politics warfare and the reductions of, of an individual to wherever they can be usefully mobilized in a battle of one part of, against another.
00:39:40.140But I would also say about, about Marx, and again, I, just to think of, as you know, when you get into, to studying complicated things,
00:39:49.460you always feel you must endlessly qualify what you don't know.
00:39:53.020There's a huge amount I don't know about Marx, but I also know that he says that religion does not make man, man makes religion.
00:40:01.700And at some very fundamental level, there appears to be, whether in Marx or proceeding out of his interpreters,
00:40:09.200a wholesale negation or rejection of the idea that there is any abiding metaphysical or transcendent reality.
00:40:18.040Well, and Marx also points out very clearly that, and this is a key element of Marxist thought,
00:40:23.820that social structures structure individuals, individual consciousness, and it's not that individual consciousness structures social structures.
00:40:32.880So it's the group imposing its nature on the individual rather than the group being led by the individual.
00:40:41.820And that's a profoundly anti-Enlightenment, and I would say anti-Judeo-Christian proposition.
00:40:46.720And so, and that's certainly something, and then you said something else that was interesting, you know,
00:40:52.760you said you're not a scholar of these movements, and neither am I.
00:40:56.000And that's actually a problem, right, because we're trying to address this appearance of a culture war
00:41:02.240that seems to be manifesting itself first in the universities and then everywhere else,
00:41:06.380and it's an amorphous thing, it's hard to get a grip on, and it's easy to be wrong,
00:41:10.460but we're forced to contend with it regardless and to sketch out its outlines,
00:41:15.740and I've been trying to do that as fairly as I possibly can.
00:41:18.840I mean, part of this proposition seems to be the insistence, the radical insistence,
00:41:25.720that the Enlightenment insistence on the individual as the primary unit of analysis
00:41:33.040is to be discarded in favor of a group-centered analysis,
00:41:37.360and that the only reason that that individual, the idea of the transcendent individual manifest itself
00:41:43.320was because it served the interests of those who have arbitrary power to maintain it,
00:41:48.680although the logical connection there isn't clear because it isn't obvious to me
00:41:51.940how it served the particular power interests of that group
00:41:55.480and how it wouldn't serve the power interests of other groups equally as well.
00:41:58.900It seems to be a fundamental flaw in the logic.
00:42:01.220I've been thinking about my own experience with social institutions
00:42:14.000and my knowledge of how people develop as well as how children develop,
00:42:19.860and the first thing or part of that is that all the developmental literature suggests that
00:42:26.320the use of aggression, which is what you'd expect to be developed
00:42:31.360if power was the fundamental organizing principle of social institutions,
00:42:36.260you'd expect that aggressive children would do better than non-aggressive children,
00:42:41.360and you'd expect that children would be socialized by their superordinates,
00:42:47.740their adults, their teachers, their parents,
00:42:49.660to manifest aggression in the service of power,
00:42:52.620and that doesn't seem to be the case developmentally.
00:42:56.560The children who preferentially use aggression, self-centered aggression in particular,
00:43:01.680tend to be alienated and unhappy and in a dismal minority and friendless,
00:43:07.700and then they don't do well in life at all,
00:43:09.940and the developmental course is from more aggression at the very early stages of life
00:43:15.200to less aggression as adulthood inculcates itself,
00:43:19.080and so we actually become more civilized as we become more integrated in our social institutions