Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. In this episode, we're presenting Dad's Conversation with Stephen R. Hicks, recorded on March 27, 2019, recorded at the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at the Atlas Society, at Rockford University in Illinois, USA. Dr. Hicks is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rockford, and Executive Director of the Centre for Ethics & Entrepreneurships at The Atlas Society. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University and a Ph.D in Philosophy from Indiana University. He has published four books translated into 16 different languages, including Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, and The Art of Reasoning. In 1994, he won his university's Excellence in Teaching Award. In 1998, he published the second edition of The Art and Reasoning: A Guide to the Nazis and the Art and the Nazis. In 2010, he received his PhD in Philosophy. In 2004, and in 2011, he was awarded a second edition in The Second Edition. by the Harvard Journal of Ethics and the Journal of the Stoic Science and the Neo-Marxism. He s a Master s degree from the Harvard University Press. In 2016, he has published an academic journal. . and has been published in Business Ethics. by The Wall Street Journal, Business Ethics Quarterly, Business Ethics and Review of Metaphysics, and the Baltimore Sun. in 2016, coedited with David Kelly. The Journal of Business Ethics and Sociology. and The Baltimore Sun in 2017, In 2017, he s a 2nd edition of the Journal by The Harvard Crimson . In 2018, The New York Times Bestseller, The Art Of Reasoning and the Nazi and The Nazis .
00:11:25.280And that human beings could explore both physically and mentally, and also come to predict and control the transformations of the material world.
00:11:36.600I mean, it seems to me that that's the fundamental element of, let's say, the scientific, and therefore also the modernist perspective.
00:11:43.640But also, I think that what went along with that was the idea that progress, genuine progress in knowledge was possible.
00:11:53.700And along with that, the benefits of progress, both conceptually and technologically.
00:12:00.500And I mean, it seems to me to be fair to point out that that movement bore substantive fruit.
00:12:09.020I mean, you could argue about the misery that the modernist movement caused along the way, say, with regards to the advancement of military technology and so forth.
00:12:19.120But it seems indisputable to me that the average human being is far better off now than he or she was, well, certainly 200 years ago and absolutely 500 years ago.
00:12:30.960Right. So, this revolution in thought with the subsequent developments in science and technology, we certainly can judge philosophies by their fruits.
00:12:40.120And so, we can then say, yeah, absolutely, we're living longer, we're living healthier, we're living a pain-free life, we're able to enjoy more art, more leisure, and so forth.
00:12:53.180So, all of the things that, and again, this is a value judgment, if you think those are all good things, then we're doing a whole lot better as a result of that philosophy.
00:13:01.640Now, the other side, though, I want to emphasize here is that you emphasize that the world is rationally intelligible, that along with modernism came the claim that it was rationally intelligible to each individual,
00:13:17.000rather than there being an elect number of people who have special cognitive insights into the mysteries of the universe or that there are certain authoritative institutions that are controlled by elites and only they are the ones who have cognitive and, therefore, social authority to make various pronouncements.
00:13:35.420Part and parcel of the rise of modernism is a broadly universalizing of that, that each individual is born with a rational capacity, and that with proper training, education, literacy, and so forth, they can come to understand the world for themselves, they can be self-responsible, they can take charge of their lives.
00:13:54.780And as a result of that, we should have an extension of rights that used to be prerogatives only of the few, an expansion of freedom, you can do whatever you want with your life, broadly speaking.
00:14:07.780And so, what we then see is that it's not only a religious elite or a political elite that is empowered, but rather every human being, and then we can see systematically over the course of the next century,
00:14:20.260it gets extended to not only males who own property, but to all males, and then to women, and then to people of other ethnicities and other races.
00:14:31.420So, we have this notion of universal rights and universal self-responsibility, universal freedom, that I think also is part and parcel of the modern movement.
00:14:40.620Well, the thing about science that makes it so peculiar, I think, is that science is actually a technology that enables people who are bright, but not that bright, let's say, to genuinely produce advances in knowledge because of the method, right?
00:15:01.140I mean, if you're a careful scientist, look, when we studied what predicted academic achievement, for example, both in graduate school and among faculty members, creativity didn't even enter the equation.
00:15:16.720Intelligence did, and so did conscientiousness.
00:15:19.080But I think it's partly because with the scientific method, you can actually break down your knowledge-seeking into a set of implementable technological steps, and that enables it to be implemented on an incredibly broad scale.
00:15:35.000And even if a lot of it is error-ridden, which is obviously the case, and to a scandalous degree, to somewhat lately, it still means that as hundreds of thousands of us, and increasingly now millions of us, grind away slowly at this careful technology of knowledge acquisition, that overall, we do seem to be able to predict and to control the world better.
00:16:01.620And then that started to become question.
00:16:04.220You know, one of the things that seemed to characterize postmodernism, one definition that I've read is skepticism of metanarratives.
00:16:12.780And that's, sorry, that's from Jean-Francois Lyotard, right?
00:16:16.220And he is the one credited with labeling postmodernism philosophically, right, so, and defining it as a skepticism toward metanarratives.
00:16:26.300Now, what that means, there's a couple of things built into that.
00:16:29.220One is, of course, the skepticism, and philosophy, for the last century and a half or so, has entered an increasingly skeptical mode.
00:16:39.280So, that pushes back against the very broad claims that the early modernists are making, that the power of reason is great, it is highly competent, and that essentially we can figure out all of the important truths of the world.
00:16:53.960We can come up with a big story that explains everything, ultimately.
00:16:57.680Not necessarily that any one individual will contain all of that knowledge in his or her mind, but certainly, communally, we'll have a huge amount of knowledge.
00:17:08.020We will slowly, as you're putting it together, piece together a big-picture story about the way the world works.
00:17:14.300And then, in principle, there's nothing about the universe that we can't figure out.
00:17:18.720There are just things that we haven't been able to figure out yet.
00:17:21.580So, the skepticism that Lyotard and the others are talking about is a skepticism about that grand set of claims, right?
00:17:28.980A meta-narrative, a narrative that encompasses everything.
00:17:33.840Instead, we're left with smaller narratives.
00:17:37.180And then, as the movement develops, we should be skeptical even about the truth status or the knowledge status of those smaller narratives.
00:17:46.900So, what becomes important in the postmodern tradition is a skepticism about our ability to know the world in milder form, as much as the modern thinkers thought we could, and in stronger postmodern form at all.
00:18:07.000That maybe there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as knowledge.
00:18:10.380Instead, all we have is opinions and beliefs that are subjectively held, but don't have any objectives.
00:18:16.900Well, it's like the postmodernists that were influenced by Saussure, for example.
00:18:23.380They seem to be convinced, in some strange way, of something that disturbed me when I first really discovered dictionaries when I was a kid.
00:18:33.800You know, I'd look up a word in a dictionary, and of course, it would just refer to another word in the dictionary, and that would refer to another word in the dictionary.
00:18:41.880And there didn't seem to be, in some sense, any definition outside of the dictionary.
00:18:47.160And the French intellectuals that were so influential in the postmodern world seemed to think of meaning in exactly that way.
00:18:55.600They understand that linguistic meaning is necessarily embedded in a larger linguistic context, so that each word is dependent on each phrase, and each phrase is dependent on each sentence.
00:19:09.400And so, there's a contextual dependency of meaning on linguistic framing.
00:19:16.120But they seem to me to, and this is one of the major problems, I think, of postmodernism in university, is that they seem to deny or ignore the existence of any world whatsoever outside of linguistic construction.
00:19:33.400And that's something that strikes me as extraordinarily curious.
00:19:38.200Like, it's a real denial of nature, in my estimation, but also something tremendously dangerous, because while assuming that you think that physics and biology and chemistry actually have any sort of genuine reality, it denies the existence of a substrate of existence that the purely linguistic relates to.
00:20:02.260I mean, I always think of words as being, they're not so much descriptions, they're tools that you use to, and that's a Wittgensteinian idea, is that words are really tools that you use to operate on the world with.
00:20:18.920And the consequences of those operations are actually manifest in the world of sensation and perception and emotion and motivation and embodiment, rather than purely on a linguistic level.
00:20:30.800And so, I also don't really understand how it could be that our intellectuals could come to the conclusion that our, and this seems like a primarily French idea, that our ideas are primarily constructed linguistically.
00:20:44.960I mean, how do animals exist under those circumstances?
00:20:49.200Now, that strong form of linguistic skepticism that you're articulating is most pronounced in Jacques Derrida, and he does view himself as a post-structuralist, and that's a linguistic version of post-modernism.
00:21:06.100But the challenge here is that our view is that consciousness is a relational phenomenon, right?
00:21:14.900It's responsive to an external world, and that should be the fundamental realist commitment that we make.
00:21:21.560The problem that the post-structuralists are coming up with by the time we get to Derrida, I should say the idea that there isn't any sort of ontological substrate matching onto, not all of the post-modernists will buy into that as strongly as Derrida does.
00:21:36.840They might say, well, there's something out there, but we just can't know what the relationship is between our concepts and our words and an external reality.
00:21:45.820So, the point, though, is that the words that we use are abstractions, and they do come along fairly far or high up in our cognitive development.
00:21:55.080And if you want to argue that consciousness is a response to reality or that consciousness is a relational phenomenon, as I do, to maintain that objective relational commitment there, what you then have to do is take up all of the skeptical arguments that want to put consciousness out of relationship or to say that there's no way to bridge this gap between the subject and the object.
00:22:20.700Once you start going down that road, if you want to say, for example, that perception is fraught with illusions or hallucinations or that we can't tell the difference between a veridical perception when our sensory organs are in contact with reality and a hallucination, well, then you have a gap between our conscious apparatus and reality.
00:22:44.120If you then want to go on and argue, as empiricists do, that our concepts and the words that we assign to the concepts are based on empirical observations or perceptual observations, but you now believe that those perceptual observations are subjective and out of relation with objective reality, then you're going to say these abstract concepts and words are also out of relation with reality.
00:23:11.400And then what gives them, and then what gives them their meaning if you can't establish a connection between the words and reality, then you're into the dictionary, you're saying, well, what gives the words their meaning is their sideways or network connections to other words, and then a generation or two later, you're into Derrida's university, where he says language is all of reality.
00:23:32.380That's also where the postmodernists claim about the primacy of power seem to sneak in.
00:23:39.780It's like if the words are only related to one another in terms of their verbal relationship, well, they don't seem to have any motive force.
00:23:49.580And as soon as you enter a landscape of linguistic consideration that has no motive force, then there's nothing to do.
00:23:57.480And so this seems to me to account for, like I've been criticized very often for, let's say, conflating postmodernism and Marxism.
00:24:07.220But it seems to me that the Marxists or that the postmodernists have had to default to what are essentially Marxist preconceptions to add any motive to their thinking.
00:24:17.660And what they've done is to say that, well, words are related to one another, and that's how they derive their fundamental meaning.
00:24:23.980And they're not really connected to the world in any real way, except insofar as they privilege one group or another or one person or another in terms of power and status, which they also seem to regard to self.
00:24:37.080Exactly. So to go back to your dictionary analysis, the next step then would be to say, if words are in these linguistic relationships to other words, and we can find out what they are in dictionaries, well, who writes the dictionaries?
00:24:49.540And then at that point, you're not asking an epistemological question anymore, you are asking a social and psychological question.
00:24:58.680So who are the authors of the dictionary? What authorizes rather than with the power to decide what words mean?
00:25:07.400At that point, we step directly out of narrow epistemological arguments into social and psychological arguments about linguistic communities.
00:25:17.880Okay, well, so that's a peculiarity too, though, because, well, look, if the words only have meaning in relationship to one another, and there's this gap between the words and empirical reality, which, by the way, I don't think anybody disputes.
00:25:32.060I mean, that's why we need five senses. That's why we need to communicate with each other. That's why we need the scientific method, right?
00:25:39.000It's because it's difficult to establish a useful one-to-one relationship between words and reality.
00:25:46.300But if words serve power, then it seems to me that what the postmodernists have done is taken biological motivation, let's call it the motivation for power at least, and sneaked it through the back door and reconnected the world of linguistic abstraction to the world of reality, but saying, well, look, the only connection is one of power.
00:26:15.320And then they leave why it is that people want power.
00:26:19.160Like, the idea that people want power, first of all, is a complicated idea, because you have to define power and you have to define want, and those aren't trivial issues by any stretch of the imagination.
00:26:31.260And so you sneak it in the back door, and then that seems to undermine the general postmodernist claim.
00:26:40.040It's like if the words are only embedded in a network of meaning that's related to other words, then it isn't a fair move ontologically or epistemologically to reinsert power striving, like a Nietzschean power striving, or even an Adlerian power striving, as the fundamental and, what would you call it, sort of sui generis motivation.
00:27:12.040So I also don't understand how they get away with that, except that it seems to be like a mask for the continuation of a Marxist move under a new guise.
00:27:22.360Well, I have no problem with seeing power as a positive.
00:27:26.840Coming back just in a moment to all of the suspicions that you're announcing about inappropriate understandings of the relationship of power, I do think we should be able to say our cognitive capacities are a power that we have, and they are a tool.
00:27:47.000And the whole point of using that tool is to increase our power in the world to achieve our goals.
00:27:52.840What the postmoderns are doing is undercutting the two things that make that understanding of power legitimate.
00:28:01.860One is to say that when I am making a cognitive claim, I am successfully saying something about the world so that we can use the words knowledge and truth.
00:28:14.220So if I want to act on the basis of my beliefs, that those beliefs do map onto world as it really is.
00:28:22.900But if you are skeptical about any sort of a knowledge claim or any sort of a truth claim, then you're just going to say, no, no.
00:28:29.160Well, your claims merely are subjective beliefs that are peculiar to you or peculiar to your group, and they don't have any special cognitive status whatsoever.
00:28:41.440And in that case, if you want to act on or use those beliefs to empower you, well, then you are in an out-of-reality connection.
00:28:51.000Now, the other thing, though, is we want to say that power should be a tool that we use for good, for advancing genuine values in the world.
00:29:00.660But another part of the postmodern skepticism is to say that we cannot ground any values objectively.
00:29:08.140Instead, values are merely subjective preferences, either individually or group-oriented.
00:29:14.340And so in that case, if you have your value framework, then we're into the problem of relativism.
00:29:20.780Neither of us is able to adduce any facts that give an objective grounding to those values or to argue that those values should be universally embraced.
00:29:29.640Then we're just left with, you have a certain amount of power to advance your interests.
00:29:34.900I have a certain amount of power to advance my interests.
00:29:37.800And it's a naked power struggle in the suspicious way that you're worried about.
00:29:42.360And that is, we come back to this issue of how Marxist or not the postmoderns are.
00:29:48.240But you're right that at least the great-grandfather move was made by the Marxists in one generation and the Nietzscheans in the next generation to strip power down to that amoral ontological status that you are worried about.
00:30:07.140It's like, if there isn't a reality that's outside the linguistic, then why is it that, well, first of all, what is power in the political sense?
00:30:17.880Yeah, I think there are two kinds of motivations.
00:30:19.480One of the things we know is that there are people who just like power.
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00:42:05.880So what we need to talk about is going to be, though, that third component about what your value reaction is to what you take to be the metaphysical substrate.
00:42:15.660But then there's another form of real-world smuggling that goes along with that, which is both ontological and ethical.
00:42:25.300And the ontological smuggling would be, well, there are definitely power structures and that people compete for power.
00:42:32.020So that's claim number one, which seems to be extra linguistic.
00:42:36.120And claim number two is that the proper moral stance of a human being is empathy.
00:42:44.180So there's a claim that something like empathy exists, and that empathy should be reserved for people who are on the lower end of the hierarchical distribution.
00:42:54.860Okay, and postmoderns like Foucault make that very clear.
00:43:00.200Richard Rorty, even more clearly, makes that claim.
00:43:05.960Jacques Derrida is a very interesting case because most of his work is not overtly social, ethical, or political.
00:43:13.140But at various points, particularly toward the end of his life, he says, you know, my entire sympathies are with the oppressed.
00:43:21.060And he talks about reinvigorating a certain kind of, or in the spirit of Marxism, something or other.
00:43:26.560But from his perspective, he recognizes that he has no philosophical resources to justify that value claim.
00:43:34.520And he doesn't want to say that it's just a personal subjective preference that he has.
00:43:39.220So he does appeal to a kind of Kantian regulative idea, or in more old-fashioned way, that it's a kind of platonic form that we need to appeal to if we're going to justify it in some way.
00:43:52.440So it's kind of interesting that, recognizing exactly the problem that you're pointing out, where do we get that empathy claim from and justify that?
00:44:02.800The postmoderns recognize the predicament, and some of them are trying to point to extralinguistic sources for it.
00:44:09.860Well, that opens a big can of worms if your initial claim is that there's no such thing as an extralinguistic source.
00:44:17.460You know, because you let one extralinguistic source in, especially something as complicated as the interplay between, say, power, hierarchy, and empathy.
00:44:26.660I mean, those are major motivational forces.
00:44:30.700And then, if you're willing to admit to the existence of those major motivational forces, well, it's hard to exclude pain.
00:44:43.160It's hard to exclude, well, something even more basic as hunger.
00:44:47.820It's hard to exclude the proclivity for cooperation and play.
00:44:53.300It's like all of biology, it seems to me, sneaks back into the postmodern project as soon as those initial extralinguistic realities are allowed.
00:45:07.160You know, a lot of our debates are right now about psychology and biology, is that a certain number of psychologists and biologists are pushing back and saying, oh, there is a reality here.
00:45:15.300But we're getting great resistance from the postmodern second and third generation to having to do so.
00:45:22.100Okay, so now, you said the philosophers that have reviewed your book have been basically positive.
00:45:29.660And so, why are you receiving positive feedback from, what is it about philosophy and about philosophers or about your work that's eliciting a positive response from them?
00:45:44.360Well, my book is primarily an intellectual history.
00:45:48.460You know, to some extent, I am polemical and pushing back against postmodernism.
00:45:53.140So, people understand that I'm taking a stance as well.
00:45:56.520But the primary purpose of the book is to do a solid intellectual history.
00:46:00.020Where does this confusing, sprawling, but nonetheless very vigorous and powerful movement come from?
00:46:06.280And it doesn't come out of thin air, but rather there's a lot of deep thinking that's behind it.
00:46:12.020So, what I'm doing is I'm tracing what I see as the important intellectual movements of the last two centuries.
00:46:18.320So, I'm starting with Kant and Rousseau, but I'm talking about Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the others.
00:46:23.740So, all of those figures are difficult, complex, and important in their own right.
00:46:32.160And there are scholarly debate about, say, how skeptical or not Kant is, whether there's an element of liberalism or not in Nietzsche, Heidegger's connection to the Nazis, and so forth.
00:46:43.480So, there is a range of scholarly movement.
00:46:46.000And most of these major intellectuals have two or three major schools of interpretation attached to them.
00:46:54.420And so, the pushback that I am getting on Kant or on Nietzsche or Heidegger or whatever will be from those who are in a different school of interpretation with respect to them.
00:47:05.680But typically, among the philosopher, it's a respectful engagement because they will recognize that there is a very good argument that can be made for interpreting the philosopher the other way.
00:47:17.180And typically, then, what I'm doing is emphasizing the skeptical elements or the ultimately negative and nihilistic elements that get sifted out and woven together into ultimately the postmodern framework.
00:47:32.120And along the way, the philosophers who want to argue, well, you know, this particular thinker is not that bad or he would not buy into the whole project.
00:47:41.940Those are the ones who will criticize me on various things.
00:47:44.720What I typically find, though, outside of philosophical circles, though, is, and this is not a criticism of these individuals, since we can't know everything, is that they will know something about Nietzsche or Heidegger or Kant, but they're not up on the scholarly literature.
00:48:02.280You know, they've read one book or one article about that person that was written from a certain perspective.
00:48:06.780So, if I make the argument for the other perspective on that thinker, it's new to them, and it seems outrageous to them, and so they will react negatively to it.
00:48:19.040So, now, you wrote this book back in 2004, so you were a pretty early observer of the vital importance, I suppose, of the postmodernist debate.
00:48:32.800I mean, there had certainly been a rise in political correctness in the early 90s, and that seemed to disappear by the mid-90s.
00:48:41.600But 2004 is, I would say, five or six or maybe even eight years previous to this new burgeoning of political polarization and the debate between the politically correct types, let's say, and those who take a more biological perspective.
00:49:03.480It's like, what clued you into the fact that this was an issue of potentially fundamental importance?
00:49:15.160I think it does a testament to the power of philosophy, the power of ideas, the power of logic, that when you identify abstract principles and their adoption, and you have a good sense of logic, you can make predictions about how they're going to play out when they are applied in real life.
00:49:33.580This is one of my major career beliefs, that philosophy is not disembodied, abstract, head in the clouds, but no matter how abstract and speculative various philosophical positions seem to be, when they are believed and acted upon, they make a real-life difference.
00:49:56.560So, in part, that's what I actually wrote the first draft of the book 20 years ago this year, in 1999, I had a sabbatical, and so I had an outline of the book written in 1999, and then by the middle part of the year 2000, I had fully written the book.
00:50:14.820But it didn't come out until 2004, because I had some challenges with getting it published.
00:50:21.260But I think what has happened in the last five years or so is that we're now into second- or third-generation postmodernism, depending on how you count things.
00:50:31.000And what has happened is the first generation of postmodernism were very successful inside academic circles at educating large numbers of students, getting a significant number of them through graduate school, and then to themselves becoming professors and public intellectuals.
00:50:50.000And things reached a critical mass, I would say, starting six or seven years ago.
00:50:55.740And so then we started to notice it significantly, starting to transform the internal dynamics of the university.
00:51:03.600But we also now have a critical mass of activists who are now graduated.
00:51:10.040They got bachelor's degrees or master's degrees.
00:51:12.160But they've gone into activist organizations, and they are trying to and successfully shifting the terms of the debate outside of the academic world.
00:51:24.320And so the broader public starts to notice things.
00:51:28.120And then that's where we are right now with the culture war manifesting itself on two major fronts, the academic world and the broader cultural space.
00:51:39.200Well, so what are your concerns about that?
00:51:41.860Like when you look out at the world, you're obviously concerned enough about postmodernist thinking to devote a substantial proportion of your academic career to it, and then to put yourself on the line to some degree as well.
00:51:55.960I mean, what is it about the postmodernist view that, well, let's ask this question two ways.
00:52:03.560What do you think the advantages, if any, are to the postmodernist view or the inevitability of it?
00:52:13.640And what do you think the dangers and disadvantages are?
00:52:23.680And there's a question about what degree of worry one should have.
00:52:29.220Interestingly, in my home discipline of philosophy, postmodernism is not that strong.
00:52:36.280I think part of philosophy flirted with postmodernism for a while.
00:52:43.540I think philosophy did generate all of the arguments, or at least all the major arguments that postmoderns use.
00:52:48.740But philosophy does have built into its DNA, so to speak, a very healthy respect for argumentation and a liking for new arguments.
00:53:01.020So what has happened mostly in the philosophy profession is a serious development and engagement with all of these negative, skeptical arguments and so on.
00:53:09.920But then a realization that a lot of them don't work in various ways, and then people moving off in other directions.
00:53:17.120Or once we start seeing the same arguments being recycled and retreading, a certain amount of boredom occurs with it because smart, active-minded people like new things.
00:53:28.440And so someone comes along with a new positive argument or a new positive program, and philosophers get excited about that.
00:53:35.160And so postmodernism is a little bit passe in those disciplines.
00:53:40.740But I am worried about it because philosophy demographically is a tiny proportion of the overall academy, and the postmodern arguments have been picked up by the larger and more influential academic disciplines, such as psychology, right?
00:53:57.140You know this one as well, English literature, to some extent in the law schools, in the field of history, sociology, is very polluted.
00:54:05.140And then the big rise of all of the various special studies programs, you know, gender studies, race studies, ethnicity studies, and so on.
00:54:13.260You find a much higher percentage of postmodernism there.
00:54:16.160Now, I have not seen good journalistic sociology about higher academics, whether it's 8% or 40% of people who are postmodern or not.
00:54:28.340But there clearly is an uptick, a statistically significant increase in the number of people who are adopting postmodern viewpoints and then educating the next generation of students.
00:54:41.380Yes, well, and they're certainly dominant among the activist types.
00:54:47.500So, this is a non-philosophical issue.
00:54:51.320This is a journalistic or a demographical issue about measuring to what extent it's a rising movement, how widespread it is, and so on.
00:54:59.480And my concern professionally is with the arguments that generate postmodernism and refuting those.
00:55:05.300Now, why this is important is, well, you know, I'm a professor, so I'm always dealing with young people who are at the early stages of their careers.
00:55:14.680And in my view, the most important thing that we all need as human beings, we're thoughtful people, we want to be passionately engaged with the world, we want our lives to be meaningful, is we do need a philosophy of life that's going to set us up for
00:55:29.420So, in my view, I'm basically an optimist, we do need, as young people, with our whole lives ahead, to have some sense that my life is going to be meaningful, it's going to be significant, that there are important values that I can strive for.
00:55:51.920So, you know, the romantic in me wants to say, my life can and should be this great adventure.
00:55:59.600And having that fundamental commitment and helping students sort out what are the genuine values that are worth pursuing in life, that has to be instilled in young people.
00:56:11.680Otherwise, they will just drift through life, and then they will get to their older years and realize that their life has further away.
00:56:19.920So that's an interesting, now that's a very interesting observation, because, you know, I've been trying to account, at least in part for, well, let's say, the surprising and surreal popularity of my public lectures.
00:56:36.560So, I've spoken at about 150 cities now, to about 300,000 people, and, you know, I lay out a fairly straightforward case, I would say, that's very much analogous to the case that you just described.
00:56:53.120And that is that, well, we look for some unassailable truths.
00:57:00.340And for me, there are two unassailable pessimistic truths.
00:57:04.980And one is that a substantial proportion of life is going to be suffering, because we're finite.
00:57:11.800And even if things are going well for you now, you're subject to illness, mental and physical.
00:57:17.460You're subject to the decimation of your dreams.
00:57:20.060You're going to lose the people that you love.
00:57:22.420The world that you know is going to change in ways that you find disconcerting and unfortunate.
00:57:29.820And then, the interrupting at that point.
00:57:33.900The phrase unassailable truth, what we should be doing, though, in education is saying that there are no unassailable truths.
00:57:45.200That part of a good education is any previous generation's truth should be assailed, at least intellectually, by the students.
00:57:52.380They should challenge, question, and look at those truths, what the best arguments can be amounted against them,
00:57:57.800and then make their own judgments about whether they agree that this truth is, in fact, a truth or whether it needs to be rejected and moved on.
00:58:07.180So, the great danger, I think, of postmodernism, though, is its skeptical stance toward the idea of there being truth at all.
00:58:17.140And then, in its activist manifestation, when the professors are functioning as,
00:58:22.320I just have my subjective preferences, and I have power in the classroom,
00:58:26.900and my view as a professor, or my practice, rather, as a professor,
00:58:30.600is simply to indoctrinate students in my subjective preferences.
00:58:35.680In that case, what you are doing is not only giving students a very cynical, negative, ultimately,
00:59:19.960I know you're not saying this, but from the student's perspective,
00:59:22.980it can't be that Professor Peterson, with all of his years of experience and wisdom,
00:59:28.200has announced that this is a truth, therefore, it's a truth.
00:59:31.140They have to go through the process that you went through.
00:59:33.900Hopefully, you can accelerate that process for them, but they have to go through that process.
00:59:40.160Yeah, well, and I mean, I do that in the lectures by telling stories, too,
00:59:43.660and illustrating the fact that, you know, the limitations that are placed on us that produce suffering.
00:59:52.820And I invite people, I would say, to draw their own conclusions about how they regard that reality in their own lives.
01:00:00.620And the second proposition, let's say, is that the suffering is often made worse by malevolence.
01:00:08.780And that can be, well, the sort of, what would you say, impersonal malevolence of nature,
01:00:15.700or the more personal malevolence of society or the individual.
01:00:19.320And so, we're faced with that set of problems, that vulnerability that's characteristic of existence.
01:00:26.740And then, that vulnerability, because it constitutes a real set of problems, calls to us to generate solutions.
01:00:35.100And it's in that attempt to generate solutions that that adventure that you described earlier seems to me to manifest itself.
01:00:45.160And so, it seems reasonable to me to suggest to young people that they do have a destiny that gives their life significant individual import.
01:00:57.360And that is to take arms up against the inequities of existence at whatever levels they can,
01:01:06.140and to act forthrightly and courageously to minimize unnecessary suffering and to constrain malevolence.
01:01:12.420And that it is also actually of vital importance that they do that,
01:01:17.760because their failure to do so is more damaging than they think.
01:01:27.180Their nihilism and cynicism that might entice them into nihilistic and destructive acts themselves actively is more destructive than they think.
01:01:39.420And their capacity to do positive things in the world on a large scale individually and in their family and in their community is much larger than they think.
01:01:51.320And it's very difficult for me to see how young people can be left uninformed of that as at least a potential reality without falling down the rabbit hole of nihilism and cynicism and subjectivism and relativism that seems to me to be at least one of the primary dangers of postmodernism.
01:02:26.360Yes, there is malevolence in the world.
01:02:29.960But we should also be open to the fact that there is pleasure, there is beauty, there is romance, there is adventure, there is genuine love in the world.
01:02:42.400And what proportions of benevolence versus malevolence, happiness versus suffering is possible and natural to human beings, that should be part of the conversation early on.
01:02:58.500That's a conversation about the potency of your tools.
01:03:02.800That's a conversation about the potency of your tools.
01:03:06.120Like, you could admit that these fundamental limitations exist, but you don't have to draw the conclusion that they're constraining in any finally hopeless manner.
01:03:20.520Well, it's not just about the tools, it's also about the nature of reality that we are confronting.
01:03:25.720There are, of course, people who are Pollyannists who have this view that the world is on our side, there's a benevolent God, or the forces of the universe are lined up, such that I lead a charmed life and everything will go well for me.
01:03:39.960There are people at the other end of the spectrum who argue the opposite, the fates are against me, the gods hate me no matter what I do, the forces that govern the universe will just grind me down.
01:03:52.340That's got nothing to do with my tool set, initially, so to speak.
01:03:56.480That's a metaphysical claim about the nature of the universe.
01:03:59.100Now, when we do turn to the tool set, whatever your position is along the spectrum of benevolence to malevolence, there is the question about how much power I have to craft my own tools, to forge myself into the kind of being that can take on life's challenges.
01:04:18.540And here, I think postmodernism is dangerous in two important respects.
01:04:22.500In my view, the most important development of education, schooling, parenting, and so on, is giving students and young people the critical thinking, the rational power to be able to understand the world, to be able to conceptualize it, to know how to do the experiments, to analyze the results, to sort out good truth claims from bullshit, and so on.
01:04:51.000And so all of that cognitive development that can only come from a commitment to the idea that the evidence matters, that doing the experiments matters, that being excruciatingly honest with respect to the power of the arguments for and against positions that one might want to argue or adopt, that that's absolutely important.
01:05:12.260The development of a student's rational, logical, critical capacity is fundamentally important, and postmodernism is an assault on that.
01:05:20.840And what that means is that in practice, students do not develop that most important life skill.
01:05:25.980And so we put them out into the world without the tools that they need.
01:05:30.720And I think they are then more likely to feel disempowered.
01:05:34.240They're more likely to feel overwhelmed.
01:05:36.480And then we get the angry, despairing activist type of person that we see in larger numbers now.
01:05:43.220Okay, so if the postmodernists are concerned ethically with the reestablishment of genuine power at the bottom of the power hierarchies,
01:05:59.100why do you think it's the case, if it is the case, and many commentators have made this case, Jonathan Haidt among them,
01:06:07.920that the doctrines that the postmodernists tend to be teaching young people seem to be so absolutely infantilizing and undermining,
01:06:20.040rather than strengthening and increasing resilience?
01:06:27.460I mean, is it that they're not interested at the individual level?
01:06:32.640I mean, because it seems so paradoxical that these things are happening simultaneously.
01:10:31.580Is it something that will end of its own accord or?
01:10:34.980I think it is self-defeating intellectually.
01:10:37.820And one of the things that people who are intellectuals who have been following the arguments for a while
01:10:43.360notice is this is just a recycling of arguments that I heard five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
01:10:50.920And so it becomes self-defeating in the sense that it fails to attract the ongoing interest of the smart, very active-minded people.
01:10:59.600I think also that this is something built into human nature.
01:11:02.300And this is my great optimism with young people when they come to university, however underprepared and damaged they might be by their primary and high school education.
01:11:15.600They are nonetheless, particularly, I think, in North America still optimistic, gung-ho.
01:11:21.640They believe that they can make something of their lives.
01:11:24.420And when they start going into classes where the professors in word and action and just in their physical bearing are communicating,
01:11:33.780rather, messages of defeatism and cynicism, students who are psychologically healthy will just avoid those classes.
01:11:42.840They will go into fields that hold some promise of positivity for them.
01:11:48.240There will be a terror in entrepreneurial fields.
01:11:50.220The terror is that they may avoid university altogether.
01:11:56.040So what's the point of going to wallowing about what a victim you are or what a bad person you are because you have white skin or you're a male or whatever for four years?
01:12:07.000I'm going to quit university and get on with living.
01:12:10.720I do think there also will be corrective mechanisms in place.
01:12:16.300To some extent, universities are driven by dollars.
01:12:23.140If it's million-dollar donors, when some terrible manifestation of political correctness happens at their institution, they won't write the million-dollar check the next year.
01:12:33.000That will get noticed and that will be communicated in various ways.
01:12:36.920So, you know, the universities have their problems, but I am ultimately optimistic that they will be able to heal themselves.
01:12:45.520There are market mechanisms in place to…
01:12:52.760Well, it's interesting that, I mean, I waver between optimism and pessimism because I feel that the strata of postmodernists is relatively young and relatively entrenched and protected by tenure.
01:13:08.800And, of course, I think tenure is a good idea.
01:13:13.320And that they're also unbelievably good at fomenting activism.
01:13:17.900I mean, I think the political surveys indicate that only about 4% of the general population hold views that might be regarded as radical Marxist slash postmodernists.
01:13:30.200It's a tiny minority, like, it's bigger than that in universities, but they swing beyond their weight.
01:13:40.760And it's also, I think, because, you know, serious academics, this is my impression, is that serious academics really ignored the second-rate postmodern disciplines for decades,
01:13:54.500feeling that the arguments that they were making were weak enough so that they didn't even require a strong rebuttal.
01:14:04.360I mean, even when Steven Pinker wrote his book, The Blank Slate, you know, I read that book and I thought that it was an interesting book,
01:14:14.920but I thought, Jesus, Dr. Pinker, no one's believed that people are blank slates for, like, 30 years.
01:14:23.140That's so far out of date that it seems, as a biological psychologist, it just seemed to me to be absurd that that case had to be even made.
01:14:31.480But, I mean, he was obviously right about that, and I was obviously very wrong about that.
01:14:41.980And I think it goes back to we need better journalism about the demographics of higher education and what's going on there.
01:14:49.780So, is it 4 percent, is it 12 percent, is it 25 percent?
01:14:55.320Then this issue you're raising about punching above their weight, that does seem to be true, but how much above their weight are they punching?
01:15:03.640Is the major problem in the classrooms, or is it a matter of, you know, as we know, most academics don't like Mickey work.
01:15:12.780But a significant number of, so the first-rate people are doing their real academic work, and they're trying to avoid committee work.
01:15:20.280But the second- and third-raders, they don't mind committee work, and they see it as a vehicle to power within the university for them.
01:15:27.340So, if the postmoderns are, as we like to think, second- or third-rate, that's a little bit unfair.
01:15:33.200Not all of them are, but a higher percentage of them doing the important committee work, then they have a certain amount of power there.
01:15:40.860An overlooked part of the university demographics, from my perspective, is student life, where the residents, the people who look after the residence hall and the entertainment
01:15:54.640and deciding what student clubs are authorized or not, there's been a significant infiltration of postmodernism in that area.
01:16:04.200That's not on the academic side or only in indirect, but if you look at orientation programs, and again, we need better journalism here,
01:16:12.720but you find a significant number of them are devoting the whole orientation week when the first-year students are coming in to lectures on privilege and privilege,
01:16:24.640oppression, and whatever the buzzwords are. That also is an important issue as well.
01:16:31.080Right. There was an article written in the Chronicle of Higher Education excoriating faculties of education
01:16:37.580for producing precisely the kinds of internal university activists that are pushing exactly that kind of agenda.
01:16:47.440Yeah, faculties of education. I do some work in philosophy of education.
01:16:50.980They are all over the map, but there has been a significant postmodern shift with postmodernism being the reigning philosophy of education.
01:17:01.800And then, of course, that has impact not just in higher education because that's training the next generation of teachers.
01:17:08.700One of my younger colleagues, a man named Andrew Colgan, recent PhD from Western, University of Western Ontario,
01:17:18.560in his dissertation was documenting the significant demographic shift among Ontario high school teachers
01:17:26.420toward basically buying into a postmodern framework.
01:17:30.820And that's going to be a very important generational shift for Ontario.
01:17:34.460So what makes you, like you talked about market forces and the corrective ability and we spoke before we started this podcast about
01:17:46.280speaking about optimistic and positive elements and movements.
01:17:53.100I mean, so, well, I have two questions for you, at least, before we conclude.
01:17:58.760And one is, you seem optimistic and positive.
01:18:03.400And so what do you see as the root out of this?
01:18:14.260Well, I think one thing that we are noticing is an increasing number of first rate people
01:18:19.160who are now engaging the debate within higher education.
01:18:23.180So you can mention someone like, you know, Stephen Pinker, who's not just doing academic psychology now.
01:18:29.540Instead, he's devoting resources to defending in a public intellectual sphere, the Enlightenment Project.
01:18:36.160Jonathan Haidt, also an excellent psychologist doing clinical work as well,
01:18:41.980but nonetheless is formative in creating the heterodox academy, bringing together academics from a wide variety of political spectrum positions,
01:18:53.580but nonetheless all agreeing that academic freedom, free speech, and so forth are important.
01:18:58.960The work that you're doing, stepping out onto the public stage as well.
01:19:04.160So there is a major uptick in very good academics taking postmodernism and its offshoots seriously and pushing back,
01:22:29.500And that a disproportionate number of those women are black.
01:22:33.660So it turns out that it's so perverse, that the statistics are so perverse.
01:22:39.380And part of the explanation for that, it's not the total explanation,
01:22:44.720is that these women were enticed or chose to enter disciplines where the probability of making enough money over a reasonable span of your life,
01:23:00.800especially given the high interest rates that are associated with student debt, is extraordinarily low.