The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Western Academia and Individualism ｜ Interview with Prof Stephen Hicks

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this interview of the Lotus Eaters. I'm your host Stelios and I have the honor and pleasure to be joined by Professor Stephen Hicks. Professor Hicks, welcome.

00:00:11.460 Thanks for the invitation. Happy to be here.

00:00:14.740 I'm very happy to be talking to you. And I think we have plenty of topics to talk about.

00:00:21.040 Oh yeah, for sure. Yes. Huge amount going on in philosophy and it's spillovers into the cultural sphere. So we will fill up the time.

00:00:30.680 Exactly. So first question I would like to ask you is what interested you in philosophy from the beginning? What made you want to become an academic?

00:00:41.320 Well, in that sense, I think I was a late bloomer. When I was in my teen years and into my early 20s, I planned on being an architect and civil engineer.

00:00:50.860 So most of my thinking was in that direction. Although from an early age, I always was a reader and I loved fiction and history and ideas of various sorts.

00:01:01.180 I had no idea what philosophy was as a discipline until I went to university. And there I was just taking a variety of courses to understand the landscape and to learn a bunch of stuff before I planned to have a more technical and artistic career as an architect in engineering.

00:01:18.840 But in my first year of university, I was reading and taking courses. And what often happens in the first year of university is the whole world opens up to one.

00:01:30.760 And that was the year that philosophy as a discipline came together in my mind. I understood what it was and I was fascinated.

00:01:40.120 And I ended up taking a large number of courses in philosophy, but still planning to go to to engineering and architecture.

00:01:49.040 So it wasn't until I was 23 or 24 and I'd run out of money after after graduated.

00:01:55.040 So I was working in construction that I was continuing to take, you know, math and science courses to prepare for or for engineering.

00:02:03.720 But at the same time, I was also still doing a lot of reading and philosophy. So I went back and forth for a while about where I wanted to do.

00:02:11.780 And then at this point, I was in Canada. But I made a decision, you know, I really like philosophy.

00:02:19.040 So I applied to a bunch of graduate schools in the United States, ended up coming to the States to get my my PhD degree.

00:02:25.640 And I was serious about it. But at the same point, I was always thinking, you know, well, if it doesn't work out,

00:02:31.660 because the, you know, getting a job as a philosophy professor and getting through the academic world even then was quite challenging.

00:02:38.940 My fallback was to go back to architecture and engineering.

00:02:42.580 But thing worked out. And I've been very happy spending my time doing philosophy for for some decades now.

00:02:50.180 So this is this is this is great. And I think that it's a very interesting way of going into philosophy, because you sort of come from a STEM background,

00:03:05.040 a very engineering background, and you sort of fell in love with a with a philosophical discipline, it seems.

00:03:12.660 Yeah, that's right. So let me just add one more thing.

00:03:16.360 It was the STEM, but the architecture side, I don't want to underplay that, because the the aesthetic and the design elements,

00:03:23.240 I think one of the things was appealing is, you know, that with the STEM knowledge and the aesthetic element that comes from architecture,

00:03:31.660 you are creating the world that you would like to be a part of.

00:03:36.500 So there is also a big value component that integrates.

00:03:40.360 Exactly. So I want to ask you about academia right now, because it seems to me that right now, academia in the West isn't particularly healthy.

00:03:52.360 And there are several facets of the culture war that stem from academia.

00:04:00.120 Now, would you say that this is an accurate assessment? And if so, how did we get here?

00:04:06.220 Yes, I would say yes, overall, yes, that is an accurate assessment.

00:04:11.780 We are going through one of the great soul searching times for for higher record, higher academics.

00:04:18.540 And the liberal education project, on which most modern universities have been based for more than a century now,

00:04:27.620 has been severely tested for the last generation or two by strongly illiberal philosophies of education.

00:04:36.480 And much of that then has spilled out to outside of the academic world.

00:04:42.180 So which is why everyone is aware of what's what's going on there.

00:04:46.720 So I say overall, though, I do want to say that we have to very quickly start breaking universities down because universities are big institutions with multiple aspects.

00:04:58.680 So if you talk about the humanities areas, that's where I think most of the sickness is.

00:05:05.680 And I'm using that concept of sickness. We can we can we can unpack that in the social sciences.

00:05:12.080 Things are also severely tested and there are serious problems there, but also some signs of health as we get into the natural sciences.

00:05:21.560 Things are much healthier. The professional schools, medicine, business and education.

00:05:27.920 I think we have to break those down and talk about them separately.

00:05:31.460 So the universities need to be broken down into their constituent elements.

00:05:36.760 That's just to speak of the academic side.

00:05:38.800 Another big part of the discussion has to be about what's going on in the administration, what's going on in H.R. departments, what's happening in fundraising departments, what's happening among deans and presidents and other administrators as as well.

00:05:53.840 And there I think it is a again a mixed case, but the dynamic is slightly different as well.

00:06:02.240 So we can plunge in wherever you like.

00:06:04.600 Okay, so I would like to ask you about the intellectual as well as the administrative aspects of the sickness, as you call it.

00:06:15.600 Professor Hicks, what do you think are the current intellectual dimensions of the current state of academia in the West?

00:06:24.260 Well, I'm a philosopher by training, and I do think that this is fundamentally a philosophical debate.

00:06:31.260 Modern universities in the United States, Canada, where I am from, in the broadly English-speaking world, and to a significant extent on the European continent, in the modern world, were guided by the idea that education should be training individuals to think for themselves about a wide range of issues.

00:06:55.520 That if you are going to be a functional individual, that if you are going to be a functional individual in the modern world, not only do you need to be literate, but you need to know something about economics and politics and religion and science and technology.

00:07:07.520 And so one should have this broad-based education.

00:07:11.520 At the same time, one should not simply be someone who is parroting what one's teachers or professors are saying, that you need to be an active participant in the democratic process, to be a republican citizen, to be able to make your own way economically in the world, to work out your own philosophy and or religion of life, to understand technological systems and scientific systems and so on.

00:07:37.780 And so the education is not simply a matter of content, but also training one's mind to be able to think like a free-thinking person in all of these areas.

00:07:48.360 So the idea of a university then is that students are going to get a broad-based education in this content and in the methodology.

00:07:57.480 And that the professors themselves, since we are, as moderns, recognizing that we don't necessarily have all of the answers, that we are open-ended with respect to science and technology and improving the human condition, that at the forefront of knowledge, the professors themselves are going to have different theories and be arguing with each other.

00:08:17.920 And it's healthy for students then to enter into those debates and themselves even to be able to debate and question their professors.

00:08:26.440 Now, all of that ethos and the philosophy underlying it led to a huge explosion in higher education in the 1900s, the 2000s, and most universities and liberal arts colleges were founded on that basis.

00:08:42.020 Now, there was, though, a philosophical counter-revolution that started after World War II, just to choose one significant date.

00:08:51.040 Obviously, the world is largely focused on other things as these world wars are going on and the Depression and so on.

00:08:58.420 But after World War II, in particular, you see the beginnings of a serious counter-revolution in all of the traditional now liberal arts institutions.

00:09:08.540 Because what had happened was many Central European intellectuals had gotten out of Europe due to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and the terrible things happening in Central Europe and the war in the 1940s.

00:09:25.380 Many of them, even though their sympathies politically were with various kinds of Marxism and neo-Marxism, did not want to stay in Eastern Europe after the Soviets took that part over.

00:09:36.540 So there was a big exodus of not only intellectuals, but lots of creative people from Eastern Europe and Central Europe to the West, and they brought a certain set of ideas with them.

00:09:48.480 At the same time, in the Western world, philosophy had reached a relatively skeptical point by the time we get to the 1950s.

00:09:57.540 And many of the extreme skeptical movements, philosophically, started then to rethink the nature of philosophy and the nature of education as a result, if we are increasingly skeptical.

00:10:13.540 And so what we call post-modernism, Leotard's famous phrase about being skeptical about meta-narratives, for example.

00:10:22.380 So the idea that somehow, through reason and science and so forth, we can come to understand big picture views of the world and use that technologically and in the social sciences and in the humanities to improve the human condition, was a profoundly skeptical time.

00:10:38.640 And so what we find is what we call post-modernism, a skepticism about the Enlightenment as a whole, and everything downstream from that comes to be prominent.

00:10:50.300 And the names that are most associated with this, deservedly so, are thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others.

00:10:58.440 In the 1960s, they rise relatively quickly to the top of their professor.

00:11:03.940 They become extraordinarily influential, not only in philosophy, but in the humanities more broadly, and in several of the social sciences.

00:11:11.980 They succeed in capturing some departments and graduating a large number of people who become professionals in law, in business, in the arts, and other cultural spheres.

00:11:23.260 Until by the time we get to the 1990s, it's quite clear that the traditional liberal arts idea of the university and education is under attack, that it has a formidable challenger.

00:11:36.040 And so the debate then for the last generation inside the academic world has been over those who are broadly enlightened and committed to liberal education,

00:11:44.560 and those who philosophically and deeply are opposed to every element of that.

00:11:49.300 By the time we get to 2010, 2015 or so, another generation, that's now two generations into, much of this is then spilling out from the higher education world into other cultural spaces,

00:12:02.820 into education, mainstream education, into the political sphere, into the artistic sphere, and so on.

00:12:11.540 And suddenly everybody is aware of this big battle culturally that we are having, but the roots of it are inside the academic world, and particularly by philosophers.

00:12:26.220 Just add a point here that Foucault and Derrida and Leotard and Richard Rorty, the American postmodernists, all of them are PhDs in philosophy,

00:12:35.820 and they are mounting fundamentally philosophical attacks on the Enlightenment and downstream of it, liberal education.

00:12:43.520 So that's where I think we are in a nutshell.

00:12:46.200 So let me summarize and tell me if you think that I summarize correctly what I take to be your point.

00:12:52.880 Liberal education was the dominant model, and the dominant model suggested that education should be about teaching students how to think,

00:13:02.680 and how to have a well-rounded education, rather than just being very specialised and losing the big picture, and also being citizens.

00:13:15.700 And we have lost this due to several reasons, because we have come to a position where students are being told what to think.

00:13:26.540 Most professors, particularly those who are propagating these ideas, are posing as supreme moral authorities that cannot be challenged,

00:13:37.220 without challenging them being a sort of hate speech, and we are led into this idea of illiberal and counter-enlightenment education.

00:13:49.600 Is that roughly correct?

00:13:50.740 That's roughly correct.

00:13:52.960 Just to back off a little bit from that, we have lost this.

00:13:57.920 I'd say right now, inside the academic world, the debate is engaged, and it is quite vigorous.

00:14:04.640 There's a significant number of people inside the academic world who are still Enlightenment thinkers, broadly speaking.

00:14:11.660 I think this is why those of us who follow the public intellectual realm, we all know the name Steven Pinker.

00:14:17.320 We all know the name Jonathan Haidt, we all know the name Jordan Peterson, and all of them are representative of different parts of the political spectrum.

00:14:26.400 But nonetheless, they are committed to enlightenment values and liberal education.

00:14:31.020 So inside the academic world, with those three individuals, especially assuming a kind of leadership role, we are fighting.

00:14:40.840 We don't want to say quite tooth and nail, although in some cases it comes close to that, to figure out what we want universities to be now.

00:14:51.160 So the battle is not lost, but it is engaged, and in some cases it is vicious, and some subsections of the university, some departments, some programs, have been, in fact, lost.

00:15:01.780 Okay, I want to ask you a question here that I don't hear people asking, because there is a lot of focus on the continental philosophy traditions, like critical theory, deconstructionism, and the masters of suspicion, that I think Paul Ricoeur was talking about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

00:15:21.780 I think I rarely listen to people asking about the elements within analytic philosophy that could be corrosive.

00:15:34.220 And by being corrosive, I don't mean that they could lead into the practices and ways of teaching that we encounter in the other tradition, but create indirect problems.

00:15:48.040 So, for instance, you mentioned Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker.

00:15:53.220 I don't know to what extent this is an issue with Jordan Peterson, but it seems to me that one of the major problems in late 20th century philosophy and the main worldview is that the dominant worldview is something akin to scientism.

00:16:12.220 Now, this may be wrong, but tell me if you think that there is such a dominant trend.

00:16:19.480 And there is a very interesting way in which I think that this leads into problems, and I have the impression that this leads to problems, especially with the points that Steven Pinker is raising and also with Jonathan Haidt.

00:16:38.480 It seems to me that it seems to me that they make several moral claims, but if at the end the metaphysical background in which they situate these claims is a sort of materialism that boils down everything to matter in motion,

00:16:56.640 I think that there are several problems with respect to how accounting for basic morality.

00:17:04.980 Do you think that this is entirely mistaken or maybe that it has a hint of truth?

00:17:10.180 Yes, no, it has a hint of truth, but you're raising kind of two generations or possibly three generations of intellectual history and philosophical history.

00:17:22.400 So, I think you are right that when we talk about postmodernism and critical theory and the problems downstream that we are facing in higher education and the related cultural spaces,

00:17:34.680 that most prominence is given to postmodernism and to Frankfurt School critical thinking.

00:17:42.100 And both of those come out primarily of continental philosophical traditions.

00:17:47.220 So, for example, if you take someone like Foucault or Derrida, both of them will point us back to people like Heidegger and Nietzsche, and they are in the continental tradition.

00:18:01.660 And it is true that the philosophical world from, say, the 1700s, definitely by the time we get into the 1800s,

00:18:11.940 was split into broadly Anglo and then American style of philosophy and analytic philosophy largely came out of that tradition and continental philosophy.

00:18:23.860 And one way of characterizing the split was to say that continental philosophy was much more speculative, much more explicitly collectivizing, much more explicitly anti-rational.

00:18:35.920 We have Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Nietzsche and Nietzsche and Nietzsche and they're all anti-rational and the language is impenetrable and hard to understand.

00:18:46.800 And out of that, we have a kind of philosophical tradition.

00:18:50.200 At the same time, coming out of the Anglo-American tradition, what we have is a philosophical tradition that goes back to people like Francis Bacon and John Locke and Isaac Newton.

00:19:02.260 And it is a much more empirically oriented philosophical tradition.

00:19:07.460 It's also then pro-reason, pro-scientific method and so forth, that it prizes rigor, that it sees science as something progressive and technology is wonderful and so on.

00:19:18.760 Now, what we then have by the time we get into the 1800s and on into the 1900s is what's going on in the philosophical world in terms of Anglo-American style or more broadly now analytic philosophy is quite different in its sympathies and its style from continental philosophy.

00:19:38.380 So your first question, I think, is right to say, well, what about the analytic tradition?

00:19:43.940 Why might we think that it also contributed to laying the groundwork in some way, the problems that we are having right now?

00:19:52.380 So what I think happened to the analytic tradition, this is now using it as a very broad category, using it to include various schools like positivism and logical positivism and pragmatism and neopragmatism and linguistic analysis and so forth.

00:20:09.080 So, and all of that needs to be parsed out, and all of that needs to be parsed out a whole lot more.

00:20:12.800 But by the time we got to the 1950s, clearly those were seen as dead ends, that the philosophers who were working in those traditions also became very skeptical.

00:20:26.580 So we see this, for example, in the 1920s and on into the 1930s.

00:20:31.560 So I'll just use as one example, A.J. Ayer publishes in 1936 a short book called Language, Truth, and Logic.

00:20:42.080 And he is coming out of a tradition, Oxford philosophy, Cambridge philosophy, British philosophy, and then downstream to some extent the North American philosophy and Australian and New Zealand philosophy is saying that language and logic are handmaidens to science,

00:20:59.180 and they should be working with science to clarify all of science's conceptual vocabulary and its methodology so that the sciences can go on and do their work at figuring out the way the world works.

00:21:12.180 But what you have in 1936, and notice this is getting close to World War II, though, is A.J. Ayer announcing where those trends have ended.

00:21:24.240 That metaphysics is not only kind of a weirdly speculative discipline of human thinking, but it literally is meaningless, and we should stop doing it.

00:21:36.600 That value theory and morality is not only hard to work out, and it gets our emotions engaged, and we have all of these debates, but that fundamentally moral philosophy is meaningless, and we should stop doing it.

00:21:50.940 And the same thing is true of religion and aesthetics as well.

00:21:54.960 So what you have then, by the time we get to the 1930s, is to say that if we do our epistemology seriously, that is to say we study language, we study all of the tools that philosophers use in all of these domains,

00:22:08.320 that philosophy should not anymore be interested in metaphysics, in ethics, in religion, in art.

00:22:18.740 That all of these are just non-rational, non-philosophical, meaningless disciplines.

00:22:23.140 But there might be other psychological things that we do to study them, but philosophy is going to dismiss them from itself.

00:22:29.480 So to put the language, rather this point rhetorically, what we then have is philosophy committing a kind of suicide and saying that all of the huge sectors of the real estate of traditional philosophy are just completely meaningless, and we're not going to do it.

00:22:45.820 So what we are then left with, then, is really philosophy as maybe a handmaiden to science.

00:22:51.700 But at the same time, if we then do our heavy-duty philosophy, again, this is by the 1930s, we look at what the scientists do.

00:22:58.920 Well, they would say, according to the empiricist model, they do observations of reality.

00:23:05.380 But again, by the 1930s, the leading philosophers are saying our perceptual apparatus just gives us illusions.

00:23:13.380 We can't tell the difference between a perception and a hallucination.

00:23:16.880 Maybe we are all dreaming, maybe we are all really stuck in Descartes' predicament, and we can't really say that our percepts are putting us in contact, much less accurate contact, with reality.

00:23:32.180 Scientists then want to say that they are using these various abstract concepts.

00:23:37.680 But then, where do these abstract concepts come from?

00:23:41.620 And then the argument by the 1930s is that they seem to be conventional, they're just words that we make up, that we just arbitrarily make impositions on reality, and we can't think outside of the verbal framework that we are raising to say that our concepts have anything to do with reality.

00:23:59.420 And then so forth, with respect to all of the other elements of scientific method, that we are doing mathematics, that we are doing logic.

00:24:07.300 Well, the thinkers, again, by the 1930s, working in this school, want to say, well, ultimately, logic and mathematics are just matters of arbitrary, subjective definitions, and they don't give us any guidance to say that we're actually picking out something called a causal order out there in reality.

00:24:24.120 So the point is that by the 1930s, also, in the pro-science, positivist, logical positivist, analytic philosophy traditions, the philosophers are reaching very skeptical conclusions.

00:24:38.520 And now there's the big interruption of the World War, but after the World War is over, and we get into the 1950s and the 1960s, or late 1940s and on into the 1950s, things pick up again,

00:24:50.860 and philosophy, and philosophy, even in the Anglo and American world, is in a very skeptical place.

00:24:56.640 So if we are then focusing especially on the epistemology, our view of our minds in relation to reality, can we know the world?

00:25:04.500 It's not only the continentals that are highly skeptical, it's also those coming, working in the Anglo-American tradition, 0.99

00:25:11.840 that we need to just start talking about truth as something that pushes our value buttons,

00:25:16.880 or something that happens to work for us, but what works for us is ultimately subjective according to the individual or according to the group that we are raised in.

00:25:26.160 And so philosophy has, so to speak, undercut all of its foundational presuppositions that have come down from the Enlightenment,

00:25:34.880 and most philosophers are just throwing up their hands and saying, we don't know what we are doing right now.

00:25:40.120 So what do you think of the administrative aspect of academia right now?

00:25:47.140 Is there any kind of mismanagement? And if so, how do you think, can it be fixed?

00:25:52.120 Well, yes, I think there's a few things here that we should say that are downstream from the intellectual,

00:26:02.540 and other things I think are not so polite about the administrative thing.

00:26:05.880 In many cases, what we have in the administration is partly the long marks through the institution,

00:26:11.740 that many people who want to transform in education, they don't like the liberal education model.

00:26:17.460 They have some ideological framework that they believe in, but they recognize that if they're going to change higher education or even lower education,

00:26:27.380 it's not only the faculty that is going to do that.

00:26:30.120 That through student life, through the HR departments, through the various other administrative departments of a large university,

00:26:36.800 if we can have people of our ideological stripe running the programs there, then we can change society in the directions that we want to go.

00:26:47.060 So just to take one example, it's a fairly common practice for most universities to have an orientation week.

00:26:53.800 So students, especially the first year students who are arriving on campus, to give them a week-long introduction to university life.

00:27:01.640 And if you can have your people, so to speak, setting the program, what their students are going to read,

00:27:06.280 what messages they're going to hear, what values they're going to be told that they should subscribe to in order to be good university students.

00:27:14.240 If you can introduce your ideology into orientation week, then that's an important part of it as well.

00:27:20.600 The other elements, though, that I think are perhaps less flattering is that many people who go into administration,

00:27:32.480 who become deans, who then become provosts, are academics.

00:27:38.300 And to put it bluntly, they are failed academics.

00:27:42.020 That what they do is they start off as people who are interested in their field.

00:27:47.680 They might get a degree in some field, they get their PhD, but they then become professors

00:27:53.180 and they realize after five to seven years or so that they really don't like teaching very much

00:27:59.200 and perhaps they are not very good at it.

00:28:02.520 Or they don't have very much to say, that they're not writers,

00:28:06.840 they don't have any sort of interest or track record at getting things published.

00:28:12.760 So there you are and say you've got tenure and you're still relatively early in your career,

00:28:19.460 but you don't like the idea of 20 or 30 more years of teaching

00:28:23.200 and you don't see any prospect for you over the course of the next 20 or 30 years,

00:28:27.660 making any sort of a mark as a writer and in terms of publications.

00:28:32.780 So what you, of course, can do is what some professors do is you kind of take early retirement.

00:28:37.320 At that point, you just give up on things.

00:28:39.020 You do the minimum to get through to retirement or whatever.

00:28:42.880 But another option for you is to go into administration, to become an associate dean,

00:28:48.080 to become a dean.

00:28:48.960 Now, I don't want to generalize and say that all people who become deans and so on fit this pattern,

00:28:53.580 but there is a significant number of them for whom this is an absolutely true description of their career path.

00:29:01.000 You get better money.

00:29:02.040 You have a little bit more power.

00:29:04.260 In some ways, you have less work to do, but you have a certain amount of less accountability in some respects.

00:29:11.320 And so what you then have is basically B-level or C-level people who come to have a significant play in the administration as well.

00:29:21.700 I think a third dynamic is that often when one goes into administration,

00:29:28.480 one has a significant amount of committee work and paperwork and so forth to do.

00:29:33.020 There is a rationality and there is a workload that is involved.

00:29:38.500 And what one does not want is anything that's going to interfere with that.

00:29:44.660 And so obviously, deans and provosts have to be troubleshooters.

00:29:48.700 The faculty are often fighting with each other.

00:29:50.780 The students are doing this, that and the other thing that what you often want is for just problems to go away

00:29:57.700 so that they don't give the university a bad reputation.

00:30:02.020 They don't take too much of your daily schedule and so on.

00:30:05.000 And in many cases, a compromise on various sorts of principles is an easy way simply to make a problem go away.

00:30:13.500 So if you have, for example, a student who is insisting that a given student did not perform adequately in order to get a passing grade,

00:30:24.860 but that student, say, is a high profile athlete or that student is is a representative of a certain ideological cause.

00:30:32.900 And there's going to be huge publicity, bad publicity for you and more problems and more headaches for you to solve down the road.

00:30:39.500 So it's easier in many cases for the deans or the provosts to put pressure on the on the professor to to change the grade.

00:30:48.420 Right. Or to use some sort of administrative device against the professor's will to change the grade.

00:30:53.720 That's just one one small example.

00:30:55.700 But the point just is that that's a significant portion of what happens on the administrative side as well.

00:31:01.240 And they are contributing to the problems as well.

00:31:03.900 So basically, you would say that it is those who are least qualified members of staff usually get key positions of power.

00:31:13.200 And would you also say that there is an element of politicization of the administrative positions?

00:31:22.540 Because one of the key duties of those who administer...

00:31:27.940 Both of those again, but with qualification.

00:31:30.100 I would say, as with the faculty, there is a lively debate among the administration.

00:31:35.680 You find many people who are very smart, who are very committed to principle.

00:31:42.060 They want to advance their careers.

00:31:43.860 Right. Of course.

00:31:44.780 But nonetheless, they they are doing a good job.

00:31:47.980 The point just is that there are now, as over the last two generations, an increasing number of people who can get a cushy job without particularly having strong.

00:32:00.100 A strong backbone or a strong mind and there are a significant number of them who are politicized.

00:32:05.680 So within the administration, there are the same debates.

00:32:09.680 And would you say that sometimes the universities become targets of political associations that want to infiltrate academia, not necessarily as members of staff, but in all sorts of ways, and try to use academia in order to spread a kind of message, usually a political one?

00:32:32.680 Well, for sure.

00:32:34.680 I mean, any philosophy, if you are not just a, I'll use this a little pejorative, just say a Platonic philosopher who just is happy to be up in the ivory tower contemplating your idea of a perfect world.

00:32:50.000 If your idea of philosophy is more Aristotelian or more practically oriented, that the purpose of doing philosophy is to live yourself a better life, but also to make the world a better place.

00:33:04.820 So all of the theory needs to be translated into practice, then at some point you are going to look at your society and say, what will my philosophy mean for the key cultural sectors and the key institutions in my society?

00:33:19.960 And every practically oriented philosophy ultimately does that.

00:33:25.420 And so you look not only at the economic sphere, at the political sphere, at what's going on in religion, what's going on in families, but you do look at education and you recognize that if philosophy is going to be successful, then you want young people from the earliest stage possible to come to adopt your philosophy so they can incorporate it into their lives as well.

00:33:47.720 So philosophy and philosophy and philosophy of education has always been an important spin-off as well.

00:33:55.300 So then we just have is once your philosophy world has transformed itself from an old style philosophy, as they would then call it, into a new kind of philosophy, the new philosophers want to break down and reform or totally annihilate the old ones and build the institution anew on the basis of their new ideology.

00:34:17.720 And there always are ideologists who are strategic about that.

00:34:23.160 So they go into education with the idea of transforming the existing educational institution in the light of their new philosophical framework.

00:34:33.000 Thank you.

00:34:33.360 I think we should go into the next section of our discussion, which is about post-liberalism and also the Russian philosopher Dugin.

00:34:43.960 Now, it seems to me that right now there are a lot of people who flirt with the idea of post-liberalism, and the more I look into it, it doesn't seem to me to be introducing anything substantially new.

00:34:58.220 This seems to me to be a sort of recreation of the language of communitarianism, of the communitarianism of people like Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre.

00:35:10.260 So, would you say that this is an accurate assessment, or do you think that post-liberalism right now is sort of deviating from communitarianism?

00:35:23.420 No, I think there's a lot to what you just summarized.

00:35:29.400 Excuse me for one moment.

00:35:32.620 Thanks.

00:35:33.300 Sorry about that.

00:35:34.080 Yeah, so if we take the liberalism component.

00:35:38.160 Now, liberalism is partly a political philosophy that liberty or freedom should be the fundamental political value, and that the job of governments is basically to protect people's liberties, and that other political values are important, but they're nested within a commitment to liberalism.

00:35:56.940 Liberalism is also an ethos that individuals should think of themselves as free agents, as self-governing, that I am responsible for my life, my economic life, for participating politically, for making my romantic life work, for my religious views, and so forth.

00:36:17.620 That in all of these areas, I'm going to be a free agent, and then on the underlying epistemological elements that I have free agency, what I believe, what I make commitments to, it's up to me that I can assess the evidence, I can change my mind, I can adjust my beliefs.

00:36:37.020 So there's kind of a liberalism all of the way down that can be a broad philosophical outlook.

00:36:43.880 So what then happens among the post-liberals is if one is a philosopher or otherwise a deep-thinking intellectual who comes to think that some or all of those elements of the broad liberal package are false or wrong or taking people in the wrong direction, then one will mount a critique of them and say we need to go beyond that or post that.

00:37:10.480 And that comes in many forms. One will say that it's not possible for individuals to be free agents cognitively, so to speak, that our minds are just conditioned by forces beyond our control and so on.

00:37:23.480 So that then will take one in a post-liberal direction cognitively, or one will say individuals are not moral agents and self-responsible for what they say and what they do.

00:37:37.680 Rather, people are conditioned by or puppets of forces, again, beyond their control.

00:37:43.700 So if you don't think that people are liberal moral agents and you are going to understand people in a different direction, you will have a post-liberal ethos.

00:37:53.700 If you don't like the liberal political institutions, democracy and republicanism, and if you don't like its economic institutions, you don't like free markets and capitalism, then what you will do is you will mount critiques of democracy, of republicanism, of free markets, capitalism, and so on, and go post in those areas as well.

00:38:16.440 Now, what do you then replace that liberal philosophy and that liberal culture with?

00:38:24.520 And again, there are several alternatives, and here we can say, this is now taking us directly to your question, obviously one form of post-liberalism has been post-modernism and critical theory, and these are people coming from the left, broadly speaking.

00:38:41.760 Some of them are Marxists or neo-Marxists or neo-neo-Marxists or disillusioned Marxists who want to go off in significantly different directions, but what they are opposed to is the liberal package and they want to take it in a more left-wing, anti-rational, collectivist direction, and some of them, you use the word communitarian, have left-wing forms of communitarianism as well.

00:39:06.840 But it's also the case that on the so-called right, that the right-wing and some forms of conservatism have now for a couple of centuries been dissatisfied with or suspicious of the liberal package.

00:39:22.760 They think it's too rationalistic, and that causes problems for traditional religion, or it's too individualistic, and that causes problems from their perspective for the family or believing in certain traditions that they think are important.

00:39:40.080 And that it's corrosive of various traditions as well, or that they think it's instead of prizing local communities, the conservatives that traditionally are more in favor of my group, perhaps my ethnic group and so forth, that it becomes much more globalistic, it becomes much more cosmopolitan.

00:39:58.080 I don't like the politics that I don't like the politics that the liberal world that the liberal world is bringing about, and so they will be critical of it.

00:40:05.960 And what we have found, particularly in the last generation, is as liberalism has been increasingly under attack from the left, and it has been weakened institutionally by those attacks on the left, many on the right then want to say,

00:40:23.020 well, if it's the case that liberalism is on its way out, and we're somewhat sympathetic to that, but at the same time, we don't like what the leftists are wanting to replace that with, what we need to do is go post-liberal, but in a more right-wing or conservative direction.

00:40:43.400 And so I'm putting those in quotation marks just to flag that those are a big tent, and we need to unpack and get more precise about all of those.

00:40:51.520 So you do mention people like Michael Sandel, going back half a generation now, Alistair McIntyre going back a generation now, and then the current generation of people like Yoram Hazoni,

00:41:08.140 and then some other people who are Christian nationalists or integralists of various sort,

00:41:15.520 they are trying to revive and rework that broadly right-wing conservative territory in a post-liberal direction.

00:41:24.960 And I think you're right to say that one significant component of that is the communitarian element.

00:41:30.720 Okay, so I want to ask you about something that seems to me to be the case when I listen to a lot who call themselves post-liberals.

00:41:39.520 So there are several patterns that seem to me to be emerging.

00:41:44.100 So first of all, it seems to me that they do not distinguish between the classical strand of the tradition, classical liberalism,

00:41:51.520 and what is usually called modern liberalism, that personally I don't like calling it liberalism so much,

00:41:58.260 the tradition of the later John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin, and possibly Will Kimlicker.

00:42:06.260 And for some reason, it seems to me that they mostly attack this idea of modern liberalism.

00:42:13.580 And when you tell them that that's not what the classical liberal tradition is all about,

00:42:19.160 they somehow say that, well, it has to somehow lead into this, because liberalism says that we are free and equal.

00:42:27.880 When you ask them what it means to be free and equal, they sort of never define,

00:42:32.580 they just leave it hanging there, they just say liberalism tells us free and equal.

00:42:37.300 And I see this regularly, and I have heard you talking about a conservative mythos of liberalism.

00:42:45.900 Would you care to tell us a bit about what this is?

00:42:49.680 Because it seems to me that particularly the classical version of the tradition

00:42:54.140 is routinely represented by post-liberals as just following money,

00:43:00.440 and they routinely forget the political aspect of that tradition.

00:43:04.960 They seem to be completely unaware of the republican strand of it,

00:43:10.300 and also you could say of some monarchist element within the tradition

00:43:18.120 that aren't absolute in form.

00:43:21.360 And also they seem to me to be completely oblivious, frequently,

00:43:27.700 of the distinction between the classical and the modern version,

00:43:31.900 where you see that the classical version is talking about equality of civil rights,

00:43:38.660 that includes a strong component of property rights within it,

00:43:42.320 and it is talking primarily about the relationship between the individual and the state,

00:43:49.620 and they sort of just try to have a one-size-fits-all conception of all of it.

00:43:55.340 What would you say about this?

00:43:57.520 Well, what I would say is that that is a very rich and difficult question,

00:44:02.820 partly because what we then have to do is to talk about what happened to classical liberalism

00:44:08.380 as it was first conceived in the 1600s, institutionalized in the 1700s,

00:44:13.540 and continue to evolve in the 1800s.

00:44:18.300 And then what we now take certain conservative right-wing, right,

00:44:25.300 or post-liberal thinkers' understanding of how that history went.

00:44:30.780 So we would have to talk about both of those.

00:44:34.100 But I think you're right.

00:44:34.680 The first important thing is to say, to get clear on the distinction

00:44:39.280 between how liberalism has been used classically and still is used,

00:44:45.120 that classical liberal tradition is still with us,

00:44:47.880 and a significant number of people use liberalism that way,

00:44:52.160 and then a different use of the word liberal that evolved

00:44:56.620 in the early part of the 20th century,

00:44:59.380 and a significant number of people still use.

00:45:03.040 So one of the debates we have right now is between those who want to say,

00:45:07.760 here's what liberalism, and it is continuing to evolve now as a tradition,

00:45:13.020 but it has its integrity, and it needs to be distinguished from this variation.

00:45:19.140 And we'll come back to what that variation is,

00:45:21.380 that is also trying to use that same liberal word,

00:45:25.020 versus those who want to say we see ourselves as inheritors of this classical liberal tradition

00:45:32.780 that has now evolved into something that is significantly different

00:45:37.140 from that classically liberal tradition,

00:45:39.080 even though it retains some of the classical liberal elements as well.

00:45:43.620 And I don't want this just to be a fight about words,

00:45:46.840 but to draw our attention to the substantial issues underneath.

00:45:50.300 So let's take up that first distinction.

00:45:55.240 So the classically liberal tradition was quite robust.

00:45:58.960 It was, yeah, definitely part of saying that what we should do is be liberal economically.

00:46:05.680 Individuals, human beings should be individuals.

00:46:08.120 They should not be members of a caste.

00:46:10.100 Remember that liberalism came out of a rejection of feudalism,

00:46:14.260 that people are born into a place in the hierarchy,

00:46:17.760 and what you can do with your life is dictated by your place in the hierarchy,

00:46:21.920 and things are largely static.

00:46:23.480 Individuals should be free agents economically to go into any line of work that they want,

00:46:29.620 both as producers and as consumers and as traders.

00:46:34.860 So liberalism does then mean, in part of it,

00:46:39.120 that we are going to be some sort of free market capitalists in our economics.

00:46:44.500 It also, though, was equally committed to liberalism in the political sphere,

00:46:49.420 that people should be free agents,

00:46:51.940 that they should be self-governing,

00:46:53.920 and that their agency, with respect to whatever powers are delegated to government,

00:46:59.260 to rule them in some respect,

00:47:02.160 has to come from the individual citizens themselves,

00:47:05.620 that individual citizens are free to enter into the political debates,

00:47:10.820 to run for office,

00:47:11.960 and so that we have a kind of democratic political set of institutions

00:47:16.200 that are part and parcel of the liberal project.

00:47:19.160 But at the same time,

00:47:20.560 there are limits to what political systems can do.

00:47:24.460 Individuals are the ones who fundamentally have rights.

00:47:27.520 Those rights are absolute or something close to that,

00:47:30.180 and they are protected in some sort of a constitution,

00:47:33.060 and that's the more republican element of it.

00:47:36.220 So liberalism is both a political project,

00:47:38.660 and it is an economic project.

00:47:40.920 But also the liberalism applies to religion.

00:47:43.500 It's up to you to make your own mind up with respect to religion,

00:47:47.480 and to, so to speak,

00:47:49.180 save your own soul and join whatever institutions you think

00:47:52.500 are going to help you with that.

00:47:54.640 But also, if you don't like the given religious institutions,

00:47:57.360 you are free to leave them.

00:47:59.740 You're even free to start your own religious institutions.

00:48:02.980 You are a free agent, again, when it comes to liberalism.

00:48:07.220 It was also with,

00:48:08.300 so we have a whole bunch of then non-economic,

00:48:11.720 directly, and non-political elements as well.

00:48:14.740 People should be free thinking with respect to their romantic lives.

00:48:18.400 People should be free thinking with respect to science.

00:48:20.880 Anybody can become a scientist as well.

00:48:23.300 So robust free speech and free thinking in those institutions as well.

00:48:29.660 The great battle against slavery was launched by the modern liberals.

00:48:34.340 We need to free all of the slaves.

00:48:36.300 They should have the exact same freedoms.

00:48:38.260 The same thing with respect to women. 0.99

00:48:40.620 Women shouldn't be second or third class. 1.00

00:48:42.460 They also are individuals with their own minds.

00:48:44.940 They should be self-governing individuals

00:48:47.120 in all areas of their lives as well.

00:48:49.840 So what you then have is classical liberalism,

00:48:53.380 as we now call it,

00:48:55.160 was a robust program that was basically liberal across the board,

00:48:59.420 and that was the one that transformed the modern world in the 1800s

00:49:03.380 and on into the 1900s.

00:49:05.800 Now, what we call modern liberalism is a compromise philosophy.

00:49:12.060 It's an attempt to forge a hybrid.

00:49:14.580 And the hybrid comes out of looking at what also happened in the modern world

00:49:20.220 after the fall of feudalism.

00:49:22.920 Once we get past the idea that we're going to have this hierarchical society,

00:49:26.920 kings and nobles,

00:49:28.300 and even our religion is going to be hierarchically based and so forth,

00:49:31.640 and everybody knowing their place in society and so forth,

00:49:34.840 we're going to explode the feudal hierarchical understanding of the world.

00:49:40.600 What are we going to replace that with?

00:49:42.640 And there was a significant school of thinkers and activists who said,

00:49:46.500 we don't like the liberal model.

00:49:48.640 Instead, what we want is to emphasize a more collective,

00:49:53.540 and in many cases, a more authoritarian, collective, egalitarian approach to philosophy.

00:49:59.940 And so we then have a tradition that is anti-liberal from the get-go,

00:50:04.580 coming out of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Marx,

00:50:09.500 and other thinkers in the March of History of Philosophy as we go on here.

00:50:18.600 The important point about this is that all of these people are anti-feudal,

00:50:22.360 but they are also anti-liberal.

00:50:25.140 And in many cases, what they will say is that the new ideal society

00:50:28.580 society is going to be some sort of collectivized, communitarian,

00:50:34.340 it might be class-based, it might be more tribally based,

00:50:37.600 and that's Marx versus Rousseau and so forth,

00:50:40.000 but it is definitely not going to be liberal,

00:50:43.740 and it's not going to be individualistic,

00:50:45.440 it's not going to be capitalistic,

00:50:47.580 it's not going to be democratic in that classically liberal sense as well.

00:50:52.420 So the story of the rise of what we now call the left,

00:50:57.080 and the left portraying itself as a new, modern ideal that we should strive for,

00:51:03.300 became very popular by the time we get to the late 1800s and on into the 1900s.

00:51:10.220 So what intelligent, well-meaning young people in the Western world are confronted with

00:51:15.880 by the time we get, say, to the turn of the 20th century,

00:51:18.640 is to say, I understand this liberal, individualistic approach,

00:51:23.880 and I can see the appeal of many elements of that,

00:51:27.060 but at the same time, I also see the appeal of a more collectivized,

00:51:31.740 communitarian, socialistic approach.

00:51:34.640 And so what we call so-called modern liberals are people who want to say,

00:51:38.440 we believe, with the classical liberals, on certain kinds of freedoms.

00:51:43.360 Women should be free. 1.00

00:51:44.920 Obviously, we shouldn't have slavery anymore.

00:51:47.360 We should have certain kinds of civil rights, 0.99

00:51:49.680 and we should have significant amounts of participation by citizens in the political process and so on.

00:51:54.600 So we are agreeing with the traditional classical liberals on all of that.

00:51:59.820 But on the economic front, we are much more committed to the idea of the left

00:52:05.240 and seeing the assets as belonging to the community,

00:52:09.300 that those should be distributed more equally among the community,

00:52:13.060 and or that the government should be significantly involved in managing the economy in various directions

00:52:18.820 and making sure that everybody is looked after in various ways.

00:52:23.760 So what we call so-called modern liberalism, then,

00:52:26.900 is a hybrid of classical liberalism and a kind of communicarian socialism.

00:52:32.180 It agrees in varying degrees with the economic program,

00:52:36.540 but it agrees with these people over here on the civil rights kind of program.

00:52:44.080 Now, that then, I think, is the first important clarification.

00:52:47.680 So what we then have had mostly in the 20th century was people who wanted to say,

00:52:52.080 we need to be individualists, we need to be capitalists, we need to be free market,

00:52:57.320 we need to be democratic, republicans, freedom of religion, et cetera, et cetera, in a robust way.

00:53:03.560 Then we have the people who are strongly committed to various types of communitarian,

00:53:09.680 socialism, communism, and the most dominant form of that was quite authoritarian.

00:53:16.120 And then people in the middle who want to kind of split the difference in various ways

00:53:20.220 or forge a compromise version of them.

00:53:22.940 And that was sometimes called modern liberalism in high academics.

00:53:28.100 By the time we get to the political space, it was usually called the third way.

00:53:32.500 So just to go back one generation, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, for example,

00:53:37.840 then the president of the United States and the prime minister of Great Britain

00:53:41.940 at the collapse of the Soviet Union.

00:53:44.820 So finally, the Cold War, some sort of liberalism seems to have won against this socialism.

00:53:51.880 But immediately at that point, they were very quick to say,

00:53:55.820 as good kind of modern liberalism compromises, well, yes, obviously socialism went too far

00:54:01.760 and it's a failure, but we don't want to be too classically liberal.

00:54:06.060 We want a third way that's going to combine the best of both worlds.

00:54:09.320 And so they are offering a kind of compromise version.

00:54:12.820 Now, I want to say that's partly just a conceptual distinction that we are making here.

00:54:18.780 The issue of whether we should be consistently liberal,

00:54:23.280 consistently socialist collectivist,

00:54:25.880 or whether we should try to work out some sort of compromise,

00:54:28.360 that's been the debate for the last generation.

00:54:31.200 Okay.

00:54:31.560 I have two more questions.

00:54:33.620 Question number one is,

00:54:34.940 why do you think the Russian philosopher Dugin appeals to many people

00:54:41.660 who claim to be post-liberals, especially on the right?

00:54:46.940 Well, Dugin is clearly a post-liberal.

00:54:51.000 I don't know how much your audience is familiar with the work of Alexander Dugin.

00:54:56.660 Some of the suspicions are that he is Putin's brain.

00:55:01.720 I think that's a little bit overstated.

00:55:04.380 But the question is, from the Russian intellectual perspective,

00:55:10.300 what is Russia going to do over the course of the last generation 0.77

00:55:15.680 after the fall of the Soviet Union?

00:55:18.360 And what Dugin has been very successful at is marketing a philosophy

00:55:24.900 that has significant elements of a good reading of history

00:55:29.180 that wants to say, if we look at the history of the 20th century,

00:55:33.880 the history of the 20th century came down to three philosophies

00:55:37.860 that were abstractly realized and then instantiated in political reality.

00:55:44.240 And that in addition to this three-way philosophical intellectual battle,

00:55:49.340 we also had a three-way physical battle often spilling out into war.

00:55:55.540 Those three ideologies were liberalism, by which he means,

00:56:01.140 Western, democratic, capitalistic, Republican, individualistic,

00:56:07.220 pro-science, et cetera, basically the Western world,

00:56:10.980 and the United States as the most prominent exponent of that philosophy.

00:56:15.480 The second one was communism or socialistic or international socialism

00:56:21.060 coming out of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and so forth.

00:56:24.980 And that was hugely prominent with the Soviet Union

00:56:28.500 as the leading exemplar of that.

00:56:31.160 And certainly communist China under Mao is an important part of that.

00:56:35.300 So we have that story of those two.

00:56:37.580 But also there was the fascist approach.

00:56:40.980 And the fascist approach first launched by Mussolini in Italy,

00:56:45.260 and then in a kind of a sibling or close cousin variation,

00:56:51.060 the national socialists in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.

00:56:56.560 So Dugan's account of the 20th century,

00:56:58.480 and I think this is by and large right at a certain level of abstraction,

00:57:01.740 is to say it was liberalism versus fascism versus socialism,

00:57:06.520 or socialism in the communistic form.

00:57:09.340 And so what we then did was we took all of those theories,

00:57:12.620 we put them into practice experimentally,

00:57:14.780 and one of the things that comes out in the experiment is then a collision

00:57:17.680 between these models of organizing society.

00:57:23.660 And fascism was largely discredited by the time we get to the middle part

00:57:27.560 of the 20th century.

00:57:29.120 By the time we get to the end of the 20th century,

00:57:31.840 communistic socialism has been discredited.

00:57:34.600 So it seems like the only thing left standing is some sort of liberalism on the Western model.

00:57:43.400 And certainly many people in the West wanted to say,

00:57:46.740 in effect, we have reached the kind of the end of history,

00:57:49.740 to borrow Fukuyama's phrase,

00:57:52.040 that what we have learned as a result of both theory and practice

00:57:55.580 is that some sort of liberalism is the future,

00:57:58.780 and it's only a matter of time until the rest of the world gets on board

00:58:02.100 and we all become kind of liberal, democratic, republican, capitalist at some point.

00:58:07.680 Now, Dugan, though, as a philosopher,

00:58:11.060 at this point he is in his 30s,

00:58:14.180 and so he has matured as an intellectual,

00:58:16.680 and he hates liberalism.

00:58:19.640 He hates all of the elements of illiberalism all the way down.

00:58:23.680 And he is intelligent and articulate at being able to recognize and verbalize

00:58:30.080 what the elements of the liberal package are.

00:58:34.840 And what he hates,

00:58:36.180 the language is not too strong here,

00:58:38.040 in the 1990s is that liberalism seems to be the victor.

00:58:43.940 So what he wants is to try to find some way

00:58:46.520 to say there's going to be another alternative for the future

00:58:51.880 and for Russia in particular

00:58:53.900 that is not going to be liberal.

00:58:56.880 What he does in the 1990s,

00:58:58.720 by the time we get to the late 1990s,

00:59:01.100 is say what we need to do is revive fascism.

00:59:04.080 And he makes no bones about it,

00:59:05.600 that it clearly is just traditional, straight-up fascism.

00:59:09.860 Mussolini was great.

00:59:11.520 Hitler and the Nazis were great. 1.00

00:59:13.380 Their only problem was that they compromised too much

00:59:15.800 with the liberals, with the capitalists, and so forth.

00:59:18.700 And they introduced a virus into the noble purity of fascism,

00:59:22.500 and that's why they failed.

00:59:24.220 So by the time we get to the late 1990s,

00:59:27.540 Dugan is arguing that we need to take ethnicity seriously.

00:59:32.640 We need to see individuals not as having rights 1.00

00:59:37.240 and that we're going to have some sort of scientific,

00:59:39.220 technological utopia in the future,

00:59:41.360 but rather we are communitarian,

00:59:44.300 we are ethnic, we have our religion,

00:59:46.580 we have our language,

00:59:47.660 and the idea that somehow our ethnicity

00:59:50.580 and our nation is special,

00:59:52.880 and its job is to lead the world forward,

00:59:56.420 just like Mussolini and Hitler 0.91

00:59:59.100 and the other fascists thought so.

01:00:00.620 So we basically take the fascist program

01:00:02.540 and we translate it and customize it

01:00:04.880 for the Russian context.

01:00:07.200 Now, what Dugan does is he evolves some

01:00:10.840 over the course of the next decade,

01:00:13.140 and he stops talking fascistically,

01:00:17.120 using the language of fascism more explicitly,

01:00:20.680 and he also broadens his understanding

01:00:24.520 of the place of Russia in the world,

01:00:27.260 that Russia, of course, is going to be the leading nation,

01:00:29.200 but Russia is also going to be more expansionistic,

01:00:34.340 and it's going to include all of the geographically neighboring areas,

01:00:39.560 and they will then be unified

01:00:41.320 into a kind of pan-Eurasian political ethnic mass

01:00:46.340 that will then take the world further into the future.

01:00:50.040 So that's Putin's positive program,

01:00:52.880 and it is communitarian,

01:00:55.800 it is ethnically focused,

01:00:57.780 it is deeply religious,

01:00:59.120 he wants to incorporate Russian Orthodox,

01:01:01.880 it's not clear that he actually believes,

01:01:04.020 but he certainly sees that religion

01:01:06.140 as an important cultural force.

01:01:08.820 And to come now directly to your question

01:01:10.880 about why he is attractive to people

01:01:13.100 on the post-liberal right, so to speak,

01:01:17.600 is that he mounts many of the same criticisms

01:01:20.320 of Western liberalism

01:01:22.120 that people on the post-liberal right

01:01:25.060 mount with respect to liberalism,

01:01:27.280 that it's too rationalistic,

01:01:29.200 it's too individualistic,

01:01:30.900 it leads to all kinds of immoralities,

01:01:33.820 it's corrosive of certain fundamental institutions,

01:01:37.200 moral institutions, political institutions,

01:01:40.140 religious institutions that they think are important.

01:01:43.000 And so from that perspective,

01:01:45.380 liberalism, because it elevates the individual

01:01:48.380 and it elevates freedom,

01:01:49.700 it's just going to end up in all kinds of perversions,

01:01:52.740 all kinds of nihilisms,

01:01:54.520 and a collapsing society.

01:01:56.460 And so from their perspective,

01:01:58.300 their critiques of liberalism

01:02:00.460 and Dugan's critiques of liberalism

01:02:02.320 are strongly overlapping.

01:02:04.300 Right. And I think we come to the last question,

01:02:07.720 which I want to contextualize a bit.

01:02:10.320 So what is the proper relation

01:02:14.180 between individualism and care for society?

01:02:18.280 Now, a lot of people think that individualism

01:02:21.360 is inherently asocial.

01:02:23.440 I think that this is a mistake.

01:02:25.980 Individualism is precisely a concern

01:02:29.600 about how to coexist.

01:02:31.820 Robinson Crusoe would not care about individual rights.

01:02:35.840 There would be no one to violate them

01:02:37.340 in an island.

01:02:39.980 So the question becomes,

01:02:42.220 number one, what is individualism?

01:02:44.340 And number two,

01:02:45.360 whether individualism

01:02:47.800 and a kind of support for one's society

01:02:51.360 and for one's culture

01:02:52.520 that could be seen as grounding

01:02:55.900 the institutions that ground

01:02:58.860 political and economic freedom be.

01:03:02.780 What should the relation be between them?

01:03:06.040 Yeah, again, another great question

01:03:08.320 and a very rich question.

01:03:10.100 I think you're exactly right.

01:03:12.420 Individualism is a philosophy

01:03:15.280 that wants to say,

01:03:17.900 if you want to have a good society,

01:03:19.740 then you need to take the individual seriously,

01:03:23.080 fundamentally,

01:03:24.120 and treat with a sacrosanct evaluation.

01:03:30.120 So the idea of individual versus society

01:03:33.940 comes from an alien philosophical perspective

01:03:38.480 that wants to say,

01:03:40.040 we need to valorize the society in some sense,

01:03:43.220 and we see individuals as bad,

01:03:46.420 as sinful,

01:03:47.440 as self-destructive,

01:03:48.620 as other destructive.

01:03:49.680 It's a very pessimistic understanding,

01:03:51.840 typically of human nature,

01:03:53.680 that if you see individuals that way

01:03:56.040 and you have certain social values,

01:03:57.580 then you will say

01:03:58.340 it's the individual versus society,

01:04:01.200 and what we need to do

01:04:01.980 is tame the individual

01:04:03.440 or otherwise control the individual

01:04:06.340 so that we can achieve certain social values.

01:04:09.500 Now, the proper and I think healthy way

01:04:11.220 of understanding the relationship

01:04:12.660 between the individual and society

01:04:14.500 is to say

01:04:15.220 the societies are made up of individuals.

01:04:19.640 The society is not an organism.

01:04:22.800 In many cases, in strong forms,

01:04:25.840 the socialists,

01:04:27.960 this is small s,

01:04:28.840 socialists will say

01:04:29.800 that individuals really are

01:04:31.940 elements of an organism.

01:04:34.200 Society is an organism,

01:04:35.660 and that your job is

01:04:36.620 just to be a cell

01:04:38.020 that cannot exist apart

01:04:39.460 from the larger organism,

01:04:40.760 and that you are to perform

01:04:42.160 a delimited function

01:04:43.260 in the organism as a whole.

01:04:46.580 So the individual wants to say,

01:04:48.020 no, first and foremost,

01:04:49.920 we are individuals ontologically.

01:04:52.220 We are separate physically,

01:04:55.160 and then cognitively,

01:04:56.740 and this is where philosophy

01:04:58.460 and epistemological issues

01:05:01.460 become very important,

01:05:02.740 that part of being an individual

01:05:04.580 is to have one's own mind,

01:05:07.600 that you perceive the world,

01:05:09.260 you have your memories,

01:05:10.540 you organize your understanding

01:05:12.060 of the world in a certain way,

01:05:14.100 and that you are in charge

01:05:15.420 of that process.

01:05:16.420 You can, of course,

01:05:17.000 learn a huge amount

01:05:17.880 from other people,

01:05:19.280 but it's always individuals

01:05:20.300 who need to do that processing 0.85

01:05:22.260 and say, yes, I agree,

01:05:24.600 and internalize that

01:05:25.900 into their intellectual framework,

01:05:29.700 and I'm going to act

01:05:30.660 on the basis of that.

01:05:31.760 So individuals are ontologically real.

01:05:35.160 They exist.

01:05:35.800 They're not just fragments

01:05:36.640 of some larger social organism.

01:05:39.180 They have cognitive agency.

01:05:41.360 They have behavioral agency.

01:05:43.280 As a result of that,

01:05:44.320 individuals are moral agents.

01:05:47.080 We should hold them responsible

01:05:48.360 for their thinking,

01:05:50.140 hold them responsible

01:05:50.940 for their agency

01:05:52.420 against various forms of,

01:05:55.040 again, small s, socializing

01:05:57.780 that wants to say,

01:05:59.060 no, the individual is not controlled

01:06:00.920 because individuals

01:06:01.840 are just socialized

01:06:03.460 by forces beyond their control,

01:06:05.120 and they are just avatars

01:06:06.680 acting on the basis

01:06:07.660 of various kinds

01:06:08.560 of social agendas.

01:06:10.340 So the individualist

01:06:11.960 then starts at a very fundamental

01:06:13.580 philosophical level.

01:06:15.360 Individuals are real,

01:06:16.560 metaphysically.

01:06:17.960 They have cognitive agency.

01:06:19.320 They have behavioral agency.

01:06:20.960 They have moral agency.

01:06:23.160 And so if we are concerned

01:06:24.420 with treating human beings properly,

01:06:28.100 we first have to recognize them

01:06:29.740 as individuals.

01:06:31.160 Now, individuals do form,

01:06:33.280 importantly, into social units.

01:06:36.420 So, you know, we can start one way

01:06:37.960 and say, you know,

01:06:38.560 a man and a woman,

01:06:39.840 they start off as individuals,

01:06:41.440 but they recognize certain things

01:06:43.840 about each other.

01:06:44.800 They form positive judgments

01:06:46.720 about each other,

01:06:48.100 and they decide

01:06:49.040 that they're going to come together.

01:06:50.960 They say first as boyfriend,

01:06:52.140 girlfriend, as say husband and wife,

01:06:54.880 that they are going to form

01:06:55.900 a social unit.

01:06:58.120 And the individualist wants to say

01:06:59.620 if it's going to be

01:07:00.480 a healthy relationship

01:07:02.140 or a healthy marriage,

01:07:03.620 it has to be one

01:07:04.780 that respects both individuals

01:07:07.460 as individuals

01:07:08.640 who are making a voluntary choice

01:07:11.180 and a voluntary commitment,

01:07:13.500 that they now jointly

01:07:14.440 are going to make,

01:07:16.140 say, a new unit,

01:07:17.960 a new social unit.

01:07:19.180 They will, say, start a family.

01:07:20.800 And so the new baby,

01:07:22.820 an infant,

01:07:23.280 will come into the world.

01:07:24.780 And it is a developmental process,

01:07:26.580 but that baby is going to grow

01:07:28.380 to have as its own body,

01:07:30.240 has its own mind,

01:07:31.180 becomes an agent.

01:07:32.440 And the job of the parents

01:07:33.740 is to foster this individual

01:07:35.640 now in the context

01:07:37.240 of a healthy social unit

01:07:38.740 so that it can grow up

01:07:40.000 to be a functioning individual

01:07:43.520 in other social units.

01:07:45.540 Part of it is to say

01:07:46.760 that you're going to take responsibility

01:07:48.420 as an individual

01:07:49.520 for your economic life.

01:07:52.240 I recognize that values

01:07:55.160 that I'm going to consume

01:07:56.700 need to be produced in the world.

01:07:58.660 So I need to acquire

01:07:59.640 some knowledge and some skills

01:08:01.360 so that I can be

01:08:02.920 a productive person

01:08:03.980 and support myself in the world.

01:08:07.080 And that I'm not going to

01:08:08.040 shift that responsibility off

01:08:10.100 to say, oh, no,

01:08:11.120 other people are responsible

01:08:12.640 for looking after me.

01:08:13.940 So I'm going to be economically

01:08:15.560 an individual agent.

01:08:17.060 I'm not going to be a freeloader. 0.82

01:08:18.460 I'm not going to be a parasite

01:08:19.660 in various forms as well.

01:08:21.960 And so we can then say,

01:08:23.220 well, in the economic sphere,

01:08:24.680 what does individualism mean?

01:08:26.280 Well, I make some stuff.

01:08:28.420 I've been productive.

01:08:29.560 You have been productive

01:08:30.480 as an individual.

01:08:31.560 We both have been

01:08:32.400 productive individuals.

01:08:33.500 That's good.

01:08:34.760 But again, we recognize

01:08:35.860 I've got something you want.

01:08:37.500 You have something I want.

01:08:39.280 We spot the potential

01:08:40.340 for a trade.

01:08:41.680 And then I'm going to respect you

01:08:43.520 as an individual that you need

01:08:45.380 to get from this trade

01:08:46.440 what you need.

01:08:47.760 But you also are going

01:08:48.700 to respect me as an individual

01:08:50.380 to get what I need

01:08:51.800 from this trade.

01:08:53.060 We will negotiate.

01:08:54.500 We will make a trade.

01:08:56.040 We will shake hands

01:08:57.200 in a way that's going

01:08:58.100 to be mutually beneficial.

01:09:00.220 And that's then not the basis

01:09:01.640 of a family life,

01:09:02.640 but that's now the basis

01:09:03.560 of doing business.

01:09:05.300 And the individualists

01:09:06.060 want to say, look,

01:09:06.660 if you want to have moral business

01:09:08.740 and you want to have

01:09:09.540 healthy business,

01:09:10.940 business is a kind of socializing,

01:09:12.640 but it has to be based

01:09:13.900 on respecting individuals

01:09:16.260 as free agents

01:09:17.440 in the economic sphere.

01:09:19.800 Same thing we want to say

01:09:20.920 with respect to religion.

01:09:22.520 Religion should not be 1.00

01:09:23.660 a matter of conditioning people

01:09:25.220 from an early age

01:09:26.520 or using various coercive threats

01:09:29.040 to get them to conform

01:09:30.260 behaviorally to your religion.

01:09:32.560 Religion is something 1.00

01:09:33.520 about beliefs and behaviors

01:09:35.400 and what you are going

01:09:36.420 to think about

01:09:37.940 the fate of your soul

01:09:39.320 or your value framework

01:09:40.680 and so on.

01:09:41.400 that the individualists

01:09:42.620 want to say, yes,

01:09:43.660 we can learn from each other

01:09:45.580 about religion.

01:09:46.480 We can have debates

01:09:47.260 about religion.

01:09:47.940 We can join into

01:09:49.440 religious institutions

01:09:50.460 and so on.

01:09:51.140 But that has to be

01:09:52.020 on the basis of individuals

01:09:53.960 thinking for themselves,

01:09:56.120 finding like-minded individuals,

01:09:58.400 and then forming institutions

01:10:00.060 or forming various kinds

01:10:01.440 of social relationships

01:10:03.120 with people that they

01:10:04.160 as individuals

01:10:04.980 judge to be so.

01:10:06.180 So if you want religion 0.70

01:10:07.000 to be done healthily,

01:10:08.360 it has to be done

01:10:09.340 on the basis of individualism.

01:10:11.680 So the individualist

01:10:13.100 then from this perspective

01:10:14.060 wants to say

01:10:14.760 proper sociability

01:10:15.960 is on an individualistic basis.

01:10:18.760 There's no disharmony

01:10:20.140 or conflict there.

01:10:21.560 So is it safe

01:10:22.680 to conclude

01:10:23.400 that people who advocate

01:10:25.620 for individualism

01:10:26.900 care for a community

01:10:28.520 in a qualified sense?

01:10:31.480 and in that case,

01:10:33.240 communitarians

01:10:34.180 don't have a monopoly

01:10:35.440 on caring about a community.

01:10:38.980 Would you say

01:10:39.460 that this is safe

01:10:40.520 to conclude?

01:10:42.180 Yes.

01:10:43.100 So communitarians

01:10:45.040 in many cases

01:10:45.680 are genuine.

01:10:46.480 We care about communal values.

01:10:50.200 And they will then

01:10:51.420 have a hard time

01:10:52.220 conceptually understanding

01:10:53.660 how individualists

01:10:54.820 could also care

01:10:56.120 about community values

01:10:57.400 because from their perspective,

01:10:58.760 the individual

01:10:59.900 is some sort

01:11:00.640 of antisocial being.

01:11:03.240 And so it's just

01:11:04.240 a non-starter

01:11:04.900 from their perspective.

01:11:06.520 So I think

01:11:07.340 the first intellectual step

01:11:08.520 is to say

01:11:09.140 that many communitarians

01:11:11.180 and many individuals

01:11:12.600 will say,

01:11:13.160 yes,

01:11:13.300 we care about social values.

01:11:15.720 We want healthy families,

01:11:18.060 healthy businesses,

01:11:19.120 healthy political systems.

01:11:20.700 So they have the same end,

01:11:22.280 so to speak,

01:11:22.800 but they disagree fundamentally

01:11:24.120 on the means

01:11:24.980 to getting there.

01:11:26.740 Now,

01:11:26.860 at the same time,

01:11:27.600 I do want to say

01:11:28.700 that there are

01:11:29.320 many communitarians

01:11:30.460 who I don't really think

01:11:31.580 caring about

01:11:32.460 healthy communal values

01:11:34.260 is what's really going on.

01:11:35.720 There's some sort

01:11:36.480 of other agenda

01:11:37.900 at work there.

01:11:39.820 And so in that case,

01:11:40.620 it's not only about means,

01:11:42.260 it's also about the ends.

01:11:44.380 Excellent.

01:11:45.480 So thank you very much,

01:11:46.800 Professor Hicks,

01:11:47.500 for this interview.

01:11:49.240 And I hope...

01:11:50.040 Really great and rich questions.

01:11:51.960 And time flew by.

01:11:54.160 I look forward

01:11:54.940 to seeing it published.

01:11:56.140 Selyos.

01:11:57.600 Thank you very much

01:11:58.580 and I hope

01:11:59.420 to you,

01:12:00.120 the members of our audience,

01:12:01.380 I hope you enjoyed this.

01:12:03.000 And thank you very much

01:12:03.820 and see you next time.

01:12:05.200 Goodbye.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 17, 2024

Western Academia and Individualism ｜ Interview with Prof Stephen Hicks

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