In this episode of the Lotus Eaters podcast, I interview Professor Stephen Hicks. Professor Hicks is a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, and has been in the field of philosophy for over 30 years. In this episode, we talk about his journey into philosophy, how he got started in philosophy, and what it means to be a philosopher in the modern world.
00:00:00.000Hello 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.
00:00:11.460Thanks for the invitation. Happy to be here.
00:00:14.740I'm very happy to be talking to you. And I think we have plenty of topics to talk about.
00:00:21.040Oh 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.
00:00:30.680Exactly. 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?
00:00:41.320Well, 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.
00:00:50.860So 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.
00:01:01.180I 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.
00:01:18.840But 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.
00:01:30.760And that was the year that philosophy as a discipline came together in my mind. I understood what it was and I was fascinated.
00:01:40.120And I ended up taking a large number of courses in philosophy, but still planning to go to to engineering and architecture.
00:01:49.040So it wasn't until I was 23 or 24 and I'd run out of money after after graduated.
00:01:55.040So I was working in construction that I was continuing to take, you know, math and science courses to prepare for or for engineering.
00:02:03.720But 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.
00:02:11.780And then at this point, I was in Canada. But I made a decision, you know, I really like philosophy.
00:02:19.040So I applied to a bunch of graduate schools in the United States, ended up coming to the States to get my my PhD degree.
00:02:25.640And I was serious about it. But at the same point, I was always thinking, you know, well, if it doesn't work out,
00:02:31.660because the, you know, getting a job as a philosophy professor and getting through the academic world even then was quite challenging.
00:02:38.940My fallback was to go back to architecture and engineering.
00:02:42.580But thing worked out. And I've been very happy spending my time doing philosophy for for some decades now.
00:02:50.180So 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,
00:03:05.040a very engineering background, and you sort of fell in love with a with a philosophical discipline, it seems.
00:03:12.660Yeah, that's right. So let me just add one more thing.
00:03:16.360It was the STEM, but the architecture side, I don't want to underplay that, because the the aesthetic and the design elements,
00:03:23.240I think one of the things was appealing is, you know, that with the STEM knowledge and the aesthetic element that comes from architecture,
00:03:31.660you are creating the world that you would like to be a part of.
00:03:36.500So there is also a big value component that integrates.
00:03:40.360Exactly. 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.
00:03:52.360And there are several facets of the culture war that stem from academia.
00:04:00.120Now, would you say that this is an accurate assessment? And if so, how did we get here?
00:04:06.220Yes, I would say yes, overall, yes, that is an accurate assessment.
00:04:11.780We are going through one of the great soul searching times for for higher record, higher academics.
00:04:18.540And the liberal education project, on which most modern universities have been based for more than a century now,
00:04:27.620has been severely tested for the last generation or two by strongly illiberal philosophies of education.
00:04:36.480And much of that then has spilled out to outside of the academic world.
00:04:42.180So which is why everyone is aware of what's what's going on there.
00:04:46.720So 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.
00:04:58.680So if you talk about the humanities areas, that's where I think most of the sickness is.
00:05:05.680And I'm using that concept of sickness. We can we can we can unpack that in the social sciences.
00:05:12.080Things are also severely tested and there are serious problems there, but also some signs of health as we get into the natural sciences.
00:05:21.560Things are much healthier. The professional schools, medicine, business and education.
00:05:27.920I think we have to break those down and talk about them separately.
00:05:31.460So the universities need to be broken down into their constituent elements.
00:05:36.760That's just to speak of the academic side.
00:05:38.800Another 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.
00:05:53.840And there I think it is a again a mixed case, but the dynamic is slightly different as well.
00:06:02.240So we can plunge in wherever you like.
00:06:04.600Okay, so I would like to ask you about the intellectual as well as the administrative aspects of the sickness, as you call it.
00:06:15.600Professor Hicks, what do you think are the current intellectual dimensions of the current state of academia in the West?
00:06:24.260Well, I'm a philosopher by training, and I do think that this is fundamentally a philosophical debate.
00:06:31.260Modern 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.
00:06:55.520That 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.
00:07:07.520And so one should have this broad-based education.
00:07:11.520At 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.
00:07:37.780And 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.
00:07:48.360So the idea of a university then is that students are going to get a broad-based education in this content and in the methodology.
00:07:57.480And 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.
00:08:17.920And it's healthy for students then to enter into those debates and themselves even to be able to debate and question their professors.
00:08:26.440Now, 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.
00:08:42.020Now, there was, though, a philosophical counter-revolution that started after World War II, just to choose one significant date.
00:08:51.040Obviously, the world is largely focused on other things as these world wars are going on and the Depression and so on.
00:08:58.420But after World War II, in particular, you see the beginnings of a serious counter-revolution in all of the traditional now liberal arts institutions.
00:09:08.540Because 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.
00:09:25.380Many 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.
00:09:36.540So 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.
00:09:48.480At the same time, in the Western world, philosophy had reached a relatively skeptical point by the time we get to the 1950s.
00:09:57.540And 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.
00:10:13.540And so what we call post-modernism, Leotard's famous phrase about being skeptical about meta-narratives, for example.
00:10:22.380So 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.
00:10:38.640And 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.
00:10:50.300And the names that are most associated with this, deservedly so, are thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others.
00:10:58.440In the 1960s, they rise relatively quickly to the top of their professor.
00:11:03.940They become extraordinarily influential, not only in philosophy, but in the humanities more broadly, and in several of the social sciences.
00:11:11.980They 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.
00:11:23.260Until 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.
00:11:36.040And 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,
00:11:44.560and those who philosophically and deeply are opposed to every element of that.
00:11:49.300By 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,
00:12:02.820into education, mainstream education, into the political sphere, into the artistic sphere, and so on.
00:12:11.540And 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.
00:12:26.220Just add a point here that Foucault and Derrida and Leotard and Richard Rorty, the American postmodernists, all of them are PhDs in philosophy,
00:12:35.820and they are mounting fundamentally philosophical attacks on the Enlightenment and downstream of it, liberal education.
00:12:43.520So that's where I think we are in a nutshell.
00:12:46.200So let me summarize and tell me if you think that I summarize correctly what I take to be your point.
00:12:52.880Liberal education was the dominant model, and the dominant model suggested that education should be about teaching students how to think,
00:13:02.680and how to have a well-rounded education, rather than just being very specialised and losing the big picture, and also being citizens.
00:13:15.700And we have lost this due to several reasons, because we have come to a position where students are being told what to think.
00:13:26.540Most professors, particularly those who are propagating these ideas, are posing as supreme moral authorities that cannot be challenged,
00:13:37.220without challenging them being a sort of hate speech, and we are led into this idea of illiberal and counter-enlightenment education.
00:13:52.960Just to back off a little bit from that, we have lost this.
00:13:57.920I'd say right now, inside the academic world, the debate is engaged, and it is quite vigorous.
00:14:04.640There's a significant number of people inside the academic world who are still Enlightenment thinkers, broadly speaking.
00:14:11.660I think this is why those of us who follow the public intellectual realm, we all know the name Steven Pinker.
00:14:17.320We 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.
00:14:26.400But nonetheless, they are committed to enlightenment values and liberal education.
00:14:31.020So inside the academic world, with those three individuals, especially assuming a kind of leadership role, we are fighting.
00:14:40.840We 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.
00:14:51.160So 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.
00:15:01.780Okay, 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.
00:15:21.780I think I rarely listen to people asking about the elements within analytic philosophy that could be corrosive.
00:15:34.220And 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.
00:15:48.040So, for instance, you mentioned Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker.
00:15:53.220I 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.
00:16:12.220Now, this may be wrong, but tell me if you think that there is such a dominant trend.
00:16:19.480And 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.
00:16:38.480It 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,
00:16:56.640I think that there are several problems with respect to how accounting for basic morality.
00:17:04.980Do you think that this is entirely mistaken or maybe that it has a hint of truth?
00:17:10.180Yes, 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.
00:17:22.400So, 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,
00:17:34.680that most prominence is given to postmodernism and to Frankfurt School critical thinking.
00:17:42.100And both of those come out primarily of continental philosophical traditions.
00:17:47.220So, 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.
00:18:01.660And it is true that the philosophical world from, say, the 1700s, definitely by the time we get into the 1800s,
00:18:11.940was split into broadly Anglo and then American style of philosophy and analytic philosophy largely came out of that tradition and continental philosophy.
00:18:23.860And 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.
00:18:35.920We 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.
00:18:46.800And out of that, we have a kind of philosophical tradition.
00:18:50.200At 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.
00:19:02.260And it is a much more empirically oriented philosophical tradition.
00:19:07.460It'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.
00:19:18.760Now, 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.
00:19:38.380So your first question, I think, is right to say, well, what about the analytic tradition?
00:19:43.940Why might we think that it also contributed to laying the groundwork in some way, the problems that we are having right now?
00:19:52.380So 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.
00:20:09.080So, and all of that needs to be parsed out, and all of that needs to be parsed out a whole lot more.
00:20:12.800But 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.
00:20:26.580So we see this, for example, in the 1920s and on into the 1930s.
00:20:31.560So I'll just use as one example, A.J. Ayer publishes in 1936 a short book called Language, Truth, and Logic.
00:20:42.080And 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,
00:20:59.180and 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.
00:21:12.180But 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.
00:21:24.240That metaphysics is not only kind of a weirdly speculative discipline of human thinking, but it literally is meaningless, and we should stop doing it.
00:21:36.600That 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.
00:21:50.940And the same thing is true of religion and aesthetics as well.
00:21:54.960So 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,
00:22:08.320that philosophy should not anymore be interested in metaphysics, in ethics, in religion, in art.
00:22:18.740That all of these are just non-rational, non-philosophical, meaningless disciplines.
00:22:23.140But there might be other psychological things that we do to study them, but philosophy is going to dismiss them from itself.
00:22:29.480So 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.
00:22:45.820So what we are then left with, then, is really philosophy as maybe a handmaiden to science.
00:22:51.700But 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.
00:22:58.920Well, they would say, according to the empiricist model, they do observations of reality.
00:23:05.380But again, by the 1930s, the leading philosophers are saying our perceptual apparatus just gives us illusions.
00:23:13.380We can't tell the difference between a perception and a hallucination.
00:23:16.880Maybe 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.
00:23:32.180Scientists then want to say that they are using these various abstract concepts.
00:23:37.680But then, where do these abstract concepts come from?
00:23:41.620And 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.
00:23:59.420And then so forth, with respect to all of the other elements of scientific method, that we are doing mathematics, that we are doing logic.
00:24:07.300Well, 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.
00:24:24.120So 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.
00:24:38.520And 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,
00:24:50.860and philosophy, and philosophy, even in the Anglo and American world, is in a very skeptical place.
00:24:56.640So if we are then focusing especially on the epistemology, our view of our minds in relation to reality, can we know the world?
00:25:04.500It's not only the continentals that are highly skeptical, it's also those coming, working in the Anglo-American tradition,
00:25:11.840that we need to just start talking about truth as something that pushes our value buttons,
00:25:16.880or 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.
00:25:26.160And so philosophy has, so to speak, undercut all of its foundational presuppositions that have come down from the Enlightenment,
00:25:34.880and most philosophers are just throwing up their hands and saying, we don't know what we are doing right now.
00:25:40.120So what do you think of the administrative aspect of academia right now?
00:25:47.140Is there any kind of mismanagement? And if so, how do you think, can it be fixed?
00:25:52.120Well, yes, I think there's a few things here that we should say that are downstream from the intellectual,
00:26:02.540and other things I think are not so polite about the administrative thing.
00:26:05.880In many cases, what we have in the administration is partly the long marks through the institution,
00:26:11.740that many people who want to transform in education, they don't like the liberal education model.
00:26:17.460They have some ideological framework that they believe in, but they recognize that if they're going to change higher education or even lower education,
00:26:27.380it's not only the faculty that is going to do that.
00:26:30.120That through student life, through the HR departments, through the various other administrative departments of a large university,
00:26:36.800if 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.
00:26:47.060So just to take one example, it's a fairly common practice for most universities to have an orientation week.
00:26:53.800So students, especially the first year students who are arriving on campus, to give them a week-long introduction to university life.
00:27:01.640And if you can have your people, so to speak, setting the program, what their students are going to read,
00:27:06.280what 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.
00:27:14.240If you can introduce your ideology into orientation week, then that's an important part of it as well.
00:27:20.600The other elements, though, that I think are perhaps less flattering is that many people who go into administration,
00:27:32.480who become deans, who then become provosts, are academics.
00:27:38.300And to put it bluntly, they are failed academics.
00:27:42.020That what they do is they start off as people who are interested in their field.
00:27:47.680They might get a degree in some field, they get their PhD, but they then become professors
00:27:53.180and they realize after five to seven years or so that they really don't like teaching very much
00:27:59.200and perhaps they are not very good at it.
00:28:02.520Or they don't have very much to say, that they're not writers,
00:28:06.840they don't have any sort of interest or track record at getting things published.
00:28:12.760So there you are and say you've got tenure and you're still relatively early in your career,
00:28:19.460but you don't like the idea of 20 or 30 more years of teaching
00:28:23.200and you don't see any prospect for you over the course of the next 20 or 30 years,
00:28:27.660making any sort of a mark as a writer and in terms of publications.
00:28:32.780So what you, of course, can do is what some professors do is you kind of take early retirement.
00:28:37.320At that point, you just give up on things.
00:28:39.020You do the minimum to get through to retirement or whatever.
00:28:42.880But another option for you is to go into administration, to become an associate dean,
00:31:44.780But nonetheless, they they are doing a good job.
00:31:47.980The 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.
00:32:00.100A strong backbone or a strong mind and there are a significant number of them who are politicized.
00:32:05.680So within the administration, there are the same debates.
00:32:09.680And 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?
00:32:34.680I 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.
00:32:50.000If 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.
00:33:04.820So 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?
00:33:19.960And every practically oriented philosophy ultimately does that.
00:33:25.420And 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.
00:33:47.720So philosophy and philosophy and philosophy of education has always been an important spin-off as well.
00:33:55.300So 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.
00:34:17.720And there always are ideologists who are strategic about that.
00:34:23.160So they go into education with the idea of transforming the existing educational institution in the light of their new philosophical framework.
00:34:33.360I think we should go into the next section of our discussion, which is about post-liberalism and also the Russian philosopher Dugin.
00:34:43.960Now, 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.
00:34:58.220This 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.
00:35:10.260So, would you say that this is an accurate assessment, or do you think that post-liberalism right now is sort of deviating from communitarianism?
00:35:23.420No, I think there's a lot to what you just summarized.
00:35:34.080Yeah, so if we take the liberalism component.
00:35:38.160Now, 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.
00:35:56.940Liberalism 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.
00:36:17.620That 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.
00:36:37.020So there's kind of a liberalism all of the way down that can be a broad philosophical outlook.
00:36:43.880So 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.
00:37:10.480And 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.
00:37:23.480So 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.
00:37:37.680Rather, people are conditioned by or puppets of forces, again, beyond their control.
00:37:43.700So 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.
00:37:53.700If 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.
00:38:16.440Now, what do you then replace that liberal philosophy and that liberal culture with?
00:38:24.520And 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.
00:38:41.760Some 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.
00:39:06.840But 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.
00:39:22.760They 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.
00:39:40.080And 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.
00:39:58.080I 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.
00:40:05.960And 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,
00:40:23.020well, 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.
00:40:43.400And 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.
00:40:51.520So 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,
00:41:08.140and then some other people who are Christian nationalists or integralists of various sort,
00:41:15.520they are trying to revive and rework that broadly right-wing conservative territory in a post-liberal direction.
00:41:24.960And I think you're right to say that one significant component of that is the communitarian element.
00:41:30.720Okay, 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.
00:41:39.520So there are several patterns that seem to me to be emerging.
00:41:44.100So first of all, it seems to me that they do not distinguish between the classical strand of the tradition, classical liberalism,
00:41:51.520and what is usually called modern liberalism, that personally I don't like calling it liberalism so much,
00:41:58.260the tradition of the later John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin, and possibly Will Kimlicker.
00:42:06.260And for some reason, it seems to me that they mostly attack this idea of modern liberalism.
00:42:13.580And when you tell them that that's not what the classical liberal tradition is all about,
00:42:19.160they somehow say that, well, it has to somehow lead into this, because liberalism says that we are free and equal.
00:42:27.880When you ask them what it means to be free and equal, they sort of never define,
00:42:32.580they just leave it hanging there, they just say liberalism tells us free and equal.
00:42:37.300And I see this regularly, and I have heard you talking about a conservative mythos of liberalism.
00:42:45.900Would you care to tell us a bit about what this is?
00:42:49.680Because it seems to me that particularly the classical version of the tradition
00:42:54.140is routinely represented by post-liberals as just following money,
00:43:00.440and they routinely forget the political aspect of that tradition.
00:43:04.960They seem to be completely unaware of the republican strand of it,
00:43:10.300and also you could say of some monarchist element within the tradition