TRIGGERnometry - Postmodernism Explained by Professor Stephen Hicks

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:08.660 I'm Constantin Kishin.

00:00:09.840 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:14.980 And it does not get better than the guest we have for you today. He's a philosopher and author,

00:00:19.780 Professor Stephen Hicks. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:21.900 Hey, thanks Francis and Constantin. Honored to be with you.

00:00:25.280 It is a great pleasure to have you here with us. I have so many questions for

00:00:29.980 Francis has a ton as well. But I thought we'd start actually by telling you a little bit about

00:00:33.960 our journey, which is we're two comedians. And about three years ago, we started to feel

00:00:39.520 something in the water. There was something going on where, you know, Francis is an old school

00:00:44.560 lefty. I'm somewhere in the center with a few classically liberal views. And we started to

00:00:50.200 notice that the Overton window for things you could joke about was shrinking. Suddenly,

00:00:55.580 the idea that comedians are supposed to challenge the mainstream narrative was no longer

00:00:59.860 no longer true somehow. You would be punished. You would be criticized for making jokes about

00:01:05.100 things. Identity became a huge part of our world. And we started Trigonometry to talk to people to

00:01:11.580 try and understand what has happened and what is happening. Can you explain to us what's been

00:01:18.380 happening and why we've spent three years of our lives dealing with this? What has been the

00:01:22.460 transformation that has happened in our societies in the West? I think there are a couple of human

00:01:27.340 constants at work one is uh you guys are comedians and all of us should have a sense of humor but we

00:01:32.840 do know that there are lots of people who have absolutely no sense of humor whatever is going

00:01:39.760 on in their life they take it seriously they uh they can't joke about it they don't like jokes

00:01:46.120 about that and as you know humor in several of its main forms is subversive and so they feel it

00:01:52.060 as an attack and they want to shut it down. So the connection to the Overton window is

00:01:57.500 precisely good. From a comedian perspective, everything, there should be no window. Anything

00:02:02.480 is fair game. But the shrinking of the Overton window is an indication of a context in which

00:02:09.140 some things are just not allowed to be said. We do know people have a very narrow Overton window,

00:02:15.420 The second thing is that whenever a group of people gets into positions of power in whatever institution they're talking about, it can be a family, it can be a business, it can be a college or university, there's a philosophical commitment they make.

00:02:32.820 Are they interested in each person as an individual and that person being cultivated to add their talents, to develop their talents?

00:02:41.320 Or are they an authoritarian that they have their vision and they want to impose it upon anyone using whatever tools are at their disposal?

00:02:52.640 And certainly in higher education, this is a prime area where this happens because then you have teachers with students and there's a big power differential.

00:03:00.740 So the philosophical commitment of the teacher comes out very quickly.

00:03:07.440 So there is a constant there about the choice that we all make about what kind of person we're going to be in interacting with other individuals who we know are going to have different views, different tastes, different values, and so on in life.

00:03:20.500 And it's either going to be a mutual respecting and perhaps ultimately tolerating, go our own way if we can't agree atmosphere, or one person is going to try to do a power play and dominate.

00:03:34.740 Now, what often happens, though, in these institutions is you have a plurality of positions available, and so whether the authoritarian type likes it or not, they have to put up with dissenting views, alternative views, there being vigorous debate, and so on.

00:03:52.140 But when the plurality stops being a plurality and you have one position with a large number of people who are in position to dominate, then any pretenses about civil discourse and debate and Overton windows and so on goes out the window and people start to use authoritarian methods in a social context.

00:04:14.740 So that's what's been happening in universities.

00:04:17.560 Now, you guys are comedians. I've noticed the examples at my own university as well. We always had two or three comedians who would come through each year and give a routine for the students. And you could see the shift. The kinds of comedians who were being brought in started to be funny within a narrower range.

00:04:39.840 Certain kinds of comedians just stopped getting invited, and some of them started to become controversial in the sense that, oh, should we really be talking about that sort of thing?

00:04:50.260 So it's not just you guys.

00:04:52.700 It's also over here, but probably you already know that.

00:04:56.360 Now, those are the constants.

00:04:58.280 Why that has happened, why there has been this shift just in the last 10 or 15 years, there's a longer story that would have to be told.

00:05:06.200 because these philosophical shifts and the changes in demographics to one viewpoint becoming dominant and able to enforce itself,

00:05:15.060 or at least thinking that it's able to enforce itself, those things develop slowly.

00:05:20.280 Stephen, tell us more about that longer story. Before Francis takes over, he has loads of questions for as well.

00:05:26.320 What has been the philosophical, because I feel like there's a philosophical shift that underpins a cultural shift,

00:05:31.800 that underpins a political shift. And now everything is political, comedy included.

00:05:37.040 And we experience this in our industry. So tell us more about all of that. How has that happened?

00:05:42.320 Right. So probably the best word here to use is liberal in its generic sense. So we talk about

00:05:49.500 liberal democracy or liberal societies in which we're trying to maximize the amount of freedom

00:05:54.780 that individuals have. And then we think of education and schooling and raising children

00:06:01.320 as preparing them for living a certain kind of life as free, self-responsible, competent

00:06:06.680 individuals who can take on the world.

00:06:09.360 So there is the concept of liberal education, which has a close cognate and a close application

00:06:16.600 there.

00:06:17.600 So the question then is going to be, what is education about?

00:06:22.100 And since human beings are a smart species, we have a big brain, right?

00:06:27.460 Instead of education and schooling being a matter of a couple of weeks or a couple of months, as it is with other animal species, we typically spend 12, 15, 16 years preparing young people for adult life.

00:06:41.340 And it's not until, say, they are 18 that they are ready to go.

00:06:44.960 So what are we doing with that 16 to 18 years?

00:06:48.540 And there's a certain amount, of course, physical health development and so forth.

00:06:51.840 But the vast majority of it is cognitive.

00:06:55.120 And one aspect of that cognitive development is not only self-regulation, but social regulation. How am I going to interact with other people? What are the mores going to be? What are the explicit rules going to be?

00:07:09.500 Are we going to teach students that they need to be able to enter into that process, say, in a liberal democracy, and have their own ideas for how things should be done, be willing to listen to other people's ideas, have arguments, but hopefully productive arguments, being willing to trial and error, do experiments, and so on.

00:07:30.040 And that whole ethos requires a cognitive development and the cultivation of a certain set of principles.

00:07:37.620 Now, what underlies that is and why liberal education and liberal democracies are characteristic of the modern world is that the modern world embodied a brand new philosophical set of commitments three, four, five hundred years ago where you put those dates.

00:07:57.540 And all of that, what we call modernity, has come under attack from a different philosophical perspective that wants to basically blow up or replace the entire modern project with something else.

00:08:13.500 So if you think, for example, about liberal democracy, what are the assumptions there? Well, the assumption there is that we are individuals, that we are self-responsible, that we can think about very important political, cultural matters, that everybody should have a voice.

00:08:31.680 They should be free to put their ideas out there, even to offer themselves as candidates.

00:08:37.360 Everybody should have a vote.

00:08:39.440 And the way we're going to decide very important matters is by counting up the votes and doing what the majority of people say.

00:08:47.960 And that then is to say we have confidence that the vast majority of people have the intellectual capacity to do all of these things.

00:08:56.760 And they also have the moral capacity that they're going to respect other people's having their own ideas and debating.

00:09:04.140 And if I happen to lose a given election, I can expect to lose the elections frequently.

00:09:09.960 I'm going to go along peacefully and then reenter the debate on the next round.

00:09:15.300 And hopefully it will be a self-correcting process.

00:09:18.460 So that's a long way of saying that we respect people in the modern world as individuals.

00:09:24.700 We think they have their own mind, and they should be free to accept it.

00:09:29.980 And so a certain amount of diversity and tolerance becomes very important.

00:09:34.940 Think also about how we do religion in the modern world.

00:09:39.040 And again, we go back to, say, the 1500s, and we tell the story about the Reformation and counter-Reformation.

00:09:46.160 But what came out of that was a new ethos about religion.

00:09:50.020 Again, that we're all individuals.

00:09:52.060 we should be free to think and practice or not at all practice religion in totally our own way

00:09:58.900 that we should get the state and government out of religion because the state is an incident of

00:10:04.120 coercion and religion should be something that people freely adopt or freely reject and we need

00:10:10.580 to respect and tolerate all of the so that then is to say on this very important set of issues we

00:10:16.080 think it's up to people to work it out for themselves and we're going to give people a lot

00:10:20.480 of individual freedom to do so. So again, we're back to individualism and freedom and people being

00:10:27.460 rationally able to govern their own lives. Now, all of that has implications for science. If we

00:10:35.020 are rational beings, it has implications for how we treat women and members of other races because

00:10:42.520 they're human beings who have their own minds and their own values. They're also individuals who are

00:10:47.700 rational. So the whole modern world has been extraordinarily revolutionary in all of these

00:10:53.140 dimensions, political, economic, scientific, religious, in the treatment of other races and

00:10:58.660 so on. Now, what the postmoderns are doing, and this is for deep philosophical reasons,

00:11:05.000 is, and they're all very smart people in the first generation, people like Michel Foucault

00:11:09.880 and Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty and so on, is they're first-rate educated people. All of them

00:11:16.520 are PhDs, all of them in philosophy, my field, and they have this big perspective on what has

00:11:23.160 happened in the grand sweep of historical development in philosophy, in culture, and

00:11:28.600 politics, and so on, and all of them are convinced that the modern project is a failure, and it's a

00:11:35.680 failure intellectually, and they believe also that it's a failure culturally, that it's based

00:11:42.380 on individualism but we are not individuals it's based on the idea that we have rationality

00:11:48.520 that we are rational animals and they don't believe fundamentally in rationality anymore

00:11:54.120 and then as a result of that they're not going to believe in liberal education it's going to be a

00:11:58.760 different kind of education that they are inter trusted in and fundamentally they're not going

00:12:03.960 to believe in any sort of liberal democracy and so the political manifestations are going to be

00:12:09.180 very different as well. And Stephen, what you're talking about is really, really, really fascinating.

00:12:16.840 One thing that I want to touch on is you've mentioned authoritarianism. Now, to me, it seems

00:12:22.660 that these types of people that we're discussing about, they very much want to reintroduce

00:12:29.560 authoritarianism. If you look at the example that you used about comedians, well, I don't like this

00:12:35.540 particular comedian. Therefore, we shut them down. Therefore, we don't listen to them. I don't like

00:12:39.720 this type of thought. I don't like these arguments. Therefore, I shut them down. Isn't this just a

00:12:45.400 rather grandiose way of reintroducing authoritarianism back into our society?

00:12:52.360 That's exactly right. That is the political manifestation. Now, authoritarianism means

00:12:57.740 a certain kind of social power or political power, right? That rather than listening to you

00:13:04.180 and letting you speak and perhaps entering into an argument with you, which has its own ethos.

00:13:11.020 Instead, I try literally to have you physically removed. And if you start to speak, then I try

00:13:18.540 physically to intimidate you or to overthrow you. So authoritarianism is about the use of physical

00:13:25.640 power. And of course, political dictators whom we call authoritarians, that's exactly what we do.

00:13:31.820 So, yeah, and this is the deep question. Am I going to treat you as a free agent and have to respect that and perhaps tolerate that? Or am I going to try to threaten you and physically shut you down? And that latter is the authoritarian move.

00:13:47.300 Now, the thing that's different about the modern authoritarians is, well, authoritarianism historically has always come in two forms.

00:13:56.620 I mean, one kind of authoritarianism is a kind of, I would call it a pretense objectivity kind of authoritarianism, that I think that I am a special individual, that, you know, maybe I have been endowed by God with special moral character or special insight.

00:14:16.240 And because I have this objective source that is granting me and authorizing me to use power over you lesser beings, then I am morally justified in using power to stop you from saying the stupid, immoral things that you otherwise might say.

00:14:42.540 Now, that, of course, can come in religious form.

00:14:46.500 It can come in secular forms as well.

00:14:49.280 What's different about the postmoderns, though, is in addition to being against the modern world, they're also against what we typically call the pre-modern world, where that kind of religiously based, right?

00:15:01.380 Or, you know, if I'm the king and I acquired power on the battlefield or through political machinations, that demonstrates my superiority and gives me the right to use my power to shut other people down.

00:15:17.180 They also believe that those are veneers of objectivity are also faulty.

00:15:23.940 So what they're left with is a deep belief that everybody is in a subjective perspective.

00:15:30.640 We don't get our values from God. We don't get our values from nature. We don't get them from our own biological needs. Instead, all values are just subjective. We make them up or they are conditioned into us by random social forces.

00:15:48.140 so nobody really knows what's true nobody's in a better position of knowing anything more there

00:15:54.520 is no such thing really as truth or knowledge everyone's values are just a subjective uh set

00:16:01.380 of emotional commitments that they have so the post-moderns will say you know i might try to have

00:16:06.960 a veneer of saying oh no really my values came from god and yours didn't but that's just a veneer

00:16:13.380 So they will not buy into any of that. So all we are left with is different people have different belief systems, different value commitments, and we can't reason about them.

00:16:24.980 We can't find out which ones are better, which ones are worse, because all of that's just as subjective as well.

00:16:29.580 So really, all we are left with is a social power struggle. And you might as well just jump into that power struggle and use any strategies or any tactics you can to have your subjective value commitments prevail.

00:16:43.380 So it's an authoritarianism, but based on an explicit subjectivity.

00:16:48.880 And it also seems to me, Stephen, that it's an authoritarianism mixed with, I don't know the word for it, but with a desire for a utopia, which has never existed.

00:17:01.780 And they believe that if they assert themselves in this authoritarian manner, they will achieve nirvana, utopia, where everybody's equal, as long as we do these particular steps and you shut up and you don't and you're not allowed to speak.

00:17:17.820 Yeah. Well, I think there's a split then within postmodernism on that issue. And that's nicely said, what you've said there. I think some of the postmoderns don't believe in utopia at all. Because what would utopia be?

00:17:34.900 A utopia would be the idea that there is an ideal reality that is proper for human beings, and it should be the same for all human beings.

00:17:45.960 And I have genuine knowledge about how to get human beings from where we are now to that utopia.

00:17:51.480 If you start to go down that road, then you are not a postmodernist in the sense of a subjectivist or a relativist. You have become an objectivist, small o, and a universalist again. And you're starting to sound more like an old-fashioned authoritarian.

00:18:08.840 But I think you're right that there is a there is a generational shift. And when we use very broad labels like modern, pre-modern, post-modern and so on, they are at a very high level of abstraction.

00:18:22.240 So a standard analogy is to say someone can be religious, and there's a big difference between people who are committed to being religious and those who are naturalistic, purely in their thinking.

00:18:32.760 But religion is a very broad label, and as we know, religion then divides into many major religions, and each of those major religions has lots of subspecies, and not all of the members of all of those subspecies, even though they will share some general traits,

00:18:47.020 will agree on everything and they will disagree on some pretty fundamental things you know we

00:18:52.580 know there are some religious people who believe in heaven and a happy ever after for everyone

00:18:57.760 some people who believe in religion but they think that most people are going to go to hell

00:19:02.140 and only an elect few are going to go other people believe in religion but they don't really

00:19:06.720 focus so much on heaven and hell they focus on uh just living a moral life in the here and now

00:19:12.420 and so on. So I think your utopian version of postmodernism, in my taxonomy, it's a second

00:19:20.420 generation of aspect. Those who will commit to the idea of postmodernism, that we're not individuals,

00:19:29.400 we're members of groups, and that these groups subjectively construct our values. But what

00:19:35.200 these ones do is they convince themselves in some way that their group's values really are

00:19:41.880 best for all human beings and those other human beings if only they were reshaped appropriately

00:19:48.760 they could come to adopt my group's values and the world would be a better place whether it

00:19:54.740 be utopia or not i don't know so um uh there are different political versions of post-modernism as

00:20:04.500 well the historical point is that post-modernism first developed out of the left out of the far

00:20:10.740 left. Now, the left also is a big tent with many subgroups as well, but there was a subsection of

00:20:16.700 the far left. And that left did have a certain set of values that it used to believe were

00:20:22.360 universalistic values to be imposed on everyone in society. And a certain kind of making everybody

00:20:29.300 equal across all social dimensions was part of that far leftist package. So one of the ways of

00:20:36.740 getting to your utopian understanding or at least of the utopian types is to say that they've

00:20:42.580 retained that certain kind of very robust egalitarianism everything must be made equal

00:20:49.260 and that's combined with a certain number of post-modern themes so we have a kind of hybrid

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00:22:16.100 That's really interesting.

00:22:17.440 And Stephen, I want to ask you about a thing again,

00:22:20.820 coming back to the comedy side of things.

00:22:23.840 And it's broader than comedy, of course.

00:22:25.500 but there has been in recent years the spread or the proliferation, I would say, of the idea that

00:22:31.680 words are violence, that words cause harm. Where does that come from? Because that's such a

00:22:37.580 revolutionary concept. If we think back to even five years ago, in our political field or in

00:22:42.340 comedy, that did not exist as far as I remember. I don't remember anyone telling me at university

00:22:46.520 words of violence. And yet here we are 15 years later. And now that is like the motif to our

00:22:52.760 whole conversation about everything. Where did that come from? Well, again, there's two long

00:22:57.440 stories that need to be told here that come together. One comes from linguistics and from,

00:23:03.400 more broadly speaking, epistemology. And the other one comes from your understanding of human

00:23:09.100 natures and human cognitive capacities in general. Do you think of individuals as individuals or

00:23:15.680 collectivities? So let me start with that, start with the latter one. So if you take the debate

00:23:20.460 between individualism and collectivism. So then we ask the question, am I an individual who has

00:23:28.780 control of his own mind? And so I shape my own character, I choose my own values, I develop my

00:23:35.060 habits, and I accomplish something in my life as an individual? Or do I understand myself as more

00:23:42.460 like a lump of plasticine that has been born into the world, but I was born into a certain social

00:23:48.380 context, and all of these external forces shaped and manipulated and developed me into the kind of

00:23:55.220 being that I am. So physically, I might seem like a unique individual, but really I'm just a vehicle

00:24:01.460 through which all of these social forces are developing in me. So hold that in mind. If you

00:24:10.800 are going to believe on the positive side that words are a form of speech, the traditional view

00:24:17.360 that is now being attacked, then what we typically say is, well, I as an individual, I can take the

00:24:23.660 word, I can think about it for myself, what it connects to in reality, or if I don't think it

00:24:29.480 actually connects to anything in reality, and that when I choose to use a word, I am choosing a

00:24:35.480 specific meaning, and I'm trying to communicate to you as a particular individual, and if

00:24:41.360 communication is going to work, then I really have to listen to you to see where you are as a unique

00:24:45.560 individual are coming from and so explain myself right and so forth so all of that individualistic

00:24:50.960 understanding uh presupposes that individuals are the operative cognitive units now if you shift to

00:25:00.580 seeing individuals as vehicles through which social forces are acting that changes everything

00:25:07.540 including your understanding of how language works so the assumption here is going to be

00:25:14.160 that languages already exist before you come into existence. And now these are all the

00:25:21.440 controversial things, but I'll just put them out there, right? That the meanings of language are

00:25:27.620 all socially constructed. They are not a matter of individuals in cognitive relationship to the

00:25:35.580 world. Instead, we absorb a language from our social group that shapes our mind. And languages,

00:25:43.360 again, I don't agree with this, but I'm just putting this out there, come with a certain

00:25:46.820 grammar, and that grammar builds in certain metaphysical assumptions about the way the

00:25:52.180 world works in its syntax. And so different language groups then have different philosophies

00:25:59.260 built into their languages. So the end result of this then is going to be, if you follow this

00:26:04.800 linguistic route, that you have different social groups, each of which has a different language,

00:26:10.940 but that language has been conditioned into them to think about the world in very different ways.

00:26:17.360 What that means is that there's not really any way for people of different language groups to

00:26:22.760 communicate with each other. And that means that we can't have rational individuals engaging in

00:26:29.160 conversation with each other. And they both have a common reference in reality to check what their

00:26:35.160 words mean. So that ultimately with some work, they can come to agreement. Instead, you're just

00:26:40.120 left with these different social groups and their languages are evolving in different directions.

00:26:45.400 Their thinking is evolving in different directions. So any disagreement between those social groups

00:26:49.740 is unresolvable in principle. Well, this is what I was going to ask you about. So basically to put

00:26:56.880 what you're saying into simple language, if human beings are infinitely malleable and if language

00:27:02.680 is the method by which those people are changed, then when I'm on stage performing a comedy

00:27:10.060 show. I'm not actually trying to communicate something for the purposes of making you laugh.

00:27:14.760 What I'm really doing is trying to use the power of the microphone and words to shape you to take

00:27:21.000 a certain worldview. And if that worldview is wrong or bad or evil, I am causing literal harm

00:27:27.300 to millions of people around the world. But the more troubling thing about your analysis,

00:27:32.380 essentially what you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is

00:27:35.840 this worldview, if applied to society, inevitably leads to irresolvable conflict.

00:27:42.500 Exactly.

00:27:43.900 And it leads to irresolvable conflict along group lines.

00:27:47.880 And so that's why what you've found in the last 10 years especially is when you go up

00:27:53.940 on stage, they don't see Francis.

00:27:56.120 They don't see Constantine as an individual who's expressing his own ideas and his quirky

00:28:01.100 sense of humor, whatever that is.

00:28:03.160 They will see you as a male.

00:28:05.740 They will see you as a white guy.

00:28:08.220 They will see you as, I don't know what your sexualities are.

00:28:11.640 But immediately you stop being seen as an individual and you just seem to come to be seen as a member of a group.

00:28:20.700 And everything that those groups do is flowing through you.

00:28:26.220 And if I'm a member of a different group, then immediately we are in an adversarial circumstance.

00:28:32.160 And I treat it as an adversarial circumstance.

00:28:34.220 Now, another aspect of this becomes more directly psychological on the words as violence theme. Everybody recognizes that words can have a harm, and violence is a certain kind of harm.

00:28:48.620 But there's been the standard thing to say there's a distinction between physical harms and psychological harms.

00:28:57.860 And so if I take a stick and I start beating your body with a stick, well, that is a physical harm.

00:29:05.720 But also your body, you don't have any control over the way your body responds to what's happening there.

00:29:12.960 Because gravity and biology work independently of your choices.

00:29:17.180 But on the psychological side, if your assumption is that you are an individual, that you are in control of your mind, if I start saying harmful words to you, I start insulting you in various ways, well, you have a choice.

00:29:31.540 You can say, he's saying that I'm a stupid idiot.

00:29:35.780 And those are harmful words.

00:29:37.620 That's what those words mean.

00:29:38.580 And they are intended as an insult.

00:29:40.600 But I am not necessarily a passive vehicle.

00:29:44.080 I don't have to let that hurt me.

00:29:45.820 I can say he thinks I'm a stupid idiot. Well, what does that really mean? Am I a stupid idiot?

00:29:50.020 And I can think for myself and for my own judgment, I don't think I'm stupid. I don't think I'm an idiot.

00:29:55.520 So really what your attempt to insult me is going to fail. And I'm going to think, oh, he's just attacking me.

00:30:02.100 Right. For some reason. So the point is my response to those harmful words is up to me and I'm in control of the process.

00:30:11.260 And that's what the individualist will say. So then they say sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me because the words and my response to them are up to me as an individual agent.

00:30:25.720 But if you get rid of individual agency, then you start to just say words like any other thing. I'm not in control of them. They shape me. They form me.

00:30:34.940 And if you are a being with some power, then words are a form of violence on me.

00:30:40.520 And I then become a victim of your words.

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00:31:51.720 And Stephen, it's very interesting.

00:31:53.780 They're talking about, you know, the way that we perceive words.

00:31:56.920 But there are some words that have very, very real power, and it's used, again, in the authoritarian way in order to shut down arguments.

00:32:04.480 Yes.

00:32:05.920 You know, and the way that these words are used as tools, for instance, racist, bigot, trans, we all know what they are.

00:32:13.020 Right. Sure. Yes. Well, I would agree with everything.

00:32:16.880 uh they are used in the authoritarian way but then uh i is at least as a liberal individualist

00:32:23.800 will be able to recognize that they are using those words in a certain way so and this is of

00:32:29.420 course part of the ongoing linguistic power struggle because yes words are a tool language

00:32:35.580 is functional and one of the things we try to do is not only understand the world using language

00:32:42.360 but try to communicate with other people and influence other people and if i'm an authoritarian

00:32:47.800 i will try to use words uh in an authoritarian way and i will try to use them as as weapons as well

00:32:54.260 but i would reject it it's you're you're true that there are authority you're correct rather

00:32:59.020 there are authoritarian people who use words like fascist racist sexist and so on in an

00:33:05.880 authoritarian fashion to try to shut down debate. And they try to use them to get inside your head

00:33:13.400 and to put you on the defensive. So, oh, my God, the guy called me a racist. And we know that's a

00:33:19.060 big button pushing word. So I become jangled up emotionally inside. And maybe and we know that

00:33:25.020 people don't function as well when they are emotionally jangled up. And I don't know how

00:33:29.300 to respond to this. I'm all confused. And so that puts the person who's using those words in a

00:33:35.800 rhetorically advantageous purpose. So I would say I would agree with you that, yes, rhetoric in the

00:33:42.620 postmodern linguistic framework is used as a weapon, explicitly so, but I think what we then

00:33:49.660 need to do is just not only engage in the philosophical debates about language and

00:33:55.540 cognition and so on, is refuse to let them get away with that particular tactic. So if you want

00:34:02.400 to take racism, which does have a precise meaning, it is a real problem, and broaden it into this

00:34:08.800 all-purpose weapon that you're going to use on anyone, we have to fight back against that and

00:34:14.000 say that is an illegitimate extension of the word racism. And unfortunately, at that point,

00:34:20.320 we either have to have a discussion about what the word properly should mean, or you just have

00:34:24.680 to say this is not someone I can have a meaningful conversation with and just walk away from the

00:34:29.020 conversation. See, the trouble there is that we come back to this point that we came to earlier

00:34:35.280 in the interview, which is we are in a position of irresolvable conflict. And so the question

00:34:40.780 that's been worrying me and us and many of our former guests, people like Douglas Murray,

00:34:47.380 something that he feels strongly, what is the end game for this? If we can't reason ourselves

00:34:53.740 out of this position because there is no reasonable rational based discussion how how does this get

00:35:02.060 resolved yeah well uh if if if you can't reason your way out of it then it does become a power

00:35:08.680 struggle right it's become a matter of physical force absolutely uh you know if uh if you're

00:35:16.440 dealing with uh with an an animal that that wants to eat you you can't reason your way out of it

00:35:22.560 with the animal. Then it does become who's faster, who has the better physical weapons in that

00:35:29.700 confrontation. If it's to switch to human animal context, you are being mugged in a dark alley and

00:35:37.380 someone is using physical threats against you, you're not going to be able to reason your way

00:35:43.800 out of it. Then it does come down to, can I physically overpower this person or physically

00:35:49.120 run away from this person uh and that's those are what the debates are so then it does become

00:35:54.780 a philosophical issue in an institutional context for the leadership of that institution whether

00:36:00.900 that is a principal at a high school right or the dean at a university college right or the ceo at

00:36:08.020 a at a business that person has a responsibility to say if we are going to do these uh run these

00:36:14.680 institutions on a broadly liberal basis, that this is going to be a voluntary set of relationships

00:36:22.460 that we are entering into, and people have the right to have their own ideas and to express

00:36:27.960 those ideas, and we're going to have civil debates, and we're going to settle these things

00:36:32.360 by reason. If in the midst of all of that, we have people who are fundamentally committed to

00:36:38.440 authoritarian physicalist methods, then we do need to remove those people. So if I'm a professor in

00:36:45.000 my classroom, for example, I will let the debate between the liberals and the authoritarians go to

00:36:51.760 a certain point. And as long as it's a debate, that's fine. But if I have an authoritarian

00:36:56.300 student in my class who wants to physically intimidate non-authoritarian students or

00:37:03.000 threatens violence with them or is talking constantly and won't stop talking to give

00:37:09.060 other students a chance, then I do have to use my authority as professor in the liberal sense to

00:37:14.860 remove that student from the classroom because they are undermining the liberal ethos of that

00:37:21.200 particular social institution. I would then say more broadly at the level of deans and presidents

00:37:26.980 of universities they have to make a decision uh you know am i as the president of this institution

00:37:33.160 committed to a certain worldview a religious worldview or a utopian leftist worldview and

00:37:39.460 the assumption is that all of the students are and professors at this school are here to discuss

00:37:44.060 only that worldview that's fine but if you are deciding as the president of your institution

00:37:49.800 that it's going to be a liberal education institution then once students cross the line

00:37:54.240 and start becoming physical themselves or professors cross the line

00:37:57.960 and start becoming physical themselves, they need to be removed.

00:38:02.940 And Stephen, you were, in a former interview that we were watching,

00:38:07.540 you were discussing about the terms left and right

00:38:09.920 and how they have essentially become meaningless.

00:38:12.900 I'm somebody who's always seen myself as being on the left.

00:38:15.860 I used to be a school teacher for 12 years.

00:38:19.160 Viewers and listeners of the podcast were regular.

00:38:21.280 You can have a drink now.

00:38:22.340 But kindly explain to people, why is it do you feel that these terms in 2021 now really have very little meaning?

00:38:33.260 Well, I think they've for a long time had very little meaning because it was somewhat of an arbitrary designation.

00:38:42.160 So part of it is the power of media, and media needs to have more simplistic labels for the broad mass of people who want information packaged in certain ways in digestible chunks.

00:38:58.300 So if we think, and I'm going to speak from the Canadian and the American context, we've got some very big, broad, spread out countries.

00:39:06.140 And the same thing, of course, would apply in Britain with millions and millions of people.

00:39:11.240 And the way political competition works out is it typically gets winnowed down to a few packages.

00:39:18.220 For me, as a philosopher and anybody who's an intellectual about these things, we're going to see these packages, given the complexity of society, are always going to have about 100 elements in them.

00:39:28.760 And what you want to do is you want to take each of those elements and consider it on its own and look at the arguments for and against and so forth, and then very carefully pick and choose what elements in those packages.

00:39:39.480 But if you have 100 elements, then I don't know what the exponent would be.

00:39:43.680 You could have all sorts of combinations of packages that arise as a result of thoughtful individuals working their way through the packages and forming their own sets of beliefs.

00:39:54.880 But we do know that, you know, as with cars, as with VCRs, and I'm dating myself, but various kinds of electronic devices, things typically devolve themselves into bundled packages of things.

00:40:09.060 So it becomes Apple versus Android.

00:40:12.700 It becomes VHS versus beta.

00:40:14.840 It might become Ford versus GM versus Chrysler or Nissan versus whatever.

00:40:20.340 And these are big bundle things.

00:40:21.680 And the same thing has happened in politics.

00:40:24.780 So what we end up with is parties, which are retailers of political ideas.

00:40:33.120 And, you know, the intellectuals and so forth are the wholesalers working out various discrete elements.

00:40:40.620 But then they get packaged by the retailers and then sold to the broader market.

00:40:45.320 And it's then much easier to put together, oh, here's our package of 100 ideas.

00:40:50.940 Here's our competing package of 100 ideas.

00:40:54.380 But there's no necessity that it had to be that package of 100 ideas versus that package of 100 ideas.

00:40:59.840 And then the media sells them or extends them out to the broader public and the labels then come to come to stick.

00:41:09.140 So one encouraging thing, though, is about the polarization.

00:41:14.740 And I think polarization does have its social and psychological costs.

00:41:19.080 But I think it is a cognitively healthy thing, because one of the things the polarization does is rather than say,

00:41:27.000 and I'll come back to the American context, say, instead of you have to choose between being a

00:41:31.720 Republican and being a Democrat, in my entire lifetime, everybody who's a Republican or a

00:41:37.060 Democrat or neither is unsatisfied with all of the elements in the package. What the polarization

00:41:43.100 does is to push things to an extreme. And then people think about the extremes. And then they

00:41:48.680 think about what the alternatives to the extremes are. And then they start to put different packages

00:41:53.300 together and so then we start to say well let's take the republicans and then we're going to

00:41:58.100 divide them into the religious right and then say that the free market right and we'll do the same

00:42:03.640 thing with the left here's uh you know different segments of the left and that polarization then

00:42:09.280 pushes things in a breaking up fashion which i think is intellectually healthier it shows that

00:42:15.040 more people are thinking for themselves instead of just accepting i'm a leftist or i'm a rightist

00:42:20.220 You start adding all of these adjectives, and so you have a better understanding of what the political landscape is. And to the extent that that's happening in the broader population, I think that's part of improved political education.

00:42:32.920 and and Stephen when when is it so again I'm on the left and it seems that the left have

00:42:40.380 undergone this transformation where they care more about identity and identity groups

00:42:46.580 than they do about disparity in wealth between rich and poor why has that happened and how long

00:42:53.180 has this been happening for well uh again a long story uh part of the book that I think got me

00:43:00.240 invited to you guys, my explaining postmodernism, skepticism, and socialism from Rousseau to Foucault,

00:43:08.740 much of that book is a history of the left, right, or a history of socialism over the course of the

00:43:14.840 last two centuries, and it has gone through multiple iterations and branchings and splittings

00:43:20.480 and mergers and re-mergers and so on, so it's all some very, very complicated territories. But yes,

00:43:26.000 On this point about exactly what you're saying, the shift from caring about wealth inequality and gaps there to identity groups, there's a very important marker in the history of left politics in the 1950s, but especially in the 1960s and since then.

00:43:47.280 Because for the first century and a half or so of modern left politics, it was primarily an economic differential issue, rich versus poor.

00:43:59.440 And we are perhaps we hate the rich, but we are primarily supposed to be motivated by concern for the poor and getting them elevated.

00:44:07.400 And the main criticism of capitalism or whatever the alternative is, was that it does not look after its poor members very well.

00:44:18.520 They fall behind, rich get richer, poor get, and all of that sort of stuff.

00:44:22.340 But that argument came to be seen as untenable by the time you get to the 1950s and the 1960s.

00:44:29.220 Of course, you still hear some leftists who make that argument.

00:44:31.480 But it's very hard in the modern world to argue that capitalism does not improve the material standards for the vast majority of people.

00:44:41.340 If you say, I'm concerned for the workers, and then you go and you look at 80 percent of the workers and the workers have two cars and air conditioning and big screen TVs and they're going on vacations.

00:44:52.880 Now, they might not be going on vacations like Bill Gates goes on vacations, but you can't say, oh, these impoverished, poor workers who are victims of capitalism.

00:45:03.440 By the 50s and 60s, that argument wasn't flying very hard.

00:45:07.100 And also the idea that if we have a socialistic system, it's going to care about its workers and elevate the workers.

00:45:16.500 By the time we get to the middle part of the 20th century, there have been quite a few experiments in socialism, and they had never done that. They had never done anything close to that. They had, in fact, impoverished.

00:45:28.860 So there was a shift then from primarily economic concerns to another strategy. And the new strategy was that the different groups in society, again, there's a more collectivism that's built into left politics, are not being treated equally in society along other social dimensions aside from economic dimensions.

00:45:53.460 So maybe different racial groups or gender groups or or and then we shift to sexuality groups or maybe other animal species.

00:46:02.220 We're not treating them equally and we're driving them to extinction and so on.

00:46:06.280 So the economic arguments get put on the back burner on the left and other dimensions of inequality and group identities come to the to the fore.

00:46:16.620 i was just going to say that my final point in this but what we've seen now with the present

00:46:24.420 young generation is a generation that are actually going to do less well financially

00:46:29.960 than their forebears they're less likely to own property they're not going to earn as much and so

00:46:35.320 on and so on and so forth don't these arguments about inequality and added to that the ever

00:46:41.560 widening gap between rich and poor aren't these arguments now suddenly becoming coming to the

00:46:48.480 fore again or shouldn't they be and aren't we wrong to be focused on the identity stuff

00:46:53.520 when when with the like i said the inequality between rich and poor is ever more increasing

00:46:58.700 yeah all right well i'm a philosopher by training but i do know and i think enough

00:47:03.880 about economics to be to be dangerous on this point but also i know the history uh and i'm so

00:47:10.240 I'm going to make an economic prediction here. The next generation of young people are going to

00:47:16.180 be richer than I am, and they're going to be richer than you are. Now, partly I'm going to

00:47:22.600 make that... That's not very hard, Stephen, believe me. Well, okay, maybe so. Your generation on

00:47:29.620 average, I'm sensing that you guys are younger than I am. And partly this is for historical

00:47:36.140 reasons. I've read a lot of the history here. And Francis, the argument that you are making,

00:47:41.520 that's exactly the argument that was made in the 1990s. And it was made in the 1970s and the 1950s

00:47:47.540 and the 1920s and the 1880s, that this generation's young people are going to have a lower standard

00:47:53.400 of living than the previous generation. In some sense, whatever we're doing has run its course.

00:47:58.500 We are depriving them of opportunities. There's a wealth gap. It's an argument that gets repeated

00:48:04.660 over and over again. But I think it's driven by the same fundamental assumptions about opportunity

00:48:10.420 and freedom and technology. And those are some very seductive assumptions, but they also are

00:48:16.400 very deep. So we are pushed back to what intellectuals say about economics, what

00:48:22.260 intellectuals are saying about those philosophical assumptions. So if you want to say, for example,

00:48:29.940 that you are a representative young person right now and you look at your opportunities for the

00:48:38.280 future and you compare your opportunities for the future now with the previous generation young

00:48:45.260 people now have more economic opportunities than people did in the in the past generations

00:48:51.640 and i think what of course we have to start looking at the data but yes absolutely this is

00:48:57.580 This is the case. For example, suppose I'm a creative person in the visual fields and so on.

00:49:06.340 And then 20 years ago, I want to get into making movies.

00:49:11.660 What are my options for getting into movies 20 years ago?

00:49:14.920 Well, I need to have about a quarter million dollars worth of capital equipment in order to be able to do so.

00:49:20.680 And then we fast forward one generation. If you're a young person right now with some creative movie making talents, what's your capital investment that you need in order to be able to make good movies? Maybe a few thousand dollars.

00:49:34.360 So that then is to say more younger people who are poorer now have more opportunity to be successful in their fields.

00:49:43.480 And that's just one example in computers.

00:49:46.180 There are more professions that are being opened up as a result of the new technologies that are coming.

00:49:52.340 It's not only that there are more technologies making more professions and more kinds of creativity possible.

00:49:59.280 They are also leveraging us in a way that they make us more productive.

00:50:04.360 And that's what wealth is, becoming more productive, creating things that are more valuable to people.

00:50:09.340 And on top of that, they're also becoming less expensive so that more people more easily will be able to afford them.

00:50:18.300 Now, another example is step outside of our own immediate context.

00:50:22.520 Think about the average person in a poorer part of the world, in, I don't know, Peru or Nigeria or Vietnam.

00:50:34.360 Does that person have more opportunities now for wealth creation than an equivalent Peruvian, Nigerian, or Vietnamese person a generation ago?

00:50:45.800 And the data are astounding about how much more opportunity people have.

00:50:50.020 Stephen, no argument on that point whatsoever. But let me interject. The one issue in this country that is animating a lot of resentment intergenerationally is the housing, what we call the housing crisis, which is it is ever more difficult for people in this country, young people particularly, to get on the housing ladder. And that means their opportunity for accumulating wealth is significantly diminished versus previous generations. What do you say to that?

00:51:18.060 Well, I don't know very much about the housing market in Britain, so it would be a bit difficult for me to pronounce on that.

00:51:26.460 I can speak to the housing market in Toronto, my hometown.

00:51:32.060 And, of course, there are going to be market pressures.

00:51:35.140 The countries that are sexier in the world are going to attract more people.

00:51:41.800 The countries that are prosperous, their babies aren't going to die and they're going to live, so their populations are going to grow.

00:51:47.580 you naturally then expect that there's going to be increases on the on the demand side so

00:51:52.480 london england toronto san francisco these are sexy places lots of people wanted to go there

00:51:58.260 so the question then is going to be on the supply side uh and and my understanding in toronto is

00:52:04.500 that toronto and san francisco it's pretty much the same story uh uh made it very difficult for

00:52:12.260 new development to happen yeah yeah we have the same problem here yeah so to the extent that you

00:52:17.680 then say uh we want to attract lots of people and we have a rising population we want them to have

00:52:23.200 housing then if you at the same time are preventing people from building housing then you have a

00:52:29.060 cognitive dissonance the problem there is then a political problem how the the zoning people

00:52:34.740 are thinking yeah that is the the fight that has to be happening fair point so let let me

00:52:39.920 By contrast, I'm going to say one more thing. A city like Houston, which has had huge population growth, but housing is very affordable in Houston, they've solved the political problem actually by not having that oppressive set of zoning and other kinds of restrictions as well. So I think it's a political problem.

00:52:59.980 I hear you. So in summary, what you're saying is that's not the housing pressures in this country or elsewhere. They're not a reflection of the capitalist system. They're a reflection of certain quirks of the political and administrative state, which I accept completely.

00:53:14.520 So let me come back to France's previous question,

00:53:17.280 because what we're really trying to get out of you is,

00:53:20.940 you know, it's like with jokes.

00:53:22.160 When we write a joke, we may write a joke

00:53:24.020 that we think is funny,

00:53:25.040 but you go on stage and you try it out

00:53:26.900 and sometimes it lands and sometimes that joke doesn't,

00:53:30.140 but another one does, right?

00:53:31.600 So why have these ideas, this postmodernist worldview,

00:53:35.620 why is it landing so damn hard right now?

00:53:38.760 What is the reason that people look to it

00:53:41.600 and embrace it with such vigor?

00:53:43.100 Yeah. Well, I think it's because human beings are a smart species and the philosophical framework that they adopt when they are young is decisive.

00:53:55.660 We all go through the soul searching teen years, particularly if we're reflective, what kind of person am I going to be?

00:54:03.240 What do I want my life? And then we make a commitment to a certain set of values.

00:54:07.280 So what we learn from our parents, from our teachers, and then particularly if we're very thoughtful about these things and we go into higher education, that becomes decisive.

00:54:19.580 People live what they believe.

00:54:23.140 And so then it comes back to the arguments that have been developed and have prevailed in universities over the course of the last two generations.

00:54:32.500 what happened in the 60s and 70s was an anti-modernist philosophical framework we call

00:54:39.540 it post-modernism came to positions of significance and dominance in the humanities and that's very

00:54:46.780 important because what is it to be a human being that's what the humanities are all about and we

00:54:51.420 go to literature we try to learn from history we take courses in anthropology and political science

00:54:57.340 So the philosophy that prevailed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s was decisive.

00:55:03.740 And universities are very important here because that's where the next generation of teachers goes for their training.

00:55:09.400 So they take those humanities courses, and then they go off and they become teachers to millions and millions of students in the next generation.

00:55:16.840 That's the philosophy they teach.

00:55:18.940 Journalists go to university, and they get their training.

00:55:22.520 That's what they teach, and then that shapes their journalistic approach.

00:55:26.540 Lawyers go to university and then they go off into the legal profession and they try to influence and change the laws and so on.

00:55:33.740 And of course, most politicians come from a background of being lawyers or some sort of university education as well.

00:55:39.700 So the political landscape changes. So what we are seeing is high theory that was developed in the 60s and 70s in universities by some very smart individuals that prevailed.

00:55:51.200 That then taught a next generation of intelligent people in the professions, and then it has spilled out into the culture as a result of that broad cultural education.

00:56:21.200 diamond musical a beautiful noise april 28th through june 7th 2026 the princess of wales

00:56:27.660 theater get tickets at mirvish.com and stephen do you think and this is where i'm going to more

00:56:36.140 and more of my own thinking do you think that these big institutions whether it's a university

00:56:40.380 whether it's the justice system whether it's the education system whatever it may be they should

00:56:45.420 be utterly apolitical. It is not their job to push their own political views and opinions

00:56:52.040 on the minds of the employees or the people who work there or the people who go there to study.

00:56:58.320 Apolitical in the sense that I think there should be a separation of education and politics.

00:57:04.920 So that's why we have the institution of tenure and academic freedom, for example,

00:57:10.060 The people we think are dealing with the controversial ideals need to be insulated from political pressures, right?

00:57:18.120 So in that sense, yes, absolutely.

00:57:20.400 And I think this is the harder argument, but it does mean separation from educational funding from politicians

00:57:27.380 because politicians have a terrible track record of he who pays the piper calls the tune.

00:57:33.240 Now, to the extent that the liberal education ethos has been strong and the idea of academic freedom for fearless truth seekers to be able to speak anything they want has been strong, we've been able to marry some level of political funding with academic freedom.

00:57:50.020 But we're entering into dangerous territory to the extent that the liberal education thing is gone.

00:57:54.580 But then if we ask apolitical in the sense that the people who are inside the institutions, like deans and professors and so forth, should they be apolitical?

00:58:04.500 Or should the CEOs of corporations and managers, should they be apolitical as well?

00:58:10.080 And here I would say, no, I don't think so.

00:58:12.840 I think education should be about everything, including political education.

00:58:19.020 so an important part of life is politics and we need to be able to prepare young people to enter

00:58:25.880 into political life but if i'm committed to some sort of liberal democracy then what that means is

00:58:32.000 i have to ask what's going to enable my students to become good participants in a liberal democratic

00:58:38.980 process and for me that means they need to be able to learn how to think how to think about very

00:58:44.140 difficult issues and about controversial issues. And so part of my responsibility then is to

00:58:49.820 train them on all of those cognitive skills and the emotional skills, because all of these things

00:58:55.040 push our emotional buttons and we get angry and frustrated. So emotional education about

00:59:00.940 developing a thicker skin and the tolerance requirements and so forth, all of those are

00:59:05.940 feeders into politics. And then in terms of my discipline, I'm a philosopher, so I only bump up

00:59:11.880 against politics occasionally. But if my job is to teach British government or comparative

00:59:18.060 political systems, then of course, that's a legitimate academic field and it should be taught,

00:59:22.820 but it should be taught in a liberal education fashion. So be political, absolutely. As for CEOs,

00:59:29.020 I do think they need to be political. And part of the problem is that many CEOs have not had

00:59:35.680 political education. In our tech society, a lot of them were engineers and they just

00:59:40.640 you know were fascinated with their with their the things that they're able to develop and they

00:59:45.260 didn't think about very much but then suddenly they're in charge of a 50 million dollar company

00:59:49.740 and they're dealing with people with all of these ethnicities and they are entering into a global

00:59:53.600 economy they don't know anything about politics so they typically then will fall back on just

00:59:59.020 grabbing an off-the-shelf politics that they've not really thought through very much and that

01:00:02.820 leads to problems so i do think ceos they are going to be political animals your your businesses

01:00:09.540 are social and they are political. And also you are dealing, particularly in the modern world,

01:00:15.360 with your own government. So you need to know how that works. And you're dealing with

01:00:19.620 international government. So it should not be a politicized education, but it should be

01:00:25.380 political education. It's got to be in there. Yeah, that's a very good point. Stephen, before

01:00:30.780 we ask you our final question, let me ask you this. When you did your interview with our mutual

01:00:36.140 friend, John Anderson, when you were in Australia. You finished that interview by talking about how

01:00:41.960 optimistic you are about the outcomes of some of the things that we've been talking about.

01:00:48.320 And I imagine you would have recorded it somewhere between 12 and 18 months ago.

01:00:53.680 Are you still optimistic now? Well, yeah, I am overall optimistic. I think in the near term,

01:01:01.420 The next five years are going to be pretty ugly because, you know, this is a philosophical battle and those ones move slowly, but it has become a cultural battle and cultural battles always become politics, but politics is in the final analysis about police, guns, military and so forth.

01:01:26.160 And that's that that's the ugly part. And we do have a generation of younger people who've not been trained in good cognitive skills and good civil discussion skills.

01:01:35.940 So it will be ugly, ugly in that sense. Now, why I'm optimistic is I do think there are certain human constants.

01:01:43.780 I mean, we are a smart species. And one of the things that has happened is that this upsurge of irrationality and incivility has taken most people by surprise.

01:01:55.840 And most people, though, are decent, civil, rational beings.

01:01:59.940 And once they get up the learning curve about what they're dealing with, they will enter into the debate and there will be a retraining of civility and rationality from the broad mass of people.

01:02:10.560 I'm also optimistic because, you know, in institutions of higher education, there's a huge number of smart, smart people all over the world.

01:02:20.560 And mostly they, as academics, they like to be siloed. They like to just focus on their own thing. But increasingly over the last 10 years, they are looking around, realizing that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and they are starting to reenter into the debate inside their own institutions and to clean house.

01:02:41.260 So I do think there's a case to be made for self-reform within the institutions of higher

01:02:47.640 education. There is a political element. We do have a significant amount of state funding of

01:02:53.600 education, however jaded and cynical we are about our politicians. They do recognize that they have

01:03:00.000 a responsibility to make sure that those education dollars are actually spent on education and not

01:03:07.380 on politicization. And so they get pressure from their constituents and they do then put pressure

01:03:13.360 on presidents and chancellors and so on to clean house inside. And I think that cleaning house

01:03:19.440 will go in the direction of a reinvigoration of liberal education. But I think I'm most optimistic

01:03:25.980 because young people, young people can be subject to indoctrination in education, but most people

01:03:35.000 recognize even as young people when they are being indoctrinated and they just start to tune out

01:03:40.120 the indoctrinators and they have all kinds of sources of information and values available to

01:03:46.340 them now that people did not so the indoctrinators will have limited effect increasingly and also

01:03:54.780 young people i think it's built into human nature that we we grow up we want to make something of

01:03:59.720 our lives. We want something real. We want something genuine. We want love. We want our

01:04:05.220 careers to be meaningful. So any sort of worldview that is very jaded and cynical and adversarial

01:04:14.020 and says everything is shit and just attack and hate, that's only going to be attractive to a

01:04:21.280 subset of the younger population. Most young people will gravitate naturally to the healthier

01:04:27.340 disciplines, the healthier teachers and professors, and go on and make something of their lives. I

01:04:32.860 think that's a human natural. Well, thank you very, very much for that, Stephen. It was an

01:04:38.600 absolutely brilliant interview. Appreciate that. Thank you, by the way.

01:04:45.280 Oh, thank you. We have one final question that we always end all our interviews with,

01:04:50.560 and that is, what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should

01:04:55.780 be yeah well i just completed a manuscript called eight philosophies of education with

01:05:02.420 my co-authors a younger canadian philosopher of education andrew colgan where we look at the uh

01:05:09.140 the the many different philosophies that have been operationalized in education and all of

01:05:14.860 them are there so uh we we have a kind of chaotic education system right now uh with a mixture of

01:05:21.720 all sorts of elements and nobody is, nobody is happy with.

01:05:25.100 But I think the thing that we are not thinking about the most is there's a

01:05:30.720 disjunct between our idealism about young people.

01:05:35.160 So all of us, when we become parents or we become teachers, we are,

01:05:39.220 we're idealistic about here's this baby and all of the possibilities for this

01:05:45.840 child. And we're just excited and jazzed for it.

01:05:48.960 And we want this person to have the best possible life.

01:05:51.720 And then if we think about, you know, before we send the child to school, how we educate this person, we give this kid lots of opportunities and toys, and we're encouraging, and the kid can explore and experiment, and the kid basically plays for five years.

01:06:10.660 and all of that is beautiful and wonderful and then what do we do we send kids to school

01:06:16.940 now if we just pause for a moment and just form an image in our heads what does school

01:06:22.580 mean and i bet 99 of people are going to say rows of desks kids sitting at the desk

01:06:30.080 listening to the teacher writing it down or reading from the textbook and everybody is

01:06:37.020 reading the same pages and working on the same problem. And the assumption is that the answers

01:06:42.340 are already known. And you have to just memorize this. And you better not fail the test. And if

01:06:49.640 you want to go to the bathroom, you have to ask permission to get up and move around. So we have

01:06:54.620 this very regimented, authoritarian, one-size-fits-all school system that we have developed.

01:07:02.460 And we put our kids in there for 12 years. And what is 12 years of that kind of schooling going to do to those young people? Now, most of us, I think, also went through schooling systems like that. And we know how boring and how vaguely dehumanizing it is.

01:07:22.120 So to my way of thinking, the one thing that we should be thinking a lot more is, why is there such a disjunct between how we raise kids for the first five years of their lives to what we then do to them for 12 years?

01:07:36.680 And then, of course, we say, you know, once you're out of the education system, you're free.

01:07:41.520 You can do anything you want.

01:07:43.920 Dream big, solve problems, be an innovator, be a creative person, and so forth.

01:07:48.320 But that 12 years of education has the opposite of all of that.

01:07:54.140 Now, we are smart.

01:07:56.000 We know the history.

01:07:57.220 We know about Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein and all of the great musical performance.

01:08:02.280 And somehow lots and lots of people survive and keep their creativity and their humanity intact despite the school system.

01:08:11.820 But to some extent, we are still highly tolerant of this kind of school system.

01:08:16.520 We need to do better.

01:08:17.540 And we know that we can do better. So what we're not thinking about is how seriously to experiment with different kinds of schooling. We all know it's important, but we're complacent. So that's what we need to be directing our energies to.

01:08:34.040 Stephen, that is a suitably fascinating end

01:08:36.460 to what has been an absolutely brilliant interview.

01:08:38.440 We really thank you.

01:08:39.820 We wish you all the very best with the manuscript.

01:08:42.760 And hopefully when all of this stuff is over,

01:08:44.900 next time you're in London,

01:08:45.860 we'd love to have you here on the set

01:08:47.720 and have a proper chat face-to-face.

01:08:50.140 Great interview, guys.

01:08:51.520 Brilliant questions.

01:08:52.720 Yeah, absolutely timely topic.

01:08:54.700 And I will see you in London at some point.

01:08:57.440 We really look forward to it.

01:08:58.680 And if you've been watching,

01:08:59.660 make sure you check out Stephen's work

01:09:01.480 and we will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or an interview

01:09:05.480 take care and they all go out at 7 p.m uk time whether it's an episode or a live stream see you

01:09:11.040 soon guys

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TRIGGERnometry - January 17, 2021

Postmodernism Explained by Professor Stephen Hicks

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