00:00:51.420We talked, of course, about postmodernism.
00:00:53.360You explained where it comes from, where it's going, and so on.
00:00:55.960But I was saying to you in our emails about coming back on that we here at the studio were watching a documentary you made, as you explained, about 20 years ago.
00:01:06.340I must confess the production values reflect the fact that it was 20 years ago.
00:01:16.420But nonetheless, despite that, it was a documentary you made about Nietzsche and the Nazis.
00:01:21.520And in that, you talked about what motivated the Nazis, what motivated the people who supported the Nazis, how that is misunderstood, and of course, some of the philosophers who inspired some of the things that they did and also the differences between them.
00:01:35.860But the real reason that we wanted to talk to you about that is, you know, the Nazis in the discourse, at least, they're back.
00:01:45.200They're on the rise if you're on this side of the political spectrum.
00:01:48.160And people talk about it in the context of COVID now, of course, and all of that.
00:01:53.120So can you talk to us about, first of all, one of the things that really struck me in that documentary is you talked about the fact that the ideas that motivated the Nazis, they saw themselves as heroic.
00:02:05.280They saw themselves as doing something for the greater good.
00:02:08.180Can you just give us, because I think will be a shocking perspective to many people in
00:02:27.420And we should be trying to learn from history and those comparisons can be made.
00:02:31.760But we do have to, of course, be very careful in how we do it. That's dropping the hand grenade into the conversation. And it needs to be contextualized.
00:02:43.620But yes, one of the interesting things is the one that you're flagging here, that we have this image of the Nazis as thugs and as brutes and as just the most evil people almost in all of human history.
00:02:58.400and they were thugs, they were brutes, and this was a mass movement, and so there's a huge number
00:03:05.400of people in the movement who are operating on that low level of humanity or anti-humanity.
00:03:14.280But I think it's a mistake just to write off the Nazis, particularly the intellectuals,
00:03:19.460the activists, the politicians, merely as brutes and thugs, as amoral individuals,
00:03:26.120that when you read the literature they did see themselves as idealists and the hard thing for us
00:03:33.680particularly those of us raised on western civilization with a very different set of ideals
00:03:39.140is to understand that there are people who can have dramatically different philosophies of life
00:03:46.260including an understanding of what is good what is bad what is moral character who the good guys are
00:03:54.100who the bad guys are and really believe it and be strongly committed to realizing those values in
00:04:01.340the world. It's a philosophical collision that comes out in political battles and then ultimately
00:04:09.280in war-like battles. But unfortunately, most people don't get enough philosophical education
00:04:17.820to realize the values that undermine or animate their own civilization. They kind of have
00:04:24.080a sort of understanding of them. They pick it up through osmosis, much less being taught the major
00:04:30.940competitive value frameworks and really get inside them and to see how someone raised in a very
00:04:37.200different culture could come to believe completely different sorts of things. So we talked about
00:04:42.580Hitler and Goebbels and Goering and Hess and all of these guys, and they were politicians. Initially,
00:04:49.300they were activists. But my focus as a philosopher and as an academic is to say,
00:04:55.740these guys didn't just pop out of nowhere. Anytime you are going to rise to the top
00:05:01.760in an educated, philosophical nation like Germany especially. And in the 1920s, the Germans were the
00:05:10.020most educated people in the world. They thought of themselves as the most cultured people in the
00:05:15.320world. And there was a lot of evidence that they can cite in order to support that. And it's not
00:05:21.760just that. Millions and millions of people voted for the Nazis from all walks of life. It's also
00:05:29.120the case that mainstream intellectuals, even intellectuals at the top of their professions,
00:05:35.660Germany was a highly philosophical nation. German philosophy especially had the highest reputation
00:05:42.060around the world at that time. You get a PhD from a German university, that means something.
00:05:49.440You get a PhD from a German university in philosophy, to use one of our metaphors,
00:05:55.500you are a rock star. In the same way that we now know, you guys are British, so you probably follow
00:06:04.160the football over there. You know who all of the main names in football, and you know who are the
00:06:11.360The second tier ones are, and you know a lot about their personal lives and so on.
00:06:15.740That's what it was like to be a high profile academic in Germany at the time.
00:06:21.120And the fact is that the PhDs and PhDs who were professors were widely supportive of the Nazis, not only after the Nazis came to power.
00:06:34.280And then you might say, well, after they come to power, people are cowards or people want the goodies that the politicians can distribute to them.
00:06:41.580But before the Nazis came to power in the 1920s, the brightest stars in the German academic world, many of them are on board with some philosophical, ideological variation of the National Socialist Program.
00:06:57.720And then pushing things back even further, all of them are educated.
00:07:12.420Anybody now around the world, if you are getting a first-rate education in the humanities, you know something about Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche.
00:07:54.080But maybe we can't put too much together.
00:07:56.200But the point is going to be that there is a philosophical universe that was staked out by the most brilliant intellectuals almost of all time, all of them German philosophers.
00:08:09.040And the reason why they were so influential and are still so influential two centuries later is because of their brilliance and the power of their arguments.
00:08:17.420And that's not to say whether the arguments are right or wrong. It's that they are brilliant. They are deep. They are shaping the entire intellectual culture of Germany in the 1800s. And they believe themselves to be high moralists and deep thinkers, the inheritors of all of the great cultural traditions and pointing the direction toward the future.
00:08:41.020They have it worked out. And of course, what comes along then is idealistic and ambitious and energetic young people in every generation.
00:08:49.080They want to reform their society to make it to make it better.
00:08:53.180They want their own lives to be meaningful.
00:08:55.940They turn in their culture to their most famous philosophers.
00:09:02.180Then they go into law. They go become teachers.
00:09:04.900They become journalists. They become medical doctors.
00:09:07.440They become parents. They shape a culture.
00:09:10.020And the point is going to be that the philosophical groundwork by Germany's deepest thinkers was laid for the National Socialists.
00:09:19.000It was a philosophical movement. It saw itself as an idealistic movement.
00:09:23.640And they were very effective also at organizing and doing the nitty gritty of politics and then successful in the in the political sphere.
00:09:31.860Now, the point of contrast is going to be for, you know, so I'll use some examples since you guys are British, but I was born and raised in Canada.
00:09:39.220So we're kind of like the little brothers, culturally speaking, so do you.
00:09:47.040But the biggest names that most of us will have heard of are going to be people like John Locke and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.
00:09:55.800And if you're an educated person, then these are the guys that you read and you read them deeply.
00:10:01.660You read the two treatises of government and on the wealth of nations and on liberty.
00:10:05.820And it becomes part of your intellectual furniture. And you come to believe that some sort of liberalism broadly construed is deeply decent and moral. And we need to have moral fervor to reform all of the illiberal cultural traditions that have come down to make society a better place. And we become committed as cultural activists and political.
00:10:27.400But the idea is that we are channeling John Locke and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and so on, and we think that we are right.
00:10:36.660And the point is going to be at that level that John Locke and Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith and someone like Karl Marx and Nietzsche and someone like John Stuart Mill, entirely different philosophical universes.
00:10:51.320It's a collision of philosophies, a collision of values.
00:10:55.320And then one of the things that happens, of course, by the time we get to the 20th century is that collision of philosophies becomes a collision in the trenches.
00:11:06.620So, I mean, there's a reason why the French and the English had their guns pointed at the Germans and the Germans had their guns pointed at the other way and so on.
00:11:16.460And so the roots are deep and we do ourselves, I think, a disservice if we don't take the ideas seriously, however repugnant the ideas are.
00:11:27.760We just say, oh, they're just a bunch of thugs or they were just lucky somehow.
00:11:32.520And we're able to fool a lot of people. The philosophy is hard, but it's important.
00:11:38.060Stephen don't you think that the reason we call them thugs the reason that we call them brutes
00:11:43.420is we do actually the same thing with people like sex offenders and rapists and pedophiles
00:11:48.980where we go these people are monsters they're nothing like us we dehumanize them by going
00:11:54.500they're nothing they're nothing like us therefore they're different to us therefore I'm never going
00:11:59.560to be capable of those particular acts whether they're nazis whether they're rapists etc
00:12:04.080Now, that's exactly right. Your moral framework is absolutely important. What standard you use to say this is good and this is bad. And then when you apply that to other human beings, those human beings that you see who are most assaulting your standard of the good and most embodying your standard of the bad, those people, you see them as less than human.
00:12:27.820So the dehumanizing languages is very important. And then once you see them as dehumanizing, then you think it's appropriate for me to start treating them with less than fully human respect. And then that goes all the way down to I am willing to put these people in prison and or I am willing to kill these people.
00:12:47.040So the establishment of your standards of right and wrong, that's a very difficult, high-level philosophical project becomes absolutely important because ultimately that's going to be the basis for your laws.
00:13:00.060That's going to be the basis for the circumstances under which you are willing to fight other people, either aggressively or self-defensively.
00:13:08.020What does your life mean? And you are going to be willing to kill, ultimately, people you think are evil and you are going to think that you are doing it in a good cause because you are upholding your standard of value.
00:13:23.100And Stephen, you talk about the clash of values and value systems.
00:13:26.640And I think that's really where this is important, because one of the values, it seems to me, of the Western liberal project, which we obsess about almost to a fault now, is the idea of equality.
00:13:39.400And the philosophers that motivated and whose work the Nazis relied on were explicitly from a different way of looking at the whole issue.
00:13:51.460Absolutely. So the concept of equality, of course, is a rich one. But in that liberal tradition, we also have the values of liberty, the values of individuality. We expect that people as individuals are free to run their own lives, their own romantic lives, their sex lives, their artistic lives, their business lives, and so on.
00:14:15.460So all of this liberty, and we think that everyone should have that liberty correctly, but then we recognize that since people are individuals, they're going to have different secondary values and make different choices, and the universe is complicated, and so we're going to have different ways of conceptualizing it and so on.
00:14:34.880But if your bottom line is the liberty of individuals, and that's an equal principle that should be extended to all human beings, then tolerance becomes a very important social value as well. So those form a bedrock network, as I see it in the liberal tradition.
00:14:51.980And the idea is that, of course, we're going to have our differences with each other. But by and large, people are decent. And, you know, if you go off and you do your thing in the artistic sphere, you're likely to come up with some creative, you know, artistic things and you'll be fulfilling yourself.
00:15:09.640But I'm going to enjoy reading your novels or listening to your songs and so on.
00:15:13.800Or you might be a little bit of a weird, you know, eccentric inventor kind of guy.
00:15:18.700And you're going to go off and make some sort of a gizmo.
00:15:21.300And I don't really know what you're doing, but it's and it's kind of weird.
00:15:23.960But ultimately, you're going to be making something that I'm going to say, oh, that's cool.
00:15:27.180That can benefit my life. And so I'm going to be willing to give you some money in order to have one of those gizmos.
00:15:32.320And so the idea is that we will live and let live.
00:15:35.920but if we live and let live people are going to go off and do interesting things that are
00:15:39.640ultimately going to benefit themselves and then then us and of course if i don't like your kind
00:15:43.840of music or the gizmo that you're made i'm free not to buy it and so on and destroy it on twitter
00:15:48.600as well well yes so the the free speech element absolutely even if that's going to get a little
00:15:57.040bit a little bit nasty but there's a kind of benevolence in that that ultimately we're going
00:16:01.760to have a peaceful society, and we're going to be doing a win-win trade. Now, if you then reject
00:16:09.500all of that fundamentally, the equality, the liberal freedoms, the idea of tolerance,
00:16:19.320even the idea that people are first and foremost individuals, you're going to enter into a very
00:16:23.500different philosophical space. And so what we find in the 19th century, particularly thinkers
00:16:31.000like Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche is a very deep assault on all of those liberal values. For all
00:16:38.900of them, first and foremost, people are not individuals. They are all of them seeing people
00:16:44.400as born into various sorts of cultural groups, and that those cultural groups have their own
00:16:50.540internal dynamic that is completely different from other cultural groups. And those cultural
00:16:55.880groups. They can't understand each other, really. They have completely different values that are
00:17:01.400antithetical to each other. So they are not only unequal, but they're also not really individuals.
00:17:08.080All of us really are just members of these different groups with completely different
00:17:11.820values. And those values are so antagonistic that any sort of tolerance just seems impossible as
00:17:20.200well. So it's a conflict of groups, and these groups are unequal, and respecting other people's
00:17:26.820freedom to do what they want with their lives and tolerating differences, that's just completely
00:17:30.640alien. The world is seen as a dark place of conflict, and it's either your group is going
00:17:36.960to prevail or my group is going to prevail, and so to speak, all's fair in this bottom line.
00:17:43.820The world is not fundamentally fair. The world is fundamentally conflict and whoever has the most power is going to dominate. So I just want to cite for many of us who have our undergraduate brushing up against thinkers like Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche, that all of them are violent conflict theorists.
00:18:05.600All of them say explicitly that individuals belong to the group. They have different ideas of what that group is, that individuals should be serving the group, that individuals can be used by the group, sacrificed by the group.
00:18:19.340And if you are in an out-group, you are a fundamental mortal enemy, and anything can be done to destroy the out-group enemy. And that is the inheritance of early 20th century German intellectual life, and the Nazis are just a particularly effective player of that cultural framework.
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00:19:42.760about technology privacy and censorship steven so we're talking right now and to me it strikes me
00:19:52.140as dare i say a very darwinian way of looking at the world in that there are winners and there's
00:19:57.400losers and that you have to strive you have to be the best in order to defeat your rivals in order
00:20:03.720to get to the top of the hierarchy yeah sure yeah so at that level of abstraction yes and and that
00:20:11.700being the case they're they're called nazis national socialists what does that mean were
00:20:16.480they actually socialists were they actually right-wing were they left-wing or was it its
00:20:21.180own philosophy entirely yeah well that's uh good so then we get into all of the great debates about
00:20:28.740what is a socialist really and uh you know it's like that we've had long centuries of debates
00:20:34.600about what's a christian really or what's a liberal really and so on so i'm happy to jump
00:20:40.400into into into that debate but let me say that the uh the nazis uh and it's a short form for
00:20:46.700National Socialist German Workers Party is the full name of the party. The party was originally
00:20:53.800founded in 1919 by, this was before Hitler joined the party, and it was called the German Workers
00:21:02.680Party. And as that name suggests, it says that we are in favor of the workers against all of the
00:21:09.040other classes in society, and it is this zero-sum adversarial struggle, and they saw themselves as
00:21:15.320a revolutionary party. They were anti-capitalist. They thought that the government was in the
00:21:22.700pocket of the big bankers. And most of the big bankers, of course, were Jews from their
00:21:27.380perspective. And that the way capitalism and free markets work allegedly is in terms of liberty and
00:21:34.340so on. But really, it's just the rich exploiting the poor. They're charging interest and living
00:21:39.300parasitically off the interests of other people. So all of this is worked out as an ideology. And
00:21:44.980at that level, it sounds like a very left-wing ideology. And all of the early members of the
00:21:50.100party were very well read in Karl Marx. Adolf Hitler in 1919 goes to a big rally and hears a
00:21:58.860speech by Gottfried Fader, one of the founders and intellectuals of the movement. Very impressed
00:22:05.760with this guy. And then he, on the basis of being inspired by this speech, decides to join the party
00:22:12.180in 1919. Now, what you have then is what sounds like a left-wing socialist version of class
00:22:22.180warfare, adversarialism, anti-capitalism. And that was part of Hitler's background. Now,
00:22:28.940the other part, though, then is the anti-Jew, anti-Gypsy, anti-Black people, basically anti-anybody
00:22:37.140who doesn't fit our understanding of what the best kind of human being is. And that's another
00:22:42.080kind of collectivism. That then is to say it's not so much economic groups that are in this
00:22:47.780brutal conflict with each other, but it's ethnic groups and it's racial groups and it's religious
00:22:53.080groups and so on. And there's all various mixes of that that's going on. And we happen to be a
00:23:00.060part of this group and we have within our midst all of these other subgroups that really should
00:23:05.440not be a part of this overall community that we are thinking of as Germany. And this is the
00:23:11.500nationalism part of the program. And it says from that perspective, economic matters are part of
00:23:19.200the package, but they're only one part of the package. We're more interested in cultures and
00:23:24.540societies as a whole, you know, their language, their traditions, their religions, their racial
00:23:30.460groups and so forth, along with all of their economic arrangements as well. Now, the point
00:23:35.520of this is that this is sometimes seen as a more right-wing approach to doing political views,
00:23:42.680and that's fine in a European context. But what is important here is that that also is a
00:23:49.480collectivism. It is also saying individuals are not free agents, individuals don't have their
00:23:55.960own lives, liberties, pursuit of happiness, and all of that sort of thing. Individuals are part
00:24:01.020of ethnic groups, or individuals are part of racial groups, just as the people on the left
00:24:07.100are saying, no, individuals really are part of economic groups. And both of them then are saying
00:24:12.680there is no individualism. Individualism is totally shaped by and should be submerged to
00:24:19.660various groups. And so what the Nazis are doing, you might say this is very clever as a political
00:24:26.340move, but they also believed it truly, is to say, we believe both are correct. It is an economic
00:24:33.700clash. It is a racial clash. It is a religious clash, and so on. We need to put it together,
00:24:38.900and that is why they renamed the party in 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers Party.
00:24:46.300And they took the nationalism seriously in this collectivistic fashion. They took the socialism seriously in this collectivistic fashion. And they did see themselves still on the side of the German workers.
00:24:59.260Now, at this point, Hitler had become a serious mover and shaker in the party. He was a highly energetic guy. He was very well read, very well read for a politician, even if we would disagree with just about everybody he was reading.
00:25:18.700And then, coincident with the renaming of the party, they published a 25-point party program.
00:25:26.480So to come to the question about whether they were socialist or not, what's interesting is if you go through these 25 points,
00:25:33.720that by my count, 14 of those points focus on economic matters.
00:25:41.000And then 11 of those points focus on other kinds of matters.
00:25:44.940How do you define the nation appropriately?
00:25:49.100Should we be dictatorial or parliamentary?
00:25:51.660Should there be freedom of the press right and so on?
00:25:54.040But those 14 points, and I would put it to you as a hypothesis,
00:26:02.120every socialist in the world would agree with those 14 points.
00:26:07.380And that's a strong claim, but check it out and verify it for yourself
00:26:10.960at Wikipedia, any number of other points that are out there.
00:26:14.940The policies with respect to government price controls, nationalizing of certain key industry and various kinds of controls all the way down, the development of government education and running of the education system and so on.
00:26:31.600You just go right through the list. It's all socialism.
00:26:33.940So I think what we very quickly we're going to get into, though, is the debates over how pure does your socialism have to be?
00:26:42.140And does your socialism need to be nested in a broader context, or should the economic socialism be fundamental?
00:26:50.460So what the Nazis are pushing for is not going to be a Marxist version of socialism.
00:26:55.860It's not going to be a Saint-Simonian version of socialism or a Fourier version of socialism or a Rousseauian version of socialism.
00:27:03.940They thought of themselves as socialists, and they thought of themselves as better socialists than the other socialists that are out there.
00:27:10.760So I will just leave it at this point. But the debate strike me as very similar to the Catholics and the Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox, all having their centuries long arguments about who the real Christians are.
00:27:25.960It's the exact same sort of thing. They are socialists, but there are lots of different subspecies of socialism. The Nazis are in that mix.
00:27:33.240So why do we call them the far right, Stephen?
00:27:35.100I think that comes out of, that's always struck me as a North American, as extraordinarily alien, because when I was a young guy, I was educated in classical liberalism. And so what left and right mean is always culturally specific to the political landscape.
00:27:52.440Right. So in Canada, right, where I grew up, right, what was left and what was right means something different than what was left and what is right in the United States and so on.
00:28:03.620So I think what you have to do for that is to go back to the 19th century European intellectual context.
00:28:10.500And this is the continental European because the British are somewhat exceptional on this score here.
00:28:16.440And what you find when you look at the intellectual landscape, particularly by the time you get into Central Europe, is right is a nationalistic form of collectivism, that you are part of this ethnic group.
00:28:30.400So you're a German, you're an Austrian, you're a Schwabian or whatever it is that you happen to be.
00:28:35.540That's the first and foremost thing about your identity.
00:28:39.240And with that comes a certain language, a certain number of cultural traditions with a certain number of religion.
00:28:44.040So you are formed, your nation is formed by all of those, that constellation of group membership identities.
00:28:53.420And then the people on the left have a more economic understanding of your collective identity.
00:29:09.120Now, obviously, they disagree with each other on all sorts of applied issues.
00:29:13.600But what they do agree with each other is on the collectivism and that and they are all anti individualistic and they also agree with each other that there's not going to be a harmonious negotiated resolution of the differences between these various groups.
00:29:29.980The conflict is deep and fundamental. And as a result, the conflict is going to be resolved by power, not by means of negotiation, agreement, democratic and parliamentary procedures and so forth.
00:29:45.600It has to be ultimately through revolution, fighting and suppression of the of the other group.
00:29:52.180So I want to say any time you use right or left or even liberal and conservative now, they're almost useless in contemporary discourse unless it's a journalistic shorthand.
00:30:05.840And you know that you're talking for the British context or the Japanese context or the Russian context.
00:30:11.260Makes sense. And like you say, we all fall into that trap very often nowadays, I think, in our conversations. The other thing I was going to ask you, and this is just us getting some of the definitions out of the way, really, is I think in the modern culture, we use the terms fascist and Nazi interchangeably. Can you explain what that is all about and the differences and what we should know about that?
00:30:36.840Yeah, that's another fascinating issue because, you know, technically, and the academic in me wants to say that you should not distinguish national socialist and fascist, that they do have ideological membership inclusion criteria, but they also have historical differences that should be important.
00:30:57.600So the point about fascism is that fascism originated in Italy, and the most important person here, obviously, is Benito Mussolini.
00:31:07.840But the important thing here, this is often overlooked, is that Mussolini was a man of the left until he was 35 years old, a man of the far left until he was 35 years old.
00:31:19.580He was a card-carrying Marxist and saw himself as working with the unions, organizing the workers, that the Marxist picture of the world was by and large correct, and what we needed to do was bring Marxism to Italy, that it's not an ethnic rivalry, but rather it's a class rivalry, that it's the Italian workers versus the Italian capitalists, and it's the same.
00:31:45.400So it's all of that line that we know. And he was a true believer until he was in his middle 30s. And then World War I happened. And World War I, he was shocked to realize was that the Italian workers whom he'd been arguing his whole life and working with them said they're being oppressed by the capitalists.
00:32:02.180that World War I was, on the Marxist analysis, supposed to be this capitalist war,
00:32:07.680and that really what should happen is that all of the workers in all of the different nations
00:32:11.320around the world should get together and overthrow their capitalist oppressors and so forth
00:32:17.280and bring about the revolution, that instead what was happening was that first and foremost
00:32:21.880in all of the Italian workers' minds was their loyalty to being Italian.
00:32:26.940They thought of themselves as part of the Italian ethnic group,
00:32:30.380And they're against the French, and they're against the Germans, and they're against all of the other ethnic groups. So what Mussolini realized was that this idea that economic interests come first was wrong, and that it's a different collectivity that needs to be stressed.
00:32:45.920And so what he wanted to argue is, rather than international socialism, that workers of the world should be uniting, what we need to do is have socialism for the Italian people. And it's going to have a different flavor than the socialism for the French people and the socialism for the German people. And that's where the label fascism comes from.
00:33:06.160And it's partly hearkening back to ancient Rome, where you take a bunch of rods and you bind them together with a cord.
00:33:25.440You're supposed to serve this collectivity, even sacrifice yourself and die for this collectivity.
00:33:31.120But the right collectivity is the Italian cultural group.
00:33:34.720So it's socialism for Italians, and that's what fascism is. And the same story needs to be told here. Mussolini was a very well-read man, and he was a very articulate man. He made a living as a journalist and as an editor of a newspaper for many years.
00:33:51.740He knew the ins and outs of arguing all of the fine points of theoretical detail from his years as a Marxist, and he was working with first-rate philosophers in Italian universities, Gentili and others, who were reading Nietzsche, reading Marx, reading Hegel, reading Kant, it's all the same guys again.
00:34:12.920And then taking that philosophical framework, putting it through an Italian collectivist lens and outcomes fascism with with with Mussolini at the leader.
00:34:22.300So if fascism is Italian socialism, then when we go a little bit north, then what we have is Hitler and the others arguing, well, we need to have national socialism for Germans.
00:34:36.620So they are siblings in the collectivist, socialist, nationalist universe.
00:34:47.300So coming forward to the present day, because in our culture, you know, when Brexit and Trump happened, everyone started calling everyone a Nazi and a fascist.
00:34:59.440And, you know, even I jokingly as a comedian, sometimes, you know, I see a later story out of Austria, you know, making vaccines mandatory.
00:35:07.160And I am sort of tempted to make the historical connection as well.
00:35:10.740So how do we, you know, everyone seems to be worried about the rise of this thing.
00:35:16.480How do we know? Because what I'm hearing is a thread through everything you're saying is collectivism.
00:35:21.380It's all about the collective is more important than the individual.
00:35:25.340And therefore, maybe you don't have the right to take or not take the vaccine because your body isn't quite yours as an individual.
00:35:32.160We, the collective, need you to do something very specific.
00:35:35.600How do what would be the telltale signs that Nazism or fascism is making a comeback?
00:35:41.280Yeah, well, I would say, yeah, that's a hard question.
00:35:45.240So I think very quickly you need to get to know the person you are labeling well as an individual.
00:35:53.660And I think just taking one data point, you know, that the person is in favor of a more authoritarian political policy on this particular issue is not enough to bring out the big gun.
00:36:06.460I think it's fair to say, you know, if someone is in favor of, say, mandatory COVID vaccinations for children before they can go into school.
00:36:16.180Well, that clearly is an authoritarian measure. And the right label to use at that point is to say that is an authoritarian measure. But then to go on to say that that is a Marxist measure or a Nazi measure or a fascist measure, that's going to then bring in a whole bunch of other baggage.
00:36:33.800That rest of that baggage might be appropriate, but you would need to know that that particular individual advocating that particular program also signs on to, by and large, the rest of that particular program.
00:36:46.520If you don't do that, then I think you are just engaging in name calling and doing cheap shots.
00:36:52.140And that's an intellectual irresponsibility.
00:36:55.160So it's not just, you know, fascist and Nazi and so on, you know, the same sort of accusations with respect to calling someone a sexist.
00:37:03.800or calling someone a racist because, you know, their nuanced understanding of these complicated
00:37:09.840issues is slightly different from yours. That's too much cheap shot. You need to do your homework.
00:37:16.260I also do think, and this is the liberal tolerance coming out here, treat people as
00:37:21.100individuals, not as avatars for various shadowy movements that are going on there. And just as
00:37:27.000we do in a court of law, you need to give that person a chance to explain. You need to know about
00:37:33.360the person's broader context before you uh you start using the condemnatory language
00:37:38.560steven i remember talking to my grandfather who volunteered to fight the nazis and i remember
00:37:46.080when he was still alive when i was a young boy having a conversation with him asking him why is
00:37:51.140it that people voted for hitler why was it that people supported him and he said to me and i always
00:37:58.140remember this he said you have to remember francis at the time that germany was in a really bad
00:38:03.340way economically, Hitler was a working man's friend at the time. Is that a fair statement
00:38:09.140to make, Stephen? I think it is a fair statement to make. So, you know, when you start asking about
00:38:16.280the nature of the support for the National Socialists, the same sort of dynamics that
00:38:22.220we would talk about right now in any democratic, republican, political context, an election is
00:38:29.960coming up. And then what your party strategists do very quickly is they look at their demographics
00:38:35.860and they start dividing them into different groups. And the different groups do have
00:38:40.520different interests and things that are more or less important to them. So the Nazis did have,
00:38:46.620by the time we get into the late 1920s, and they're starting to get increasingly more votes
00:38:51.720and then on into the 1930s, things go up and down until they're successful in 1933. And they get
00:38:58.240Hitler appointed the chancellor. But it's parliamentary politics, and we have to
00:39:04.020understand it that way. So a lot of people are working week-to-week jobs. They are laborers,
00:39:11.880and so that's a huge demographic. And so the question every party is putting to itself is,
00:39:17.560how can we appeal to this demographic, appeal to their interests, and make them election promises
00:39:44.720money and interest is making slaves of all of us.
00:39:48.720We are friends of the workers and so on.
00:39:50.660So there's the workers, there's the teachers,
00:39:53.140there's the professors, there's the newspaper people, there are, you know, people in all
00:39:57.560different walks of life, and you tailor your program to appeal to as many people as you
00:40:03.560possibly can in those groups. So people who are workers, by which we mean shorthand tag,
00:40:13.320manual workers, whose employment prospects are somewhat uncertain, you know, things are going
00:40:19.900up and down. Weimar Germany, you know, it was up and down. Devastations, obviously, following World
00:40:26.220War I, vicissitudes of the market and all kinds of government controls that were going on. So
00:40:31.740it was not a stable, comfortable place to be employed. And in that context, it's very easy
00:40:37.940to say, we will give you all sorts of goodies, right? And we've got scapegoats. So anytime you
00:40:44.500have a problem, these are the bad guys who are causing all of your problems. And so we should
00:40:48.280hate those people and vote them out. So the Nazis, like many other groups, were very clever at
00:40:54.020putting together a package that was appealing to many people in that subgroup for whom economic
00:41:01.240matters on a week-to-week basis are very important. What's interesting is that they saw themselves as
00:41:07.260being in direct competition with the Communist Party. And if you follow, and this gets very
00:41:13.960nitty-gritty through the late part of the 1920s and on into the early 1930s. So you go into
00:41:19.660specific neighborhoods in Berlin, in Germany, in Munich, in Hamburg, and so on. So working-class
00:41:27.160neighborhoods. And what you find is in this election in 1928, 80% of the workers are voting
00:41:34.880for the communists. In the next election, those same 80% are voting for the Nazis. And then in
00:41:41.380the next election, they switch back to the communists and then to the Nazis. They're going
00:41:44.960back and forth. So they're competing for exactly the same turf. And it becomes a matter of very
00:41:49.640fine detail, sometimes at the level of personality politics. You know, this guy was caught in bed
00:41:54.600with the wrong person's wife. And so we lose that particular election and so forth. Or we're able
00:42:01.680to sweeten the economic pot and make slightly more economic promises than these guys are in
00:42:07.140this election so they've switched over and vote for us uh vote for us as well so i would say yes
00:42:12.360absolutely your grandfather was right economic interests do drive uh elections significantly
00:42:20.300but i want to say that's not the only issue and it's perhaps not the most important issue
00:42:24.980what were the most important issues that that caused people to to vote for hitler and for the
00:42:30.74090s in 1933 and before that? Well, I think there were religious issues. There is the long
00:42:38.520sordid history of anti-Semitism in Germany. So whoever is most able to paint the Jews as bad
00:42:47.140people, as the poison in our midst, and get people riled up on religious and anti-Jew matters,
00:42:54.540they're going to be more successful in particular elections. And that's a long-standing issue.
00:43:00.740And it's also striking that if you look at the leading philosophers, I'm coming back to the philosophers again, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche to a lesser extent, they are all anti-Semitic.
00:43:13.120It's shocking to the of us raised in the liberal tradition. We read John Locke about tolerance back in the 1690s, arguing that we should be tolerating the Jews and Adam Smith.
00:43:27.500and just becomes part of our ethos, that we might disagree with them religiously and see
00:43:32.480their cultural habits as different from us, but they're human beings living their lives,
00:43:37.080and they should have the same rights as the rest of us. You don't find that in Germany. There's a
00:43:42.340very tiny classical liberal movement there, and all of the big names are anti-Semitic in various
00:43:50.580degree. So that religious matters, the longstanding ethnic feuds, right? What do you think about the
00:43:57.620Russians? What do you think about the French? What do you think about the English? Do you see them
00:44:03.520to the extent that international commerce or international politics is the dominant set of
00:44:09.220issues in this particular ethnic cycle? You know, the same way that right now, you know, we need to
00:44:15.360be worried about the Russians or we need to be worried about the Chinese. It's easy to get that
00:44:19.340whipped up into national consciousness and get a swing vote based on that particular issue.
00:44:26.360I think it also is important is what people are reading in the newspapers.
00:44:31.420And if you've got a generation of journalists who've graduated from high school and gone on
00:44:38.200to university, they absorb a certain ideological view of the world, and that comes out in their
00:44:44.160newspapers. So what are the newspaper editors deciding and so on? The other group would be,
00:44:50.540and this is another shocking one when I started reading about this, is what are people learning,
00:44:55.320not in universities, but in primary schools? And one of the striking things in the 1930s,
00:45:02.860slightly before the Nazis came to power, if you look at all of the teachers teaching in primary
00:45:08.740schools all up and down Germany. And you look at their political party memberships. There were
00:45:15.200more teachers who were members of the Nazi party prior to Hitler coming to power than any other
00:45:20.720party in Germany. So it's a cultural revolution. So people are absorbing this ideology in schools.
00:45:29.660They're reading about it in their newspapers. In many cases, they're hearing it in their sermons.
00:45:34.400And then when they have their, you know, their after dinner conversations or after work conversations at the pub over a few beers and so on, and then the union organizers come in and they preach a certain economic message, you get it from all angles. And I think ultimately that's what shapes people. So it's not going to be one thing. It's the whole ideological package that's put together.
00:45:56.180at what point was it that Hitler decided that he needed to spread Nazism around the world or was
00:46:04.740that always a goal for him yeah well uh that's that's an interesting question so what I would
00:46:13.600say is here I think Hitler is channeling the great philosophers and what you find in I'll just
00:46:22.620cite two here is just Hegel and Marx. Hegel in the early part of the 1800s, but he becomes perhaps
00:46:29.780the dominant philosopher of the early part of the 19th century. And then Marx writing in the middle
00:46:36.340part of the 19th century, and his influence starts to be manifested more in the early part of the
00:46:43.18020th century after the success of the revolution in Russia. But what do both of those have in
00:46:51.080common, despite the fact that they are somewhat different in some of their metaphysics and their
00:46:55.200epistemology, some of their value frameworks, and so on. What you find in Hegel is the idea
00:47:00.740that the state is the manifestation of a kind of divine providence on earth, and that through the
00:47:09.180state, all individuals need to realize their personal identity to serve the state and to be
00:47:17.280willing to be sacrificed for the state so that the state can realize its divine providential
00:47:23.660mission. And it's going to happen. Divine providence happens, no matter what you or I
00:47:28.540as individuals say. And there are certain great men who come along, who are chosen by these divine
00:47:35.220providential forces to embody the state and thereby to embody the entire culture, to bring
00:47:42.120that culture forward to the next stage. And it just so happens that Germany is, of all of the
00:47:50.860cultures around the world, the one that is most evolved, and that Germany has this providential
00:47:56.360mission to take all of the world in a certain direction. Now, that's a two-minute summary of
00:48:03.760Hegelian philosophy and political philosophy. But imagine yourself as a young, thoughtful,
00:48:10.000well-read politically ambitious german reading hegel what is your inspiration going to be right
00:48:18.440well i want to be the embodiment of the state and to take germany in the in the in the right
00:48:24.040direction so all of that collectivity and a little bit of religion and might makes right
00:48:29.420at the international level all comes to be fine and uh it necessarily has to be a conflictual
00:48:35.740warlike fashion that's going to bring this about. So Heidegger, another German philosopher of the
00:48:43.8601920s, Carl Schmitt, probably the most intelligent legal mind, also a PhD. All of them are reading
00:48:52.520Hegel and are arguing that Germany has this special mission. And both of them end up being
00:48:59.580very strong supporters of national socialism and providing the intellectual and academic
00:49:04.040ammunition for it. You find the same thing in Marxism, in a more left-wing or economically
00:49:10.540socialist version, that the whole world is in this economic clash of cultures and classes,
00:49:18.180and that it's a die-hard struggle of alienation and exploitation, and it's only going to be
00:49:24.160through this violent revolution, that this manifestation of the proper way of society
00:49:32.880being organized is going to happen. And there needs to be a dictatorship of the proletariat,
00:49:38.700a small vanguard of individuals who embody their class interests and know what is best for the
00:49:45.440society as a whole, who are willing to ram things through and make the revolution happen,
00:49:50.660no matter how bloody that it gets. So whether you're absorbing a more right-wing Hegelian
00:49:56.320understanding or a left-wing Marxist understanding, by the time you get to these guys, that's the
00:50:02.540political zeitgeist. And I was going to ask Stephen, we've got a few minutes left before
00:50:09.060we ask you our final question. Moving slightly beyond the Nazis specifically and into the
00:50:15.600philosophical underpinnings of that, again, coming back to collectivism and liberalism,
00:50:20.720one of the things we've explored on the show somewhat is the lack of meaning in modern society
00:50:27.600that we have and the absence perhaps of religion, but also just the whole liberal world seems to
00:50:34.340create that sort of, you know, we are all an island of one person in some way. That's how
00:50:40.680it can feel sometimes to a lot of people. On the other hand, collectivism, you've just charted,
00:50:45.320you know, the terrible ways it can lead people to think and behave. So is there some kind of
00:50:51.320golden middle or is it just classical liberalism all the way? Is there a good way to organize
00:50:58.900society? Yeah. Well, I don't think there's a golden middle when you frame things that way.
00:51:03.960I'm a liberal all the way down, all the way down in the philosophy. But you're right. I mean,
00:51:10.880it is a very good criticism of liberalism to say that fundamentally you are on your own,
00:51:17.000that you are an individual you have your life and you are a free agent you have the right to life
00:51:23.200liberty and the pursuit of happiness now what's distinctive about liberalism though is to say
00:51:29.060that making your life is a do-it-yourself project not to say that you won't be very social and other
00:51:36.100people won't help you and you'll have wonderful support networks right and so forth but there is
00:51:40.560a bottom line responsibility that liberalism puts on each individual. And then we do find a big
00:51:49.300divide among individuals in a liberal society, those who are grateful, who are energized,
00:51:57.820who are delighted by the fact that I am a free agent and I can do whatever I want with my life
00:52:02.880and I'm going to go out and do something pretty special with it versus those who feel that as a
00:52:08.920burden, as a weight, as I'm not sure that I'm up to the task, and that sounds a little bit scary.
00:52:17.420And for that psychological type, I'm just going to call it a psychological type right now,
00:52:21.800I do think the collectivisms are going to be more psychologically attractive, setting aside any of
00:52:26.880the intellectuals. Because what all of the collectivisms do is to say there is a ready-made
00:52:34.140group with a ready-made set of values, and there is this set of institutions where all of it is
00:52:42.940worked out, and all you need to do is just be part of this group, and we will provide meaning for you
00:52:49.160and give you a cause and mobilize all of your energies in a certain direction. So the idea then
00:52:56.820is for the collectivisms it's going to be through politics and absorbing yourself into
00:53:05.140pre-existing social institutions that you are going to find meaning uh and that's going to
00:53:11.540be very comforting to uh to a large number of people and the individuals uh in on the in the
00:53:17.140liberal tradition they're given a lot of hard work to say you have to make your life it's not
00:53:24.020something that you can just take off the shelf or be absorbed into. So I think that really is
00:53:29.480the great challenge for any sort of liberal philosophy broadly conceived, is to say that
00:53:35.460we need, when we are dealing with young people, to be able to raise people who are, by the time
00:53:41.940they're adults, they're welcoming and able to take on that great challenge of going forth
00:53:48.940into the world and making their own meaningful life. And I think the reason why there are so many
00:53:54.880animistic and atomistic individuals floating around in liberal society is that
00:54:00.820we've not done a very good job of that. And the way you talk about mobilizing groups and giving
00:54:07.980groups a sense of purpose and, you know, people can identify themselves by their group.
00:54:13.480it sounds a little bit like identity politics you know what we see now yeah yeah this is not
00:54:22.560a cheap shot but this is 2021 if you were to go back to germany in 1921 it's exactly the same
00:54:31.800thing only only the names have changed it is a form of identity politics and notice that the
00:54:38.100the point here is not first and foremost political. It's what is your identity? Am I an individual?
00:54:45.800I have my own mind. I can form my character and my values. And it's up to me as an individual
00:54:51.900to get up off the sofa and go out into the world and make my life into what I want it to be.
00:54:59.320That's my core identity. Or is it the case that I, as an individual, I'm born into certain groups
00:55:05.880and I have a ready-made individual, a ready-made identity that I can just put on like a suit of
00:55:12.360clothes. And that's who I am. And my values and my goals and what I'm supposed to do in my place
00:55:19.180in society is all worked out. That's my collectivized identity. So, you know, if you
00:55:25.820think about the ethnic versions of this, so, you know, you guys are, again, I'll use some British
00:55:32.700examples here, but you know, you say, so part of your identity is to be British. And then you can
00:55:38.700say, you know, we are the nation of Shakespeare, and John Milton. And just, you know, saying those
00:55:45.440names, you sit up a little straighter in your chair, and you feel some measure of pride. That's
00:55:51.640a point that needs to be unpacked very carefully. So was it the fact that you just happened to be
00:55:57.100born in this particular place in the world, that because other people who were born in that
00:56:03.520particular place in the world centuries ago did some amazing things, that that makes you a better
00:56:08.660person, that you don't need to do anything additional. Just by virtue of being British,
00:56:13.380you are special. I think that's a danger. I think the right way to do that then is to say,
00:56:19.940yes, Shakespeare was great. John Milton was great. And why I can feel pride of that is not
00:56:26.480due to the happenstance of my birth, but I as an individual have become an educated person
00:56:32.380and I have learned to appreciate Shakespeare and John Milton and all of the others
00:56:39.200who have done some pretty amazing things. And so I'm the kind of person who is worthy of
00:56:45.520being related to in some way Shakespeare. So it's got to be tied to your individual achievement,
00:56:59.720particularly the point that Francis brings up
00:57:01.620about collectivism and collectivist ideas in modern society.
00:57:06.260And I take your point that the job of educators like you,
00:57:09.220and I'm sure you do a brilliant job at it,
00:57:11.620is to prepare people not to have to get an off-the-shelf solution
00:57:15.240to living a fulfilling life and making meaning for themselves.
00:57:20.380what do we do with the fact that there's a lot of people who who who want the off the shelf thing and
00:57:27.240that that's that's you know we failed as you say to to provide that how do we manage that in the
00:57:32.580current political moment yeah well i uh i think we have to think for the long term right by the
00:57:38.500time people are 25 30 35 40 and so on uh they can change they can reform you know people who are
00:57:45.640are alcoholics who have various kinds of addictions they can change but it's a rare
00:57:50.200person who does so uh and my particular interests are in university age people but in this last
00:57:56.920year or so i'm doing a lot in in philosophy of education and applied philosophy of education
00:58:02.200because you know this is not an original point to me by any stretch uh how we educate children
00:58:08.120is the most important long-term thing. So if, for example, I've written on this, if from day one,
00:58:18.220for example, we teach children to be afraid of the world, that we're killing all of the animals
00:58:23.400and everything is going to be poison and you probably aren't going to see age 25, if we start
00:58:28.680teaching people that at age five, then we're not going to raise a generation of people with the
00:58:35.100emotional resilience to handle important, say, environmental challenges. That's an indoctrination
00:58:41.300education method that sabotages people's emotional resilience. If we dumb down mathematics and
00:58:49.200science because we say it's too hard for boys or it's too hard for girls or it's too hard for
00:58:54.040members of this racial or ethnic group, and so we do math for dummies, so to speak, at a very early
00:59:00.280age, then intellectually, by the time we are graduating so-called high school graduates,
00:59:05.360we're going to be putting out millions of people who do not have the intellectual resilience in
00:59:10.380order to be able to take on the challenges of modern technological and scientific society,
00:59:15.420much less the broader intellectual project. So my view is that formal education, there are some
00:59:22.420islands of excellences in some places that are pretty good, but the average has been very low,
00:59:28.240And in some cases, it has been outright sabotage of people, young people's intellectual and emotional capacity for taking on modern living.
00:59:37.300So that's where I think we need to be focusing our education, reforming existing educational institutions.
00:59:45.120And the one thing that I am encouraged by is a large number of people who are recognizing the low to abysmal results in much of mainstream education and who are engaging in literally thousands and thousands of different entrepreneurial experiments to try different educational models.
01:00:03.980So by the time we have this conversation, hopefully 20 years from now, we're dealing with a different young people demographic.
01:00:11.200Stephen it's been absolutely wonderful thank you so much for coming on the show the hour has quite
01:00:17.720literally flown by uh yeah but uh we always end our interviews with the same question which is
01:00:25.100what's the one thing we're not talking about but we really should be uh well I I would just return
01:00:31.320to the point uh that I just made but make it in slightly different form uh I'm trying not to be
01:00:37.980one of those curmudgeonly old professors talking about kids these days. But I do notice a
01:00:45.940generational shift in the young people who show up in my university classes. And it's not just
01:00:53.100the young women, it's also the young men. By and large, it does seem that the young women are
01:00:58.780coming out of high school a little better prepared for university life than the young men are.
01:01:03.600But I'm still a little bit discouraged that we're not talking enough about what's going on in the high schools, how we are kind of minting people with a degree that to a large extent is not actually an honest credential.
01:01:26.500There's a huge amount of dishonesty saying, we give you this diploma, we send you forth,
01:01:31.280you are ready for adult life when everybody knows that is not true.
01:01:37.180We revere educators, teachers, we've given them a huge amount of money.
01:01:44.080And there's been a certain amount of benevolence on the part of everybody to give them the benefit of the doubt on all sorts of scores.
01:01:51.500but I think we do need to have an honest reckoning