Ben Burgis on media, culture wars, and the left

foreign ERS welcome to how the light gets in thank you one approach of the left and especially in the US I think when it comes to reactionary right-wing ideas and the people who hold them is to avoid them avoid giving them a platform avoid talking with them avoid engaging with them and the argument is you're only going to end up propagating their ideas right you're someone who takes very much the opposite view of this and even though your politics are very much on the left you choose to go head-to-head with people whose views to put it mildly you disagree with right what do you think is the value of that kind of Engagement and what are you hoping to achieve with it sure so I think the impulse to you know not give people platforms both uh I think both shows a kind of disturbing lack of confidence uh in our own ideas and also just doesn't really make sense to me mathematically uh that it seems like oftentimes we're talking about people who already have much larger platforms you know than than we do and so the idea that if you just sort of studiously ignore them and not give them the magical Aura of your uh of your presence you know that that'll decrease their influence doesn't really make sense I think it makes a lot more sense to you know to go out there and you know present your ideas uh to uh to people who might not otherwise be exposed to them especially because we've you know we're at an incredibly fractured media landscape where oftentimes this is the only way you can ever talk to anybody else's audience and what do you have to achieve when when you argue with these people I mean I imagine you don't think you're going to change the Mind necessarily as I hope that people watching it that aren't really already part of the tribal divisions are going to somehow take something away from it yeah I mean the goal is never to convince the other person on the stage or the person the other half of the YouTube split screen or whatever uh-huh that because that's realistically that's probably not going to happen uh people whose personal and professional identities are wrapped up and promoting um their point of view do sometimes change their mind but it's an incredibly slow process at that point it's almost like experiencing religious conversion and it's probably not going to happen as a result of one conversation Nation uh so and the goal isn't even to reach their most hardcore fans uh for the reasons you you kind of hinted at in that question that that's also probably not a realistic goal but any audience of any size whatsoever is composed of lots of different groups of people and so you want to reach whoever's persuadable in that audience that could be curious fence sitters that could be people who you know you debate in Charlie Kirk there could be people who you know kind of like what he's saying and are willing to give him a sympathetic hearing but aren't really marriage these ideas yet it could be people who used to be hardcore fans but you catch them at exactly the right time you know in the ark when they're open to something else YouTube has been known as this kind of like radicalizing platform do you think it also acts now as a kind of the opposite as a deer radicalize people that already have sort of views that are quite far out there yeah um it can I think that the enemies certainly anecdotally you know I mean I I hear from people all the time um who who have moved to the left as a result of you know things that they've you know they've watched on YouTube that they think that's played a role so you know it certainly can I mean I have all sorts of issues with the way that those platforms work and you know and I if I could somehow magically get my way you know I think that there just wouldn't be um you know I'm kind of an algorithm abolitionist you know I think they just wouldn't be recommended videos you know you'd have to uh you'd have to search for things but uh given that it is what it is I think it's a space that it's not helpful to concede to your ideological opponents you are a defender of free speech and a Critic of those who argue that you know platforms like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook should regulate speech online ban certain forms of misinformation band session forms of conspiracy theorizing do you think the left is on the wrong side of the argument when it comes to free speech especially with online platforms yeah I think many uh many progressives even many people with like seriously left-wing views who end up sort of tailing the liberal end of the culture wars on this issue uh how incredibly short-sighted about this you know that uh so even though you know what they would call misinformation which is a word I kind of hate because I think you know lying is a perfectly good word uh just believing dumb things is a is a perfectly understandable concept but misinformation is the sort of unhelpful pseudo-technical term that sounds like it identifies something very clear but my problem with it the reason I think it's so short-sighted is that every political argument is to some extent an argument about the facts that uh you know people who you know people who want to raise the minimum wage and people who don't disagree about whether that's going to lead to more unemployment you know people who want to you know escalate the conflict with with Russia you know are less likely to think that that's gonna uh that's gonna lead to the the threat of world war three the people who don't etc etc that's always going to be true like there's no political argument that's only an argument about values not at all an argument about facts so both sides will always from their perspective think the other is guilty of you know misinformation whatever that means and so the question is as always with free speech I think who gets to decide right you know who gets to decide what's uh what's true and what's misinformation and I don't really trust any institution you know with that power even if even if YouTube and Spotify and Twitter were run by you know some committee that you know represented working class interests you know like I still wouldn't trust them but I particularly don't trust them because they're actually owned by Massive profitable corporations that have every incentive to oppose the platform of the serious left they they don't want to give up their money and who have every incentive to stay on the right side of the National Security State so you know one way of kind of bringing all these threads together is to ask like okay if uh social media as we know it had existed in 2002 and um they had you know strict policies against misinformation who'd be more likely to be booted for misinformation people who agreed with George Bush Tony Blair in the New York Times their weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or people who didn't around the time that Elon Musk was pretending he was going to buy a tomato we don't know whether he's actually going to do it you wrote an article saying despite the fact that he has this kind of position of absolute free speech that that wouldn't really help Free Speech why did you why did you think that yeah so I think it's possible that if Elon Musk actually did go ahead with the purchase I think it's entirely possible that there would be moderation policies there uh For Better or For Worse I doubt that he would do exactly what he was saying but you know they I think it's entirely possible the policies would change in a direction I would like but the point I was making in that article is that um one I don't particularly trust him on this I think uh if you look at his own history of Union busted if you look at his own history of being very hair trigger about suing people for libel uh I don't particularly believe that he would uh that you know maybe he would surprise me but I I would be very unsurprised if he wasn't quite good to his good you know good on his word on Free Speech policies on Twitter but that's you know I could be wrong about that the larger point the more important point to my mind is that it's kind of absurd that you should have to hope that some benevolent rich person is going to buy the digital Public Square and that they're going to allow lots of free speech there I mean you know as if in actual literal Public Square as we lived in some sort of you know libertarian dystopia where those were profitly owned and so you could only hold a public protest March if the particular sidewalk you were you know marching down happened to be owned by a free speech billionaire instead of an anti-free speech billionaire that that seems like a a very short-sighted solution to me so you know my have good results but I don't think we should have to count on that I think we would be much better off having democratically accountable institutions around these platforms you mentioned earlier that political disagreement isn't just about values it's also about facts is disagreement about the facts increasing or was this always a part of politics and we've just somehow gotten onto the fact that that's the case I think it's always been part of politics I think it might be maybe like a little bit more obvious or disturbed in some ways now than it was like in 2002 for example so I think that now there's just a different problem with media that the problem with media in 2002 was more or less all the stuff that like Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann were talking about in the 80s you know manufacturing consent um you know that certain you know that there was this uh you know mainstream media that was incredibly powerful that excluded voices that shouldn't be excluded and was too credulous about government claims and things like that all entirely correct criticisms but that's just not the problem that we have now right the problem we have now is that traditional media has economically collapsed it's incredibly fractured uh it's in many ways returned to its roots you know that we sort of had this idea of politically neutral media as a sort of mid 20th century invention and you know and we're reverted into an older form of media that's very fractured where the economic incentive uh given that you know five percent as many people are watching you know Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson or whoever has watched Say Walter Cronkite you know back when the economic incentive is to relentlessly Pander to whatever audience you have left which means that there's a lot of incentive for reporting even the Wisp of the rumor of something that fits with your preferred narratives and a lot of disincentives for correcting it when you find out you know that it's not true so I think that you that certain kinds of arguments about facts are more frustrated now probably that they were 20 years ago but I also don't think there has it was ever a time when arguments about facts played no role in political arguments I think that's always going to be there our culture wars based on a disagreement also about facts or are those really truly only about values yeah I don't think they're only about values I think that in fact very often times uh cultural or spats are fueled by uh people having very different impressions of facts that you know there'll be some high profile trial that you'll you know that you'll get completely parallel universes of people's perceptions of what's going you know what's going on in them they'll get very mad at each other about this and then at the end of the day you know like there is no um you know in terms of policy there's no there there random trials don't set legally binding precedence right it you know what happens with you know I don't know Johnny Depp and Amber Heard only affects Johnny Depp and Amber Heard like you know literally and nobody else but people still you know people still fight about this um and it's in a lot of ways it's this sort of strange symbolic pseudo-politics right you know Politics as I would understand it is about what the laws are how material resources are distributed and note of that is actually at stake in in any of this I mean it's I think in a strange way because there's so much information everybody's fingertips all the time and so much chance to sort of signal your allegiances you know by by who get us through your media preferences but also most Ordinary People are largely disempowered in terms of institutional things that affect their lives the combination of all this is that everything is political but none of it actually matters very much is there a danger of dismissing culture or Politics as irrelevant as kind of politically frivolous and pseudopolitics when especially the U.S some of the key cultural issues and things like abortion and gun control really do end up affecting sort of how people's lives are run yeah so I'd make a distinction between social policy and culture right so I think that you know battles that are fought literally over what the laws are whether you're allowed to get an abortion whether you're allowed to you know sell 18 year olds AR-15s are not the same thing as fighting about cultural sensibilities which would be probably culture we're properly speaking although they're fought as proxies for the culture War so I think that for example you know it it's you know the reason why uh you know Republicans in Florida you know passed uh the uh the law against uh teaching anything that had anything to do with sexual identity or sexual orientation uh in um in early grades of in early grades of school wasn't they'd like received a bunch of reports about this happening and you know and and they decided that you know something had to be done about it you know it was for the sake of scoring points about the cultural set you know sensibilities but sure once you do that then you have a real issue and and that could be very bad you know you could you could imagine all sorts of ways in which you know under that law that example you know that uh that the teachers could get fired for you know doing all sorts of innocuous things uh and the attack on public education and that need that does need to be thought about but even there I would say that you know recognizing that a lot of these social battle policy battles are often fought as proxies for the culture War should impact how we think about them which is not to say that the left can be neutral on them I mean there are issues of principle here um but I think it does impact how you think about issues of emphasis because battles over cultural sensibilities do tend to polarize people in a much more evenly split way whereas battles about distribution and material resources at least have the potential to build you know much larger majority Coalition so without giving anything up on the you know the substance of it right you know I mean that again you know there are issues of principle if you believe women have the right to control their own bodies you know you you have to oppose you know attempts to roll back abortion rights but I think strategically it could still make a lot of sense to try to focus as much as possible on the kinds of battles where uh I think the last message is going to be most compelling to the most people and how do we move the agenda away from the kind of cultural issues that just divide people so tribally and onto the kind of economic agenda one part of that specifically on the left the Electoral front uh is that you actually do have to give people something that they can get excited about about the material issues I think it's a little much to hope that if you're you know six percent better than they have in the opposition on the material issues uh that people will get more excited about that than they do about you know cultural tribalism um but I also think that not all the answers electoral I think that you know I think that a lot of it has to take place um you know in the workplace as we're having this conversation uh there have been several hundred Starbucks stores in the United States that have uh that have been have unionization efforts you know going on at them right now um there was there was just the first Amazon you know Warehouse that was unionized uh and this is the kind of thing because it affects people's interests and the most immediate visceral level you know that they am I going to get paid more you know uh do I is it going to be easier to take time off you're going to spend with my family I think there's much greater potential for uh for winning over people whose cultural sensibilities might put them at odds that the left uh in the that first ever Amazon warehouse that was unionized uh one of you know even though uh the main organizer Chris Smalls is a black radical leftist uh you know he's given credit to this uh this Amazon warehouse worker who refers to his Uncle Pat who's an Italian-American Trump voter on Staten Island uh who signed up several hundred people uh for uh for the union because even if you like Trump because he triggers the libs you know you uh you know you might still like to have more bathroom breaks and be paid more money among other things you're a philosophy Professor is a room for philosophy and contemporary politics or is that too idealistic and naive to believe I think you need to fire on both levels so I think that it's um I don't I'm under no illusions that 99 of political persuasion is going to take place at the level of like you know well worked out intellectual arguments um you know you know you have to have a version of that that trickles down to the point of like Punchy easily communicated things but I actually also think it's useful to have a version of it that is that is well worked out that they uh that you know if you're you know trying to convince a lot of different people uh who um who are going to ask different kinds of questions and you know and and be you know be engaged with different kinds of arguments I think it's useful to you know I think it's useful to have some people who who do each some people uh some people who do both do both you know I mean I think that you probably don't get me wrong I think that you know I think the left probably needs more you need an organizers than philosophy professors but I don't think it's bad to have a few philosophy professors left-wing policy is supposed to be sort of forward-looking but they often have this kind of whiff of the past you know ideas from the 19th century economic ideas from the 1960s and 1970s and that in some ways allows people to dismiss them as kind of irrelevant to the 21st century caught in the past trying to resurrect an economic World in reality that no longer exists so what's your vision for left-wing politics of the future that sort of is a genuine orientation towards the future not the past yeah I mean I think that um you know I think that for most of the couple thousand years between the end of the Roman Republic and the French Revolution uh anybody who was talking about a republican form of government you know was talking about things that uh that hadn't existed for many centuries um and you know surely if the mid to late 19th century had gone you know had had gone a different way and the sort of world that meter dick presided over you know was more or less the one we were still in then you know then say ah you know we tried some of this democracy stuff in the early 19th century you know it didn't go anywhere why why are you still stuck in that you should be talking about some slightly different form of monarchy because that would be exciting and new and Progressive I think that I think that the the Left Right distinction that I care about is about how um how equal you know a society how fair a society you're living in and uh you know to uh you know to the extent uh that you know the society you're living in has gone in the right direction then going even further you know we'll seem you know Progressive in that chronological sense uh to the extent that it's gone in the wrong direction as it has in the last several decades of neoliberalism that it's uh it's going to it's going to seem backward looking but I don't really care about forward or backward I care about you know more egalitarian or less Ben Bridges thank you very much thank you so much for more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to The Institute of Arts and ideas at IAI TV

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 2,215

Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, philosophy, ben burgis, free speech, free debate, open debate, youtube, left, left wing, politics, marxism, elon musk, cultural politics, identity politics, culture wars, no platforming, contemporary politics, give them an argument, political debate, social media, algorithm, algorithm abolitionist, karl marx, morehouse college, cancel culture, cancelling comedians, logic for the left, myth and mayhem

Id: W86KArwr4gQ

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023