Conversations | Stephen Hicks | Postmodernism and Nazism

[Music] [Music] [Music] Stephen Hicks welcome to Australia and welcome to conversations you have quite a story to tell your professor of philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois the executive director of the Center for Ethics and entrepreneurship senior scholar at the atlas Society you've written four books and you've emerged as one of the world's leading critics of post-modernism and also the state of free speech in our universities you've also I think very interesting Lee studied the relationships between the idea of nature and the rise of Nazism which is still something we ought to learn a lot from but perhaps don't talking of learning you're actually a native of Canada and we're in Australia both of us have been the lucky recipients of a lot of good ideas that were fought out over a long time that have produced I think we'd both agree very free societies that are great to live in do you think we understand that history well enough now to be able to preserve it so it's a history education and a philosophy education but no you're right I the first century we live in astonishing times for for human beings the prosperity and we take it for granted the lifespans the the lack of pain but also that sense that also is quite unique in human history that when problems arise we can solve them we can figure them out and we can make progress that's that's very rare so as residents of Canada and and and in Australia yeah we we inherited a tradition that made all of that possible so we don't though do a good job of communicating in education what all of that depends on so all of the the worries about the state of history education and of course our battles over history are are are genuinely well found felt and well articulated so it doesn't come from nowhere it's not magic although those ideas had to be discovered and debated and articulated and there are often appealing ideas from other perspectives that are out there and every generation does have to go through that same cultural learning process and so right now we're not doing a good job at that that's why some of our leading important institutions are being undermined I think it's probably true to say the very great bulk of a sort of particularly in this country 70 or 80 percent of people get on with their lives they think basically Australia is a pretty good place even if we're a bit concerned about our unity and there's a lot of anxiety a lot of stress you can't get away from that the research play it shows it but they watch this sort of gain of intellectual sort of ping pong going on over their heads left versus right and it seems to me culturally at the moment what we might have once called the left I don't know where that label works anymore they seem to have the louder megaphones and it does also seemed to me that social media has enabled them to use those mega phones in pretty powerful ways mmm fair enough I'm not too happy with left versus right labels I think the intellectual and the political landscape is shifting yeah and it's much more nuanced than that but as journalistic starting points that's that's acceptable but yes but certainly the average person they have a full work life they have a full family life they want to enjoy art movies right and so on and they do recognize if they need to keep up on what the issues are but there is a division of labor culturally and so they monitor what the intellectuals are doing it so they plug in at various levels of understanding and commitment and an interest and you're right I think part of the complacency on the right and among the liberals among the libertarians is starting to catch up with them so the big battle for example in the 20th century the the Cold War not only the economic battle in the geopolitical battle militarily but also the intellectual in the moral battle that was won and I think after that there was a strong sense among people who believed you genuinely in democratic republicanism and free speech and a kind of a culture of tolerance and individual rights they thought we've won but what happened in the 90s and the early 2000s is particularly among the far left that was really feeling beaten up on both ideologically and in terms of what had happened politically they reese tragedies they did get their act together and they're doing a much better job over the last generation of getting the message out now the social media tools is a part of that and you know who who is the first mover in that case you can have obviously huge leverage point but I'm not pessimistic I think the the people who are genuinely concerned with liberal civilizational values are recognizing that they have a battle on their hands so I think over the course of the next generation things will improve it'll be ugly but it will improve well you were very familiar with the academic scene in America and it's probably much the same in the West one of the things that strikes me is that this battle royal has reached fever pitch in the english-speaking world mm-hmm the places that are basically deprived derived from Great Britain with the mother of Parliament's and in many ways a place that became a high-water mark for civilized behavior and respectful debate why is it that the english-speaking world seems to be the place where these battles are most fiercely fought today yeah or am I wrong right no I don't think though I think that's that's right I think partly it's a it's a product of having a wealthy society is if you have a wealthy society then you will attract the best intellectuals and you'll be able to afford to buy the best intellectuals part of it will be a historical reason that the big disasters in 20th century politics happen primarily in Europe the disasters of communism or international socialism those are European export national socialism another European battle and but what happened then was that the the intellectuals and cultural activists they got out of those places largely and they went then to the West but they brought their called heritage with them I think it's also not accidental that it happens in those places because those are the civilizations that have the most tradition of tolerating eccentrics tolerating the expression of any idea and a culture of debate right - traditionally so you would expect then if you've got the brightest intellectuals from all over the world and you've got a lot of money and you're a culture that encourages people to put any idea out there and debate it vigorously that's where the fireworks are most going to happen so there we are but that immediately brings us to the point of the great debate about free speech which you've written oh yes that's right does that mean that somehow or other because they're able to argue their case passionately they've won because their writer universities seem very monochrome in their views now if there's this clash of ideas that we've encouraged why is it that one set of ideas which might be broadly defined I suppose is this sort of emergence of post-modernism or of identity politics on the back of post-modernism other than the way why is it that the universities seem to be now almost hotbeds of conformity right yeah well I think there's a two-step argument that has to be developed there and my home field of philosophy I think is the the problem what happened is during the Enlightenment era at the birth of modern science and the the optimism that we can solve problems that we can have a democratic Republican system because most people are rational and they can learn and we can have these great public debates and the voters will most of the time get it right and when they screw up they will recognize that they've screwed up and then the next election they'll change their minds so all of that is underwritten by an enormous confidence in the power of reasoned judgement objectivity and so forth and that was a philosophical achievement of the 1700s and then the modern world comes out of that but what had happened was over the things happen obviously slowly in the academic comment was a counter-reaction and philosophy as its arguments developed became increasingly skeptic increasingly pessimistic about the power of reason and so what happened by the time you get to the middle part of the 20th century was in philosophy it was in a very skeptical place right that we don't have the ability to observe the world and get it correctly they were trapped in a subjective reality that our conception SEPs and propositions and theories are largely arbitrary and socially subjective constructs and to the extent that you have then a generation of philosophers and this is at the elite institutions the leading philosophers who are saying reason is not capable then that opens a vacuum space because then you say alright well if we're going to come to formulate our beliefs and our values and act in the world but it's not going to be on the basis of reason what is it going to be on the basis of and then you turn to much more subjectivist your rationalist sources for those things and that sets you up for a different kind of kind of debate if you remember free speech and the principle of free speech it depends on a couple of things one is that you think individuals need to think for themselves and you want to give them space to think for themselves to try out different ideas but if you don't think that individuals are primaries or the individuals can think or the result of thinking is that important then you're not going to be that interested in training the individuals capacity for for thinking but also a free speech culture is a partly a social phenomenon that each of us has to think for ourselves but we all start off with a limited amount of knowledge and my knowledge set or belief set is partly overlapping with yours I don't have a whole lot on the truth but neither do you I've got some falsehoods in my system you've got some falsehoods in your system so the idea then is that a competition or a contesting of our ideas will be a winnowing out process and if I'm open to the good ideas that you have right and I'm if I'm open to your criticism of my ideas and so then we have in place an open mindedness and a toleration then I think I'm going to be better off as a result of that it's gonna be a partly painful process because my ideas they're going to be bruised I have to admit sometimes I've made mistakes I after you engage in effort right and so on and I might engage a certain amount of public humiliation or have to say I'm sorry I made a mistake I've changed my mind on this issue but a deep confidence that that social process is important under Rights a commitment to free speech but if you then say this is a contesting process but it's also cooperative have you replaced that with a different philosophy that says no human beings are not engaged in a contesting cooperative process we have a different understanding of human beings that people are not individuals who are seeking the truth and seeking values and said what I see individuals as is really this is an overstatement but bits of plasticine right or some sort of plastic substance it's born into a social context and it's moulded by a social context and doesn't really have any agency of itself then what you have is I'm just a vehicle for various social forces that are operating through me and that you have come out of a different context in like some cases a very different context and now we're segwaying into identity politics and so neither of us is rational instead we are just constructed by different social forces and those are contesting with each other but we have that skepticism I don't have the power of reason you don't have the power of reason instead what we just have as a social contesting and that's going to be nasty is this what Jonathan Hart talks about when he says that we're teaching our children to believe that life is a battle between good people and bad people well that's one aspect of it yeah that's the that's the value debate but it's going to be broader than just values is going to be our scientific theories or our understanding of Technology right and so forth so all of the things that are not overtly normative are going to be constructed differently so our religious beliefs our scientific beliefs as well as our moral beliefs so if you are a strong what we call social constructionist instead of a strong individualist then you're going to have reading worldviews and colliding worldviews but no social hope of resolution at least not through peaceful means so to go back to history yeah it seems to me that you know I'm not great scholar I don't pretend to be that as I try and understand the American Revolution and the you know Declaration of Independence an incredible intellectual thought that went into trying to work out how to maximize people's freedoms that's sort of America's big thing or has been and we're free people and they defend freedom and they've been on balance I think pretty powerful advocates for freedom absolutely very very long time yeah a great model for the world yeah but as you as you look at say the the Federalist Papers they don't claim for a moment to have read them all but many of them put together by Alexander Hamilton he's grappling very deeply with how to on the one hand exalt the standing and the recognize of dignity of the individual but on the other hand how to constrain if you like mob rule and chaos and it provide a framework and of course you end up with a democratic model it's it's checks and it's balances its limitations on power which is designed on the one hand if you like to reflect the dignity of the individual but to reflect their capacity to fail but especially collectively yes but we've really moved away completely having away from that understanding that gave basis to those freedoms mmm well I don't think we've moved away completely from I think a sector of our intellectuals who are a very prominent and of in power have moved away from that completely no but I think you're right what we now call social psychology is an important understand part of understanding any successful politics so we do know how individuals will behave as individuals and it's very possible for an individual to be rational decent common sensical and so forth but change to a different modus operandi when you put that individual in in a group and one of the big problems that we have is put people in a group where other people seem to have an agenda they seem to have a moral vision then in many individuals will immediately start to suspend their own judgment and they will become conformist they will follow along now whether that is an inbuilt bias that we want to be part of the group and it's very easy for our wanting to be part of the group to override our sense of individual moral responsibility or individual agency or whether some people have that and they have been taught that well by their parents and by their teachers and so they're able to resist it but other people have not been taught so well so whether it's native or learned as a side issue there but the the political fact should be grappled with is that there always is in every generation a large number of people who will not function as rational moral individuals in a group context and so the possibility of mob rule certainly is there now conformity also can happen in a vertical direction instead of that kind of a horizontal direction so a large number of people who seem to want you know thinking for yourself and taking responsibility for your life in all areas that's a huge responsibility and many people are comfortable with deferring that responsibility to authority figures in various aspects of their life that's another problem that your Democratic Republican institutions have to grapple with because we're in many cases willing to defer power to government agents agencies in the short term but then government agencies being what they are they never give it back or they don't want to give it back very easily and so you end up with an increasingly elitist right operation and in many cases people are are fine with that so yes how the American political model with its checks and balances I think it's trying to retain the individual freedom as well as guard against those two kinds of conformity there's an interesting comment that our perspective I think to be had in that comment you made about people almost outsourcing their decision-making and their conscience even to institutions of whether it's government or their agencies yeah oh this is a good word there sorry outsourcing is a good one here Lee but but the irony of it is it comes at a time when we're we've never been so distrustful of government and its agencies we're very distrustful now so what are we putting our confidence in to revert back to this thing you raised of identity politics one of my guests Peter Baldwin a very thoughtful Australian who was a would have identified and I accept your point about not wanting to use those old labels they largely out-of-date but he would have described himself as a member of sort of proud left I think I'm putting words in his mouth and he's goals I think as a member of the left I've always seen as noble even if I vehemently disagreed with how the left wanted to get there but he would have said and he did say in one of these conversations that there was when he was a left-wing member of the Labour Party in Australia his goal was universalism so if you've got marginalized people if you've got people who are doing a tough or not being treated fairly the idea is to elevate them up into family Australia yes into the community but now in the name of identity politics we're sort of creating a new aristocracy usually based on victimhood even if the person doesn't see themselves as a victim they painted as victims and and and so instead of universalism we're almost creating in the name of identity politics a new set of aristocratic groupings who have to be accorded you know special attention yeah so your understanding of the politics a bit better yeah I think there's two dimensions packed into your question there that's exactly right about the left one thing is that the older Left tradition has been universalistic there were all human beings we all have the same fundamental values we want to live a good meaningful life and then the question socially is how do we make it possible what's the cultural and political infrastructure going to be so that all human beings can live the best human life and then left and right and so forth I have a different set of values at some level but also a different understanding of what institutions are going to get people there that was largely abandoned in the 1960s in the left before fulfill Asafa collisions that they stopped believing there is a single human nature right that there are human nature's plural constructed by different groups and so what we have to understand is men and women to some extent are different the races are different the ethnicities are different and so forth and getting away from that Marxist purpura as a key example you know that the workers of the world are united in their humanity and they have one set of economic interests that need to be realized the left became much more plural and a certain kind of multiculturalism then came out of that so that's one issue now the other issue that is this is comes to the the victim issue here's are we trying to raise those who we think are dispossessed or underprivileged or in a weaker position to what we take to be the normal Australian or Western or human standing or do we have another agenda at work and this is a very interesting thing about the history of left and I think there are different species of leftists here are you more interested genuinely in helping the poor and the weak and the dispossessed get better or are you really interested in bringing down the the rich and the powerful so are you animated more by destruction and and resentment and envy and that has been a powerful left tradition or are you actually motivated by compassion for the underprivileged so I think what has happened here is that the left has gone through various metamorphosis in the first century and a half or so of modern leftism you had both sides I haven't John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche both of whom were critical of the left we're going out of their way to say if you really want to know what hatred and envy and resentment look like look at the far left ists and that's back in the 19th century but at the same time to be fair to the left there are any number of them George Orwell and others among them who have been genuinely motivated by poverty is not the normal human condition damn it we should be able to solve this as a society so I think both of those motivations are there what I think though has happened in the modern left and I'm much less sympathetic to leftists of the last half century or so is that the left has widely come around to agree that look they used to think that socialism was going to outstrip capitalism in productivity and that capitalism is ultimately going to generate poverty and despair and an in miseration and they just had to abandon that argument because you know free-market capitalism if anyone has a shred of intellectual honesty about them has been the greatest boon to human beings ever lifting billions of people out of poverty extending lifestyles and so forth there's no debate I don't think there's actually any honest debate that if you want to have economic prosperity you need to have some sort of a market economy and even the far left has recognized that so the leftists who are then in a position of genuinely being motivated I want to raise the poor out of poverty the honest thing then for them to do is to say alright I have to convert to some sort of market liberalism and a significant number of them did they repackage themselves as centrist and went over to to capitalism and so forth but what you're then left with though is the resent errs the ones who are not actually motivated by that what they are interested in is for whatever reason I just hate rich people right I hate powerful people and I don't want to get to psychological in this because you know you have to know someone very well to make these sorts of accusations but we do i do know a certain number of people personally you see this in the writings of the leftist when they are writing more autobiographically about what what motivates them and a lot of it is not sympathy for the poor it's just hatred resentment and envy for those who you think are doing a lot better and they just get a pleasure out of seeing those people brought down a peg so the resentment left and and so forth I think is a powerful animating force from their perspective the people who are on the losing end of various cultural battles who are dispossessed right and so forth I think they are just being used tactically as pawns that's not what's really going on so that's that's fascinating it's a really interesting set of insights would it be fair to say then that in that context traditionally Marxists people committed to communism really believe the revolution would come the workers would make it happen we'd move into a new nirvana where people gave their loyalty to the party and the state that collapsed it became an unacceptable view for all sorts of reasons and many of which you've just touched on but then you had this sort of rise out of the ashes it says well the workers are not bringing the revolution on so we've got to attack the institutions of the West in order to bring it down and then these people motivated by resentment by loathing and distrust of well-being some of whom let's face it have just been damaged by terrible experiences underneath it all the probably people who would like to break free I suspect but nonetheless they're consumed by this loathing and hatred it's more about just smashing what we have rather than having an alternative vision for a better way to live mmm yeah absolutely you don't have to go to politics to see this you can see this in many other walks of life you know if you have set some great goals for yourself as a young person and then you didn't take the leap you didn't go for it right but then you see other people who went for it and they made it how do you think about yourself yeah when you get into your 30s and your 40s that's a that's a real psychological type independent of politics but of course another variation on that is that you did go for it you went you sought your dream in Hollywood and Broadway or in in business or whatever but you failed and you had to go back home with your tail between your legs to or whatever you thought you were escaping from and then you realize that the rest of your life you're going to be a mediocrity how do you feel when you see other people out there succeeding in their dreams that is a real psychological problem so people who suffer from failures of courage or just genuine failure but they don't pick them elves up and try again there is going to be a political manifestation of that and then resentment politics is a is a real phenomenon now I though follow the philosophical developments more and another thing here is it's a cognitive failure that if you're an intellectual and you're genuinely motivated by truth seeking then one of the things that you have to do is be willing to say I have a hypothesis and I'm going to put it to the empirical test and when it fails the empirical test I am going to modify my hypothesis and in more extreme cases abandoned my hypothesis hypothesis and this is not a resentment issue but another kind of psychological problem that human beings can have it's very hard for people to admit that they have made a mistake and it's an unforgivable sin among intellectuals but a huge number of intellectuals do commit the sin on a fairly regular basis they commits to a certain belief system when they're 18 or 20 they know that they're pretty smart and they make a very strong commitment and truth comes to shove they're not going to change their minds on on those fundamentals no matter what the empirical evidence is but because they're clever they always find ways to modify double down triple down and so forth their hypothesis so to preserve their image this is you know a psychological explanation now to preserve your image as a smart person who has a has a lock on the truth that's a real phenomenon and it's also independent of politics but if you're committed to a political viewpoint when you're a young person and you're not ever going to change your mind then you'll just get increasingly sophisticated iterations of that goes on so what we have had then in the left and this is my unsympathetic reading of the left is a huge number of young people who were motivated in the early part of the 20th century by socialism as a noble vision of the world but they really held it bottom line as a faith commitment and so when the empirical evidence piles up against it they're still not going to change it they're just going to find more clever strategies so the trendy labels for this Frankfurt School cultural Marxism post-modernism deconstruction and so forth so there's an indefinite number of variations but I see them all as variations of people who wanted to simply double down on a failed theory a question there immediately arises out of that for me and and one of the observations I'd make is a lot of people who are very comfortable that are products of the university say no to make the same mistake that somehow or other very reluctant to not only admit they're wrong but they're locked into positions that it seems to me they couldn't hold if they understood history mmm you plainly believe that history is a great guide that can show us what's worked and what hasn't yeah but we don't seem to it's almost as though now somehow or other no one who's gone by heart before us had any real insights or wisdom yeah well the history education I do intellectual history but the the debasement of history education and the gutting of history is part and parcel of this process if you are a skeptic or a relativist in your philosophical orientation and immediately history is going to become less important it was the idea of the the Santayana phrase that we need to learn from the lessons of history otherwise we're going to repeat them built into that is a kind of universalism that human beings stay largely the same over the course of history and that then you can see history is a kind of laboratory and you apply scientific method to history and then you generalize to what the lesson is and the lesson will apply because to humans despite different cultural contexts there are general lessons that will apply but if you are a skeptic and a relativist you will think well although these big whopping generalizations of the historians want you to come up with well we don't believe that that's possible because we're skeptical about the power of empirical science applied to to applied to history and then if we are relativistic then we're going to say no no people back then or that other part of the world they were just so different the difference is vastly outweigh any residual human similarity so whatever lessons you might be able to figure about the way things were done in the 16th century or the 4th century or whatever they're not going to be applicable to our times because we are very different people and the times are very different so on both scores history goes out the window instead what you will do is you will use history tactically if there's an historical tidbit that you think can support your ideological position then you will trot that out but there's no strategic use of history and so as a result of that history education isn't going to happen and then younger people aren't going to have the the the knowledge base in which to understand their institutions so we see even both Britain and America young people very attracted turning out in large numbers to support very very old men yeah old white men well ironically if I may say so who are offering essentially socialistic right solutions that have been tried and tried and tried again yeah over the last 500 years and it never worked right but there's no awareness of that that's right that that is a big problem no you know it's easy to to be flipping it every younger generation I know I was this way we think that we are rediscovering everything right for ourselves and that's fine ok but there is a role for teachers and for parents to say history matters experience matters listen to your grandparents right pay attention in class and we've dropped the ball largely on on that particular project but it is partly strategic on on the part of those who want to destroy any cultures institution so if you are an enemy of capitalism well then you don't want to teach the history of capitalism because the history of capitalism is a success story and you are opposed to that or you don't want to teach any sort of history of science if you are opposed to science as a an imperialistic belief system and so forth I was extraordinarily fortunate to go to the University of Sydney in the 19th and study some history and there was a man there his name was Bob dryer I remember it will and he confronted us I've no idea to this day what his politics were none which is a good thing that he confronted as I understood in my mind with the reality that Western democratic capitalism that certainly given us a lot of freedoms but it it also if you like Western thought had produced two terrible aberrations one on the left if you like one on the right communism and and and and fascism which were very very ugly and which for me seemed to offer incredible lessons about the wisdom of staying true to the you know the classic Western understanding I suppose you'd say of human nature mmm-hmm and of the need to manage you checks and balances which I see as democracy but you yourself have written about the dangers I think or you've plainly think we can learn a lot from nature and other influences producing Nazism mmm-hmm it's absolutely you see that is available yeah well first kudos to your professor at the University of Sydney who you took a course from him and you didn't know what his politics was good for him yeah no and yet my view on this is that students in their first two years of university should be taught by professors and at the end of their first two years they should have no idea what their professors politics are because students in the first two years they need to absorb a whole lot of material they need to be exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints now I think professors should have something to profess but at its after you've gone through the initial legwork and so on so one of the things that I can take a certain amount of pride is that I do know half of my students think I'm a socialist and the other half think that various other right parts of the political spectrum when they take more advanced courses with me than they they come to know but I think that is still what a large number of well-meaning professors will do they are still genuinely committed to education as bad as as many of the horror stories are coming out of out of contemporary university needs are but that's what we need to to reinvigorate now you mentioned yes need and the issue of the Nazis and what can we learn from the 1920s avemar Republican the the culture that then gave rise to crime to the Nazi via one of the things is that absolutely everybody needs to know something about Nietzsche he is the most important philosopher influence on an enormous variety of thinkers in the 20th century atheist and theist far-left far-right centrist you name it Nietzsche has had an influence on those people and had just just a little thing here that I would say a very good friend of mine a neighbor said you know I mean people are sensible we don't need to worry too much about history they'll find they were quite sure the point I just want to rise was I think what you're really saying is enormous Lee influential thinker and you're about the sort of demonstrate to that an enormous and terrible consequences played out ideas really matter it's just a sort of an injection from me yeah that's going to be that's that's one of the great themes of philosophy education inch and should be historical education that feeds into political education as well so now we think of John Locke and the American Revolution and the lines are very clear they're jean-jacques Rousseau in the French Revolution the terrible third generation French revolutionaries were all disciples of Rousseau Karl Marx his PhD was in philosophy he had a whole philosophical system and the communist revolutions and now Nietzsche and this is the provocative part and the connection to National Socialism yet Nietzsche absolutely important but one of the important offshoots here is that all of the theoreticians of Nazism and these were very well-educated Germans PhDs from German universities in the early part of the 20th century and those are the best universities in the world these are very well-educated men and a few women and then even the the Nazi Party activists and politicians gurbles at a PhD explicitly right from Nietzsche also from Karl Marx interestingly gurbles loved Karl Marx any anyroad pants to to de Marxist economic thought as well Hitler in in his study and one of his places had a bust of of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche there when Mussolini came on a state visit gave him the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche as a head of state to head of state gift and so forth so there the striking thing then is that and I think there's a legitimate position here from many Nietzsche scholars and from Nietzsche himself you would say that they would be horrified by many of the things that the National Socialists did but at the same time the National Socialists thought themselves as disciples of not only Nietzsche but significantly Nietzsche and they were drawing on a large number of things there now the important thing here is that Nietzsche is deeply an irrational list he is deeply a conflict model understanding of human beings that we become our best not by thinking about the world and analysing facts and being trying to be objective he doesn't think that's possibly things is a very superficial johnny-come-lately evolutionary phenomenon but human beings are deeply instinctual beings that what you need to do is channel your instinctual drives and it's out of that that the best artistic creativity and and including political activism and so forth comes but of course there are different subjectivity and any also goes a quasi evolutionary understanding that it's the predator species fighting against predator species for dominance but they will also see the vast majority of others is and of sheep and and prey type animals and we look at them with contempt but that is this conflict of predator types that are willing to use others for their own events and to use other predator types who are strong in the contest to demonstrate and to bring now the higher type in themselves that's how history advances and so the Nazis loved those themes in Nietzsche so absolutely here's a philosopher influencing practical politics a generation after his death now what we can learn is this is go back to the issue about the left and the right labeling I would say that if we're going to move on and understanding what's going on in the 21st century there is a resurgence of a certain kind of right that is more nationalistic and what it is arguing that what we need to do is channel our identity with our people with our ethnic group that you're not primarily an individual you are a member of this group and that groups need to understand they're in contestation with the other groups around the world that we're not all going to be free traders and cosmopolitan and so a certain segment of the right is going in that direction and there is of course the left including the postmodern left and they're much more wrapped up in identity politics and victim politics and they don't agree with the right obviously but they have the same ear rationalist and contesting and conflictual or understanding of the way the world works so that kind of right and that kind of left are in collision with each other but there is a very third distinct type and that is the the classically liberal that needs an updating where we genuinely believe that human beings are rational and they should be decent and that we should be peaceful and that we should trade with each other and that's going to require a certain amount of tolerance so at a minimum we have a three-way battle culturally going on politics is a manifestation of that but I really think it's a cultural values battle first the government that I was part of for a long time our leader often used to say that we were the repository in this country of classic liberalism and of conservatism and I think things that a conservative would have bought of that argument would to say would be to say we're all we should never lose sight of human nature that were all a mixture of good and bad we can all make good choices all make bad choices the classic liberal would say as you've just done we've got a plate of our better angels so to speak now and create as far as possible an understanding about individual responsibility responsibility to one another mm-hmm and not look to excessive government but that comes back to the issue we're outsourcing so much of our conscience and our responsibility now to government and its instruments mm-hmm well the first yeah there's two things built into your your a good question there yeah the first is the point about human nature and that if we are going to design or set principles in place for healthy civil society and healthy politics it has to be based on a proper understanding of human nature that means we have to do good philosophy it really is a philosophical battle what what is constant in human nature what is changeable in human nature or capacities do we have what weaknesses do we have and only to the extent that we get that right will we have principles in place that will enable human beings to to flourish to flourish the best so absolutely a philosophical battle has to go on but what we then have right now and this is part of the Oort outsourcing point that goes on here is that one of those issues of human nature is do you think as a matter of human beings a human nature rather that human beings do have a powerful capacity for agency that I can decide I'm going to think for myself and formulate my own beliefs that I have all of these passions and desires that I can train my emotions and self-regulate my emotions and that behaviorally whatever I think and feel I am the one who pushes the trigger or steps on the gas and I take them responsibility for my actions so to the extent that you think human beings as individuals do have this powerful capacity for age see that has a moral implication you're going to see human beings as moral agents and you will expect them to take full responsibility for good or for bad for what they thank for what they say for what they do and the fruits of their labors for good or bad will will belong to them and then that will have political implications as well so then you will say if we think that individuals are powerfully agents then we want a government that individuals do for themselves now we'll do that socially but that almost always comes out in some sort of democratic Republican politics you have your ideas and your goals I have my ideas and my goals to a large extent we go off our own separate ways and we do our things but of course we want to come together for lots of various things so we have to have lots of discussion find common ground compromise when we can compromise and we'll just have then whatever rules that are going to be commonly in place will be ones that we are going to do it so democracy is really a do-it-yourself kind of political system but it depends on a strong sense of individual agency now if though you have a very different understanding of human nature you don't believe in human agency you think that what people think is conditioned into them yeah by the social forces that they are born into that you know there's a linguistic version of this we all learn different languages but built into the grammars of different languages are very different assumptions about the way the world work but human beings are born into different language groups and they're never going to be able to think objectively about the way the world is or even communicate meaningfully with people in other language groups so that's going to be one variation that's a philosophical issue that's been powerfully advocated in the 20th century and it feeds into our our positions right now if you think that people are born into different economic circumstances and again those different economic circumstances dramatically mold people into different kinds of beings then you're going to have a class warfare understanding the classes will never be able to understand each other and they will don't even have the same economic issues if you think it's a matter ethnicity not so much economics that you're born into an ethnic group and language might be a part of that economic issues might be a part of that but rather it is your your polish ethnicity or your Korean ethnicity that gets deep and that shapes who you are and so first and foremost you're not an individual but rather you're a Korean or you're a pole or whatever then again you're going to have a different understanding of where values come from and so forth and a different kind of politics so is this at heart the problem arising out of identity politics is it is yes so this is why I think the the philosophical debate over volition versus determinism is is fundamental it's not an accident that all of the classical liberals were strong believers in volition individual moral responsibility the Marxists are pure environmental determinists the the the safer Whorf hypothesis linguistically that I just threw out very powerful in in linguistics American pragmatism of the John Dewey variety very much a collectivise understanding of human formation an anti individualistic and I think it's also important to emphasize the biological versions of this as well so if you are for example take 40 in psychology which is very biologically based that we have as human beings instincts that have been bred into us in varying degrees well you're not really an individual with any sort of autonomy to think about it rather you know you're your individual rational agency and your moral agency just is very thin civilizational veneer that's lane over underlying instinctual biological drives pretty sad and a low view of human well your fellow humans really what identity politics has produced certainly in this country is a desertion of the idea that we ought to celebrate and participate in freedom and if we were responsible we will look for people who are still being marginalized and try and include them you know out of a generosity of spirit and doing what you order by your neighbor because you know that's the right thing to do to a situation where we say to people well you have rights but by the way they're clashing rights so you've got to compete for your rights and so we've set up all of this discrimination and anti-discrimination legislation in this country over the last nearly 60 years now and you know and you have your rights basically determined by technocrats increasingly including in the legal profession and the courts and so now we have to go and compete for our rights somehow it's a very counterintuitive yeah it's nowhere near as noble as saying we'll celebrate freedom will exercise freedom and we'll try and create the greatest freedoms possible for ourselves and everyone around us yeah well is that just too simplistic well no that's a good very good summary of her some complex territory so the core concept of Rights there what happened in the 1960s I would say this was a perversion but there was a transmutation in the understanding of what her right was so and the old in the tradition of Rights you know a right is a is a freedom it's a protection of the individual I have a right to my life and you have an equal right to your life that then is to say I'm in control of my I'm not the subject of the king I am a citizen and in a society I can't dispose of your life you can't dispose a self control position I have a right to Liberty I have a right to action and you have a right to action and of course at certain points we might collide but then we will have mechanisms in place to decide who should have the right to remove an AK or a right to my property so if I have created some value in the world I have stakes and claim I've made some resources more productive I have a right to the product of my of my labor and none of those are our contesting rights because then they're saying you know my body my life and and my productivity belong to me and equally the same can be said said for you what happened though is the older concept of entitlements or charity or philanthropy and we say well what do we do about the people who are not keeping up or who have fallen behind and we might think we have some sort of obligation to give to them to help them out and so forth so we would call that philanthropy or we might call that charity but then that starts to sound a little bit demeaning right right and so we don't want to say that these are charity cases so rather than saying I I am giving to you or we are giving to you as a society as a matter of philanthropy that you really are entitled to this you're entitled to a piece of the social pie whether you have contributed to it or not and then that entitlement and starts to be called a right you have a right to it now once you go down that road then of course rights start to clash because if I have fallen by the wayside and I'm not earning my own way in the world for whatever reason but I have nonetheless a right to other people giving to me then that is an infringement on you that is to say that your productivity belongs to me to some extent naturally you don't necessarily want your productivity to belong to me by right and so you're going to contest that to some extent so I'm asserting I have a right to this and you're saying you have a right to your property then we have a collision and then that set of Rights sets you up for a collision understanding of rights there's a lot of our young people who are not fooled they're not taken in by this they're actually looking almost for a verification for what they instinctively feel is is right a better way that our foundational sort of cultural foundations our relevance shouldn't be thrown away I think there's a tremendous opportunity there if we can just set those younger people free to respond to what they instinctively recognize is right and wrong yeah am I being naive no not at all and I think this goes back to a human nature issue there is built into human nature a life Drive and when you are young it is natural to see your whole life ahead of you and to feel that vigor of youth that you've got this unlimited energy to watch to go for them to make some and unless that is troit in you when you're young I think that will naturally out its a natural human growth imperative so they show up in universities they want something they they're there for a reason and this is partly why I'm optimistic even though many sectors of the universities are deeply unhealthy those sectors of the universities are not offering to young people what young people want they will attract some young people who are already unhealthy I don't want to get too psychological but you know there's a chicken and egg issue here about whether bad philosophy makes people sicker right or whether sicker people are attracted to bad philosophy it can go either way but by and large people come in they are healthy they want something they looking for guidance they're putting together their philosophy of life deciding their career goals looking for love and romance and adventure and all of that stuff and they will find other individuals among their students and among the professors who will offer that to them so I think there will be a built-in market correction within the universities and you see that already because if the students are the customers and the universities the business offering offering a service here enrollments will decline in some departments and those professors and won't be in a position to lobby within the university for promotions for more grants and so on in many cases if the university is paying attention to financial bottom lines those lines will not be replaced those departments might be shuttered in which case those those faculty positions are lessened so I think the the natural health and aspiration of young people is something to be drawn so as you put it as long as you provide them you know not only healthy food but healthy things for their mind they will expand they will take off and we will continue to grow at the same time I'm optimistic because within universities you know there are always first great people and second rate people and third rate people and so on I think they're one of the reasons why universities have been able to become as dysfunctional as they have is that the first-rate people in almost all of the disciplines don't pay very much attention to what goes on in the rest of the university they're focused on their work they don't want to be bothered by committees by faculty politics and so on so the they just focus on their work but that doesn't leave a vacuum for people who are careerist in other directions and they take over the curriculum committees and the guest speaker invitation committees and this that and the other thing and then they mess things up and then it starts to hit the the fan and it hits the press and but then also the first-rate people start to realize hey the institution that I joined it's got these problems and so on and they say okay I'm going to take a certain amount of my time to start to deal with the problems in my university or in my my academic profession more broadly speaking that's what we're starting to see in the last five six seven years or so so once the first-rate people join the battle inside the university I think there's no question first-rate minds versus third-rate Minds first-rate Minds that really want to get stuff done versus third-rate Minds in the grip of a failing Theory over the course of a generation of things move slowly in the academic world so it'll be a nasty battle for a generation or so I think we will prevail well thank you for giving you something of your first right mind and the enormous good cheer and humanity that comes with it it's terrific that you've been in Australia and I know that what I'll get now is a whole lot of commentary I wish I could think and speak like that further does so thank you very much indeed a great pleasure talking with you thank you thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 152,156

Rating: 4.8358064 out of 5

Keywords: Stephen Hicks, Nazism, Nietzsche and the Nazis, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Foucault, Progressivism, BLM, Postmodernism, Political correctness

Id: OpZ5cvPkDT8

Length: 58min 14sec (3494 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020