Do Free Societies Need Postmodernism? A Debate

science is not about finding truth it is about disproving truth isn't it truth is not a revelation that is handed down to us once and for all by higher authorities gender generally is a social construct this is a very scary idea for a lot of people human beings are are are real things they're not just social constructs science in the 19th century gave us this thing called scientific racism the problem is not science the problem is collectivism there is no correspondence between language and truth language is just a game and you manipulate logic you manipulate evidence you use any rhetorical trick in order to advance your group's value judgment and morality to me as a form of superstition progress has been real the status of women the status of gays the status of blacks and all of the other races I never speak the truth I'm telling stories and you can like them or not I don't think they're any more true than any other story about the Holocaust or about World War two Michele Foucault said I am simply a Nietzschean and at what we do know about Nietzsche is ruthless power politics all the way down you don't get individual liberty out of that tonight's resolution reads post-modernism is necessary for a politics of individual liberty and again I want to bring on arguing for the affirmative Tydeus Russell Thaddius please take to the stage and I'll give a negative Stephen Hicks please Stephen please come to the stage [Applause] and since Thaddeus is arguing for the negative he will lead off you have 15 minutes to tell us why post-modernism is what you claim it to be take it away I'm actually arguing for the affirmative so that's okay I make mistakes too and the good thing is since I'm a postmodernist that doesn't matter it's just about being interesting not being right so let's start at a really important moment in history 1961 I think is a great moment for freedom individual freedom this was the year in which two books were published one by this guy named Michel Foucault this terrible French philosopher who everyone hates he wrote a book called madness madness and civilization which was simply a history of the asylum in Europe and North America in which he talked about what I think might be the worst use of state power against human beings or the worst abuse of state power of human beings in history if you think about it as you may know after World War Two and even before then but certainly after World War two many many people were locked up in these asylums which are essentially prisons for the so-called mentally insane now do we know who those people were where they just schizophrenic no it included women who were simply promiscuous or who sold sex and it included people who were known as free thinkers people who were simply dissidents people who even believed in things like opposition to war people who believed in free markets sometimes anyone who's thought outside of the dominant discourse of the time tended to be locked up in these kinds of places and reformed by being sedated sometimes being sterilized sometimes having electroshock given to them or lobotomized if none of that worked this is pretty bad stuff so what that was all based on the justification for doing this to these people was these claims made by medical scientists medical scientists at the Sorbonne at Harvard at Columbia at UC Berkeley and at Stanford and at Oxford and Cambridge medical scientists using the scientific method studied a bunch of people and said oh well if you have these ideas about Paulo or if you're a woman and has these bad desires and sleeps around with women or if you simply are something that we don't want in our society because you are weird or different we're gonna have to do something to you put you away and reform you and assimilate you into the dominant norms of our society so that you can get along here and many of those people never left those places right I actually used to live in Salem Oregon which is the home place of the mental hospital that is famous for being the site of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest movie that was fun that was fun they were doing lobotomy is an electroshock into the 1980s there now again these were psychiatrists medical professionals scientists telling the courts your you need to go there you need to go there you need to go there and many of these people most of these people were not schizophrenic s-- they were actually people like me they were like people like you too if you have divergent ideas or had at divergent ideas from the dominant norms you were very likely be locked up in one of those places Foucault then later wrote a history of the prison similarly right he said that it wasn't just people who were bad or criminals were violent it was people who were simply different eccentric crazy and all sorts of waves in that very same year in 1961 the year that that fuko's madness and civilization came out another book was published by a man named Thomas saws we are familiar with this right and that book was called the myth of mental illness now he didn't make exactly the same argument as Foucault but it was a very similar argument he said that these these ideas about mental illness were really just myths they were made up they were made up by the state they were made up by scientists they were made up of medical professionals and they were used to punish people who were simply aberrant displayed aberrant behaviors in 1961 1961 very important date the next year next year another really good year was 1962 this was the year that Thomas Kuhns structure of scientific revolutions came out now this argument was revolutionary and this was really in many ways the beginning of post-modernism in some ways it uh it argued that that science has changed scientific truth constantly changes science is not about finding truth it is about disproving truth isn't it any science any scientists you know should be a postmodernist in fact the real scientists I think are all postmodernist they always say this we're never finding truth were simply disproving claims about truth right so Thomas Kuhn said well look at the history of science again just like Foucault look at the history of a truth claim any time you hear a truth claim just read the Sun read the history of it and Foucault and Kuhn said in every case here's the thing there is a history there is a history these claims these ideas about truth or truth itself doesn't come out of nature it doesn't come out of God in every case you simply look at the history you can find that there was a point in time where women who are promiscuous were considered to be crazy and needed to be locked up there was a time right then when people who were considered to be homosexual were homosexuals were considered to be crazy and they need to be locked up as you may know homosexuality until 1973 was officially designated by the American Psychiatric Association as a pathology and many homosexuals were locked up in those cages in those mental asylums and sterilized lobotomized and sedated Thomas Kuhn said science is always changing its mind all the time we are one minute completely convinced as a society that something is true like the fact back in the day that the Sun revolved around the earth everyone just knew that was true and if you disbelieve that if you even were skeptical about that claim what happened to you what happened to you very bad things because I was challenging truth that was supported by the church and the state and it was universally agreed that the Sun revolved around the earth that was the Ptolemaic system right then this guy named Copernicus came along and said not so much maybe the Earth revolves around the Sun big trouble for him big trouble for anybody who believed this right and then Galileo got his his problems too when he when he followed up on that idea so again it is this there's an arrogance here in every moment in history we as a society are all there's a consensus around what is true and what is not right and then a few years later we change our minds entirely about it so one minute everyone's convinced that the Sun revolves around the earth and the next minute everyone is convinced just the opposite how do we know today that we are right even about that if we were so wrong about it before back in the day not even that long ago we considered this to be completely solid right completely solid no space in there well what do we think now there's atoms and there's spaces between them this is as full of holes as it is of hard matter solid matter right completely radical idea that could have gotten you burned at the stake or thrown in a prison or an asylum are we still are we convinced now that these scientific truths are true forever when is a truth that is a claim about something being universal everywhere eternal always and applying to all people that's a heavy claim to make in any case right so Kuhn really pulled the rug under from out under from that and people started to follow that in post modernist theory Jacques Derrida the most evil man on earth according to Jordan Peterson later in the 1960s began writing several books and articles in which he argued that there is no correspondence between language and truth there was a common belief it's still pretty common now that we can ascertain we can arrive at we can find truth through language is that true is that true he said no not so much because language always changes and all the words refer to everyone every other word when you look in a dictionary at synonyms of words what do you find you find just word after word after word describing the other words there is no end to it there is no word that is closer to the truth in any other in this case now what was Derrida inspired by he was inspired like Foucault by the abuses of government by the state in the 20th century and in fact he said his inspiration for inventing the idea of deconstruction deconstructing language and texts and showing that there are internal contradictions and that there is no absolute correspondence between language or words and truth he can't it came from rejecting these claims made by governments that with the use of scientists that owes things like you know Jews are vermin right or women who are aberrant and don't behave properly need to be locked up or that blacks are biologically inferior to whites these are language claims about truth that needed to be deconstructed that was his impetus was actually an opposition to state abuses of powers through language you don't have a law without norms and language upholding them which involved truth claims so that is to me the origins of what should have been an alliance between lovers of personal liberty and these so-called post modernists but it didn't happen unfortunately then later in the 1970s we had the advent of post modernist feminism which said that again women and gender generally is a social construct this is a very scary idea for a lot of people but if you think about it gender has changed what it means to be a woman has changed over time it changes constantly what it means to be a man has changed constantly the ideal feminine has changed constantly the ideal masculine has changed constantly across time across history and across space different countries different societies think of these things differently and always have and even in this country we have changed radically in our in our views of what is a good and proper and ideal man and a good and proper and ideal woman their contingent their contingent they are not eternal that means that they come from the minds of human beings not from nature or God in 1979 Jean Francois leotard another terrible French postmodernist argued against these what he called meta-narratives these claims that there are that there are currents in history that just are ineluctable that they that they happen regardless that they are not contingent that in particular progress is inevitable right this is third of the Whiggish idea of history that the further we go along the better we get well here's the thing these guys all of them were born in the mid twentieth century right and so they saw what happened they saw what happened in the 20th century what happened in the 20th century this was the culmination of enlightenment scientific thinking wasn't it World War two this was the mobilisation of scientists and engineers to build all those tanks and bombs and airplanes that killed 65 million people just in one war same thing in World War one that was the use of scientific knowledge to wreak terrible havoc on massive populations so we began to claim we began to question science itself it can be useful it can build bridges and it can build airplanes but it can also build tanks that can drive across those bridges to lay waste to villages it can also build atomic bombs that are dropped from those airplanes science and the Enlightenment can bring the best and it can bring the worst it is not just a forward progress it is not just good and it is not a religion the idea that science is scientists and science should be respected and revered and believed on its face is possibly the most dangerous belief system ever they said and I agree if we simply agree that scientists are always right then they were right about eugenics they were right about scientific racism they were right about scientific sexism they were right about some of the worst horrors that have ever been visited on human beings in history these are all scientific projects the idea of mental illness as a pathology of aberrant behavior as a pathology again that was invented by medical professionals and scientists in the name of science so we must always be skeptical of science don't reject it this is another thing that's confused about post-modernism no post modernist it says don't don't listen to science don't ever fly in an airplane it's very useful within the sphere we live in in the world we live in but always be skeptical and whenever anyone makes a claim about any truth claim any truth that is rooted in nature or God be careful and maybe reach for your gun then there was a confusion and I have two minutes of try to do this quickly that was really tragic for me and very frustrating I'm this is why I'm talking about these days in in 2016 sorry I should say 2013 there was this new beast created this thing called the social justice warrior on college campuses these are the people running around saying I was born with a penis but I was also born a man and you must and that means X Y & Z about me you on the other hand were born a cyst white male and that means X Y & Z about you these were essentialist claims this was a repudiation of post-modernism this is the opposite of post-modernism when you are told that you are such-and-such because of your body and how you were born that is what the old conservatives used to do so the sjw's were a repudiation of post-modernism but a couple of canadian professors nonetheless started talking about how what's going on in college campuses is the result of this thing called post-modernism this guy named jordan peterson whose mentor on this subject is this man right here have argued that that is the root of these things but actually it's just the opposite it is conflict I flipped between that politics and what I've been calling post-modernism so I urge you to vote in favor of the proposition libertarianism and post-modernism are a marriage that could result in a brand new movement that could bring real freedom Thanks thank you Thaddeus arguing for the negative Stephen Hicks take it away Stephen so yes politics of individual liberty is essentially an Enlightenment and a modernist project what I'm going to be arguing there are some elements of post-modernism as a comprehensive philosophical package the politics is just a small part of it what I am going to argue is that thinkers like dr. Russell and some others who are attracted to post-modernism are doing is taking some of the elements of post-modernism watering them down and trying to then forge a compatibility with individual liberty but this is a big project so what is post-modernism is is a huge thing itself what do we mean by healthy politics individualism and liberty I'm going to argue that those have to be at the other end of the spectrum now I'm going to say as a philosopher some things about all of the major branches of philosophy post-modernism is a comprehensive assault on all of the elements of modernism all of the major elements of the Enlightenment of which the politics of individual liberty were one of the crowning achievements can everybody hear Stephen in the back ok ok sorry good so I should get a little closer here but I do want to start with the politics because while politics is important to us the yet the politics of individual liberty politics is also important to the post modernists and there's a couple of ways of going at this one is to look at the philosophical themes of post-modernism in their history dr. Russell does some of that the other is of course is to sample what the leading post modernists have said and dr. Russell did a very good job identifying who the important thinkers are here Michele Foucault is certainly one Jean Francois Liat are another Jacques Derrida certainly another I'm going to add to that mix richard rorty the most important of the american postmodernists as well so on the political starting points of the the leading post modernists Michele Foucault consider his philosophical political evolution and these are combined for him in the 1950s he was a member of the French Communist Party card-carrying true believer in the entire package he did break with the French Communist Party by the 1960s he was declaring himself a Maoist that is to say a follower of the program of the Chinese Communist at that point he did eventually break with them by the time we get to the late 1970s he declares support and admiration of the Islamic theocratic revolution in Iran so this is a man who does change his mind about political views over the course of the decades but there is nothing fundamentally liberal in his evolution moving on to Richard Rorty by our context the American standards he's about as far left as you can go he considers himself a radical social democrat and that is a position that he maintains when after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union he is asked to reflect on the terrible brutal real horrible evil regimes that have come out of the far left rorty's response was this quote I think a good left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins so an abdication of moral responsibility we can tell a different story put a different interpretation on it we don't have to take the facts seriously and that is of course part of the philosophical poison that we're dealing with Jean Francois leotard as long a Philly ated with a group called socialism or barbarism in the early days it was a movement that was straight-up Bolshevik but then as things got bad under Lenin and then under Stalin they broke away and became Trotskyite so again there's an evolution but not at all a liberal evolution finally jacques derrida most famous for his theory of deconstruction wishes comes out of technical philosophy of language but toward the end of his career he he made the following comment about deconstruction and his commitments to post-modernism he says and I will quote deconstruction never had any meaning or interest to me and my eyes except as a radicalization that is to say also within the tradition of a certain Marxism in a certain spirit of Marxism right now what we do have then is a series of thinkers and these are the big guns who are coming out of very far left politics but it's not just politics and they do change but they do not change at all in the direction toward liberalism and the reason for that makes very good sense when you look at the underlying philosophical commitments of course Marxism is a comprehensive philosophical package it's not just in economics it's not just in politics it has a theory that's metaphysics it has an epistemology it has an understanding of human nature it has an ethics there's an entire package and I suppose if you wanted to essential eyes it there are probably 16 important claims that Marxism makes all of the leading post modernists in the 50s and 1960s are breaking away from classical Marxism because they recognize the brute the failures of it and they are shifting in various directions and in many cases they are critical as dr. Russell points out about some of the horrible top-down authoritarian abuses of power by far-left regimes but being opposed to certain species of authoritarian in positions of power is not to be a liberal there's lots of other places on the political spectrum one can move away from certain abuses of state power and still not at all be anything like a liberal or a libertarian and that is what characterizes all of the postmarks and that makes sense when we start to look at their underlying metaphysical views there is skepticism in epistemology there's social construction understanding of human nature rather than being individualistic and then the the corresponding very jaded views about the possibility for peace between human beings the possibilities that we can work out win-win transactions the the they do remain in the in the camp of believing that human beings are fundamentally in conflict that it's always power domination and somebody's going to win someone is going to lose so this has been an emphasis on the politics and I've emphasized the Marxist roots but I do not at all want to make the claim that post-modernism is Marxism there is an evolution here through neo Marxism zon to various forms of cultural Marxism and if you look at the history of the far left the far left is a multi-faceted menti splinter group and postmoderns do not all occupy the same space but what is true to say is that all of them all of the major and the first two generation postmoderns are philosophically committed to anti liberal politics all the way down and it's important here then that the four post modernists that we've mentioned so for all of them are PhDs they're very politically engaged politically active individuals but they are PhDs and they're not PhDs in history or in in economics they're all PhDs in philosophy and that's important because what they are doing is getting their PhDs in the 1950s at a moment when philosophy has reached a very skeptical phase and it's going to be this skepticism and the consequent subjective isms and relativism that leads to a hollowing out of all of the rest of philosophy from the postmodern perspective and so there's a repackaging that's that has to go on here but let's say a few things about the the philosophical stance that it's not just a political stance that's being taken here Richard Rorty for example will say that the postmodern task is to figure out what to do now that both the age of faith that is to say that that was a near stretch from say the collapse of the Roman Empire on into the Renaissance and the rent information when essentially our religious philosophy dominated failed that collapse the postmodernist say that entire super naturalistic facebait faith-based tradition top-down institution based tradition as they understand it that is a failure but also Rory goes on to argue the enlightenment itself also seems to be quote beyond recovery so that is to say the entire modern project that there is a natural world that we can understand through the application of are using our independent judgment reason and then in more complicated cases sophisticated scientific method and we need to continue to develop those methods of scientific method an understanding that human beings are individuals with their own independent judgment they're not born into caste memberships or racial memberships or anything that we should treat peoples as individual with their own capacity to form their own judgments and govern their own lives and then the consequent to rest of the Enlightenment project what the postmoderns are arguing is that entire package is wrong now what that means metaphysically in terms of our understanding of reality is that the post moderates are what we call anti-realist so they will say yes for 2500 years the history of philosophy we've been arguing about whether God exists or not that is to say we've been arguing is the natural world is cause-and-effect world the self-contained world is that it or is there a supernatural world as well so that debate they want to say well we've been arguing about it for a long time nobody knows what the answer to that is and that is to say we should stop asking that question what is the nature of reality is that the natural world or is it the supernatural world is ultimately a meaningless question right we started to put to reality in quotation marks we start to put the word truth in quotation marks and distance ourselves right from that but of course if we're interested in a politics of Liberty about one of the big arguments of the Enlightenment is we need you know we live in the real world and the real world gives us feedback it's important for every individual to have the confidence and the competence in his or her increasingly her own judgment so that they can understand the way the world actually is in order to live successfully in it if you philosophically back away from that claim and start saying well there is no such thing as reality there are only interpretations of yours there's mine reality starts to drop out of the picture you're not going to support a politics of individual liberty it's also important that the the enlightenment was for the first time in history a consistently individualistic philosophy that individuals are the unit of reality we're not fragments of a supernatural being we're not born into a class we're not pre assigned to gender rules each individual has competence has agency as a basic respect and that is to be captured universally so yes absolutely the modernists and the Enlightenment are gung-ho about the importance of a big meta-narrative all women should have equal rights slavery is a moral abomination and we need to get rid of it that's a huge meta-narrative every human being has the birthright of Liberty those are meta-narrative claims and what justifies them is an epistemology that says we can figure out truths yes truth is very complicated sometimes and sometimes we only have probabilistic knowledge sometimes we're just speculating sometimes we make mistakes but if we apply our independent judgment well we can individually and socially self correct and acquire better and better knowledge through these concepts are ones that we need to maintain it's important then to note that the leading post modernists do not see people as individuals they explicitly reject the individualism Richard Rorty the least radical of them says somewhat apologetically you know this is a direct quote we are in fact stuck in our ethnocentric predicament so his position is for individuals their ethnicity is in fact the fundamental shaping part of their identity that we all have to think of ourselves in ethnocentric ways and different ethnicities have different histories and different value framers necessarily they're going to be in conflict with each other so that then is to say we're anti individualistic and we are saying is not possible to solve these historical problems and so forth so it's a very pessimistic and cynical position some of the post modernists of course come at it less from an ethnocentric perspective but they do focus on linguistic issues dr. Russell mentions Derrida and he is the most famous proponent of this view here and there's a there's a one thesis there's actually several of them here but the most important one here is the product of the view that language is a social product and that human beings come into the world they don't have individual agencies they don't have the ability to understand the world individually in terms of their own contact instead the language that they are born into shapes fundamentally how they think and and and operate in the world and gives them their values and so therefore we are all prisoners of our linguistic background now of course if you take that position now I think that philosophy of language is entirely wrong but it is exactly the one that the post modernists buy into and that is to say it is anti individualistic your very thinking and your values is a product of a group linguistic structure that pre-existed you there's no way to get from that postmodern position to anything approaching a respect for individualism and then finally when we turn to the the ethos all of the postmoderns without exception Richard Rorty again to a lesser degree retain not the classical Marxist exploitation theory but as Derrida says in the spirit of Marxism the view that human relations across multiple dimensions are deeply exploitative it is this race against that race it is these rich people against these poor people it is the the white people against those people it's men versus women and all of them are constructed by different groups and so the conflict is necessarily going to be inescapable it also means that since we are skeptical about reason we're not going to be able to get past those differences think about our confidence in the free market or demo kradic Republican politics that's all about saying human beings can take agency we can have our differences but we can just talk about them we can point to common facts and come to some sort of peaceful agreement and so forth if you think that human beings are divided into different groups and they do not have that rational agency as a matter of principle then you're going to say democratic politics doesn't make sense the free market doesn't make sense instead all you're left with is naked power struggles Michele Foucault said I am simply a Nietzschean and at what we do know about Nietzsche is a ruthless power politics all the way down you don't get individual Liberty out of that [Applause] five minutes to rebuttal from various so I and Jean and Foucault and Derrida all have something in common we all began our political careers as Marxists now if you were to look at my career as a whole all my writing all my speaking and genes I think you would not take away from that that we are Marxists at all I think you would take away from that that we are very clearly anti-marxist and anti-communist that is also true for Foucault and Derrida how do we know this because Noam Chomsky Fredric Jameson and every Marxist I've ever known I mean serious Marxist hate the guts of post-modernism why because Marxism is based on this idea of historical materialism which is that materialism the material matters in society economics institutions the state the material in the nature that is what's real and everything else is immaterial or less important things like ideas and culture right now that is exactly counter to what Marxists have said right I mean sorry that's exactly counter what to post modernist who said they have said that no there is no such thing as a natural truth an eternal absolute truth outside of human consciousness I had a friend who was a Marxist professor at Columbia who said to me once are you reading all that French horseshit up there we can't stand that because it distracts us from the real work the true work of revolution they also believe that capitalism inevitably results in socialist revolution don't they that's an essentialist Naturalist claim right that in capitalism is ass intrinsic self destructive quality right and that the proletariat will inevitably necessarily naturally be the vanguard of that revolution it's all superstitious nonsense isn't it postmodernist called on that first and foremost and that's why Marxist to this day hate them fredric jameson a very famous professor at Duke devoted an entire book in the 1980s to saying that post-modernism has distracted us from the real work of social change and revolution Noam Chomsky has is still irritated by post-modernism it says the same thing it distracts us from what is and what is really necessary if you are in the working class you must by your very nature work for revolution if you were a capitalist that means something essentially bad about you as for the Enlightenment and individualism that one's hard to take because the Enlightenment gave us science and science in the nineteenth century gave us this thing called scientific racism now were these marginal scientists were these quack doctors and quack scientists no these were all the major scientists and all the major universities they were the ones studying skulls measuring skulls measuring noses measuring craniums and saying oh those are black people and those are Irish people and those are Caucasians and they all have different characteristics based on their nature that was a scientific product that resulted in this thing called eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s which resulted by the way in the sterilization of 50,000 people involuntarily by court order mostly women was that done by quack doctors and marginal figures no pretty much every major not just scientist but intellectual in this country operating in Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Berkeley and Stanford were sympathetic or proponents of eugenics these were scientists who believed this was true that there were people who were genetically inferior and that needed to be bred out of the human race that was the product of science do you know do you know where Hitler and the Nazis got their ideas about Jews and about eugenic ijen eugenics from American scientists there was a big interplay interchange between American and German scientists in the 1930s the Nazis got most of their ideas from scientists from this country this was a consensus view among scientists that there were certain races of people that were inferior to others so one of the interesting things about post-modernism is that we if I am one don't believe that there's any true reading of a text but all I can say is that my reading of the texts in question here of Foucault Dario Eliot art and the rest is radically different than Steven I can also say that my reading is much more common than his now you can you can believe me or not but what I ask you to do is do something that most of the critics other than Stephen of post-modernism have not done is to read the texts read the text I don't think Jordan Peterson is read more than maybe half a book of it I have never heard any any citation any quotes I mean Stephen actually offers quotes he's actually read the text so I respect him for that that's why I'm debating him but Sam Harris Jordan Peterson the rest of these people who go around yelling about post-modernism they've never once quoted any of these people read the text Foucault is not actually difficult Derrida is but that's what you have to do you won't have to engage with this and there's a lot of miss reading that I think might be deliberate all right I second that II is's point about reading the post modern thinkers absolutely this of course is part of a commitment to liberal education and it is the modernists who give you liberal education the reason why you read this side of the debate and that side of the debate is that it's essential for every individual to train his or her judgment this is a John Stuart Mill point it's a one that he was drawing on with John Locke Michele de Montaigne Galileo and the others all right so absolutely that is a modernist position to be second what we do find though is that the postmoderns do not offer that advice themselves instead what you find explicitly in the postmodern educators when they take the high theory and apply it to educational practice is one sided reading texts explicitly so so Stanley fish for example when a leading literary postmodern theorists was taught it was a was engaged with this issue of John Stuart Mill's liberal education thesis that if we're going to properly train young people to think for themselves as individuals they need to hear arguments from both in all sizes of eights so they can make up their own individual minds and fish's response was to say that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard you do not want your students to read the others you want to squelch the other side's arguments and that is part of the commitment to of post-modernism that you're not interested in training reason you're not interested in training individual judgment instead once truth is out once individual judgment is out what you have is the movement and your value agenda your value agenda is a subjective commitment that you have have acquired and the important thing is to you know in a world that you see as a zero-sum power struggle to use your power to advance your value so if you are a professor and you have some power over your students you don't want to take a chance that they will read the other side and come to the wrong conclusion right from your perspective fish's colleague at Duke also a colleague of jameson took this one step forward and i have the quotation i'm happy to send it to anyone or he says explicitly as opposed modernist i am not interested in truth i am not interested in knowledge he puts those in quotes for creation marcus is my job as a professor is to help students realize the horror of this evil capitalist world that we have arisen and and all of the negative things that have come out of the modern world and to train them to be activists to go out and fight the the world so I agree with Thaddius Russell but I think Fatih is on this point is actually a modernist he is not a post modernist in urging people to read both sides of the arguments the point about science changing is absolutely true and that's a very important point because part of the modernist project has been to say truth is not a revelation that is handed down to us once and for all by higher authorities rather truth is something that we each have to work at very hard and in the initial stages of any science we're going to make a lot of mistakes and we should be partially committed to our hypotheses and being open to alternative interpretations and at science if it's properly done has to be a self-correcting process and open-ended there are lots of things that we know but there are lots of things that we don't yet know and part of the modernist project is to be self-critical about exactly how much evidence one has for or against a given project but if you're a postmodernist and you think evidence doesn't matter it's all just subjective narratives you are not going to train those skills part of the modern project is to say oh I believe this and maybe I over believed it but here are some good logical arguments against my position to be open-minded and to say I have individual agency I can change my mind and reject my own or my former beliefs and come to believe something else if I see myself as an avatar of my group and I'm just part of a group advocacy then I am NOT going to engage in that process so what I would say in tears of all of the abuses of psychiatry and I agree entirely that those are horrific but think of it this way the fact that some psychiatrists were willing to use state power and authoritarian methods in the name of their quasi scientific theories consider an analogy to nutrition of course there are lots of kooky nutritional theories and what we should do in an ongoing basis is critique those and so forth but the issue is if I have a nutritional theory and I start forcing down your throat food that I think is good for you I might have a bad nutritional theory right and that should be criticized but the issue here is unforseen food down your throat right that's what we should be focused on so the fact that bad scientists using authoritarian power we're forcing their views on other people does not mean that there's no such thing for example as good nutrition and that we shouldn't continue to do the science of nutrition to say oh it's all just theories and so forth but rather we need better science [Applause] well thanks to both and now we go to the Q&A portion of the evening and I I want to exercise moderators prerogative to throw a couple of questions that you at you each and start with you Stephen Thaddeus mentioned two writers that you have an address that was Thomas das and Thomas Kuhn would you regard them as leftist and would you regard them as post modernist all right take the microsites I'm Mike Mike yeah sorry reminder Thomas says politically is libertarian yeah and my understanding is that he is a moderate skeptic when it comes to epistemological and metaphysical views he believes that human beings are are real things they're not just social constructs that there is a difference between psychological health and psychological illness even though he wants to whom I understand he recognized that this is still something that we are in the infancy of and his politics he is a broadly libertarian okay on yet Thomas Kuhn it is important to structure of scientific revolutions book I do see him as the most important philosopher of science in the 1960s and he is definitely the one that all of the post modernists I think correctly cite so in chapters 10 and chapter 13 of that book he says yeah I have this this analysis scientists have changed their mind about stuff so therefore the argument that Thaddeus gave us that's exactly the right but what he doesn't does is draw the conclusion is that therefore we have to start saying that science is really not about the truth it's about something else and and then in chapter 13 he goes on to say that therefore means that we can't say that science has progressed so there's no such thing as scientific progress so we are not in any better off come to the 19th century 20th century 16th century and so forth and Kuhn is part of a coterie of deeply skeptical thinkers of the time willard van orman quine harvard philosopher for example so you know I really want to believe that there are subatomic particles in the scientific project but from my philosophical perspective the Homeric gods and whatever the scientists are talking about right now I can't say that one of them is any better than any other Paul Feyerabend also publishing at exactly the same time and a student of karl popper's we'll leave that one to the side but Paul fire Robin at the same time drawing extraordinarily a a sceptical conclusion saying the best of modern medicine as it has it been achieved in the 1960s and witchcraft I don't see any epistemological superiority of one to the other and that is exactly the postmodern epistemology and Kuhn is part of that package any comment from you Thaddeus on that completely different than my reading of those works and I don't think you'll find many people who have studied the works would agree with Stephens interpretation of this I'm just you'd have to check this yourself I yeah so it's it's very hard to respond to things that just are don't comport at all with my readings do you want me to respond to the question about kuhn and saws if you would like to if you don't want to i saw is clearly libertarian we agree on that kuhn not he does not say that there is no progress in science there was no such thing as in fact he argued explicitly against relativism in fact he doesn't take a radical position like I do so yeah I I don't see a lot of this in the work itself okay my question I will send quotations to anybody yeah okay please do because of youth adieus is where I got from Flex I mentioned you before you when you arrived at I was excited by the research you've done into World War two and whether it was really a necessary war and I listened to your interview the first interview who did with Dave Smith we were actually telling him and I was struck by your words I them down that the argument has to be airtight about World War two you said airtight and then though words I am now completely convinced and this is a fairly new thing for me and then you said again completely convinced emphasize that Western intervention in World War two killed way way way more people than it's saved we're not going to debate that issue tonight but my question to you is if I hear a postmodernist say twice that he's got an airtight case and that he's completely convinced then I wonder what the heck is the difference between me and that guy if he's completely convinced right so I am operating as a historian within a modernist frame so that's where Steven was actually somewhat right about me okay so to convince other historians and peep and the general public you have to operate within this particular sphere so post modernists don't say that there is no such thing as logic or logic is irrelevant it is of course quite relevant in our world it's relevant in the world i inhabit I come from Columbia University I am trained by a professional academics to to work within that world and this is what Foucault actually said himself he says I use reason against rationalism I use the I use the tools of of power against power I use their own logic to disrupt their own logic that's what I'm doing in my work in history I'm simply using their evidence their logic to call into question their basic claims that's what you meant when you say you were completely convinced you meant to say I meant within within the logic of history yes okay as it is written so far okay thanks I did you want to come in and that's even you want yes Thaddeus was all respect is respect the paradox at all skeptics Objectivists and relatives is wrestle with they do want to say on the one hand and Thaddeus mentions his social upbringing I was conditioned to a large extent by my academic training to accept logic and evidence right and so forth but then of course the hardcore postmodern are simply going to come back and say well that's just one community and one set of standards and why is the logic and evidence set of standards any better than any other set of standards and there is no answer to that within post-modernism it's just I'm making a subjective commitment to it and that's exactly why a two generations later we have a whole generation of university students right I think they still are a loud and noisy minority who are not at all interested in playing that language game and that's what they've been taught language is just a game and you manipulate logic you manipulate evidence you use any rhetorical trick in order to advance your group's value judgment and they will then say yeah I will be willing to play that game with you in this particular context but I'm not making any claims that it's correct or not if we're interested in the politics of individual liberty we want to say no the evidence is on our side the logic is on our side and this holds for everybody not just people who've chosen or been conditioned to believe a certain set of definitions I think you just want to follow up on that so there is nothing in my book and my work anywhere that is true I never speak the truth I'm telling stories I'm telling new stories or different stories or trying to anyway new narratives and you can like them or not I don't think they're any more true than any other story about the Holocaust or about world war two now I use I use evidence that other people use against them or against the game that they're playing but I don't claim that there is that this is an absolute universal truth that is going to apply for all time that would be highly arrogant of me you want to make okay yes I would like to be very arrogant I would like to say that slavery is a moral abomination what do you think that yes so what exactly does that get you right so here's no no so here's no so here's the answer okay so so there were so there is that was not what ended slavery what ended slavery was the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people to kill hundreds of thousands of other people right that's what ended slavery the moral abomination part wasn't influencing the Union soldiers who went down south most of them were racist as anybody right and actually many of them supported slavery they did it either because they were conscripted or because they thought it was the only decent job in town or they simply supported this idea of the nation-state we don't know but most importantly and actually they were more concerned about the slave power the power of the slave masters than the slaves themselves the intellectual moving in Britain Thaddius against slavery yes did that help end slavery in the bridge yes it did to some extent not much though the abolitionist movement was a minor player I'm talking about the British movement in England that ended slavery in South America it was it was part of it but ok as part of it but so but here's an important point though no no so not not in this country at all though and that's that's a consensus among well no I know but but but so here's the interesting thing about the abolitionist movement Stephen calls that a triumph of enlightenment individualistic thinking does anyone know about who the abolitionists in this country and in England were and who what was influencing them and what was really driving them white what made them anti-slavery was a deep deep belief in Christianity in particular in this country Calvinism the oldest most rigid most superstitious you could say forms of Christianity it was not it was not an Enlightenment movement at all if you know anything about history of abolitionism it was as Christian as the day as long had nothing to do with science or reason to rationality in fact it was a very pre-modern movement just another question for for Thaddeus part of Thaddeus isn't for a first round of argumentation was to point out the terrible state abuses of power in psychiatry with respect to gays Jews women and so forth so my question would be do you think that those were morally wrong abuses of state power or do you think that it's a narrative interpretation that you believe that those things are wrong but there are other alternative narrative narrations that could justify the state use of power against blacks Jews women and so for right so morality to me is a form of superstition so it is an it is the idea that something applies again to all people at all times in all places forever right that that is a religious idea I hope that's clear I hope it's clear that you can't prove that you can't disprove it either but that is a hell of an arrogant claim that is very similar to what you find in the Bible isn't it right that something is going to apply eternally to all people in all places I find that incredibly arrogant now now does this mean that I am NOT opposed to slavery no I don't want to live in a society that has slavery in it because of my values that's a different thing the morality so what I what I tell people and I've told my students this for decades don't don't worry about what is morally good or morally wrong figure out what you want what you value and as a Randi an Objectivist you should appreciate this it's the politics of self-interest that I'm preaching here if you want to live in a society that includes slavery I'm gonna fight you if you're gonna try to impose that on me right if you want to not live in a society with slavery that's all you need you don't need to make moral claims do you if you don't want to live in this society like that includes slavery you would have picked up a gun in 1861 and gone down south maybe or you would simply have refused by force of arms the entrance of slave states into the north so just figure out what you want and move from there politically it's just a question of strategy once you know what your value is instead of we get stuck in this idea about what other people should want what how other people should live which I find to be not fine to be but I would submit is the root the origin of imperialism not just cultural but political and military as well you will find in the case of every imperialist movement every imperialist General every imperialist great Conqueror they begin with a claim that those people over there should live according to the way that I think because it is morally right this goes all the way back to the Crusades right think about the Crusades a whole bunch of people thought the people in the Middle East were living in a bad way in an immoral way and what happened next and that goes all the way up to the present time every imperialist campaign in from every country in the history of the world began with universal truth claims Universal moralistic truth claims I say let's get out of the business of that and let's move toward individualistic value claims and operating our politics from that all right thanks and yeah I so first question please face has a question go ahead please good this is for both or either does post-modernism teach that there are no absolutes so mathematical let's say Pythagoras theorem ethical rape is wrong let's say economic the law of supply and demand no truths whatsoever I guess that's mainly well go ahead Seema yes no okay explanation okay most wanted theory of language is that language is a social construct how terms are defined is arbitrarily as a result of tradition that applies universally and that is a universalistic claim but then that just means that and all of the analytic and skeptical continental thinkers at the postmoderns are growing on when they are getting their first rate PhD education say explicitly logical truths are true only because we have decided to make them true it's a subjective projection the truth somatoform attic and how we have defined the axioms are true only because we have stipulated them to be so they don't say anything about the way things are out in the i I would challenge Stephen or anyone else to find any of these postmodernist thinkers that we've discussed saying anything like that I will send the quotation okay so they they simply do not they simply write the history of these claims like with Kuhn in Coons case he would he would have written the history of the Pythagoras theorem and shown that it was invented by a particular man at a particular time in particular place right now is it true universally we'll all we know is as Kuhn said that these truth claims within science get overturned pretty much every single day even just recently last year last couple of years they found something moving in outer space that didn't comport with the theory of gravity okay again the idea of you know the of atoms and spaces between them that's a relatively new idea which was craziness before we discovered that or we think we discovered that no it is simply this has not ever been a claim by postmodernists they simply want to be skeptical not atheistic agnostic about all these questions gnostic and skeptical next question hi my name is Patrick dord and I guess my question is more for dr. Russell how do you don't call me doctor alright sorry daddy is how do you reconcile bad science with not throwing the baby out with the bathwater can you unpack that just a bit I'm not exactly sure as far as like some of the examples you gave us like eugenics or scientific racism running the bathwater okay so so what do you want do you do you want eugenics do you want people to be divided by their gene pools and then the people with inferior gene pools to be weeded out from the population no if you do you want a cure for cancer then then you might want to support that right you might want to support that part of science I do I love medical advances I love much of medical science because it makes me healthier makes me happier it makes me right now again is that going to be let's think about he brought up a nutrition and diet right will those well those methods those techniques in medical science always be right the best to do so now we all believe what that carbs are terrible for you right and fat is good for you well remember about 15 years ago when it was just the weather way around and wait till the next diet fad and that's just in nutrition so scientists ask a scientist they're revising truth all the time all the time that's what you do as a scientist you don't get up in the morning and say you know what we're done with gravity we've discovered we know the truth we know the truth and we're done stops stop studying it no scientists study gravity every single day all over the world don't they they study all of the questions that are that many people think are settled there are no settled questions this is the problem with modernist thinking right they believe that you can get to it you can get to an end point and find the truth it's anti-intellectual if we closed a question that means there is no studying left to do that means there's no science left to do it's also anti science scientists should be and they day themselves will tell you this relentlessly skeptical relentlessly questioning and relentlessly revising that's what good scientists have always done don't ask me ask them comment from you doctor sorry Thaddeus is hey look call me fat really it's fine you got it we've been on each other a long time professor Russell yeah is presenting to us a false alternative on the one hand we're supposed to say science means that everything is fixed final complete somehow scientists have acquired this omniscient understanding and then and only then can we use the words truth knowledge and certainty but since we don't have that we should and this is your bathwater issue throw out the concepts of truth throw out the knowledge claims throw out the claim that we can ever be certain and that's a false alternative and I don't want to say it's somewhere in the middle but proper science is a low-grade skepticism does have a place in in science we should every generation every individual think for ourselves about all of the claims but the truth is some people do know more than others some people have a better understanding of the evidence than other people do some people have spent more time they've done more logic and we do know some things right in science we know that the Sun generates Heat for example we know that gravity is actually a real force in the world now when you start with the basic things those things don't get changed when we get to very complicated theories of course then we need to be more hypothetical more speculative more probabilistic in our thinking's but don't think it's an all or nothing there is no truth or we have absolute infinite truth right now we're working the territory next question hi Ted Parris I just wanted to see if Thaddeus and Stephen could comment on whether this summer gets at the distinction between your views which is that absolutes exist and absolutes don't exist so there is an epistemic split between subject and object in the universe people perceive things subjectively there is no objective observer god was invented to be the objective observer but because there is no objective observer there are no absolutes there can be no absolute truth and when you talk about morality it's just silly because morality developed as a way for people to cooperate in groups and to have rules of behavior so if you're a moral realist it's really just silly because morality differs in every different culture and group all right comment you want to comment 15 yeah yeah so let's take up the issue of morality and objectivity so let's take the phenomenon of traffic and the rules that we have evolved with respect to traffic and what's the status of those rules now we could say at one level driving on the left side of the road or driving on the right side of the road there's no God that specifies right and there's no you know when we started driving flags that sprang out of the ground and said thou shalt drive on the right side of the road so we we decided those things and so there is with respect to many moral principles and moral rules wiggle room and decisions that are largely operated but the fact is that human beings are real the fact is that cars are real the fact is objectively so that people want to get various places the facts are that if people collide with each other in multi-ton vehicles they will be damaged so there are objective facts and objective values that we are trying to resolve in a social context and we make rules to say there has to be one side or the other that's an objective fact if we're actually going to get to our places safely so it's a combination of objective facts objective needs that we have identified properly that leads us to make certain decisions but often there are is wiggle room in those particular decisions and that's where the so-called subjective element comes in come in I second what you said my questions for dr. Hicks I'm gonna frame it in terms of an intuition pump so we don't have to argue about the parameters so imagine a world where there are advances in neuroscience and psychology that we can say by age 10 that this individual will be a sexual sadist or a psychopathic killer to put it differently we can say with scientific certainty that these individuals will impinge on the freedom of others if they are left to be free so my question is what happens to your epistemological claim that all humans have a birthright or I forget how you said it but essentially a right to freedom well the right to freedom is not infringed everybody still has the right to freedom but your right to freedom where other people's freedoms are being infringed upon so your SATA masochistic killer they're not there's not your salt that's right so once they they don't have a right an absolute right to engage in those kinds of actions so what I would then say is it would be a normal police thing if you have good knowledge that someone is likely to commit a crime than you engage in surveillance but you engage in surveillance to the extent that you have good evidence you get search warrants and so forth so I wouldn't say yeah in this science fiction scenario the police should start following that guy around very closely now there's not going to be any prior restraint but yes you put a security cordon around that guy to prevent him from engaging in in the actions not very libertarian of you I must say then it sounds like Minority Report to me except worse you with eugenics added to it yeah next question hi my question is for Thaddeus I wanted to follow up on a question that came up earlier about science whether science has has made any definitive claims yet or whether it's always evolving and Steven brought up a few examples my my favorite is the earth is round so I want what I'm trying I'm trying I would like daddies for you to explain to me how to wrap my mind around this in a postmodern way so let me be very specific how would you or how could I think of the world is round as not true in a universal way right and that seems to me a scientific claim it was it was achieved through scientific methods but how could it be you seem to be saying that it's true maybe within a context but not outside that context or within within the context of certain claims but not universally true so how how do you wrap your mind around this idea that the earth is round this claim the earth is round is not universally true yeah well I would just say just okay well doesn't matter doesn't matter please no heckling for the audience thank you was that a flatterer throughout there get them out of here that's just not true it's just not scientifically true we know this okay okay okay right it's not know she's actually right so first of all so of so first it was flat and everybody was completely sure it was flat everybody right and you were burned at the stake if you disbelieved that and then everybody believed it was a perfect sphere and this is kind of getting what you're at right I think where you're coming from right and now it's sort of oblong and bumpy and not exactly round right well here's the question then should we then stop studying the question of whether the earth is round no if you're a scientist you study everything you keep researching and maybe this is not answering your question but claiming the my question had nothing to do with half the the exact degree to which it's round it's just that it's not flat all right we know it's round it meets on the other end but do you see how is it that's all that my question needs but no no but do you see but do you see how the shape of the earth keeps changing according to science so it was flat and then it was a perfect perfect sphere and now it's a bumpy oblong thing do we stop studying it I say no if you're an actual scientist okay okay so in response to this question I would be willing to say the shape of the earth is an objective fact right but it's not a universal truth and the reasons for that are individualistic that knowledge resides in individual minds and what you know depends on what you as an individual have studied and learned now it is an objective fact that the earth is spherical for those who have looked at the evidence and so forth but there are lots of people who have not looked at the evidence so it's not a truth for them if you ask them is the earth spherical or not and they're you know four years old I never thought about it the right answer for that person would be to say I don't know to be agnostic on it so it's not yet a truth for that person because they've not processed even though for those who have studied it it's objectively true that the earth is spherical um I'm afraid that's gonna have to be the lat we've got one more minute okay one final question thanks good yeah hi this is directed to um mr. Russell don't call me mr. professor Russell okay do you believe anything actually exists bacio do you know anything actually exists I'm not sure I exist anymore what I don't can you a little bit more of that I'm not exactly sure what you're asking me what do you mean actually actually exude believe anything is real okay so I don't know is my answer I am an agnostic on this question it is a possibility that you're not there and I'm not here I don't operate in the world like that I don't walk down the street thinking oh my god I might disappear I might not be real right I'm I'm operating in the world that my head is in okay I just know that there have been so many fundamental beliefs like that that were believed across societies that have not just been revised but radically overthrown that I remain skeptical what everything like again the Sun revolving around the earth everyone believed that everyone believed that the floor with this floor was completely solid and had no spaces in it right so even on that yes I'm just say let's be skeptical let's be actual scientists that's what post-modernism is I'm Stephen maybe you want to address that in your final summation that'd be good uh so you have five minutes okay so here's an essentialist claim that's often made every year by this thing called the IRS they say to you well you're an American you were born on this this piece of land and that means you need you must because you are an American essentially fundamentally you must give us your money that's an essentialist claim the nation-state as a born of essentialism too if you're born on a piece of land in a particular time you are a German or you're an American or you're a Canadian or whatever it is and that means x y&z about you it also means that you have to serve your country every once in a while go to war and fight and die now postmodernist would say excuse me very much what why on earth just by dumb luck I was born here I had no choice in this right but that means that I'm an American and that I have all these obligations and duties to this place I didn't even choose to live in right well this modernist would say let's let's ask some questions about that let's let's write the history of it let's study the history of that's what Foucault would say and he would find out that oh no actually you know this was a land that was conquered by one people over another people and they imposed this nation-state on it and by the way that happened about 5 minutes ago in world history if you look at it right the nation-state is a very very new phenomenon it's only about a couple hundred years old but we all walk around thinking like oh my god I am American in my soul don't we don't we Germans thought I am German in my soul and that means all these things about me what a fiction that is quite obviously and I would say a pretty destructive fiction too so if you look at all the casualties of the last 200 years in the world including just just all the killings all the murders in the world I'm gonna say that the nation state and people acting on behalf of the nation-state have killed more human beings in the last 200 years then all the other actors combined there's no doubt about that especially in the 20th century the culmination the pinnacle of modernism and scientism and a belief in reason and rationality the 20th century was nothing but killing fields the greatest murders of human beings on a mass scale ever world war one world war two the anti-colonial revolts of Vietnam goes on and on and on all again conducted by engineers with state power acting very rationally studying things looking at maps you know who ran the Vietnam War right guys from Harvard all the best and the brightest didn't they there was their idea the Vietnam War oh and they're also the ones who invented napalm and they're also the ones who built the airplanes that drop the bombs all in the name of science and reason and rationality and improving these people lifting them up from their savage pre civilized existence into the modern world that's what was said has always been said about imperialism that's what it is it's good for them we're raising them up into modern into the modern world we're gonna give them the advances of science we're gonna do that by killing half of them first and then we're gonna put them in our schools which are also run by scientists and engineers and rational reasonable people so again I really like some things that science and reason and rationality by the way I love Reason magazine so much except for the name of the damn thing let's work on that so yeah reason rationality science have given me medicine that I use that I really enjoy I love flying in airplanes it's great to just get in this thing and I end up in another city the next in a few hours fantastic but as I said before those airplanes are and have been used for other purposes pretty nasty purposes and will be in the future most likely the atom bomb we love that thing don't we who is that invented by scientists so let's at least be skeptical whenever it is claimed that scientists are right and science is true let's be skeptical of this thing that that I think who invented the term scientism oh it was this guy named FA Hyack a great libertarian scientism he said is the belief in science as a religion the belief that scientists have access to truth that the rest of us don't that science arrives at universal eternal truth that is scientism the idea that even gravity the theory of gravity will never change we'll never be revised has already been proven false every major scientific claim has been revised or overthrown and again that's what scientists do if you're really a scientist or really a postmodernist but most importantly post-modernism and a belief in personal liberty I think should be twinned should be paired and could create a brand new movement and maybe a new iteration of libertarianism that might actually make me for the first time in my life identify as a libertarian so we'll see thank you for listening and I hope you hope you vote for the proposition I'd like to do a second dad's remarks about the horrors of 20th century political history and certainly there have been abuses up and down every continent and so forth the problem is not science the problem is collectivism you look at the death tolls the Nazis the fascists the Communists in China the Communists in the Soviet Union all of them were as young people committed to a strongly collectivist anti individualistic anti-liberal methodology as a secondary overlay way they would use pragmatically when they thought it helpful various scientific theories they would draw upon science in order to serve their collectivistic ends so the issue the issue here is not science in places where individuality is respected its science being abused by collectivists now the connection then to postmoderns is that the postmodern czar in their understanding of human nature and their understanding of human cognition actually don't believe in human cognition in their understanding of human whatever it is we do with our minds and our understanding of human values are deeply and thoroughly collectivistic if we want the fruits of science we do as this one gentleman says that we need to sort the good from the bad the only way we're going to sort the good from the bad is by ongoing commitment to doing the experimenting doing the logic doing the reason but we have to respect the individuals all the way through science combined with individualism has brought the modern world and I'm sure we have all seen the charts you go the timeline of human history when humans were tribal and pre-scientific and mystical religious and so forth flatline and all of the indicators of human wellbeing and it's not until we get to the early modern world where individualism starts to be taken seriously the the belief in capacity for all individuals to think for themselves to make their own judgments that individual pursuit of happiness is a universal birthright and we then seriously start to try to extend it not only to the white males who first came up with the idea but to non-white males to women to people of different religions that is when we started to make progress and the progress has been astonishing so there are facts in the world with hard work and rational commitment we can come to know them at the some time we do need to be aware of our limits and not be hubristic in overstating what we do and what we do not know but what we do know is that there is one philosophy in the entire history of human beings that has enabled us to enjoy the prosperity and the tolerance and the extended lifestyles and all of the gadgets that make us make us happy to be living in the 21st century and we have learned also the negative lessons and I think fad has half learned some of those negative lessons right yes the abuses of state power are wrong but notice that he is agreeing that abuses of state power are wrong that is a universalist claim that's an Objectivist claim he is making about of state power and I don't think he's going to want to zou and maybe he would want to say it's only my personal preference that abuses of state power are all wrong thing we want something more than that and we can do it right but it takes a certain philosophy now the postmoderns don't believe as referred to tonight right that we can say that there's a difference between reality and unreality if you think that everything is a subject of reality than any sort of politics of individual liberty is not going to matter to you if you don't think that reason is competent then you're not going to try very hard to be rational and if we're not going to try very hard to be rational we're not going to get science we're not going to get democracy we're not going to get a free market all of those depend on people being rational and so forth if we don't believe that individuals are the units of value that each person has their own inherent dignity they're the right to the pursuit of happiness then we're not going to tolerate people who are different from us so tolerance is a deep universal respect for other people's individuality and that has to be held as an objective universal principle the only places and the only times in history where we have made progress and the progress has been real the status of women the status of gays the status of blacks and all of the other races the fact that we can be in a city like New York and just look at all that has been achieved right post-modernism is never going to build a skyscraper instead what it's going to do is argue that the skyscraper is a phallic symbol and a tool of yes white male imperialism and we know the rest of this story so please vote no well please register your final vote on your smartphone post-modernism is necessary for a politics of individual liberty please vote and meanwhile I do want to announce that Thaddeus will be hosting a fattiest Russell's unregistered live event if you put that into a search engine I guess you'll find it that will feature Dave Smith whom you heard tonight as well as nickel SP who you also saw tonight you want those three guys back then you can see it tomorrow night in Brooklyn Thaddeus Russell's unregistered live event tickets tickets are still available with Dave Smith and Nicholas be next month Monday August 12th we are will have another debate on Bitcoin I do urge you to buy your tickets now that Bitcoin event is selling out fast the resolution will be Bitcoin is poorly suited to the purpose of becoming any nation's main medium of exchange defending that resolution will be George Celgene against savety and a moose that's August 12th our debate on Bitcoin Monday August 12th on Tuesday September 10th Dave Smith will be back again not only giving us a warm-up act but also debating in this case debating Nicolas saw walk on the future of the Libertarian Party they will be doing double dipping that evening that's August September 10th and then afterwards at our home two blocks away the loft apartment that I share with a suckle we're going to host a fundraising event for the Mises caucus of the Libertarian Party and Michael heist will be there I will be there Dave Smith and a couple of other people that will be hosted at our home just two blocks away we'll give you the address then if you show or you want to go we will be posting that event on a website very soon but for you to come to that charitable event on behalf of the Mises caucus of the Libertarian Party on Monday October 7th we're going to have a debate on drug use Jacob sullen of Reason magazine what's a better name for the magazine unreason what do you think post-modernism postmodern magazine Reason magazine Jacob solemn will be defending the resolution a little a little bit of a mouthful but he wanted to be careful except for laws prohibiting the sale of drugs to minors and driving while impaired all laws that penalised drug production distribution possession and use should be abolished along with special sin taxes on drugs covers the map pretty pretty well there and Thaddeus is gonna vote YES on the resolution I can see and he will be debating former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson author of tell your children the truth about marijuana mental illness and violence no we have the results so the the yes vote on the resolution began at and we take it to the second decimal place because my man Yuri who developed program was careful 7.07 percent voted yes initially that rose to eighteen point one eight percent so that means that the yes vote gained 11.11% that's the number to beat 11.11% the initial know started at 33.33% and rose to sixty seven point sixty eight percent to a 34 feet so uh but again both of you gained votes congratulations however the tootsie roll goes to Steven [Applause] [Music]

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 71,850

Rating: 4.85813 out of 5

Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv, Todd Krainin, Soho Forum

Id: Qb9Eajt0KVA

Length: 88min 46sec (5326 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/zilooong]

Hmm... The question went from, 'Does society need postmodernism?', to something like, 'Does society need scientism?'

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I got the impression that Mister Russell spent so much time bashing on science and its history (to what conclusion he didn't seem to give, maybe to be skeptical of science? I don't know) that he didn't actually give a proper advocacy of postmodernism. He was doing this weird attempt of trying to ally postmodernism with science as the 'proper' scientific method, that the postmodernists were the 'real scientists' that I just felt like he was contradicting himself all the time because he was simultaneously bashing science.

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Mister Thaddeus spent so much time shooting himself in the foot that I doubt Professor Hicks even needed to be there to win.

[u/TheBayanWay]

How interesting! Digging in!

[u/JKtheSlacker]

One of the most striking things I took from this is that Russell doesn't so much take a position as criticise others. That's exactly one of the problems Dr. Peterson has with postmodernism - it's easy to abdicate responsibility for your own actions when you can instead just criticise the world.

Other than that, I was amused when Russell attempted to distance pomo from Marxism by pointing out that many Marxists hate pomo. Given how vehemently Marxists of all stripes persecute those who they believe to be heretics, I'd call that strong evidence that pomo is grounded in Marxism.

[u/OursIsTheRepost]

Here is Thaddeus talking about the debate with Michael malice. pretty interesting

[u/SpaceKarate]

Submission statement: Stephen Hicks is an often IDW-referenced philosophy professor who is most known for his historical work on postmodernism. Postmodernism, and the problems therein, are an often discussed topic in the IDW, most notably by Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose.

[u/[deleted]]

Reposting a comment I posted in another sub:

After listening to the full podcast, one of the main takeaways for me was how unproductive the format of a debate is for a topic like this. Russell was obviously saying some things that were a bit incoherent but I do think there was a logic behind what he was arguing for, I just wasn't completely on board with the way he was arguing for it.

At base level, I think he's correct to say that we should be highly skeptical of absolute truth claims, scientific or ethical, and that that skepticism can function as a bulwark against absolute certainty. That being said, anyone who is "committed" to radical skepticism as an organizing framework to guide your decisions by would be completely debilitated and hamstrung from moving forward in the world. As Russell said, and Hicks rightly pointed to this inherent contradiction, he functions in a modernist/rationalist/realist framework in order to move through the world in a sensible and coherent manner. You have to. Even the person who kills themself is (in Jordan Peterson speak) acting as though they believe it would be better for them to be dead than alive; so that's acting out a truth claim, in a sense.

Russell seems to want to just replace this 'striving for orientation towards truth' with "preference" and on some level I agree with him, it does only come down to preference. There is no, as far as we're aware, externally validating source or moral arbiter. That's why Hicks can say things like 'it should be uncontroversial to say rape is bad' (paraphrasing) and of course it should but us being convinced of that doesn't make it any more objectively true. But.. that can't possibly paralyze us from continuing this project of rationalism and science and building on past discoveries, forward motion, etc.

[u/cv512hg]

Thanks for posting. Been waiting for this

[u/Bichpwner]

Funny that Thad keeps implying psychology is a science in order to establish the belief that science is bad... Psychology is, far more often than not, bullshit criticised by scientists - and empiricists generally - as non-scientific. Psychology is a field within which the empiricistic epistemology upon which what is today called the scientific method relies, is too often abandoned for naive rationalism and subsequently ideological commitments.

Thad also argues that the rescinding influence of identity politics within our legal frameworks as not an enlightenment project because some of the leading proponents of anti-slavery movements were religious Christians of various kinds. Unfortunately for Thad's argument, the enlightenment is built on Christian ethical philosophy, specifically to this issue the concept of the divine individual (we are each a fragment of God) which is the intellectual genesis of Western individualism.