Jordan Peterson, Heather Mac Donald, Stephen Blackwood: What is the 'Higher' in 'Higher Education'?

[Music] a warm welcome to all of you here today both those here in person and those watching online i'm stephen blackwood president of ralston college a new institution of higher education preparing for launch in savannah georgia it is our conviction that nothing will more powerfully renew and reform our beloved institutions of higher education than competition the new institutions that set a positive example of what higher education can be i'm honored to have with me today two people i greatly admire heather mcdonald and jordan peterson heather mcdonald is the thomas w smith fellow at the manhattan institute the author of many books and articles including most recently the diversity delusion how race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture dr jordan peterson is a professor of psychology at the university of toronto a widely published academic psychologist and author most recently of 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos we have chosen for our topic of discussion today the question what is the higher of higher education mean we chose that topic because we often hear a lot about what is wrong with higher education and indeed so we should but we don't hear as much about what it could and should be i'm thrilled to have heather and jordan with us today because they're often scathing critiques of the academy to me are grounded in love in a sense of what could and should be thank you heather and jordan for being with us today why don't we start with a bit of diagnosis what's wrong with higher education what's wrong with the academy give us just give it to us as straight as you can and take as long as you need well it's abdicated its responsibility to infuse students with the sense of their extraordinary privilege to be reading works of utter sublimity the faculty should approach these works with love gratitude and a sense of joy and they have one responsibility to cram as much knowledge of greatness and of our inheritance into students empty noggins as possible in four years instead they're teaching students to hate to hate the greatest works of western civilization and to hate frankly each other because the reigning ideology on campuses is that of victimhood and students are immediately categorized from the moment they step on a campus as either belonging to the high status victim groups or the oppressors and and they go through the next four years seeing things through that lens of victimhood and oppression which is a tragedy and an extraordinary loss of opportunity to me i think this has happened this is mostly characteristic of the humanities and to a lesser degree of the social sciences but increasingly will become characteristic of the stem fields because they're under assault i would say by the same agents who undermine the humanities and the social sciences and i would say of all the dangers that the current situation in the university presents that's probably the one that's primary because so far the stem fields have remained relatively let's say unviolated by the intellectual corruption that characterizes the other disciplines and there they're of crucial importance obviously practically speaking but also as a bulwark against the ideological pathology that currently passes for academic knowledge in you know in the institutes of higher education um what's wrong exactly i i see it i really see it as a continuation of a process that was identified by both nietzsche and dostoevsky at the end of the 19th century that it's a it's a continuation of the collapse of the collapse of the idea of god or collapsing the belief in god or maybe if you thought about it psychologically as a collapse in the archetype of divine masculinity that's another way of thinking about it i mean nietzsche warned that if we lost our fundamental foundation block which was the notion of a of a of a transcendent divinity that we would degenerate in two directions one direction being nihilism and the other direction being it's it's twin it's its malformed twin totalitarianism and that was his diagnosis for the 20th century and i think that's exactly what happened during the 20th century it's a diagnosis of stunning accuracy especially given how relatively early in the 19th century it was made and dostoyevsky for his part made exactly the same case particularly in in the devils the possessed the books variously titled um which is a study of the corrosive effects of really of an ideology very very similar to the one that reigns today in the university campuses the devils is is a literary work that describes the intellectual and moral genesis of exactly the type of thinker who caused the catastrophes of the russian revolution it would be 30 years later i guess so it's another work of incredibly prescient insight almost incomprehensible with the loss of that see the problem with the loss of that idea and i'm i'm speaking psychologically i would say which is what i try to do as much as possible is that regardless of your religious belief you cannot exist outside a hierarchy of value it's not technically possible you need a hierarchy of value to organize your perceptions and i i mean this i mean this literally i mean this neurophysiologically in that even when you're observing the world which as far as you're concerned merely manifests itself for your observation you're focusing your eyes are engaged in a series of complex movements that are controlled by unbelievably complicated neuro neurophysiological circuits and you focus on something and not on everything else and that means that you pick something out of the almost infinitely complex realm of potential phenomena as of signal importance and that orients your very capacity to observe the world and that hierarchical structure that guides your perceptions is is of unbelievable depth and complexity because you you tend to attend to those things that let's say you regard as important they're going to further you in life so you need a philosophy of what constitutes furtherance in life which implies a gradient between what's undesirable and what's desirable and that that structure that gradient of undesirable too desirable is in fact the philosophical manifestation of the neurophysiological hierarchy that enables you to parse the world up so that it's comprehensible and something has to be at the top of that well it doesn't because you can be a war you can be an internal war of conflicting values that's the alternative but that's not um psychologically acceptable that's that's would manifest itself in uncertainty and anxiety and directionlessness and hopelessness and nihilism to be a house that's divided amongst itself all of that needs to be oriented into a hierarchy that's a unity and something has to be at the pinnacle of the hierarchy because otherwise it's not a hierarchy and and the question is well what is it that might be at the pinnacle and that is the question it's it's the question right it's it because what's at the pinnacle is that to which all of your resources should be fundamentally devoted and what we decided in the west over thousands of years and and i would say beginning far before christianity was that there was an ideal mode of being that's expressed in the idea that human beings have a spark of divinity within them and that and that manifesting the personality that would be the most genuine embodiment of that spark of divinity constitutes the highest of possible goals and you know you can you can simplify that idea you could say well you know you you you have an ethical responsibility um to manifest what's best in you to manifest your potential people speak in those terms and to become more than you are to become who you could be but lurking underneath that is this idea of the ideal the ideal the embodied ideal or even the incarnate ideal because this is something that's not merely an abstraction it's something that's expressed in flesh that's the idea of the word made flesh let's say that's that's part of the same set of ideas and that that that ethical proposition is that i think i think it's expressed well in in the earliest chapters of genesis the ethical proposition is something like there's a there's an action in the world there's an action in being that's characterized in christianity as logos and it's the operation of truth and courage nested in love on potential so the idea in genesis is the world springs into being in some sense as a consequence of the action of this logos and that if the logos is operative on potential then what emerges as a consequence is good by definition so that's an ethical it's an ethical axiom it's a daring ethical accident it's it's it's one of the most daring ideas i've ever come across because it's a very daring idea to to state deposit because in the absence of proof except that which you would gather as a consequence of enacting the proposition that if you act courageously and you tell the truth then what you bring into being is by definition good because it often doesn't look that way you can get into a lot of trouble by telling the truth and so it's very easy to take the easy way out in the short term that that's the characteristic of god himself and it's and the logos is the characteristic of the logos is the definition for the process that undertakes that extraction from potential and its transformation into reality and then there's the secondary proposition that human beings are made in the image of god and i believe and i also believe this as a scientist that there isn't a more accurate way of describing what we do as conscious beings you know you you hear that if you're a adequately informed scientific materialist that it's incumbent on you to note that human beings are fundamentally deterministic in their behavior but the evidence for that i would say is not strong the conceptual evidence is strong because you can make a coherent argument but the actual evidence is rather weak because it isn't obvious at all that we can act deterministically except when we've done things that we've practiced intensely but that isn't the way that the world manifests itself to us in many ways what what seems to be the case instead is that we wake up every morning and what faces us is the unformed future that's the reality that we confront it's not the present and it's not the past it's what could be that day and and we see that as a field of possibility all of which could conceivably be manifested but none of which has yet been manifested and and and then we feel called upon as as the action of our life to chart a course through that multitude of potential paths to select from among all those possibilities the realities that we choose to bring into being and then to work to bring them into being and we also recognize and we treat each other like this that the quality of what it is that's brought into being as a consequence of those choices is directly dependent on the ethical integrity with which we conducted ourself while making those choices which is why we can wake up at three in the morning and berate ourselves for having made a mess of the week or the day or the month or our lives because we understand that we've deviated from the appropriate path and we call ourselves out on it like we call out the people we love and the people that we have relationships with and that idea is is that's that idea that idea of hierarchy and the divine spark of consciousness and its relationship to ultimate reality and and to metaphysical reality that's fundamentally what's under assault at the universities it's far deeper than the political it's it's it's with great trepidation that i would take any exception to jordan peterson especially in his field of work and so i'm just going to offer an alternative possibility without in any way negating your profound insights when it comes to the university when it comes above all else to the humanities i think it is possible to approach this extraordinary civilizational inheritance that it is the purpose of education to pass from one generation to another without necessarily grounding that in a metaphysical conception of god uh or even believe it or not a unitary truth and and i take for me the model of humanistic learning the renaissance humanists who rediscovered the classical legacy that had been nearly buried throughout the early period of christianity in the dark ages renaissance humanism began with petrarch's discovery of livy's monumental history of rome and cicero's letters which would go on to inspire the american founding fathers with their lucid prose and insights into political organization and this triggered an extraordinary appetite a passion to find again a civilization that the renaissance humanists found expressed things that was beyond their current horizons petrarch felt so intimately involved with these writers that he was discovering and they were the humanists would travel across europe going to monasteries in mountains to try to recover these muldering manuscripts of quintillion petrarch was so engaged that he wrote letters to the classical authors he wrote letters in latin to virgil and ovid and to cicero and and to homer although in latin because he didn't speak greek to his utter despair and he wrote one letter to cicero rebuking him for the vindictiveness that he came across in one of his letters and it it wounded petrarch to the core uh because he had formed this ideal vision of this monumental roman order and then he thought better himself and he wrote another letter to cicero saying i apologize but i just was so so upset but you have to understand it's because i love you so deeply that spirit of discovery of passion of belief in beauty i think can go on without necessarily being grounded in a transcendental metaphysics now of course i would grant the humanists were themselves christian but there is an entire range of western civilization the extraordinary evolution of the 19th century novel i've been pondering a lot recently the drama of the evolution of human style of whether it's in music the evolution from the 18th century oprah syria that was all operas written in highly allegorical form to the late 19th century verismo or the the mysterious evolution from the medieval allegory the troubadour poetry uh spencer's fairy queen where it was absolutely taken for granted that literary expression the expression of the most eloquent among us would be couched in terms of abstract allegorical figures how did we get from there to the great flowering of the 19th century british novel and a french novel that is an amazing transition and an amazing evolution of the possibilities of human expression and i think it's the purpose of the university separate from it can incorporate a religious faith and certainly our universities in america in particular were grounded and in europe were grounded in a christian faith but they can also proceed simply on the basis of the joy of exploration and infusing in students a sense of human accomplishments that would otherwise be completely outside of their can it's interesting you know i just had a discussion with stephen pinker two days ago and pinker makes a case i would say that's quite similar to yours being in a very someone who's very um let's say fond of the enlightenment and um i am too that that's that's and and i mean i i don't have any uh quarrel with that except that i think that one of the things that has laid us open to what's happened in the universities is our inability as a culture to weave together the relationship between the enlightenment that you speak of and the deeper underlying metaphysic from which it emerged and i i think the fact of that fracture which would be at least in part the fracture between science and religion is one of the causal factors that's led to the rise of the kinds of ideologies that we're talking about as being destructive in the universities so possibly um i mean we've we've we've lived with the enlightenment for a long time you know we've we've had two centuries now we can argue about whether rationalism is to blame for nazism i would agree not uh but i think that we had an enlightenment philosophy i mean my my word when you think of the uh the german philosophers that were passionate about truth i would put hegel in the enlightenment category i would put kant there now they were not necessarily agnostics but but i think that a belief in the powers of reason in the powers of exploration can be perfectly consistent with a reverence for the past and a joy of learning i don't think it necessarily leads you towards nihilism although i would also say one of the reflexive so-called conservative critiques of contemporary academia is to say well it's all from nihilism or it's all from relativism if only i mean the the problem with these student yahoos is not that they are uh sort of uh abstractly and aloof from any passion and zealous passion for truth they are utterly convinced that they are in possession of the single acceptable truth about western civilization which is that it is fundamentally racist and sexist at its core they admit no doubt they admit no discourse so we do not have in the university today the instantiation of an enlightenment ideal to the contrary we have the assumption that discourse is equatable with hate speech and once you forswear discourse you are left with one option which is brutal force or submission or well of course but to somebody else's force i wonder whether this is a good moment to bring up the whole status and fact or possibility of freedom of speech because there is very much dominant in the academy at the moment as you just alluded heather to the the idea that somehow the protection of the vulnerable or oppressed is incompatible with freedom of speech and i think this might be a way of as it were brooking what is uh an apparent divide in your analysis uh insofar as as as we might ask whether freedom of speech gets at anything or whether there's a there's any world out there to know um uh and so to return to this question of the status of free speech within the university i just want to read a an absolutely beautiful quotation from your recent book uh heather which moved me very much it's one i hadn't encountered before by frederick douglass from 1860 in which he says slavery cannot tolerate free speech five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the south now i don't think i can even begin to imagine from my position of of peace and relative prosperity and liberty how vast was the power douglas thought freedom of speech carried and so i'm wondering if if we could talk a bit about uh what the consequences of of a of an oppression of freedom of speeches on campus but also conversely what liberating enlightening power freedom of speech opens up well first of all what needs to be underscored here is the extraordinary ignorance that underlies these students contempt for freedom of speech nobody who has the most foggy connection to the history of tyranny the world over who understands as douglas said that freedom of speech is the right that tyrants first of all destroy because they understand that it has the power to challenge their authority these students are not only historically ignorant about the fact that it is minorities who depend above all else on an ability to speak outside of accepted norms that is a that are oppressing them but they're also unable to think abstractly so let's forget the past and let's just think in the present moment uh you know one of the key functions of thinking is to reverse positions to you know rawls talks about the original position what arrangement of rights would you choose if you don't know your status when you're first born so if you don't know if you're going to be the one with power or the one without power do you want freedom of speech or not so right now the student censors the progressive yahoos on campus are the ones that control the power to define what is hate speech and thus what is prescribable do they want to give that power to our current president i know stephen didn't want to get into politics here so i'm not even going to name him but there is a certain president at this very moment that is not exactly welcome on college campuses his very name causes emotional breakdowns did these students not understand that they are setting a precedent that can be used against them they think they will always have power maybe sadly they will let's hope not uh but but they are unable to think abstractly in terms of general principles and precedents that can be used against them as for the power of speech yes it's important i would just add as an addendum that we can return to i nevertheless think that conservatives are making a mistake by grounding their analysis of what's wrong with the university almost exclusively in terms of the violations of free speech i think there is something far more important than debating opinion in a university and that is again the transmission of knowledge for which debate is sometimes relevant but not always so i should clarify something i mean in in my initial comments i wasn't making the case necessarily for a religious viewpoint i was making the case for the necessity of a hierarchy of ethics and that at the pinnacle of the ethic of the ethical hierarchy is a conception of that the sovereign individual will say and i think that you can make that case psychologically and you can make it metaphysically but you don't have to make it metaphysically it's it's it's not let's say it's optional i'm not convinced necessarily that it's optional but i think you can make that case but something has to occupy that high position psychologically to to organize you and it's out of that concept that we have this creative capacity to interact with the world and to bring it into being as a consequence of our ethical action that gives rise to the notion of the sovereign individual and the sovereign individual in my estimation is the proper category for apprehending the human being and there are presumptions that go along with the idea of the sovereign individual and those presumptions are that well first of all that you're an individual and not defined by your group identity you may have a group identity in fact you do you have multiple group identities which is a problem that even the identity politics people have great difficult great difficulty dealing with conceptually but your group identities are to be regarded as secondary there's something to you that's unique to you that's of fundamental intrinsic value and the fact that it's unique and of fundamental intrinsic value is actually what makes free speech of fundamental value and you see the debates on campus aren't about who should speak that's not the problem that that's to radically under estimate the danger of the philosophical argument the argument on campus is that there is no such thing as free speech and the reason for that is that for there to be free speech well first of all there have to be sovereign individuals who have experiences that are grounded in truth that are unique to them that can be shared with other people of good will through dialogue and that the consequence of that can be something approximating um a novel and negotiated peace novel because something new has come into being and negotiated because sovereign individuals of of value have engaged in a process that enables them to come to to a mutually understandable agreement if you don't buy any of that you don't buy the idea of free speech now what you buy instead if you're playing radical left identity politics is something completely different completely utterly different which is that your conception of yourself as a sovereign individual is an illusion and for the case for for most of the people in this room it's not only an illusion it's a it's an it's a delusion that you support only because of the privilege and power that that confers upon you you don't have individual opinions because all you are is an avatar or a mouthpiece for your group identity whether you know it or like it or not that's all you're capable of mouthing and what you see in the world is nothing but a hobbesian battleground of identity politics groups battling for supremacy and there's no communication between them this is part of what drives arguments such as um the criticisms of say cultural appropriation or the idea that like that it's improper for a fiction author for an author of fiction to attempt to inhabit the imagination the the being of of say if you're a man to inhabit the being of a woman or if you're white to inhabit the being of someone who's black that you're you're you're walking across lines that it's not possible to walk across because you're in you're outside of your bailiwick you're outside of your group identity and there's no communication possible between people of different of group identities and so what's under assault on campuses is actually the idea of the communication between people of different groups at all levels and and one of the things that's so terrible about that and i think the intersectional types have stumbled upon this stupidly and without noticing is that because we have a plethora of group identities i think it's possible in the case of most people to identify at least eight cardinal group identities everyone is a unique combination of their group identities and therefore no one is able to communicate with anyone else and so what's up what's under assault is the idea of well not only the idea that the past is worthwhile that it has something to teach us because we're historical creatures that we need to extract as much wisdom as we possibly can from those who were kind enough to hand down what they learned to us but the very idea that negotiated communication between people of equivalent worth is even possible and so i think people especially the people who look at this as a political battle radically underestimate the depth of the of the of the ideational clash that's actually in play i mean the most fundamental conceptions of our civilization are what are under direct assault by the unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the and the modified marxists what i see though too is it's a very odd thing on the one hand a lot of the current campus dysfunctions and sicknesses is a instantiation of a very pseudo-sophisticated discourse of post-structuralism and the you know the spawn of of uh de ridan foucault at the same time you mentioned cultural appropriation which is truly one of the most civilization destroying concepts to have come out of the campus left and it is based on an extraordinarily primitive idea of the self as something that is somehow contaminated is is it is there's a sort of an essence there that is authentic and can be stolen you know that you can steal my identity through language or a name can steal an identity it's a very bizarre thing and it's it's a blindness to the fact that one of the beauties of of human society is the role playing it's irony it's wit it's the fact that human beings take on different roles at different times castiglione wrote a book the il cortegno the court you're talking about what it is for an aristocrat how he should bear himself and he talks about sprezzatura the sort of a lightness of being that should be our ideal of an awareness of of play of of possibility and these campus yahoos uh are are and able to think of differences of degree at this very moment there is a harvard law professor who is being investigated by the harvard bureaucrats because he has the temerity to represent the accused sexual predator harvey weinstein he also oversees a harvard undergraduate dorm and the students at harvard under his tutelage at the dorm had a complete nervous breakdown because somehow by representing by serving in a professional role of representing harvey weinstein he is somehow carrying into the dorm the essence of rape and they're unable to understand that no he's playing a role that is essential in due process in restraining the potentially tyrannical power of the state without which we have no guarantees of justice and yet these students think of this ronald sullivan's professor as somehow a bearer of the essence of of rape culture uh because they have an extraordinarily primitive view of of what it is to be a human being what's a fragile view it's fragile and the question at least in part is like what what accounts for the fragility yeah they're they're so defensive it's fred but you know i don't quite buy the fragility argument which is saying it's just like snowflakes and they're over parented i think what's at stake here is ideological war i should have said shallowness there okay right i think that they are they are using the language of psychological fragility for something that is far more dangerous and and and malign which is to try to take down western civilization well you've both alluded to how the the the dominant views on the academy have far more uh widely reaching consequences than that which is simply contained there's often a critique to some people would say well it's just the ivory tower it's a kind of sequestered problem it's contained in a certain sense it it has it has borders but but both of you it seems to me have a keen sense that what happens in the university spreads in fact in a certain sense is is is distributed or disseminated principally from the university to everywhere else and i wonder if you could each say a few words about the consequences for however you might characterize those dysfunctions those maladies internally in the university what their consequences are both psychologically for the student and then broader culturally whether artistically politically or otherwise well let us count the ways i mean there's probably a day goes by that is not some real world manifestation of academic victim politics right now we have this absurd crusade going on of a former vice president joe biden for acting like a normal human being for acting like an older man who is a politician and is physical and puts his uses his hands to express himself i have not seen a single image yet that comes anywhere close to sexual predation and yet we're going through this massive meltdown because somehow he's engaged in rape culture look at the hysteria that greeted this incident of the boys from a catholic school in covington kentucky who were visiting the washington monument and happened to get in between a battle between some kooky black nationalist extremists and some native american activists and there was one image that was caught that was a boy exercising enormous self-restraint as an indian activist pounds his drum right in his face that was seized upon by the elites as the very embodiment of white patriarchal cis-normative privilege and for a few days there was an ecstatic uh self-indulgence in finally we've got a real world example of of white male privilege until the story fell apart we are also seeing the stem fields in silicon valley meritocracies under assault the assumption the reigning assumption of academic identity politics is that well there's three that gonads and melanin are the most important things about a human being that discrimination based on gonads and melanin are the defining features of of american society and any disparity in proportional representation be it of females and males or of different minority and ethnic groups in any american institution is by definition the result of discrimination against females and minorities so what does this mean for the stem fields it means that every single big tech company whether it's google or microsoft uh are twisting themselves into knots to try to hire to create gender equity there was a a hr manager at youtube who was fired because he refused to go along with the edict from on high to interview only females blacks and hispanics for entry-level engineering jobs who knows how many highly qualified white or asian males were passed over that could have given us some breakthrough in say energy efficiency to take on uh climate change because these tech firms are now putting obeisance to the demands of identity politics above meritocratic hiring so so there's something that's that's really crucial about about the idea of the assault on on meritocracy because i think one of the defining features of the campus pathology is in fact an assault on the idea of competence itself absolutely um and i've been trying to untangle the logic behind that to lay it out and and at the same time trying to understand how we might define when the left goes too far this is actually being a technical problem like we all understand if we have a modicum of knowledge about the 20th century that the left can clearly go too far we obviously know that the right can go too far and the conditions under which the right can go too far seem to be fairly well understood and they tend to involve claims of superiority and intrinsic superiority based on group identity that's the the dividing line i think for the pathology of the right for the pathology the left it's much more difficult it's it seems like it's more like a combination of ideas that produce a kind of genocidal toxicity if they're left to run to their full extent but but of all those vague ideas that cause immense trouble the most deadly is the notion that unequal outcomes are evidence of systemic oppression it's it's pathological first because it denies the idea that there are intrinsic differences between people that may play a role in those differences in outcome that are independent of oppression and prejudice now we should say as reasonably intelligent people that hierarchies meritocratic or not are prone to their various pathologies and to their corruption by power and that it certainly is the case that throughout history and even now the most qualified person doesn't necessarily get the job and that's often for reasons that have nothing to do with their qualifications so they're discriminated against for prejudicial reasons that happens with less attractive people for example it happens with shorter people it happens with people who are more introverted there's there's many many reasons why the best person doesn't necessarily get the job but to say that that happens sometimes is not anything like saying that that's the characteristic function of the hierarchies of the functional west it it seems to me to to be self-evident that most of the organizations that we have put together with such great difficulty are unbelievably functional remarkably or even miraculously functional and that it's unquestionable that a large proportion of them are devoted to solving problems that everyone wants to have solved i mean people who take care of the sewage for example are a good example of that i mean we actually do take care of our bodily waste that actually works we actually have electrical systems power systems that function we have infrastructure that is reliable i mean our society works and what and everyone's happy about that because everyone recognizes that well it's not so good to freeze in the winter and and to die of heat frustration in the summer and it's not so good to walk you know in 10 inches of filth like you might have in london in 1750 and and we've organized structures that take care of those problems and we all see that at least to some degree the reason that these organizations work is because we have encouraged allowed and rewarded the people who are capable of running organizations of that sort to actually be the ones that run them hence the meritocracy so and one of the consequences of that in combination with the fact that there are intrinsic differences between people is that there isn't equality of outcome and another contributor of course is that it's impossible for there to be equality of outcome because you can almost infinitely subdivide people into their various group memberships and so it's technically impossible to equalize outcomes across all possible relevant group membership domains which is actually a great thing for the radical left because it means that they have an exhaust inexhaustible supply of potentially prejudicial attitudes to complain about um the the the the most interesting example of this i would say probably comes from scandinavia so you may know that there are a series of studies deemed by the london times to be among the most reliable psychological studies ever produced because of their magnitude and because of them of their rep replicability they've been replicated dozens of times and because the findings themselves were a shock to the scientists who discovered them they weren't what was expected which is another hallmark of i would say validity in science if you discover something and you really wish it wasn't true then it probably is and so what happened over the last 30 years was that it has become increasingly obvious that a substantial proportion of the difference in outcome between men and women with regards to career position and income is actually a consequence of temperamental differences between men and women and the temperamental differences the most important temperamental differences seem to be in agreeableness a big five personality trait and negative emotion another big five personality trait but also in interest because the largest psychological difference between men and women that has been discovered is the proclivity to be interested in people which is a feminine trait or things which is a masculine trait and what's so fascinating about that and so completely unexpected and truly shocking it's truly shocking to psychologists as it was laid out because they're as left-leaning as the campus intellectuals are in general was that the more egalitarian the society the bigger the differences in temperament so the largest differences in temperament between men and women in the world are in the scandinavian countries followed closely by countries like holland and that those differences are driving substantively driving differences in outcome especially in uh let's say in the proclivity to become an engineer versus a nurse and that a fair bit of that is driving what relatively small differences there are in average pay by sex and so the scandinavians are i lectured in scandinavia a number of times this year and i presented most of the audiences i talked to with the scandinavian paradox which is that as you increase as you level the playing field and maximize equality of opportunity which i think you could argue the scandinavians have done better from the gender perspective than any other country whether you agree with what they've done or not you actually increase the degree to which certain outcomes are unequal and so you don't get to have your cake and eat it too that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are by no they're not aligned or they're certainly not aligned in every way now obviously as the workforce has opened up to women some equality of opportunity has manifested itself because approximately as many women work percentage-wise as men and that's a huge transformation but there are other forms of inequality that emerge as a consequence of allowing people their free choice and so the scandinavians now are a real conundrum technically speaking um they face a number of difficult choices one is just to disbelieve the research which is becoming increasingly difficult as the number of studies mounts and the ends the the the number of research subjects in the studies you know increases into the hundreds of thousands which is where it is now and so to deny the validity of that which which has its consequences or to double down on the idea that we're social we're socially constructed right to the core and start to become positively totalitarian in your attempt to eradicate the remaining differences let's say between boys and girls which is something that's definitely happening at least to some degree in scandinavia where they're attempting for example to eradicate what appear to be intrinsic uh preference differences between boys and girls with regards to toys and so it's an invitation like we could make boys and girls the same but to do so we would do substantial damage to both of them and we would enable or create a bureaucracy the likes of which would would would send chills down the spine of anyone with with any sense and with any and with any knowledge of history yeah it's very very scary and let's you ask steven about the real world consequences let's note that uh google fired a young perfectly competent computer engineer named james damore in august of 2017 for saying precisely invoking precisely the research that you did and he had poor guy was so naive that he used one of the big five psychological traits unconsciously and self-consciously which is neuroticism and this really struck the feminist ears but he said females score higher on the score of neuroticism you'd better not use that term and everybody freaked out but he's right i mean females are more risk-averse they're more likely to see threat guys are more competitive they're more risk takers sometimes to a massive fault but this is now transforming the workplace and it's not just the private companies it's also basic research you have the national science foundation which is the united states premier funder of academic basic research founded in 1950 by congress to give us a fighting chance with compete with the soviets and they are now spending americans taxpayer dollars giving it to gender theorists to do studies of intersectionality in engineering i mean it's very difficult to wrap one's mind around this because they are determined to destroy this scientific truth and you know this is a real watershed moment can science and the the arrival at empirically demonstrated truths survive politics and if it can't we really are going to it seems it seems it seems unlikely to me i mean um you know we're we're accustomed to thinking of science as a a force of almost unstoppable magnitude but it's historically new a couple of centuries old and we don't know the conditions under which it's flourishing is possible and the probability that we can undermine those conditions even accidentally is unbelievably high i mean already in the uc systems in order to be considered as a new hiri or to be promoted through the through the ranks in the stem fields you have to write a statement describing your alignment with the you know the three fundamental shibboleths of the radical left diversity inclusivity which i've never understood as a concept and equity and without you making obeisance to those fundamental axioms then you're not moving anywhere in your career and there's an insistence from the nsf which i found just as jaw-dropping as you did that we move as rapidly as possible say to gender equality across the stem fields and and this is this is i think the scientists are so politically naive that they'll be taken out by the post-modernists in no time flat well what i'm hearing from my friends in the sciences is tragically some of them are actually on board this i i have a friend uh in the engineering department on a uc campus and their dean has been systematically tearing up their final hiring list the short list of three candidates saying go back to the drawing board because there's no females there now these are people that have been chosen based on merit i have no doubt i have no doubt they are not discriminating against qualified females but they are being forced to hire females and about half of his department thinks this is a good thing the the control for this stephen at the very beginning you mentioned sort of market forces well we are in a global economy and for sure the asian countries do not give a damn about equity diversity and inclusion in fact the the asian students who are studying here think we're all nuts like they cannot believe it what is going on so they are absorbing our scientific knowledge and taking it back to china and who can blame them you know china is obviously then at least it'll be somewhere somewhere exactly somewhere and they will they will continue with discovering genetic differences without the slightest shame or or embarrassment about the country it seems to me that at the at the heart of this this problem is is the assertion that there is no real world out there whether it's uh in the terms of the forms of the studies you talked about uh in terms of the underlying natural differences it does it could be nature it could be the denial that beauty is a real thing that truth has any objective character that there's any reality that exists independent of our wish or whim and i'd like to to move from that you might say that insight as a kind of uh mode of diagnosing what is dominant in through much of the academy as a way of of moving towards what might be a more a more positive account i want to ask the question what is the higher of higher education and i want to preface that with an observation in my own life which is that the moments that have been most disruptive of my immediate self-perception in the most productive and positive ways have been encounters with something outside of myself whether in whether in love or beauty or truth it could be a sunset and i want to to relate that to one of the books that i've spent the most time with in my life and that's a book written in the in the early 6th century by a man named boethius at the after the fall of the roman empire and to make the story short he had risen quite high in the roman state and and was accused of treason by the king he was a very wealthy powerful highly educated man and thrown in prison and after a year brutally executed and killed but in that year that he was he was in prison he wrote a book called the consolation of philosophy it's a drama in which a woman named philosophy comes to console a prisoner we might say played by himself boethius and what's very striking about this the beginning of this text is that the prisoner is he's in fact he's writing a poem and it's a really bad poem it's all about sort of woe is me and how terrible the world is and and that there's no hope and he's lost all of these things that he thought really mattered and it's compelling in a way it's a true story it happened and then in comes this uh woman named philosophy and she just comes blazing in as this this this irrepressible force of dynamism and illumination and she says essentially she says the muses of poetry who are dictating that she says get out of here you you you theatrical harlot she calls them you have no cure for this man's ills you only make them worse and in that moment she is where she just casts aside the clouds of of psychological darkness and the immediacy of his own feelings and it's those were real it was a real thing that happened but there was no way out of it for him other than this this this this casting off of his immediate perception in light of higher realer truer things and so what i want to ask you both about is you know what is the higher that pierces through us that is not simply outside of us but through our encounter with which we ourselves become more more illuminated uh and perhaps let's talk to answer that in a way in a kind of abstract way first and then maybe we can talk about particular works of art and music and literature and philosophy that have had that role in your own lives but what is the higher of higher education heather well first of all again i am i'm not sure that the fundamental sickness is on the left is a belief in no objective reality on the one hand you're right in that the characteristic of our time is this narcissism students only want to study themselves and yet again they are not it's not a platonic vision that we're you know we're living in a shadow world and above us outside of our perhaps current perception our ideal forms they really do believe that the reality is oppression so they're not relativists when it comes to that narrative um that's the one part of the world that remains real that's the one thing that's real and uh to align themselves with marxism right as well as the all importance of their particular gender and race identities which as far as i'm concerned is the least interesting part of the self i do not regard being female as an accomplishment it's not particularly interesting sorry um but the higher i mean i guess it's i don't i don't think so much in abstractions to me the higher in higher education is the particularities of a civilizational inheritance whether it's it's plunging into the greek tragedies and and trying to imagine the terrifying strangeness of these festivals of tragedies in in in athens and aeschylus is oristia or it's the the lacquered beauty of milton's language in book four describing paradise lost so it's it's a series of the ability to lose yourself in expression that is of a greater sophistication and eloquence than you could possibly attain to for yourself so that's that's i would say well that's exactly that calling to the higher self that's of that's of absolute of primal importance you know one of the things that's amused me i would say um in the in the as i've observed the reaction of my audiences in the tour that i've done over the last year so i've visited about 150 cities since last january like 14 months ago and spoken to about 300 000 people and i've had an opportunity to watch the audiences and i do that very carefully i don't use notes i watch who i'm talking to and and i listen to their response i watch them as individuals and i listen to their response as a group and one of the tropes that i've used fairly frequently is the following we've had 50 years of concentration on individual rights and and i would say the pursuit of hedonism and happiness as the goal of life and and also this and it's probably primarily the fault of psychologists this this notion that the right way to interact with someone if you're going to be of benefit to them with regards to their mental health is to note that they're entirely acceptable in their current form you're all right the way you are and there's a big problem with that as far as i'm concerned which is that well especially if you're young which is that well if you're so all right the way you are then well where are you headed i mean if if you're already at up then where's the up that you're going to pursue for the next 60 years so that's a big problem if you're already everything that you could be in any ethical form in terms of your let's say even your your your value to yourself and other people then while you don't have a future you certainly don't need one but even worse there's something worse which is that well let's say that you aren't so all right as far as you're concerned the way you are in fact you're not so all right at all you're suicidal in your not all rightness you know you you're you you see the world as an unmitigated source of suffering you overwhelmingly tormented by the the malevolence of of existence at the individual level and the social level in the natural level and you see no direction forward and so your life is not without meaning because that would be that would actually be a relief your life is nothing but unmitigated suffering and someone says to you hey kid don't don't worry about it you're you're perfectly fine the way you are it's like i tell my audiences that they're not all right the way they are in any possible sense of the word that that there's so much more to each of them than has already been manifested that it's not it's not even within our can to understand just like it's not really within our ability to understand our depth for evil and our capacity for evil um it's not within our ability to understand our capacity for for good and for who we could be and there's two reasons that that's important one is that well if you start to understand that there could be a better you well then that's actually psychologically meaningful because it gives you it gives you something to do it gives you hope that a better future might await and it does that technically that's the other thing i should point out is that most of the positive emotion that people experience is a consequence of p of us each observing ourselves moving towards a valued goal it's not a consequence of attainment it's not satisfaction that motivates people it's hope and and that's technically the case there's a special neurophysiological circuit that mediates hope and it activates when it observes that you're moving towards a valued goal and the more valued the goal and the faster your progress towards it the more the circuit is activated and it's it's it's it's what engages you in life and it's analgesic and it's anxiolytic it has all of those properties and so it's not optional to have this circuit activated all the drugs of abuse that people rely on activate that circuit that's why they take those drugs that's cocaine and they're really addictive drugs cocaine heroin the psychomotor stimulants that's the class of drug what university is for what higher education is for is to call you to that it's it's to make you more than you are and and and first maybe that means that you need to understand who you are and you're a historical creature i mean and this is something that even the people on the left are duty bound to agree with you are a socially constructed being in many ways you're a product of history and so you need to understand history because history is actually about you the the the the the great corpus of civilized works is your autobiography and so if you're ignorant of it you don't know who you are or where you are and and so how can you orient yourself possibly in the world without that knowledge not knowing who you are where you are you're you have a map but you have no idea where you're located on it and so you're disoriented and so i always tell my students when we talk about anything that's historically that anything of historical import is well why study history it's like this is you you don't understand it's like the nazis they were you the the jews in auschwitz they were you this is about you and the less you know about you the less armored you are for the world and you better be armored for the world because the world is a very rough place it's a place of sorrow and suffering and malevolence and the less prepared you are for that the worse for you and for everyone else so you better wake up and people understand that put that way and and then the hire is also well it isn't only a matter of knowing who you are it's a matter of envisioning who you could be and strategizing how you might achieve that and and what do you have to do and know to be able to do that well you need some knowledge of aesthetics like what's the beautiful what's the good what's the noble what's what's of worth you know i talk to my audiences of nobility which is very strange it's a word you never hear you should have a noble goal right something that that that that can be of comfort to you when you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself about the validity of your being i'm pursuing this goal of sufficient nobility to justify the inequity of my existence it's so solace it's not optional and so you get educated to find out about what the ideal is and so then you can orient yourself towards that and then that gives you hope and and the hope that can sustain you through catastrophe and catastrophe is coming so you better have something to sustain you through it that's education and then there's writing and thinking it's like my students they'll write an essay i wrote this little treatise that i put on the web that many people are using about how to write an essay and i start out psychologically it's like well essay means attempt it's like okay well why are you writing an essay well let's think about it ethically for a moment well first of all you should have a problem that should be the first issue it's like you need a problem if you're going to write an essay because the essay is an attempt to answer a problem and if you're playing the game properly well then it's kind of incumbent upon you to pick a problem that you would actually like to have an answer for you know and students so often come to me and say well what topic should i write about and i think i'm not telling you that it's like that's the hard part is to pick the problem so pick your own damn problem and make sure that it's one that's actually a problem right that you that there's something in your soul that's calling you to grapple with so that you're not bored into a state of of of what of what what corpora while you're scraping out your tenth rate manuscript to hand in for your class grade but instead engaged in something that that that deeply affects you it's like this is a problem man this is driving me mad i need to solve it it's like great you've got a problem you can start your damn essay okay so now why write it well how about because you're trying to solve the problem how about how about because what you're doing is you're laying out a pattern of thought that's going to shape the way you perceive the world and act in it because that's what thought does if it does anything is it alters your perceptions and it shapes your actions to write isn't some abstract luxury it's to think in the deepest possible sense and the reason you want to do that is because you want to orient yourself in the world and the reason that you want to do that is because if you're disoriented in the world it will take you out and so you better be prepared not not just physically we seem to all accept that necessity at least in principle but intellectually it's like prepare yourself the worst is coming your way and the wiser you are and the more prepared you are the better you're going to be able to cope with it when it arrives and so sharpen yourself up and the way you do that is you pay attention to every damn word you write every word you see how it's embedded in every phrase you look at how every phrase relates to every other phrase within every sentence you look at how the sentences combine together to make paragraphs that are coherent and logical you sequence the paragraph so that they tell a coherent and profound story and you incorporate that and you transform your perceptions and you change the way you live and that's the purpose of being educated and that's the that's the purpose of the humanities it's like find out who you are find out how you could be lay out a strategy sharpen yourself up and start to become who you could be and and then the the end of that is it isn't merely that it's necessary for you to be who you could be because that would be good for you and because it would be good for your family and because it would be good for your community that's all self-evident but there's something worse even which is if you don't do that if you don't bring what is within you to fruition and you allow yourself to be less than you are the the the bitterness that accompanies that the sense of loss and failure and and and and absent opportunity corrupts you and then that corruption brings into the world something that should not be and even if you're not animated by the hope that you could make the world a better place as a consequence of sharpening yourself up intellectually and morally you should at least be animated by the knowledge that and this is the knowledge that anyone who has any historical wisdom at all possesses is that the the space that you could have filled with what was good will definitely be filled with what is evil and the purpose of education is to it's to tilt the scales right it's to tilt the scales at the individual level away from what's pathological and corrupt and resentful and vengeful vengeful and destructive and towards what's good and true and courageous and noble and none of that's just words not if it's not if you're not using it in the cliched sense not if you understand the connection between your soul your spirit the words you use and the manner that you manifest yourself in the world and that's the purpose of higher education it's to make citizens rights to make noble citizens and it's an idea that we're we're so far from comprehending now that no one i talked to has ever even heard that so well these are very profound and inspiring thoughts i want to add the substratum of technique underneath them you're confronting the vast tragedy in some sense just simply of student writing and the inability to structure something coherently a mastery of language underlying this journey that you're describing to move out of yourself or your current petty self into a larger self that is infused by knowledge of human possibility is also the simple mechanics of absorbing mechanisms of expression and it used to be that it was assumed that if you want to be an artist if you want to be a writer you study the models of the past and every single painter went and he spent hours copying in museums because the assumption that he was somehow a toxinous you know born from the the seeds without fathers without without an ancestor was absurd you step in the shoes of greatness and you learn through learning what your predecessors did and now we have this idea that people simply go out and they express the wonderful uniqueness that is them and that that is itself validates their in inarticulate and in kuwait attempts to express themselves we have lost that understanding that learning is also about discipline you also speak quite rightly and eloquently about close reading you're saying read your own prose uh and and listen does that sentence have anything to do with normal syntactic structure and do the sentences follow but i would also say one thing that i'm very grateful for in my education even though it was i spent way too much time absorbing deconstruction and post-structuralism when i should have been simply reading more novels but i was still a benefactor of the yale tradition of close reading of the new criticism and i learned to pay extraordinary attention to every single word in a text i could write 25 pages on 12 lines of words words prelude because i was observing every single one of those words and how they related to others perhaps to a fault perhaps i was making things up but but i think that an attention to things outside of the self is also extraordinarily crucial and and i would also say you mentioned nietzsche at the beginning as adam braiding our current males in in what would happen if we lose a sense of a transcendent ideal but i i think another way of understanding what's going on in in education today is is a concept that the french philosopher paul recur articulated he talked about the hermeneutics of suspicion and he traced those to and that is a sense of reading text or reading human creations with seeing them as subtext as as guarding unacceptable truths and that that the surface of things is a bunch of lies and so the characteristic hermeneutics of suspicion which he attributed to freud nietzsche and marx was to see the products of human civilization as mere masks for power for the unbounded ego as opposed to rationality and for the oppressive workings of the economy uh and power relations between capitalists and and the proletariat rather than a functioning mutually beneficial free market and we are we are now approaching civilization exclusively through the hermeneutics of suspicion and he contrasted that to the hermeneutics of faith which was involved in trying to recuperate the meaning of text in sympathy with the author's intentions rather than reading against it if i could pick up on that on that very question that is to say paradoxically that which realizes us in a higher or fuller or more complete way requires a stance of humility right of attending to that which is outside of you uh whether it's whether it's whether it's a text piece of music could be just the reality of your life in any number of ways but so far as education is confirmed concerned i'd love to have both of you speak about encounters in your own lives whether educationally or aesthetically with objects of art or philosophy or literature or science that have done that very that have engaged you in that in that very way to to awaken you you know if one of the ways that we might think of the of the the viewpoint that you're all right in your own is reflected precisely in terms of the way uh students are taught to write that it's all just in you you know just just emote and you know what are your opinions about this as if anyone really cares and that you have as if you even have opinions and that leads to a kind of you know narcissism to sort of solipsistic subjectivity out of which there is no there is no there is no exit and uh and simultaneously to uh to what i take to be a kind of a kind of group think i mean if there's one thing that you can say with the university today it's that you can very often predict the opinions that people will come out with who think that they have learned to think critically i mean there's a famous entrepreneur who interviews people and one of the questions he asks is is tell me two or three things you believe that virtually none of your peers believe and it is and it is and this is the difficulty of finding answers to that question uh is proof of how far our universities have strayed from being able to cultivate a genuine independence of mind and so i i want to come back to encounters that you have that you have each had with texts or however you might want to construe it that have been illuminating and enlarging and have cultivated for you something of the independence of mind that both of you are so notorious for heather well i actually again i i don't think and that i may be completely blind in this i don't think independence of mind is is what i would put is the goal for education for me it is the transmission of an inheritance if we don't read these authors they die it is on us it is on the faculty to inspire students with the sense of excitement of terror are they up to these works are they worthy of them do they possess the attention and the knowledge to possibly confront the aurasta and know what is going on so the idea that it's ultimately about freeing the self i suppose that ultimately you are right and that you need to be able to talk to students about the goal here is for you to live a life that is more open to your own possibilities and those of others still for me we are so far from understanding the primary responsibility which is to keep this tradition alive well don't don't get me wrong like i don't believe that and this is something this is a transformative moment i suppose for me is that one of the things i learned from nietzsche was that there's no freedom without a very long previous period of voluntary slavery right right is that what you do is it's an apprenticeship that's right you you you you go in on your knees if you're lucky right and you think i know nothing let me be worthy of this yeah exactly and then and then if you're fortunate you you have you know in the universe you have the opportunity to choose for your peers those who have been nominated by by the entire sequence of your ancestral past as worthy of preservation you can you can you can knock on the door of that club and and be let in at least as an observer and it's an unbelievable privilege exactly and the scandal is these students are being given a license for ignorance i was at yale recently as a dinner with students and one student said with utter confidence not a slightest hint of of of embarrassment or shame i don't like reading white males and he was referring to homer but this encompassed the entirety of white males and he was shameless about this and he actually invoked the authority of a yale professor who i doubt he misinterpreted who had said she no longer uh can teach avid because it is so uh she she only understands it now she cannot get beyond the violence to women to un to appreciate the beauty of the language students i hear again and again are being given a license to reject that which they are completely unworthy of and it's heartbreaking well this is this is associated with two things we already talked about and one is the insistence that the west is an oppressive patriarchy and also the assault on meritocracy because if there's no meritocracy there's obviously no works that are classic and and if there's no works that are classic well then the motivations of those who wrote the classics or who preserved them is obviously up for that skepticism that you described and what you see happening is that all the wheat is reduced to chaff and so you know when when i introduce my students let's say to freud or to nietzsche um and i use those two because they're notorious thinkers in some ways and and i i i i try to instill in them the conviction that their job is to read with discrimination is to understand that this is not all truth and not all value that that that what's useful and profound has to be extracted out of the text as a consequence of careful reading right and the la and the rest the errors that are are are a necessary part of any even any endeavor of genius have to be let go but the trick is to pull the weed out and to leave the chaff behind not to say well it's all chaff and therefore only a fool would bother with the endeavor and that's certainly what students are taught i'm amazed constantly amazed at the degree to which students are willing i taught a course on on on an introductory course on religious thinking one year to undergraduates and the degree to which an an 18 year old freshman would come into class and announce you know triumphantly that there was nothing of worth in the entire history of christianity was just breathtaking it's like well that's blindness blindness that that that's that's a a relatively new psychological concept uh it's the it it technically it's there are levels of ignorance that are so deep that they are unable to recognize themselves you know so little about what you're talking about that you can't even tell that you don't know anything about it and then the unmitigated gall of that attitude it's like really this is this is how you construe yourself you're you're you're 18 you've read nothing you know nothing you've done nothing you've been dependent on other people your entire life and yet somehow the consequence of your movement through the educational system is your absolutely confident pronouncement that there's nothing whatsoever of worth in the entire history of western christianity just to take a single example and i've never heard a faculty member rebut that without some pulling qualification about respect for diversity this is what is so infuriating and appalling is that these ideas this contempt for greatness is it's not coming out of nowhere they are being fed this and given license for this ignorance by their professors that's because they have very many professors who are and maybe this is particularly true of literary criticism who are cain like in their envy of genuine greatness and they've gone from critics who admire the literary canon to those who are resentful for their own inability to contribute to it and perfectly motivated to tear it down well you did have harold bloom elevating the act of reading to that of the equal of the author with the you know anxiety of influence with but that he was referring to himself really uh but you know it's again it's the hermeneutics of suspicion that we are going to deconstruct these texts rather than finding in them what is beautiful so just one question this is look why given that and i agree with what you're saying and this is a great mystery to me is that and it relates to something you said about the post-modernist belief and in some externalities in the world it's like nothing's real nothing's of value except power why why is that the single external reality that the radicals all agree constitutes the ultimate reality it's like i don't understand that it's like there is people have criticized me to say well you can't be you you talk about post-modern marxist you can't be post-modernist and marxist it's like well i know that but the people who are post-modernist and marxists don't seem to know that i mean because they've rejected meta-narratives but they turn to this dialectic of nothing's real nothing's reliable everything functions as a consequence of tyranny and power those things are real it's like why i don't understand that what's what's the metaphysics of the of the of the faith in in that reality of tyranny and power i understand it as a product of the west's self-critical guilt that it took us a long time say in the united states to come to terms with our original sin of of slavery and and its long aftermath and and now we have swung over into the opposite where we somehow are unwilling to hold universal standards to all all groups we had the concept in the 1960s of blaming the victim you cannot if you if you identify a victim group you cannot hold that victim group up to the same bourgeois standards as you expect out of your own children uh and and so the narrative that is acceptable currently to explain ongoing socio-economic disparities the only acceptable narrative is that there remains subrosa endemic discrimination going on even though that's demonstrably false it's empirically demonstrably false because there is not a single mainstream institution in the united states that is not favoring uh underrepresented minorities or females you know go ahead i was only going to say because i know we need to draw to a close soon i was only going to say that that uh relative to jordan your question it needs to be said that the the the claims of power or the damage that unchecked power can do have been one of the principal sources of investigation of great minds throughout an entire history and that what to do about the problems of the unchecked power of the self uh whether in under the form of original sin or on the limits of power and politically or however else we might construe this this is this is actually one of the great focuses of human investigation for all of history and i don't think there's any question and certainly jordan you've often said that where that position leads is to a kind of nihilism that uh if there is only power and there is nothing else uh then we're in a dark space indeed but i want to conclude in an optimistic note and that is to simply note that there appears to me not only because i've observed jordan your your worldwide lectures and how eagerly your your words are are are drunk up by people seeking meaning and truth honesty about the difficulties of life but pointing towards ways of discovering deep and true and beautiful animating realities i know that this conversation is likely to be seen by many such people who themselves would love to know what our works you can point them to that you have been brought to your knees by the beauty or truth of give us a few examples and say a few words about them well musically in high school i encountered bach st matthew passion for the first time and was something unlike anything i'd ever experienced the grandeur the pathos the the sorrow and the catharsis of moving through that work with its its choruses of unbelievable power and strength its solos of of heart-wrenching beauty with the one of the final arias in the work uh a bass arya mahadikhiman hetzerhain make make yourself pure my heart because i'm going to bury jesus in you get the record and get dietrich fisher discount singing that it's it's it's beyond belief in college i've discovered the great performers series had a performance of mozart's don giovanni from the met this is with james morris and joan sutherland i was smitten for three months i was i was simply walking around absolutely in complete erotic love with don giovanni but because of the music because of the the grandeur the nobility the the drive uh in literature my experiences are tied up with my professors again i had the the great privilege of a professor of greek literature who could bring alive the athenian festivals uh i had a fantastic professor for for the inferno for dante's comedia that was infused with theory but with the knowledge of of the complexity of medieval theology and and politics george eliot's middle march is a extraordinary act of language in its precision of understanding the challenges of interpreting human behavior and striving for a moral understanding of human experience and i'll throw out something that's much lighter for uh just a sheer verbal tour de force uh max bierbaum zulika dobson of a edwardian uh tale of a beautiful woman who comes to oxford and destroys the entire university but the language is at the height of ripe luscious enameled uh expression of the greatest resources of english literature of which we are so fortunate to be native speakers and we should never uh underestimate what is available to us in its riches jordan well i have a list of those books most of them for me have been books although i love music i i think the music that's most affected me was also bach on brandenburg concertos in particular especially the third one which which is it's every time i hear it it's a it's a revelation of a kind of ordered miracle i regard music as the most representative of all art forms because music speaks of everything in a musical piece is a part that exists in relationship to a harmonious whole right and it has its own intrinsic reason for being and it speaks of meaning you know and i don't think people can live without music for that reason and it's and it's and it's opaque to cynicism which is also something so remarkable about i mean i i don't think that's true of any other art form but music i've never met anyone cynical about music and that's really something you know um books i have a book list on my website that has i would say maybe 50 or 60 books and that's been fun because many people have visited that site and have bought the books and and and and many many thousands of copies of the books it's it's actually been a very successful endeavor so that's quite entertaining especially given that some of the books are extraordinarily difficult but some of them have been works of science i i read a book when i was a a graduate student called the neuropsychology of anxiety which was written by a scientist an english scientist jeffrey gray and that damn book just about killed me man i mean he gray was a student of hans isaac who was the most cited psychologist who ever lived and he was unbelievably educated i mean i don't know how many references there are in the neuropsychology of anxiety maybe 2 000 2500 scientific papers and difficult neurophysiology psychopharmacology animal behavior hardcore psychological and biological science and he read all those papers he didn't just cite them and he understood them and he integrated them into this great book which which took me deeper into the structure of the human brain and and the psyche than i'd ever gone and it was a six month read you know because there was something that i needed to learn in every sentence and so it was lovely to go through that and it was a it was a life-changing experience and it had a huge effect on the way that i thought from then on and even though the book was written in 1982 um psychologists are still catching up with it um and usually reading it very badly by the way partly because it's so difficult um i the works of carl jung absolutely floored me uh when i started to understand and then the psychoanalysts in general did this when i started to understand what it meant that you were not the master in your own house when i actually started to to understand that as a psychological reality that that we're inhabited in some sense by by by partial personalities that are autonomous they have their own motivation they have their own viewpoints and you can tell that because you can't control yourself you do things that you wouldn't do you do things that you shouldn't do and you certainly don't do things that you should do and so there are these dynamic forces that play within you and the psychoanalysts jung in particular helped me understand two things one was those things were alive the second was they had they had historical reality historical and biological reality they were they were shaped by culture and they were deeply biologically rooted and they were and they played the same role inside of you that the ancient greek gods played for the greeks and and and that's the situation that we're in and so that was an absolute revelation i've never i've never recovered from that and and dostoevsky's um investigation of morality in crime and punishment the the the masterful way that he sets up the rationale for the murder because dostoevsky and this is something that makes his writing so remarkable always makes his enemies stronger than his allies so when you read a book by dostoevsky and he's investigating a complex concept he makes those people who make the arguments that he wants not to be true those who are the most powerful characters with the best arguments and so he sets out raskolnikov who comes up with a detailed rationale for a murder like as as good a rationale for a murder as you might need to commit one and then he has him undertake the murder and he gets away with it and then the study and the entire novel from then on is the study of what happens when you go somewhere that you didn't know existed when you thought you were more than you were you know for dostoevsky ruskolnikov had violated a fundamental ethical law something real and he ended up in something indistinguishable from hell and and be and and and crime and punishment makes that makes that unbelievably real and in an incredibly exciting manner like it's a great thriller it's a great detective novel it's unbelievably deep and it just flattened me when i read it and i i would say the last one i mean there's many but the last one was likely solzhenitsyn school-like archipelago which was just you cannot read that book and come out the same person it's not possible um and it was the book that really finally convinced me that the destiny of that destiny itself was a function of the ethical conduct of the individual because not only did solzhenitsyn demolish the intellectual and ethical credibility of marxism although you'd never guess that now he also made an incredibly strong case that even an ideology as powerfully attractive and pathological as marxism couldn't find its its home and wreak its havoc without the willingness of individual citizens to falsify the nature of their own experience and to lie in word in action and that the proper the proper pathway forward if you're con if your fundamental conviction is opposition to tyranny and hopelessness is actually truth manifested at the individual level and so those are books that had well incalculable effects on me transformed the way that i thought completely and permanently and and hopefully for the better i don't think we need to look in my view we don't need to look much further for an antidote to the males and dysfunctions of so much that we see in higher education than the testimony you both have just given to those works of beauty power and truth in your own lives regrettably our time has come to an end join me in thanking jordan and heather for the love they have shared with us and that has animated their learning and their courageous defense of the beauty that they see around them and in the works they have studied thank you

Channel: Ralston College

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Length: 110min 52sec (6652 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2020