Stephen Hicks @ Lafayette - "Postmodernism: Politics and Philosophy" (full event)

[Music] dr. Hitz who we have with us today is a canadian-american philosopher intellectual historian who teaches at Auckland University Illinois where he also directs the center at Kingston intrapreneurship he's the author of four books ranging from topics of logical analysis to Nietzsche to post-modernism which is a topic for today is foundational understanding of the philosophy and its origins and implications have influenced not only the work of Jordan Pederson former gas of velocities but even helped me constitute a four lucid and robust understanding of post-modernism especially through his many recorded online lectures it is my pleasure to welcome professor thought leader and intellectual powerhouse to the mercy is above end please join me thanks a lot slightly on September 13 2018 Stephen Hicks visited Lafayette to deliver a presentation entitled post-modernism politics and philosophy hick stayed for roughly four hours giving a lecture than participating in a long Q&A and post Q&A conversation over the course of this 4 hours we covered five main questions first what is post-modernism or more precisely what are the key tenets of post modernist thinking second and most centrally for Hix what accounts for the rise of post-modernism in the second half of the 20th century third how and to what extent has the rise of post-modernism affected our society fourth psychologically what drives contemporary post modernists and those over whom they have influenced fifth and finally since post-modernism is a critique of the Enlightenment we ask what factors account for the emergence of the Enlightenment in Western Europe centuries ago the video was organized into five sections corresponding to these questions in some sections I will combine material from Hicks's presentation and the post presentation Q&A and conversation we spend about an hour on the first question a little over an hour on the second a little over half an hour on the third roughly 15 minutes on the fourth and over half an hour on the fifth in the description box I've listed and stamped the starting times for each of these sections let's begin with the first question what are the main tenets of post modernist thinking most broadly post modernists reject modernism where modernism is roughly synonymous with the Enlightenment so to answer the what is post-modernism question you have to understand what the Enlightenment is it's the Enlightenment project that the postmoderns see themselves as being against so what is the Enlightenment project and it's big what do we mean when we say the entire right modern world in all of the institutions well eh science religion economics politics Industrial Revolution relationships between the sexes battles over the elimination of slavery etc etc that's the whole shebang the modern world has been revolutionary in at least eight or nine major cultural dimensions but this is my way of putting it together if you go to some of the people were mentioned a little earlier Francis Bacon Rene Descartes and John Locke you'll notice all of them are in the 1600s and that's a candidate argument between bacon and Descartes or their followers over who should properly be the founding fathers and I think you could probably make a case that their Co fathers both of them disagree with each other about how reason should work bacon is much more empiricist Locke is what we call a rationalist but both of them are committed to the idea that reason is fundamental against earlier more authoritarian forms of epistemology Locke a couple of generations I'm a to more mature working out of the empiricist project but what we have by the time we get to John Locke who is also of the generation of Isaac Newton they are contemporaries is empiricism and reason are working together and that's the fundamental epistemology and this is revolutionary because once you're no longer intellectually authoritarian that you believe in certain texts as containing the absolute truth or that you believe in certain institutions as infallibly delivering the truth to you that we have to think for ourselves and do the hard empirical and analytical work you're in a different philosophical universe now part of this is fairly straightforward if we then say our empirical understanding of the world is fundamental that gives birth to science and what we then see is as that epistemology takes off science becomes mature after Galileo we get impressive developments in mathematics live Nets and Newton are famous here we get this astoundingly maturer work from isaac newton published in the 1680s then really is a make-work project for physical scientists for the next two centuries until till newton comes along so what we were recognized as mature physical science comes into existence in the latter part of the 1600s and then we can see chemistry coming on board and its founding maturity is in the 1700s biology getting its full coming on board by the time we get seriously into the 1800s and so on if you take the very hard project and start to apply scientific understanding to human beings you get medicine and getting rid of apologies to old wives getting rid of all of the old wives tales getting rid of the the the idea that sins are diseases or punishments for various sins or that we need to pray and sacrifice chickens and and find which doctors of various sorts in order to solve various problems we get all of that out of our system and we have modern empirical rational medicine and that comes in but human beings are complicated a little bit later but now we are very seriously into the end of the 1700s and recognizably we have the modern sciences in place and we have their application to to modern medicine if we're not so interested directly in human beings but we take all of the theoretical science and we're being empirical about working with our hands and what can we do with our stuff we have a boom in inventiveness and amateur and then increasingly professional engineers and the integration of the theoretical science and the practical tinkering and systematic inventing work the Industrial Revolution takes off and the a dates again are not accidental here 1750 is typically when most historians will say the Industrial Revolution very clearly is going on James Watt 1769 the first commercially feasible steam engine the one that delivers commercially more energy output than it costs for the for the energy input and then our ability to control the natural world and manufacture things for the good of everybody more stuff better quality lower prices and so on as a result of that we start to see life expectancy going up that's the health indicator here I don't know if you know these numbers but for basically the last 17,000 years of human history life expectancy was in the 30s everywhere before metallurgy and Agricultural Revolution it was apparently in the 20s what happened starting in 1700s in the nation's most governed by the Enlightenment at this point it's the northwestern European nations for the most part life expectancy starts to go up and go up dramatically over the course of a the next century it doubles never has had happened before in human history a doubling of life expectancy but it's precisely in these nations that it happens where this intellectual revolution has taken hold so we have more stuff and we're living longer but what happens if we turn to the normative disciplines now we're taking reason seriously that individuals need to think for themselves well the individual then becomes very important you are not right under intellectual authorities you need to think for yourself and your freedom to be able to think for yourself and then increasingly to act on the basis of your individual judgment starts to become very important and so we start to see much more individualistic thinking particularly since the big battles had been over religious doctrine and much of Europe is going through its religious wars at a certain point we say look you're not going to convert anybody's mind by torturing and killing them to death and threatening to wipe out their entire families for believing the wrong things what we need to do is adopt a live-and-let-live policy as a practical matter but really the only way anybody is going to save their soul or figure out the truth is if they get there on their own and that requires social tolerance we have to respect individuality in religious matters and then increasingly in all of the other matters now liberalism are very broadly speaking is just individualism applied to political matters you're not born into a class you should not be a slave you should not be a second-class citizen or the doctrine of the universal Liberty rights of all individuals who start to see that language and rhetoric and sophisticated arguments for increasingly late 1600s on into the early 1700s and again it's in the nations that are most committed initially to this broadly enlightenment project if we say people are rational and people or individuals and the economic consequences seemed to be pretty obvious as well well we should leave people responsible for their own economic life so that people choose whatever it is that they want to make don't require them to get licenses and permissions from their feudal lords and their kings or say that because you're born in this class here's the limited range of occupations that you can go into and you shouldn't aspire to go here or here you can do whatever you want find your dream and pursue that and make a living however it is that you want we also are going to start respecting people well people are pretty smart and they can learn they can learn to be informed consumers we don't need to guide them by the hand and tell them what they can and can't buy and how much they should pay for it they can judge for themselves what's good for them they can negotiate they can figure out what the proper price is so on should be and we should let people trade freely with each other and the capstone of that is 1776 again a very pregnant year I think how many amazing things happen in 1776 well Adam Smith writes the first modern treatise in economics making these arguments now the nations that adopt capitalism increasingly become wealthier the nations that adopt liberalism become freer and so by the time we get into the 1800s still a lot of work to be done but intellectually and culturally there has been a revolution and it's happened in just a couple of centuries which is a blink of an eye in historical time we are clearly into the modern world and the Enlightenment thinkers are self-conscious about it they recognize the revolution that they have wrought and they start to use very lofty language about how freedom and the pursuit of happiness should be the natural birth rights of man that we should not expect to suffer in misery that we should be able to make the world better for the next generation and so on and principle there's no problem that we can't figure out how to solve and so again for the first time in history this language of progress comes to dominate rather than just saying you know there was the good old days and everything has been going downhill ever since or it's just the same damn thing over and over again in cycles and so on my reading of history it's not until the Enlightenment that we start to see this interpretation of history and what's possible for human beings in this very optimistic progressive sense and not to take it for granted because they all recognize a lot of work has to go into it but that is what we should strive for now that is a one slide version of the Enlightenment project it is say it's a cartoon but there is a place for cartoons and it abstracts away from a huge number of sub debates that all of the Enlightenment thinkers are engaging with amongst themselves and we are still engaged in all of those debates to our time but the postmodern response to all of this is more radical and more fundamental having addressed what the Enlightenment is we're now in a position to understand what Hicks thinks post-modernism is post-modernism again is a rejection of modernism defined as the Enlightenment one way that post modernists project the Enlightenment is through epistemological skepticism or epistemological subjectivism leading Enlightenment figures believed that reason was potent and drove human progress post modernists by contrast are skeptical about the efficacy of reason they suggest that we cannot know empirical or moral truth that bias is inescapable that the pursuit of objectivity is futile that all we have are our subjective preferences importantly on this account one cannot seek truth one can only express one subjective preferences bond with people who share those preferences and try to advance one's preferences even in supposedly truth-seeking professions like journalism or academia in other words on the postmodern account language is not a tool for discovering reality it is a tool for expressing one's subjectivity and forgetting what one wants for finding the world in the direction one favors but there is more to the defining core of post-modernism than epistemological subjectivism according to higgs post modernists in addition to being epistemological skeptics tend to share a particular set of subjective biases for one they tend to be social constructionists emphasizing the role that circumstances and conditioning rather than eight tendencies play in shaping the thoughts and actions of groups and individuals in addition they tend to take a negative view of the modern world that is they tend to believe that the Enlightenment has brought terrible real-world consequences that we live in it's dim ruins third and importantly they tend to share a collectivist left-wing outlook viewing the social and political world as a power struggle between groups and siding with the group they regard as exploited marginalized dominated etc to be clear hits is not arguing that epistemological subjectivism entails social constructionism and collectivist elect ism on the contrary he argues that this collection of beliefs does not form an intellectually coherent whole he simply argues that leading post modernists do in fact tend to hold all these beliefs there are a half-a-dozen postmodern thinkers who have towering stature in the discipline many of them are European a few of them are American but perhaps the one who is most outstandingly recognized and deservedly so is Michel Foucault so here's a quotation from Foucault talking about the significance of post-modernism and he uses here a geological metaphor right talking about Western culture as a whole the deepest strata of Western culture have been exposed so whatever we are doing as post modernists we're going down through the foundation to the very depths of it and are once more stirring under our feet can we be more precise and unpack what this metaphor is all about what is the deepest strata etc please advance one more here's Richard Rorty probably the most famous of all of the American post modernists and what he's arguing is yes when we take what's going on in Western culture Western civilization particularly in the modern world we are at a transition point but Rory puts it more precisely the postmodern task as of what we're trying to do right now postmodern thinkers like myself is to figure out what we're supposed to be doing now that both the age of faith and the age of the Enlightenment seem beyond recovery all right what do we mean by the age of faith well essentially we mean 1,000 years or so a Western history from fall of Rome to the Renaissance of course the historians will argue about where the boundaries of that are when what was dominant was Christian faith an orthodoxy Christian faith in the Catholic tradition until there was a split with Eastern Orthodoxy but that entire pre-modern world intellectual framework that was seen to be dysfunctional challenged by the early modern thinkers set aside and then we're into modernist modernism the claim here is that the Enlightenment 1700s is the capstone of the modern project when all of the major ingredients have been articulated put together into a movement and clearly we are into a mature modernism by the time we get to the age of enlightenment but Rory's claim is now that we are a century and a half past that we also think that that entire project has been a failure and so essentially we are back to looking at 1500 years ago of 1500 years of Western history two major projects have been attempted both our failures what are we going to do that's the post-modern project now Foucault was French Rorty is American here's a Brit this is an international phenomenon John Gray and other brilliant guys actually gone through many phases in his career but most recently is in a postmodern phase and he's making not only an intellectual claim right that the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement has failed but we've tried to live according to Enlightenment principles and what we see in current society is as he describes it the dim ruins we are in a deeply dysfunctional SiC corrupted Society and all of the pathologies of contemporary society are a manifestation of the death Nell's of the end project so once again we need to set aside the entire enlightenment project and figure out what's post do that well if you remember the very first element on the modern enlightenment slide was a commitment to reason that reason works is efficacious and is fundamental that on the basis of that we can figure out the truth it's not easy science is hard work but in principle we can and we have been successful at figuring out lots of truths we know stuff and one indication of the radicalness then of post-modernism and that they are attacking rightly at the fundamental they know where their targets are is this rejection of all of those fundamentally success concepts that we have in epistemology and it's not just that a lot of things that we thought we knew turned out to be wrong it's not the things that we thought were truths turned out to be wrong or that our commitment to reason is overstated this is a strong claim that meaningless so when I say point you mean fry master that's meaningless there's no difference semantically and cognitively between saying that and truth and of course intellectual hygiene means we should stop using these words so on the basis of this rejection this is the point at which we start to see these concepts used in quotation marks typically right postmodern writers one rhetorical device is to put the quote the word truth right in quotation marks or knowledge in quotation marks that's a distancing act or flagging it for suspicion to say that we're not going to take this and this is a very radical move to make now why is this move made well we'll come to that but this is a fundamental chip next one please now Rorty is agreeing with Foucault this is from an essay of his saying this does put us in a somewhat paradoxical point because we can't be saying that truth is meaningless but that we know that that's true or I know that there's no knowledge or the rational position after looking at everything as we do in philosophy is that rationality is meaningless so how do we even talk as post modernists so a difficulty faced by a philosopher who like myself is sympathetic to this suggestion fucose that these concepts are philosophically meaningless one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to or the poet rather than to the physicist and that's what I want to pause there this is important whatever it is that we are doing as philosophers and intellectuals we should stop thinking of ourselves as working with the physicists as traditionally conceived and if we think about the early modern project it's precisely the achievements of the physicists Galileo Isaac Newton and the others that are seen as the paradigmatic what we can aspire to and actually accomplish as human beings and so philosophy and so many other intellectual disciplines try to model themselves on physics and Rory is then saying well what are the physicists trying to do they're trying to say well we're trying to come to know reality and we're trying to know read through it through reason and we're getting the truth and we're coming to acquire knowledge but now we're skeptical and suspicious of all of that so we should get rid of this thinking like physics physics talk and we should start to see our intellectual project as closer to what poets do and what do poets do well the physicists are about being objective that's their goal but poets you know I'm not necessarily subscribing to this theory of poet but it is a mainstream view of poetry poets are not that concerned with objective they're concerned with the subjective they're concerned with expressing things that they feel and believe deeply and when we read a poem our primary concern and maybe not even our concern or not is is this poem objectively true has it been run through empirical and statistical tests and where are the regressions those completely inappropriate language what we are interested in again from this perspective is does this resonate with me right subjectively and it's perfectly fine we say when we're talking about poets if you don't like a poll and you want to completely reject it and you want to express something completely different that's something like the intellectual world that we need to think of ourselves going in the direction so then the highlighted part what we need to do is avoid hinting that this suggestion whatever it is that we're doing get something right that my philosophy corresponds to the way things really are trying to get things right to correspond to the way things really are that's what small o objectivism is about and that's what we're not doing anymore as postmodern we're not interested in objectivity it's a shamira it's a mess it's a bankruptcy we are going to then go the opposite poets are leading the way some sort of deep subjectivity is that work alright next slide please now what do we do in response to that Stanley fish longtime professor at Duke University then came to Illinois University of Illinois at Chicago very good Milton scholar I understand I only have a mature knowledge of this stuff but he's also a very deep guy and and a graceful writer deconstruction which is a literary method of post-modernism applying to literary texts that's a most famously associated with Derrida and fish here is arguing that if we take deconstruction seriously as he does what does this mean for practice particularly what does it mean for practice when we as literary critics are analyzing poems and other works of fictional literature and is again indicating this concern with objectivity and getting our interpretations right and seeing the text as a body of symbols and semantic units that need to be interpreted correctly we can have rational arguments and slowly work our way toward the proper interpretation all of that is wrong deconstruction relieves me of the obligation to be right you don't have to be right let's just not talk about right anymore and demands only that I be interesting that's the job of a intellectual literary critic well what's interesting well as we know well what's interesting to you and what's interesting to me going to be highly relative subjective and so forth so we become intellectually playful and there is a wing of post-modernism that goes in this direction let's just have fun and get away from this notion that truth really matters a whole lot there's another important wing though of post-modernism that comes out directly on the heels of this next slide please and this is Fisher's colleague while he was at Duke University and other English professor Franklin rikiya and what he's arguing then is to say if we take post-modernism seriously this precisely means that we need to reject and overturn entirely that liberal arts education model that the model the modernists were all about that our job is to cultivate in our students our respect for evidence and reason to train them to get rid of the biases in their mind and practice certain intellectual virtues instead if we're not going down that route at all this then is where we go so post-modernism seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth okay that's old news now truth is out but what we are left with then is power and particularly when you are a professor you are in a power relation you have power over your students and how should you use that power not as traditional liberal arts education suggested but rather exercise power for the purpose of social change you want to change society and okay well yeah way to say that's fine but changing in one direction if we don't know what the objectively true direction for society to go is one's task as a professor is to help students quote spot confront and work against the political hole of your time so once again we have now the John Gray assumption we live in horrible times horrible times brought about by the Enlightenment that we take for granted your job as a professor is to teach the students how awful their society is and then more narrowly politically how horrible it is so your job is to train political activists and that's how you should use your power all right next slide please Andrea Dworkin we're talking about post-modernism in in general post-modernism in general on the value side believed in universal human rights enlightenment liberals have been concerned with extending civil rights extending political rights getting rid of double standards in the law and in various cultural institutions now for two and a half centuries and the idea is that ultimately we should achieve genuine liberty and equality for all human beings Dworkin is arguing that is not going to be possible the claim about universal truths and objective values we have to dispense of that the reality is again power and when we look at power in a particular set of dimensions in this case she's focusing on male-female relations males have the power and they are interested in exercising power against women and using women for their own ends now the crude language you can read that for yourself but the argument then is that all of this talk about respect and mutual respect and a mutually beneficial interactions that is again fundamentally flawed that enlightenment claim is also out we should recognize social relations for the conflictual power struggle that they are between groups we might be interested in other groups jean-francois authorities famous sorry brilliant brilliant mind a very good writer clearer than a lot of the other postmodern so agree with him or not he is definitely worth your time for reading he is also the one who more broadly gave the formulation that post-modernism is a suspicion of all narratives particularly all meta-narratives that what we're just left with is stories narratives not truths or scientific theories and so on but if we're interested in understanding the world again we have to reject this enlightenment idea that what we're interested in is universal rights Universal liberty equality peace for all mankind or all humankind as we should say instead what we should recognize again is that that's a fraud it's not true the reality just is power in this case it's not men have the power and women don't but rather some nations have the power and others don't and those nations that want to advance their interests internationally of course they will fly the flag of truth liberty and justice and so on but really what's going on is they are grabbing power and using that as a as a cover story and what this then means is those who are the victims of the strongest power should be recognized as victims and excused from the blaming that we typically impose upon them so take someone like Saddam Hussein from our narrative right he was a brutal dictator violating human rights and so we can have an argument about the justice of removing him from power but really we need to just see him as a product he didn't make himself and it's not that the problems in Iraq were homegrown in any fundamental way and what we have here really is Lenin's a exploitation Theory applied internationally Mussolini or Hitler Mussolini and France were born of the peace imposed on their countries by the victors so Hitler bad guy yes but Mussolini bad guy etc etc but not their own fault the fault really should be shifted to the powerful Western nations and so on and so we get the Marxist or quasi Marxist connection here the transfer of problems in the capitalist system so as we end the Enlightenment world are reaching our gimm ruins all of our problems what we're trying to do is divert attention by exporting our problems to other countries that can't resist us and so on so again a deeply cynical analysis at work here against the idea that it's really about peace justice liberty and so forth in the long run I think I've got one more Jacques Derrida and collected these sampling different aspects of important social or postmodern thought but also the famous the most famous names here deconstruction sometimes it's a pitch des just purely a literary method it has no real value implications for political implications and so on and Derrida here is concerned to correct the record and in a very important way by saying in fact deconstruction however abstruse it is about semantics and syntax and theories of linguistics and so on it ultimately comes out of a certain kind of political commitment the way he puts it here is deconstruction never had meaning or interest at least in my eyes then is a radicalization that is to say also within the tradition of a certain Marxism in a certain spirit of Marxism now turning to the Q&A here Hicks identifies what he regards as the three essential tenets of post-modernism how many things in the post-mortem package as it was developed say by the 617 in a struggle raid and still post lot and I think the see a human beings as fundamentally socially constructed that human nature is one the second one is the histological subjectivism there's another and I think the third is the always taking the side of the perceived social so classic force modernist intent is to say we are using rhetorical strategies anything that works in a society in which everyone has been socially constructed according to certain rules means though is you could say if you're insincere racist on the help writer I suppose most of all right right if you so you don't believe identities are constructed or reflect some biological reality or or sincere sex as you want okay Gary Hicks briefly addresses the relationship between post-modernism and science if you take post-modernism seriously at the fundamentals that is in fundamental opposition to science with its commitment to facts reality and objectivity as as real phenomena now that is to picture things at a very high level of abstraction what you'll find is that there are subsets of post-modernism will say that we don't want to go that whole hearted fully skeptical anti realist approach instead they will call themselves neo pragmatists and they will say things like what we find is we don't think that objectivity and any robust sense is possible but nonetheless we do find that certain theories and coming out of science work better than others and so provisionally I'm going to accept them and so I'm backing away from the stronger enlightenment claims and so that's a more modest form of post-modernism so I would say strong post-modernism and the Enlightenment aspirations of science are on a single dimension at the opposite ends but as we know people come in are skeptical in various degrees people are relativistic in varying degrees so there can be semi post-modernism that could be worked out here hicks elaborates on postmodern views and uses of language please forgive the echo but here if you are a skeptic one of the implications is a certain view of language that language is no longer referential about a mapping of words and propositions onto structures out there in reality and so on so it is then subjectively expressive and it's when you then be subjectively expressive of my value commitments and so what we're doing then is using language not as a tool or kind trying to understand the world but rather as you started your sentence say we are in disagreement situation my language is a weapon that I'm using so the liberal if we can make the connection your wants to say we as John Stuart Mill do we should see language as a tool of communication and cognition and what we're trying to do when we're having these debates and dialogues is get ourselves on the same page cognitively to get the right community understanding of the world but if you have abandoned getting a right understanding of the world but we still have language and it does seem to be a useful tool but what's it a useful tool for and then we say it's useful for either expressing your agenda or for advancing your agenda and so what many of the postmoderns will say is well we do happen to live in a world where people take the appearance of argument seriously and some people take argument seriously so if I want to achieve my power goals I might just become a physical activist and go out and beat people up or I might become a politician and use my power but if I like words or if I'm an academic and I want to then be more intellectual in my agenda approach then I will see language as a rhetorical weapon and that what I have learned is that I use certain formulations that puts people on the defensive somebody says that opinion and I say oh that's really racist of you how does the person react they're immediately put on the defensive and that's good because a person who's on the defensive is a little bit more vulnerable and they're trying to figure out what their defense against the racism charge is going to be now do I necessarily have to think that the person really is a racist to say that I might or I might not or I might respond this is just a really useful rhetorical tool to use to put people on the defensive and then I can use various other arguments now an analogy that we might use this ties into your question about old fashioned lying versus postmodern right lying and so on is to say if we think about lawyers very crudely there are two kinds of lawyers when they go into a courtroom a lawyer or a courtroom there's going to be a lot of discourse a lot of argument and so on but there's a difference between the lawyer who says ultimately for all of its failings the law ultimately is striving for truth it's striving for justice and we go through this messy adversarial process with lots of rules of evidence and who can say what under what circumstances because we think that's our best shot at getting to object or proves about guilt and innocent and it's not going to be perfect we're gonna make lots of mistakes but that's my commitment to the process I believe in truth I believe in justice and I believe in the procedures of the law as our best chance of getting there objectively but we know there's a whole other category of lawyer when they go into the courtroom they're not interested in truth they're not interested in justice they're not interested in the appropriateness of the procedures instead what are they interested in they are interested in power there is a legal power in this room and I want that power to be wielded on my clients behalf and I am going to use any rhetorical tool that I can get away with in order to achieve my value agenda in this case it's not about truth there is no truth it's not about justice there is no justice the procedures are just there to be manipulated by the most rhetorically powerful in this case and so that's a very different strategy and that's closer to post-modernism here Hicks discusses some inherent and oft noted tensions and post modernists thinking we might for example say all right all morals are relative and everything is subjective but then ten minutes later we were saying no racism is really evil sexism is really evil or that you know all cultures are equally worthy of respect and so on but then 10 or 20 minutes later we are harshly criticizing some culture for some practice or detonating it and that does seem to be a logical contradiction there's a few ways to square this one is to say that well I just have my strong subjective opinions about these matters and when I have my philosopher brain engaged I will say I don't think that I can justify my commitments as true but they are my subjective commitments and so I'm just going to go for it so you have a discussion with me about epistemology I'll talk to sceptical relativistic talk but as soon as it switches the values well I'm switching hats and I just live with the contradiction particularly if we are Marxists and neo-marxists or Hegelians and neo Hegelians or hiding Aryans and neo hiding Aryans all of those philosophies explicitly say contradiction is not that serious a matter and so one of the things that they will just do is to say okay oh it's a contradiction but so what everything fundamentally is contradictory it's only enlightenment epistemology that has a problem with contradiction and I've I've gone past that so I'll just live with it here Hicks discusses social constructionism especially linguistic and cultural constructionism and how these theories fed into post-modernism so the question is what is the connection between social constructionism and post-modernism more generally social constructionism is a subset of post-modernism right more general it's a thesis that says that what we take to be reality and we all have some view about reality is not an objective real reality but it is a product of social forces so it's not the case that what we call reality exists independently of us and that we objectively study it and learn it on its own terms instead there are social forces that operate us that construct in us a view of reality now one approach to this is not the only one though is as a linguistic route and it's one that's favored by many of the people who come to post-modernism through deconstruction and so what they will say is and this is a theory that started to be developed in the early 20th century by people who are not postmoderns but what they would argue is some sort of a tabula rasa theory of the mind so you're born into a society but it's completely arbitrary what society that you are born into you could have been born into this one or that one but different societies have different languages and the different languages have different grammars and you then are when you were learning a language your plastic mind is just absorbing the structure of that language but built into that grammar including certain semantical principles right that you learn is a certain view of the world and so you grow up thinking in terms of that language but we're now thinking of language in not as a tool that puts you in contact with reality but rather as a kind of filtering structuring math thing that a thing that goes on to make your mind and your view of reality so what we then say is you're resulting view of reality is a product of your language but language is a social product and therefore your view of reality is socially constructed then we can add relativism just by saying well different languages have different grammars different syntax different semantics and so on and so there are going to be different views of reality out there each of them socially constructed kind of social relativism follows from that because then it's impossible for me to think outside of the language that I was born in just as it's going to be impossible for you if you're not a native Canadian English speaker to think outside of your framework and so we're not going to be able to get our theories on the same page so there's a famous early 20th century thesis called this sapir-whorf thesis these guys will not post modernists but they are advocated a version of that and that was very influential on proto postmodern theory many of the early 20th century anthropologists would through their more empirical studies just say any principle you want to find there is no universal agreement any value principle any metaphysical understanding of reality they're all different and so they will generalize to say therefore we can't step outside of our socially constructed framework we're just left with different views and so on and then adding that to the epistemological stuff that comes out of the philosophers you get then a robust postmodern theory that really integrates all of them here Hicks discusses how according to epistemological non skeptics human beings can overcome their biases so I think the claim is from the postmodern perspective that everyone has biases and in that respect that's not a very controversial claim because everybody will recognize that there are biases the postmodern claim is that the biases are inescapable that what we've been trying to do with scientific method and so forth is find ways to overcome various biases and we believe that all of those attempts are subject to skeptical attacks and they can't be answered so we are stuck in a skeptical bias framework so everything really is subjective so when they then hear someone like me who says well I'm making these arguments and I'm presenting do you what they then have is their editorial strategy to say well that's just your bias right that is speaking and sometimes the bias will come out and say well you're or you're speaking as a white man and so you have white male biases and that's just taking it as axiomatic as a as a dismissing point right or you maybe you're from Europe or if it's a more ethnic one so what they claim then has to be on the other side and this is the Enlightenment project as an ongoing is to say whether the biases are inherent in us or not whether there are mental blocks or whether we learn biases let's abstract away from that issue of course there always is temptations that we are going to face to be biased in various ways that I come up with our hypothesis and I like this hypothesis because I'm the guy who came up with it and we know that it's very hard for people to be self-critical about hypotheses that they came up with then the question is going to be is it possible for individuals to learn the intellectual virtues of being self-critical for example then to say here is my hypothesis and I really like it but I'm going to do my experiments in a double-blind fashion to try to take my bias out and is that a successful way of doing it right or I am intentionally going to take my ideas and ask other people who might know who are smart and disagree with me to subject them to the best criticisms and I'm going to do it in a public venue so that I can't ignore those criticisms and I'm going to do my best to respond to those criticisms so the Enlightenment side wants to say no the issue was not that we're not fallible of course we're fallible it's not that we are limited it's not that we don't come from backgrounds in it particularly when we're younger and we're uncritical we absorb certain beliefs the question is is it impossible for us with intellectual honesty to individually unlearn certain habits and to consistently practice certain intellectual virtues and then socially develop certain kinds of institutions like publishing your data so you can't fudge the data privately like going through peer review and that we have various institutional checks that will weed out the biases so that if we take all that project service and it's going to be hard at some points we can say no we're certain we've got knowledge this is objective so that's that's the project but working all of that out that takes philosophers and scientists working together here Hicks get his opinion on hate speech I would say that the shunning from society is the right way and that is a fundamentally liberal way of dealing with people whom you judge to be beyond the pale now the question is how do you define hate speech and distinguish that from free speech that's not how I look at it because I believe hate speech should be part of free speech and my reasons for that would be I think there are that you know that hate is a legitimate human emotion and that hate is a perfectly rational and appropriate value response to some phenomena so I'm quite happy to say that I hate Nazis I do and I think I should be able to in a public venue including a college classroom express my opinion that I hate Nazis I hate serial rapists I hate child molesters lots and lots of people write that I hate so I don't think it's appropriate in many contexts now there are going to be contexts especially I was going to say that in principle certain human emotions are just off-limits and you're not allowed to express those that's just destructive of human valuation and the reality of human emotion now then the question is going to be since we know that expressions of hate typically don't lead to productive dialogue then when we are in context where we think productive dialogue is very important we should have a strategic principle in place about how we're going to deal with discussions of topics that are likely to generate very strong emotions including emotions of hate and so the way I think that should be done and I'm only going to speak as a professor here say this is a specialized institution you take the college classroom what we are interested in is on my view classic liberal arts education model we want people to be exposed to all of the important viewpoints and they should also know the hateful ones and need to work through them because they every generation is going to confront them in one way shape or form and we should encourage people to be able to express their opinions about them and we know that people are going to get heated up in the context of this so I think the most important thing would be for the professor's themselves to see themselves as role models for the professor's to show students how I can say that I hate Nazis but nonetheless I can discuss Nazis objectively I can present the arguments that the Nazis made in the counter arguments and so forth and that what we need to do is be able to learn to regulate our own emotions in a context in which we are doing that and so professors at a matter of principle need to themselves have that character and that's the only way not the only way but that's a primary way for students to learn because we do know students hopefully respect their professors and try to model it now what I also then think is that when things that you think are inappropriate and there's going to be lots of things that come up in freewheeling philosophical and political discussions in class people are going to say things that are inappropriate that they don't necessarily even believe that we know that people say things in the heat of the moment how should we react to that and it's a cliche but I think professors should say this is a teaching moment how do we respond rather than becoming the censor and becoming the intellectual authoritarian and say you can't do that I'm going to penalize you for doing that to say I disapprove right of what you're doing and show how you express disapproval in a civil fashion give the student a warning if as the student is being disruptive of the learning that's going on in a class beyond a certain point I do think the professor should have the authority to say look we are here for discussion you're clearly at the point of disruptiveness I'm just going to ask you two to leave but that's a shunning as you put it I think that's how it should be done so here Hicks summarizes his meta ethics there is a line that goes from Aristotle to Locke to knee to Rand that is the most promising line here and all of them are a biological functionalist fundamentally in there they're metal things so if you think I want to turn this into a whole meta ethics letter but where do we get our moral standards from and then there are four main theories one is God or the gods Justin lay them on us so divine command theory or they are just based on pleasure pain that's built into us biologically or we we make them up socially kind of a social subjectivism or if we don't think any of those are adequate we're kind of nihilistic so the theory I think that works best is a technical biological functionalism so the way to think about it I think is before we get to the really hot complicated human cases is to think of a simpler biological case so if you think of like a fish for example under just a biologist in your studying fish and you're being purely scientific and you start studying fish and you say well the fish is in water and the fish has certain needs certain nutritional needs but it has these gills and these fins that enable it to be mobile in the water so certain capacities so as these needs say for nutrition and it has certain capacities that enable it to when those capacities are exercised then get prey to satisfy its needs now does it then make sense and this is the move this is the meta ethical move to say what's good for the fish is swimming but if you took a fish and threw it on the land and it's trying to flop around that that's bad for the fish now what we're saying it's bad for the fish because the fish has certain needs but being on land it cannot exercise its capacities in order to fulfill those needs and we're speaking purely objectively here in terms of biological facts but we're making a normative move fish on land bad fish in water able to swim and the exercise of the swimming is good that's good proper healthy for the fish to do so what we then are saying when we're making value claims is there's a fit between an organisms needs its capacities and the exercise of those capacities in an environment to extract what it needs to satisfy its claims so that's the main move and if you grant that moved in we just start saying well when we do morals what we're looking for is to say well what are genuine needs of organisms now human beings are more complicated so we're gonna have a much bigger list of needs we have all of our biological needs but we're also psychological creatures so we're going to have psychological needs and then if we're going to satisfy those needs what capacities do we need to exercise and having physical structures and psychological structures that enable us to exercise those capacities those will be good capacities to have we'll start using language like healthy and a normative sense where we say damaging certain structures is unhealthy because that means certain capacities can't be exercised which means certain needs can be satisfied having certain resources out in the environment is good because if we act to get those resources that satisfies our needs and so on so then we might be able to say something like and this would be a more sophisticated case is why do we say that farming is good and that's a normative claim well because we say humans have nutritional needs but the distinctively human capacity for doing that is by thinking about ends and discovering how to cultivate crops so all of the discoveries and knowledge that early farmers made all of that knowledge is good because it enables us to engage in certain actions in the environment to get resources that when we consume them satisfy our needs and that's why farming is good and everything is and why it was passed on as a result yeah so something would be a strategy like that and then our food is already more complicated for humans than it is for animals but then we start scaling up and then the hardest ones are are going to be I think art you know what what psychological needs is art fulfilling in politics because then it's not just an individual human it's it's huge numbers of people so but something like that so my if I could try again so my meta ethics then is to say all value claims are objective to the extent that they identify human needs the capacities and the exercise of those capacities in relation to resources in the environment now that we've defined post-modernism let's turn to hicks central question what factors explain the rise of post-modernism well when did post-modernism rise it rose in the late 1950s and 1960s so what changed in the late 1950s and 1960s according to Hicks what changed that around this time it was becoming impossible to make recent arguments in support of the political far left why because the capitalist West was out producing the Communist USSR and its satellites because everyone learned about Stalin's internal genocide and witnessed Soviet repression of Hungarian students on TV so not only was capitalism out producing communism capitalist democracies were outperforming communist authoritarian regimes from a moral perspective now some abandoned their far left ISM in the face of these facts but many did not and it is not hard to understand why just as religious fundamentalists have trouble abandoning their religiously inspired beliefs about objective reality even in the face of overwhelming people with strong moral and political convictions have trouble abandoning those convictions in the face of contrary evidence according to Hicks the postmodernist belonged to this latter group that is they were among those on the far left who did not abandon their far left ISM in the late 1950s and 1960s what makes them distinctively postmodernist though is that they found a philosophically respectable justification for not abandoning their far left ISM that philosophically respectable justification is the aforementioned epistemological subjectivism or skepticism one of Hick's most controversial claims is that Emanuel Conte is the figure most responsible for setting Western philosophy on a path toward epistemological subjectivism and skepticism and that Cohn should therefore be regarded as a father of the counter enlightenment after Conte epistemological skepticism penetrated Western philosophy by the middle of the 20th century when the first generation of post modernists were receiving their education skepticism about our ability to know things empirically and morally had become mainstream among both continental and Anglo American philosophers to be clear the post modernist were not driven by epistemological skepticism according to Hicks they were driven by their subjective left-wing political commitments but they used epistemological skepticism as a rhetorical tool or weapon and the service of their far-left ism so if the evidence showed that capitalism was more productive and communist and postmodernist could step back and ask can we really know which system is more productive or claims about different systems productivity levels objectively true if people pointed to the Stalinist gulags the Maoist Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian killing fields and argued that democracy was a morally superior regime type post modernist could step back and argue that all moral claims are subjective and arbitrary so it was the failure of socialism according to Hicks that made post-modernism necessary the failure of enlightenment epistemology nearly made post-modernism possible and according to Hicks as evidence for the success of the Enlightenment continues to accumulate into the 21st century epistemological subjectivism and verbal warfare remain useful rhetorical tools for today's post modernists Immanuel Kant is the most important figure in the transition from the Enlightenment to the counter enlightenment is doing his major writings in the seventeen that's the decade that the US Constitution is being formed after the Revolution has been formed has been one French Revolution is in the offing that's our historical context here and Kant in his epistemology and everybody me including recognizes Conte as one of the handful of most brilliant and important philosophers of all time and he is signaling a revolution at work here and it's an epistemological revolution what he's arguing is that the Enlightenment has made very lofty and pretentious claims about the powers of empiricism and reason that science ultimately can come to understand all the truths and he's going to put severe limits on that epistemological II but he also in the preface to his major epistemological work indicates that in part what's motivating him is he wants to make room for non rational belief in God's freedom immortality and so on so there's this important formulation and you can read the second preface to his critique of Pure Reason it's a very nice introduction to to his work I highly recommend it or that formulation also in that same work he says in epistemology in the theory of knowledge we need a Copernican revolution and he's using it metaphorically here and the example of the language that he uses exactly is about objectivity and subjectivity we have for centuries when we're doing philosophy said the truth is out there not in the area 51 cents but just that there is an objective world and our minds need to conform to the way things are really in the world because that's what we mean by truth some sort of mapping of the mind onto an independently existing objective reality and constant you know we've been trying this for centuries and we got all these very powerful skeptical arguments that have been developed and I think they are unanswerable so what we need to do is to do a flip and say knowledge doesn't depend on the object it depends on the subject and so just as Copernicus is offering an astronomical revolution I'm off and the epistemological revolution abandoned objectivity in the direction of subjectivity on my reading of the history of philosophy given the power of Kant's mind and the brilliance of his arguments we are still largely philosophically working within a continent universe and post-modernism is going to be one manifestation of that some generations as the implications of this Copernican shift get worked out I'll carry on to the next slide here but I do want to just March to show that from the Enlightenment era particularly in the 1700s when there's enormous intellectual and cultural prestige for reason the philosophers are increasingly abandoning reason conch dies in 1804 I think it is let's all do the Wikipedia fact check on that at some point before quoting but if we jump then 40 years later here's Kierkegaard and everybody reads Kierkegaard in their philosophy classes but notice what Kierkegaard is saying you kiss Toma logically one must crucify reason that's the exact opposite right a valorising reason and if we're interested in having a genuinely meaningful philosophy of life we have to make a quote leap a subjective leap into something that you fully recognize is absurd you can't make sense of it rationally but you really want to believe it and you make the leap all right now we're very much away from the Enlightenment in this particular tradition we jump another 40 years to Nietzsche Nietzsche writing sprinkled with contemptuous disdainful remarks about reason the intellect and so forth how pitiful how shadowy and fleeting how aimless and capricious the human intellect is very much anti-enlightenment at this point and Nietzsche is certainly one of the great heroes of most strains of post-modernism and justly so in some respects jumping another 40 years not still on this slide sort to the now the nineteen twenties Martin Heidegger again a towering mind brilliant love him or low thing you have to grapple with Heidegger if you're going to do 20th century philosophy but notice what he's saying here just this quotation if this contradiction he's pointing out some problem that has been reached in in his metaphysical studies this contradiction breaks the sovereignty of reason so their goal is to break the sovereignty of reason he's gonna say well so be it we'll have to live with that then the fate of the rule of logic is also decided so reason is out logic also is out logic and now we've got the quotation marks going on disintegrates in the vortex of a more original question so if we're really going to get to the origin and really do serious philosophy logic and reason are not going to be the way for us to do that now these are typically important figures in the Continental tradition there are various splits in in philosophy in the modern world but if we jump over to philosophers who are important to the more analytic and positivistic schools that have dominated the American Academy British Commonwealth Academy I've got one here this is Rudolf Carnap another big name now we're into the 20th century metaphysics all value a normative theory logical analysis yields negative statement blah blah blah the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless remember Foucault saying knowledge truth and so forth meaningless and generation earlier that's basically all of philosophy meaningless and that's the best philosophers and where they are in this tradition that's to focus on matter but then another philosopher in the 1950s this is the important decade now pretty generally accepted I think as a journalistic claim this is relatively true of where the profession was professional philosophers that ultimate ethical principles must be arbitrary so the claims then of all of the Enlightenment thinkers that rights to life liberty pursuit of happiness equality peace and so forth arbitrary commitment subjective can't be validated please not philosophically now that's again cartoon but cartoons do have their value next slide please I want to do some biography in my judgement the four most important postmodern thinkers these guys will appear on everybody's top five or six lists some variations here but Jean Francois leotard Michel Foucault Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty put some dates to it all of them are getting their PhDs in philosophy and all of them are doing serious work in epistemological and closely related fields here they are at the state of the debate at the time in the early 1950s when they are coming out of graduate schools and all of them are extraordinarily sharp individuals agree with them or not but notice PhD 1958 PhD in philosophy 1951 1955 1956 so if we hadn't asked the question these guys are all now newly minted PhDs in philosophy what are they coming out thinking about the state of philosophy and they then are going in their careers to become the best-known post modernist precisely because they absorb the philosophical tradition and take it to the next steps whatever those next steps are going to be philosophy is in a deeply pessimistic skeptical relativistic subjective istic stage in this generation and they are the first generation of thinkers who are going to take that seriously and work it out strategically all right carry on please so this is my first big thesis and it's a historical thesis and intellectual historic and thesis that post-modernism is an epistemological movement fundamentally and first but it's a counter enlightenment it's a rejection of the counter enlightenment and then I trace it back to Kant as the important thinker in the 1780s who's marking the big turn things get worked out slowly as you know things work out slowly in the academic world and it's all complicated until we get to the middle part of the 20th century and the revolution is over for these guys Nietzsche again a hero of many of the post modernists the techs are taking a Nietzsche in line here saying yeah Conte is right as soon as we take the continent project work it out we're going to be left in gnawing and crumbling scepticism and relativism and that's baked in fundamentally to the postmodern project alright next slide please now I think that's important but I think that's only part of the story and there's a big problem for this thesis and the problem is going to be the next slide politics isn't politics always the problem but here's the problem that I would say suppose hmm you are smart person you do some philosophy and you think about truth and knowledge and what do we really know and are there universal things that are objective and so on and suppose you buy into all of the skeptical arguments in a very serious way and you reach the point that birdy Foucault dared on the others Rishi so you know we don't really know anything there is no such thing as truth we need to at least put those in scare quotes to distance ourselves from them or maybe we should just reject those as all meaningless concepts and conceive a philosophy is doing something completely different so I do that and now I turn to value questions what should i do what should I believe what should I commit to what should my morals be what should my politics be but I'm doing all of this absent any belief in truth knowledge and so forth has significant concepts now seems to me that if say we just take the people in this room so as all of us were deeply skeptical deeply subjective istic and I would say okay there's no right politics it's subjective in some fundamental way you're on your own and then we start asking people well what politics have you committed to all of you and we go around individually how many different views of politics should we expect to have just in this room and recognizing this is actually a pretty narrow segment demographically of society right college people at a really good college okay but what would the range of political opinion be in this room pretty wide already but what we do not find when we look at the postmoderns is a wide range of political opinions being espoused instead what we find is that all of the major postmoderns and you run through the lists starting in the 1960s of the big guns these four and their followers and the other people who are second tier and what you find is that all of them however you think of the political spectrum goes from here to here whatever that is they're all over here every single one of them top 50 top 100 right I've done the count but you do the count yourself and you see if in the first generation you find any significant postmodern thinkers who are not significantly far left in their political outlook and that strikes me as a problem because if skepticism and relativism is fundamental then we should predict people to be all over the map but we don't we do not have that we have an arrow so next slide please we were to see slide here Gary dah politics very radically left-right self-described right edited and co-edited various neo-marxist bright publications the self-described as a man of the left Foucault member of the French Communist Party for a few years in the early fifties broke with them when the Stalinism got too too strong I seen what the French communists were just taking no blind marching orders anything that Moscow said he says too much I'm out but in the 1960s with the rise in Oh a mouse version of marxism he's now ism is the way to go right and so he's a Maoist right for years but consistently through his careers he's on the left and pretty far right to the left jacques derrida very sympathetic was a communist party didn't go so far as to join but publishing their journals that was his social and intellectual circle richard rorty as we know in the American context Communist Party has never been very strong but in the American for right to left however you characterize that I guess this is my left over here R or D is really as far left as you can go and this the standard American distribution as well and then that would carry on Andrea Dworkin Stanley fish Franklin rikiya the others that I've named and then the other ones that you would so what's going on politics has to be part of the story not just epistemology and theories of meta ethics next slide please so let's talk about Uncle Carl of course we always have to talk about Uncle Carl Carl Marx co-author 1848 Friedrich Engels Communist Manifesto that's a political tract sometimes we forget that Marx also was a PhD in philosophy and he worked out an entire systematic philosophical system of which his views on political economy really are an application and it's a relatively sophisticated system as you would expect from a PhD in philosophy but if we just focus on the politics as 1840s we know the rough-and-ready view it's a critique of capitalism as a class system that the two classes have antagonistic economic interests but economic interests are fundamental on the Marxist analysis but one class has more power than the others and so it uses that power to exploit and extract wealth from the others until the dispossessed and the exploited they are going to realize it but also realize that they have the value of numbers they will form themselves and organized revolutionary class they'll rise up in violent revolution overthrow their economic and political adversaries established for a while a dictatorship of the proletariat and then eventually the state will wither away and we'll have a true communist ik of socialism now all of this is laid out in 1848 in both applied and systematic form and as we know from studying the history of Marxism that there are than many generations of Marxism and many iterations of Marxism and variations that starts to come to pass but the point I want to make is that by the time we get to 1950 or if you want to be precise you could say 1948 because that's a century from the Communist Manifesto there is widespread disconcerted miss and disquiet within far left circles because Marx said certain things were going to happen in capitalism the rich we're going to get richer and the poor we're going to get poor well the rich are getting richer but the poor are also getting richer now their middle class is supposed to be squeezed out by this brutal capitalist competition everybody forced into either the proletariat class or a few lucky bastards clawing their way to the top of the capitalist class but instead the middle class is expanding hugely the workers are supposed to be increasingly angry and alienated at the exploitation of them but then if we look at all of the workers in the most advanced capitalist nations they're all buying TVs and cars and going on vacations and getting fat and life is pretty good of course you're grumbling about the boss etcetera etc but we have something very far from this alienated revolutionary class and the point is that Marx had billed itself as a scientific socialism we are making definite social science predictions and as we know if you are at all committed to science you stand on your analysis of the predictions your theory makes these predictions if the predictions don't come to pass your theory is at least partially refuted and over the course of the century Marxists were very committed to looking at the empirical data and finding every time that they looked at the empirical data it was not what Marx predicted and so doing a neo Marxism and then another neo-marxist and so what we have is a whole splintering of lots and lots of neo Marxism being developed in the early part of the 20th century but by the time we get to 1948 and on into 1950 many I would say the majority particularly a Western Marxists are skeptical that Marx's scientific socialism really is scientific and so something more radical is necessary now at the same time there's the moral side of socialism and socialism has always been driven by the idea that capitalism is immoral evil it's based on competition exploitation and so forth and socialism is going to be about sharing and cooperation and everyone being equal and so we have a very different set of moral ideals and so capitalism can't possibly be a humane and dignified system also important in the 1950s after things settle down and of World War two the fascists are gone the Nazis are gone it's really come down basically to the US and its allies the Soviet Union and its allies and it really doesn't get much clearer than that the nation of the Enlightenment life liberty and the pursuit of happiness markets and so on versus the great experiment in socialism being led by Joseph Stalin and it is an economic collision and it's a moral collision and that's the Cold War unfortunately it was cold for most of the war not an actual hot war but in the 1950s what happened Stalin died a few years later Nikita Khrushchev has consolidated power and in a secret speech actually was meant to be publicized he announced that in fact under Lenin and then increasingly under Stalin the Soviet Union had been engaged in the most brutal internal genocides in history the Communists in China are yet to come that in fact deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians no due process shooting anybody who might be a class enemy torturer on a widespread scale people shipping people to the gulag where they are systematically starved and or worked to death and the death toll is in the millions and of course Western liberals and Western capitalists had said no there's all this terrible stuff going on in the Soviet Union but we can't say that's just CIA propaganda anymore because the now premier of the Soviet Union is admitting yes in fact that happened but socialism was supposed to be about morality and caring about your people and humanity and so on and it's supposed to be the capitalists who are doing horrible things to their people and no matter how blinkered you are in your political philosophy this was shattering and when you read the documents in the discussions among people and the far left in the 1950s it is a crisis of faith a fundamental crisis of faith and the claim then is Marx's predictions they're crap it's not scientific the capitalists are doing well of course we've got all sorts of criticisms but they are so puny and insignificant compared to the criticisms that we can make about what happened in the Soviet Union and then also we have to remember 1956 again put yourself in the shoes of being Richard Rorty or Michelle Foucault you are a young idealistic socialist and what happens in Hungary in 1956 well most of you I know are too young to know but Hungary is a satellite state of the Soviet Union with essentially a puppet government in place but the socialist economy is doing terribly workers are are very hungry why spread unemployment students your age are going to university classes and they are just being indoctrinated in communist educational system they want to read real stuff and they know that there are other arguments out there they want actually to learn so there's worker protests there are student protests peacefully in the streets and what does the humane caring Hungarian communist government do call out Moscow we got trouble and Moscow sends in the tanks sends in the troops people are shot the ringleaders are rounded up they are tortured tanks run over people on the street and what's significant is that this is for the first time technically possible worldwide television everybody can see it and this is awful so what we have then in the 1950s the next slide please we end a new left and post-modernism comes out as part of this new left the old left is dead we need a new strategy what's that new strategy going to be well strategy needs strategists that needs people who are extremely smart who are extremely well-read who can think to the fundamentals of things and on by those criteria Foucault Derrida Rorty and Leo tarde they prove themselves and they advanced the new strategy what is the new strategy well we use skepticism and we use relativism now a little bit before I used the language of faith saying it's a crisis of faith and so maybe an analogy will help here so if you think about if you are a religious person you believe that your religion is true and you want it to be true but it's not just an abstract set of truths who thinks it's important it's noble it's beautiful it forms your very soul identity your commitment to your religion but suppose you are also smart and you start arguing with other people about religion and they've got really good arguments against you our beliefs and you find yourself losing these things and you can't any longer rationally convince yourself that your religion is true and so we have the standard crisis of faith that people have on the one hand I really want this to be true on the other hand my reason is not convinced in fact I'm somewhat skeptical conflict between what your reason tells you and what you want it to be true how do you handle that and that's a very stark choice that thoughtful sensitive people go through every generation and we know people make the opposite choice some people say well you know the important thing here is not what I want to be true but what is in fact the object of truth about the world and if there is good evidence against my position I need to change my position there are good arguments against my position intellectual honesty demands that I pay attention to those and I acknowledge them and I alter my position and so either I find a more rational religion or I just become increasingly agnostic and maybe even atheists because objectivity reason and truth are fundamental not subjective wantings but we do know psychologically that lots of people make the other view they say no I cannot give up this belief system it is so important and value I want to believe this and then they find various ways to bracket ignore and set aside and in some cases go on the offensive against the idea that on religious matters evidence argument and so forth matters in Kierkegaard's language right there willing to crucify reason in order to save their faith now that same dynamic does not only happen in religion it happens in lots of other domains including politics and so one of the claims I'm making about post-modernism is if you look at the 1950s in the early 1960s the far left is in a crisis it believes in its heart of hearts that socialism of some sort has to be true noble and it's part of their identity we all know what it's like to be committed to our politics we really want it to be true but at the same time they are very smart and they have received a first-rate epistemological education that has told them truth doesn't matter there is no objectivity and all of this evidence against the socialist agenda we now have a strategy for bracketing and saying that doesn't matter we can recommit to our political agenda using different strategies including rhetorical strategies evidence objectivity and all of that set it aside so it's a way of saving the theory against some overwhelming evidence next slide please I want to give the Enlightenment a chance to fight back a little bit here so far this is an intellectual history claim that both left politics and the skepticism are important to post-modernism but suppose we're interested in poverty the Enlightenment made some pretty grandiose claims about its ability to through capitalism and liberalism and the Industrial Revolution to transform the world I want to give you some data against the claims about the Enlightenment leading to dim ruins in a failed society and so on so this is 1812 this is from the gap minder site just go to gapminder.org it's a Swedish site each of these circles here is a country big circle big population right so that's China these are all European nations here this is India light blue a subcontinent and then the dark blue those are African nations and the yellows are the Americas so this is the United States right here I'm from Canada so we always have to track the Canada data that's a rule there's Canada right they're a lot smaller population this is 1812 this is income measures across the bottom both GDP PPP it's all inflation adjusted and this is people living on $400 a year $1,000 a year and then it's doubles for two thousand four thousand right all the way up vertical axis is life expectancy 20 years at birth 25 30 35 years at birth so this is a snapshot of the world as it was in 1812 and this is basically one generation after American Revolution a generation after Industrial Revolution and so on Napoleon is still not solved yet in 1812 that's our time frame but what we see is I think a kind of average life expectancy is in the 30s average income vast majority of people are living on less than $1,000 a year per person so extraordinary poverty the nations that are doing the best this is United Kingdom England primarily birthplace of parliamentary democracy in the modern world birthplace of Industrial Revolution Adam Smith is a Brit early capitalist theory and so on the United States these are all Western European nations that had adopted the Enlightenment if you go fifty years earlier these guys are all down in the pack but they're starting to break away first generation or so after adoption of the Enlightenment not yet all right now next slide jumps 100 years this is now 1912 what has happened in the world and United Kingdom and the u.s. used to be in here now they're way up there and most of the European nations are following along the Americas all of the countries are now more or less independent in South America Central America and so on they're starting to rise as well unfortunately not much happening in Asia and Africa and it seems like enlightenment just has not got there yet so they are where they were essentially a century go one more cent slide please now we jump to 2012 this is data that was published in 2013 and this is essentially where the world is now although six years later things are still up and now we are over here but I want to make the point if we just go back 200 years every single country was in here that's completely empty nobody is there anymore we go to the really poor places of the world if we travel second world nations and we can't believe the poverty and then third world we really can't believe the poverty those people are living longer and in many cases better than most human beings for human history dim ruins of the Enlightenment or success of the Enlightenment that's a current debate now that's about poverty and of course people profess to be about poverty if we are really interested in solving the problem of poverty it does seem that we should take the Enlightenment track record seriously but if you're committed to certain philosophical and/or political agendas that want to give credit for solving lots of poverty to political philosophies economic philosophies and so on that you think are repugnant that's very hard for people to do that's an intellectual honesty issue all right that's poverty suppose we were interested in sexism and racism of course we're interested in sexism and racism they are bad things and we want to get rid of them so actually I won't presume to speak for all of you but let's argue about that if you want that's fine let's look at some data here this is just American data slide pulled from the Department of Education site this is degrees granted to women throughout much of the twentieth century so go back to 1920 different kinds of degrees you can read the color coding and so on but how are we doing on providing educational opportunities to women over the course of the 20th century in the United states have we perfectly solved all problems with respect to sexism well no of course not but we're making progress and how much progress should we expect to be able to make well that's a fairly significant progress over the course of one's century actually less than a century the numbers are significantly increased those trend lines continue and so on alright that seems to me like a success that's not dim ruins particularly if you are a woman or particularly if you like intelligent educated women right that's also a success racism well remember 400 years ago basically nobody in the world had a problem with slavery just a natural order of things of course we beat you in war we can conquer you take your women make you slaves it's just what happens or right you people different from us are of course you're a lesser order of human and no problem it's only in the 1600s 1700s increasingly we start to have moral objections to slavery racism and increasing number of intellectuals start to say we have to respect individuality we start to form movements than political movements sometimes war over the course of another century or so and then if we go to 1750 that's that an astonishing number over 70% of the world's population is either a serf a peasant or a slave and down that also looks like an Enlightenment success story to me and the biggest gains happen first and most significantly in the nations that adopted enlightenment philosophy in various forms one other thing next slide please this is a survey this was published in The Washington Post but they're drawing from the original social science if you just google Washington Post survey on this this will take you to all the original data but this is saying people in all over the world mm-hmm are you comfortable with having someone of another race as a neighbor that was one of many questions they asked gauging people's racial and ethnic attitudes and so on and what you find is the blue countries are countries where 95 percent or more of the population said I have no problem with someone of another race being a neighbor and then the lighter blue it's increasing and then the areas that then become red or those are more number or percentage of the population saying yeah I kind of don't want to have people of a different race right and so on so again that seems like a success story to me but again if you look where most of the blue conditions are it's the nations that adopted enlightenment philosophy and applied it systematically northwestern European nations for the most part France is an unusual exception there but the Americas as the new countries perhaps racial attitudes don't since they're new the traditional racial attitudes don't have to take hold some of the Commonwealth nations and so and again that's not perfect that's the whole world but that looks like partial success and significant success to me so next slide please thanks Brandon I'm gonna say it's a fact that the progress is real and of course I'm using philosophically charged words I'm saying there is a reality I'm saying that we can state certain facts about reality objective facts and those are good facts progress yes and we know what progress looks like now that's just rhetorically to push back against the postmodern claims I do not want in any way to diminish the importance of engaging with the philosophical arguments the postmoderns have very good first-rate epistemological arguments they have to be addressed but they're also first rate argument system largely on the other side as well we need to get up to speed on those as thoughtful intellectual people that's one of the fundamental debates but we also have lots of empirical data and if we're interested in the empirical data that should bear on how we evaluate both broadly the Enlightenment project and the postmodern claims about the Enlightenment project during the Q&A session as a brief aside Hicks said that social constructionism according to him and a central tenet of post-modernism may also come from Marxism now one way of looking at this is to say that really that social constructionism is built into Marxism as early as the 1840s because Marxism does start with a very strong environmental determinist thesis there you go as far as to say there is no such thing as human nature you are born entirely plastic and what you are is entirely a product of the environmental circumstances within which you are raised so in very explicit about this or your mind is social mind or your social service there is no individual mind that is able to look at reality sense it form your own views you are totally a social product and then his view is that there are it's the different economic classes that are constructing the minds of the kids that are born in those classes differently and so they're necessarily in clash with each other here Hicks elaborates on Kant's Copernican revolution and epistemology I do think that Conte is the most important philosopher of the last 250 years even though from my perspective that's a fatal Mis turning but nonetheless I think objectively he is the most important person to reckon with and full contro systematically on all major branches of philosophy aesthetics politics less systematic on political theory but certainly in ethics underlying views of human nature and the epistemology in all of that I do think from him his views on epistemology are the most important so critique of pure reason I think is the most important text in modern philosophy getting into the weeds about Kant's Copernican Revolution and the shift away from from from objectivity and I think there are two important things that are going on one is the empiricist commitment that's built into science so if we're going to say everything should be put to experimental tests ultimately experiments cash out and say look at this test tube right look at this measurement or listening to this sound and so forth so what that means is that fundamentally we have to believe that our senses are giving us accurate information about the way reality is and so we have some directness there or in our initial data gathering stage before we get to scientific about things we are objectively through our senses gathering data and on the basis of that we form conceptual schemes and hypotheses and so on so what Kant though is doing is challenging that empiricist commitment and he's drawing on then almost two centuries of skeptical arguments that had been mounted against Locke than Berkeley than Hume to say well the senses are subject to illusions or senses are relative or we can't tell the difference sometimes between dreams and and and perceptions and so on and and what he's doing is arguing that in principle whatever we call a perceptual awareness it can't be a direct connection to reality it's some sort of mediated filtered structured by subjective something's or others and so that empiricism it Minh fails so we need a better empiricists understanding of how perception works the other thing I would say is that when we do in science or sophisticated reasoning we're using math we're using stats we're using logic and all of those operate at a fairly high level of abstraction the other big level we had a challenge we have is showing that our abstract logical principles and our abstract rules about what you need to do with mathematics and any abstract concept that we use has a connection to actual reality so if I say for example just to use you know that everyone in this room is a human being so I've got this abstract category humaneness and you all have that but then when I look at each of you you're all particular human beings at each of you is distinct on every single dimension no two of you have is identical hair color mass weight I'm not going to do this but you don't all smell the same and so on so on every dimension you're all unique and particular but then I say there is this abstract thing called human Ness there are certain general principles about what it is to be a human being and that's what we want to come out of Sciences these general abstract principles and this picks up then the rationalist tradition that starts with descartes and goes through Spinoza Leibnitz and conquers inheriting that and the problem that that principle that whole approach his head is that it can in no way show where these abstract principles come from in reality they seem just to be general principles in our mind but the fact that we've got general principles in our mind doesn't tell us that the world follows those general principles so I don't know so we want to say something like the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees we all believe that right every single triangle right but you know what's an angle right if you're seen an angle and if you look at any any triangle and you actually measure its angles do they always add up to a 180 degrees well no they never do you know you can get a more precise measuring protractor or whatever and say it was actually this one is only a hundred and seventy nine point nine right whatever but nonetheless we have this abstract principle every triangle really is the interior angles on 80 degrees even though none of them actually are so it just seems like an arbitrary construct that we're imposing on the world now I'm making the skeptical argument I don't believe the skeptical argument but what I then say is Conte is very sophisticated in saying those skeptical arguments are your unanswerable and so both the empirical perceptual claim and the rationalist claim that these abstract principles tell us something about the world they're both false so objectivity is dead in the water and we have to be subjective visited here Hicks discusses the often underappreciated influence of jean-jacques Rousseau on post-modernism and the contemporary far-left Hicks views the contemporary far-left is more neo Rousseau in the neo-marxist and he says it's debatable whether contour Rousseau is the more pivotal counter Enlightenment thinker I also think Jean Jacques Rousseau is extraordinarily important but I don't think he's as deep a philosopher but I think in terms of intellectual history Rousseau is important not for epistemological reasons but for political reasons that what we find in Rousseau is an early counter enlightenment political thinker so he's very much opposed to basically everything the Enlightenment stands for and he's very rhetorically articulate at developing a counter Enlightenment rather authoritarian egalitarian collectivist understanding of politics so I don't know if you want to call him outright a socialist but he's certainly strongly an authoritarian socialist of some sort some proto sort and I do think this is important because on my reading right now of we're left thinking is that Marxism and neo Marxism are actually less important that what has happened in much of the far left is as they've abandoned various elements within Marxism they've in fact returned to Rousseau so for example Marx was very much about there's a necessary logic of human development I don't know that very many people on the far left believe that anymore they think things are going to be much more random and a result of human will and that's a more Rousseau Ian point that Marx was very much in one sense in favor of the industrial capitalism developing the technological apparatus that could then divorce be expropriated by by by the Socialists but what we find is most people on the far left right now are very anti industrial very anti high-tech and they seem to valorize a much more tribal level back to the earth genuine human living and again that is much more Rousseau Ian so there any number of other dimensions if you were saying well here are the top eight things that mark stands for a lot of those have been rejected and replaced by what I think is a more Rousseau Ian version so I'm a little conflicted about whether Rousseau or Conte is more important now partly this is because we then get into a hard issue of saying is it the case that the way human psychology actually works is we try empirically and rationally to come up with an understanding of the world including then secondarily what we think is good bad right and wrong and do our ethics in which case really epistemology takes precedence over value theory or is it the case that we have various value commitments that we first absorb maybe from our families from our environments or just from our personal preferences and our rationalizing comes a little bit later and what it's doing is just trying to fit our already adopted value framework to our understanding of the world in which case values take a little more precedence over the epistemological issues so the first theory would say conte then is a little more important than Brousseau the second that Rousseau is little more more important Neel Marxism has various forms of neo-marxist without it all being most monitor but you do get to certain dead ends with respect to Marxism even if you're trying to be realistic in scientific about their Marxism but post-modernism also allows you certainly rhetorical and dismal logical tools that you can strategically use with you Marxism but then again I haven't written this up yet although it's it's in my in the book sprinkled through that I do think the better label is neo Rousseau that there's a lot more people now not new versions of Rousseau and our new versions of Mars even though the knee or so Ian's got there from postmodern epistemology new marks here Hicks argues that opponents of post-modernism must engage post modernists philosophically as post modernist political strategies rest on philosophical arguments that are quite powerful philosophy is more important than the politics when you get into the philosophy there are lots of issues in metaphysics in our understanding of human nature in meta ethics and I think most importantly in the epistemology that need to be addressed and all of the people who are the big names in the history of philosophy was important about them is that they have something to say about all of those issues now this is to reductionistic but if you were to make a list of important philosophical issues that need to be addressed I think you would come up with about 40 important things and a top-rate philosopher needs to have something well worked out on all 40 of those issues that's in a somewhat arbitrary number so what you're asking me right now is an impossible project because I can't say Detra did in fact have something to say about all 40 of those things here's what he said here's my answer to all of those and then do Hegel and then do Conte and so on that would be an entire book project and I'm working on that right now but all I would just say is that the political manifestations are in large part driven by philosophical decisions that were made by several generations of brilliant minds and all of those issues do need to be addressed and we do have a multi-faceted enlightenment versus post modernist debate that's going on right now now I'm on the one side and yes the question just is how much time do we want to put in on it right now and which of those issues would you say is the most important one to start with now we turn to the third question how and to what extent has post-modernism affected our society Hicks made several arguments and a few audience members shared their own perspectives let's begin with Hicks arguments hits acknowledges that post-modernism is now in decline as an intellectual movement that decreasing first great thinkers take post-modernism seriously as an intellectual movement taken seriously by first-rate philosophers first-rate literary critics first-rate historiography and so on it was more prevalent in the 80s and 90s a lot of people were very serious thinkers have said we don't agree with this and they've gone on to now do positive work in their fields and there's a lot of very good work that's being done in the humanities at the same time Hicks says the number of professors who take post-modernism seriously has increased in recent decades and these professors tend to use their academic positions to do activism rather than intellectual work one effect has been to turn some colleges and des bastions of radical illiberal forms of left-wing activism specifically Hicks argues that the traditional liberal arts model and free speech values have come under attack as colleges over the last two decades have adopted increasingly restrictive speech codes but what has happened is an institutional shift and I think the way it works is this if you are say a graduate student and you are studying under postmoderns of the first generation what you're going to absorb is the idea that truth objectivity and the quest for all of those things that's kind of pointless and so you're going to stop being an intellectual about it of course you'll be you know you'll do enough to get your PhD and get tenure and publish write and so forth but you don't see yourself as engaged any longer in a serious intellectual project you're going to take someone like Franklin tricky is agenda seriously you are an activist you're not interested in theory and truth and argument and debate you believe what you believe and you are going to then use your position if you have a position in the academic world not for intellectual purposes but for activist purposes so what you then see is an increase in activism we don't really have good journalism yet we have a lot of data points and so a bird's-eye view of what exactly is going on is it the case that we've got 15 percent of the profits or e it is postmodern intellectually or is it only five percent or is it 40 percent how many people are doing serious intellectual work how many are really just activists pretending to be professors we don't have good demographics on that either in the intellectual world and particularly in the humanities the postmoderns are mounting of revolution and we're feeling the reverberations all through to show how we are in revolutionary times right on this point this is from the year 2000 I assume many of you are just being born in and around then so this is in your lifetime and things are moving quickly but this is a speech code that was very controversial in the time late 1990s we started to see a surging number of speech codes at colleges and universities around the country and the one from University of Wisconsin here being proposed was somewhat representative but I want to highlight just a couple of things here one is that we are having a speech code right that now we're saying we're just ahead of time going to take certain things off the table certain things cannot be said and certain things cannot be said in certain ways so we're retreating but this is still early because you notice I've highlighted students and the assumption of many of the early speech codes at this time was that by and large we faculty are already pretty enlightened we trust ourselves but students particularly students who have been raised in contemporary American culture they have not gotten the right kind of message yet and so it's students whom we can't quite yet trust with full and robust speech they need the training wheels so to speak on certain sets of issues also I've highlighted the word individual here almost all of the early speech codes this is now half a generation ago said our target subjects are both individual students but also students speaking about other individuals and so we're still seeing students as individuals and we're concerned with the respect and dignity of individuals and we don't want certain things said to them but then notice the long list of things that we have here wrench racist language is out discriminatory comments right are out but it's not only comments it's also epithets other kinds of expressive behavior pretty broad category physical conduct la blah blah and then we repeat here and then all of these things anything that's demeaning race sex religion color creed disability sexual okay and then then it carries on so by anybody's standards that is a very broad list of things that you can't talk about negatively Wow whatever we take the definitional issues to be and this is first wave now over the course of the next years there's an increasing number of colleges that adopted speech codes of various sorts here but things started to shift again in an accelerating fashion starting about a half a dozen years or so here's two professors or two teachers rather ones a professor at Yale University they are married to each other and they you might recall the Halloween issue so we're coming up to Halloween season here and what Erica Christakis did was in a in a public email that was going out to students saying halloween is coming up here and of course halloween is all about being you know irreverent and silly and doing crazy things and outlandish and so forth but let's also remember that we should be civil right about this and particularly in your choice of costumes and how you're going to party let's try to be respectful of other groups and not do things that are going to be but we're still going to trust you to do be free and make your own halloween costume choices and what was striking was that immediately they were confronted both of them by students organized students in confrontation so it's no longer professors who are laying down the law to students we now have a shift where the students right have learned the lesson about speech codes and so forth and say well what's good for the goose is also good for the gander whatever your metaphor is going to be here and we are now going to apply this to the professor's using our power base here and also it's not about individuals that we are now shifting to group stereotypes so if your costume is from another national ethnic or whatever orientation it's the group nosov it not that you are in some sense demeaning a particular individual in targeting an individual so that's a shift and we start to see this increasingly in the in the discussions yet please jump on Laura Kipnis professor down the road for million Chicago at Northwestern University in this case a different issue is being highlighted here and that is due process in her case there was another professor who had been accused of sexual harassment and he was being investigated but Kipnis was concerned because she is liberal left of center in her own views but nonetheless committed to due process presumption of innocence and what she was concerned with was the fact that neither of those seemed to be being followed at Northwestern University where as one of our flagship institutions around the country such things should be followed vigorously and so she wrote a letter of concern for which she was then roundly attacked right at her university but at this point it wasn't just an issue now of universities policing themselves what was brought to bear was title 9 which is a federal government statute and so what some individuals within Northwestern are doing is to say we're not going to regulate ourselves on this have our own discussions we're going to bring the federal government to bear on this particular professor who is making a legal point about due process and we don't want that to be going on and that is a seismic change again or an indicator please one more yeah I've got two more I want to put up here just as journalistic snapshots here this is Professor former professor Rick Nadeau is just fired recently from Acadia University apparently he's quite a dynamic but also quite a confrontational person I don't know him personally but we do know people who are very active and argue we and so forth and he puts as put on free speech panels and free speech talks at his universities but he has apparently made a lot of enemies among the faculty a lot of enemies among certain organized student groups and on the basis of their protests even though he is a tenured faculty he was ousted now this is in development not all of the things are out usually what happens is as soon as a case like this rises everybody clamps down the lawyer everybody lawyers up and so we're going to have to wait but this is going to be a test case in Canada that will have certainly implications for the status of tenure which as we know as a modern institution designed to protect academic freedom and free speech right and then one more one of the things then on the other side this is another current event that is being played out as we speak here professor have you told Ronan Rennell at New York University she is a postmodernist a disciple of Derrida and chair of a department and just chose her as a representative of another kind of dynamic at the other end of the postmodern spectrum by all accounts people who know her former students current graduate students colleagues even though she is post modernist and committed to officially diversity and inclusiveness and all of the buzzwords she has run her department in a strongly dictatorial worst political correctness form you could possibly imagine for years and that was fine right within her institution and the only reason why she is now under a cloud was again a sexual harassment issue that has brought all sorts of other things to issue so the point is we are living in times when liberal arts free speech is at the very least under significant challenge institutionally and behind that is a lot of intellectual work that has been done what about the effects of post-modernism outside the university it suggests that because professors influence their students as post-modernism has captured segments of the university a higher percentage of the college educated population has come to view politics as a naked power struggle in which words are just tools to advance groups fundamentally conflicting agendas politicians lying that's old news I hope nobody's feelings are hurt by my saying that about politicians as a class right standards for honesty are not very good and I also don't think that the fact that people are the Donald Trump for example lies a lot now I'm just gonna take that for granted because I'm actually an a political person when it comes to contemporary politics my trump filter is very high right and so I'm vaguely aware that he says a lot of outrageous now I'm know a little bit more than that but but the fact that people are outraged that Trump is telling a lie that's a non postmodern reaction because if you say Trump is lying and that's bad that means the truth matters and so that then is still a realist objective as the point you want to hold Trump's two feet to the fire for any lie that he commits so it's only then and my judgment going to be postmodern if you have theorists and practitioners who as a matter of their political strategy say we don't think the truth matters and we are fine with that weird really just have an agenda we don't know if we are right or wrong we just want power to advance our personal agendas and the only way you're going to know if they really are thinking about their political quest that way is by first-person autobiographical knowledge or asking them directly and getting them to know very know them very well but what does seem to be all of that said a clear influence of post-modernism though is an increase I think in the number of people who seem to be saying well we really shouldn't be worrying about politics as being about truth and integrity and justice anyway it really is just all about power and we're just willing to play that game and that does seem to be a demographic shift here Hicks clarifies that he is not citing post-modernism is the lone cause of rising public cynicism about politics no I would not say that post-modernism is the only issue no no absolutely and then we would then do good political science and we would say when people are forming their political beliefs and their political commitments we ever have to do a lot of empirical research say about how they form those and where those come from and some of them might be matters of religious demographics some of them might be philosophical demographics some of it might be coming out of social media or what's going on in Hollywood so there are any number of possible sources here so I don't think we would be able to do good demographics but post-modernism is part of the mix and I think the best data would be if you then study as a subset people who are University educated and you are able then to compare the data from people of graduating say now with people graduating in 1970 if there's a clear shift and we know that a lot of those people are taking humanities courses then we'll be able to make a causal connection at that point but that's yeah stepping way outside of philosophy and and seriously into political demographics staying on the theme of post-modernism is effects outside the university here Hicks provides his thoughts on post-modernism in art the question then is about postmodern art and as your what was your name by the way dorian dorian saying that post-modernism seems to have wrecked art all of the positive value at one might find in art has been kind of systematically eliminated so the question then is if if that's the case what do we actually do about it now here I would say there's a couple of things one of the big things is an institutional issue that the post modernists do seem to have cap shirred the leading institutions and there's enormous cultural prestige attached to art institutions and so it is relatively easy for them to keep the the money flowing and as long as they keep playing the game the money will flow in so a certain amount of it is careerist and I do think a lot of it is careerist even among the postmoderns because when I started reading and writing on this I've never wrote my first article on this in the in the 1990s and just reading a lot of the postmodern theorists and you you see them saying that you know this is the same old crap we saw 10 years ago the same old crap we saw 20 years ago with slight variations and so on but they're not offering any any sort of an alternative so part of the battle then is going to be institutional but I think an institutional battle is partly driven then by the donors there are people who write multi-million dollar checks and they write multi-million dollar checks I don't think because they're true believers in postmodern art they just think they're doing good establecer during high culture and or they want to get invited to the right parties and there's a social cachet to writing the big checks and then you can hang out with cool people I really do think it's as shallow as that for a lot of people so I think one thing that could happen is an art market crash that they find a lot of the mark the goods that there's buying don't have good resale value the word gets out and so art is not seen as a hedge or we just have more people who have a lot of money say you know I'm kind of tired of this I'm ready to spend money on something that's actually going to be significant now that I think is a a less significant explanation for the problem I do think the more serious problem is is intellectual we have to have an intellectually compelling positive understanding of what art does for human psychology and that there are such things as genuine values that we need to have fulfilled and in some ways only art can fulfill some of those values and here's how art works to accomplish those things and all of that means better psychology and psychology is still in its infancy better epistemology better ethics about what genuine human values are so until we have a significant number of intellectuals and future art critics and our historians practicing artists is exposed to a positive healthy philosophy they're going to go where their teachers tell them that's going to be in in post-modernism now that said I do think there are some other institutional things that are working there has been a huge resurgence outside of the formal Academy in representational art realistic art not all of it is about beauty but getting away from now you know just you know here's my faeces and and they're you know the bus I took to Albany last week or the bus ticket and that's my indictment of Donald Trump right so the trivial stuff like that so there are but there's lots of angry art but it's realistic and it's and it's portraying an important theme and there are any number of I tell years now of people who have rediscovered or kept the traditions alive and lots of different sub schools and conferences that are starting to occur and and bigger money starting to be put in it so there is a parallel in set of institutions devoted to what I think is at least a an intellectually and aesthetically healthy art movement so that's a lot better than where things were twenty years ago hmm let me mention some names here there was a I think this might be culturally significant and it kind of ties into a point that you were making like four years ago there was the first academic conference to my knowledge in almost a century devoted to representational art representational art got blown out by early modernism and since then it's just not been allowed if you are a serious art critic Assyria arts historian to engage in representational ism but the grass movements has gotten to the point that there is a school now of academics who are taking it seriously as a real phenomenon and they're doing what academics do starting to give papers and organize themselves in in conference so that organization is called the representational art conference or track for short and I believe they've had four or five conferences now some in California and Netherlands and and so and so I do see that as an inroads that's going on there so Hicks had several exchanges with students about the effects of post-modernism here one student expresses concern that post-modernism influences the way a lot of people think that people are taking post modernist claims to heart and that critics of post-modernism are not responding very effectively post-modernism sort of has this stranglehold on political institutions not just political but more cultural institutions for me so like Hollywood in my golden more contemporary ideas and I spent the summer sort of understanding it in African sort of how it is sort of playing out in that sense culturally it's like there's like well a lot of like virtue signaling and sort of like this sort of trying to accommodate this new wave of thought and it's like this entire thing is is happening in as a much larger scale and much faster scale then modernism is offering is offering a defense it's I said right now the rage teachers which is growing yeah and the rate at which people are more taking it to heart because I see a lot of people do take are taking a to heart I think that is perhaps in my from my view a much stronger cultural force then okay the then the fight then yeah let me say you might be right whether these arguments are true and right or better supported is in sometimes that varies independently from whether those arguments are culturally successful or not as there are other factors at work there so my sense is that we still live in a broadly modernist culture this was a response to you and post-modernism is vigorous but it is a loud and to some extent entrenched minority position in a lot of the institutions now we have to drill down and say well you know if I just speak from my home philosophy departments I think are by and large a lot healthier sociology departments as far as I can tell not very healthy anthropology departments not very healthy history mixed now that though is not a philosophical judgment that is a demographic issue and we don't have to then be doing so to speak sociology of the academic world and that would require some sophisticated data gathering and and statistical analysis to try to say where exactly we are in terms of there is a lot of politically correct movement and it's and it's very loud yes but I wonder if part of the counter to that would be the argument that that's exactly why Trump got voted into office it's because people are absolutely sick of it yes and and and instead of realizing that they just bear down even more and I guess we'll see what happens with the coming elections but I wonder if somebody could make the argument so I think that's exactly right so there's the issue of your what is post-modernism whatever its positions what are its general strategies and then the question would be an institutional demographics question and that I think is harder so then we say here the post modernists say took over and they've instituted this very vigorous speech code and they've taken over the campus in some respects so then we might say let's take Evergreen College as a as an example now when we do the study though I don't know if we're going to find out that what happened was that there were save just five people who were very organized in key positions and very vocal and they succeeded in cowing into submission the other important people and on the basis of that in fact mounted a coup even though originally evergreen college 90% of the people were not radically post modernist I don't know if that's the right story or whether it was 30 percent or 40 percent now your second comment I do think that that's right I do think part of the success of Trump was a backlash against certain kinds of excesses and I do know only anecdotally but I've seen some studies where people who have actually done the demographics here and now what a lot of people like about Trump is that yes he does lie a lot but also he just tells it straight a lot and so a lot of things that people for a long time so we're not allowed to talk about that or we have to you know bend over backwards and give the benefit of the doubt the certain groups it's just refreshing to have someone say I don't give a crap I'm just gonna call it as I see it and that's refreshing particularly when we know politicians tend to tell us what they think we want to hear instead of what the politician actually think so how much weight to put on that is that 40% of his electoral victory or 20% of the factory I don't know part of the outreach is to call people races right that's right the rest of all people are just afraid yep here a student suggests that Hicks or others influenced by Hicks may be exaggerating the influence of post-modernism and using the term to refer to everything that they don't like politically seems like we've been applying post-modernism to a lot of stuff but after campus left evergreen it seems like a lot of places and I mean it seems like on a certain faction of but not less is the best name for post-modernism has come to be like the universal bogeyman and I think a fair amount of this punch from your work professor I know I find it when you look historically the sort of description of large factory to the left as part of a stream of philosophical thinking that is hostile to Western values enlightenment but there's a very dangerous legacy bet so are you completely calm and I don't know how much you've seen this I'm big on dark parts of the internet for research purposes but Wow are you okay with the way some of your work has been used sort of describe everything people don't like after sand don't knows I don't know everything like speakers yeah no there are others too but piercing is perhaps one of the more egregious I think when I hear someone describe like huge political political vacuum they don't like as belonging to a philosophical project that seeks to undermine Western or enlightenment values and to attack freedom in the name of advancing Marxism or communism this sort of reminds me of some bad historical trends art let me say that I think the story I told tonight did leave off in around say 1970 so what no I think happens this is maybe Tice's partly into your question about cycles of what comes comes next is that it is true that the history of philosophy and intellectual life more generally does go through more platonic phases or Aristotelian phases more skeptical phases and post-modernism is following in that pattern in the sense of being one of the more skeptical but I think there is a difference between saying that a lot of the things that are going on right now are postmodern and a lot of the things that are going on right now are bastard children of post-modernism that the post martyrs are responsible so one example of that would be I think it is built into the human psyche that we do need to believe in something you need to have some sort of framework in your life and if you imbibe seriously a very skeptical philosophy that only gives negative answers to everything that philosophy is responsible for putting you into that negative State of course you take responsibility because you follow that path yourself but you're reaching the skeptical state doesn't mean you're going to stay in that state and so what I think will happen is in many cases in psychology many people they will be in a vacuum an intellectual vacuum a moral vacuum feel that life is all meaningless post-modernism brought them there but what they will do then is to say well with it I'm going to make a commitment to something and they will then make a whole hearted and full commitment to something or other now at that point they're not postmodern anymore they might be making the commitment Orthodox Christianity and there are some people in Orthodox Christianity who will say you know my role is to do this modernism but I just found the nihilism there's unsatisfying and so I just made this this leap of faith committing to something that seemed to have some genuine values if you ask them do you think that it's really true they don't say well it's got a lot going for it but it's just that it seems to be working for me and so I was sort of realistic I'm sort of pregnant now that I think as a child of postpartum but I don't think it's great to stated that if somebody committed themselves to a political agenda no matter what its contact and they really believed in that sincerely you would say they weren't think you could get yourself to a non National Committee to a political agenda whatever economist up again but everybody you could be raised in this party at what you're a young teenager was everybody to social circles in this party it's also a exciting and powerful to you that you go to call it a challenge then you say I'm just going to stick with this anyways because I don't kind of change my mind let's just a combination of letting social conditioning happen to you and laziness but you are unstoppable I think if you're saying postmodern on some level involves believing in nothing if you can make yourself sincerely to a political vision irrespective of its content yeah and you really do believe it you're not like living if psychologically you believe this really is true but then you because then you're using the language of truth and you're saying things like you know now whether you are being fully intellectually honest with yourself we're just willing yourself into it that's hard to tell about no I do think we go back to the Fight Club analogy once everything has been torched it's possible for lots of people to spring up and go in different directions don't go tell us believe in torching everything but you prepare the ground to spring off and you need a different yeah but so are you saying that like it seems like the the distinction to say I believe in something but I'm willing to sacrifice everything else in the furtherance of that end like if you say I believe in many races and whatever but the rest of my values are up for grabs because that's what doesn't I just think there's a tendency in the polarized times we live in to pick up whatever label possible to bash the opposition and I think they're smart like I think a lot of left is serious racism is smart but has been miss purpose I think I don't know it's like I go very political as my creditors might reflect but listening to you tonight you don't sound political but yet the way I've engaged with what we've said in the past has been all the lists I thought I guess that's just sort of a sign of the times it's impossible to separate good ideas from their political experience sorry what that means is there's a division of labor at work in philosophy perspectives about the sociology now we turn to the fourth question psychologically what drives contemporary post modernists and those over whom they have influenced most broadly according to Hicks the post modernist coalition if you will consists of a combination of true believers virtue signalers and non-ideological opportunists at power seekers some post modernist leaders and activists are true believers these true believers can be crudely disaggregated into those who are attached to a cause associated with post-modernism for example the mistreatment of women and those who are attached to a theory associated with post modernism for example contemporary campus third wave feminist theory hick suggests that many post modernists start out attached to a cause but ultimately become more attached to a theory that relates to that cause and according to Hicks those who take post modernist theories seriously are focused on attaining power within their institutions to advance their genuinely held subjective values not on doing intellectual work not on engaging in good faith dialogue with ideological opponents other leaders and activists associated with post modernist causes may be even more cynical that is they may not genuinely be epistemological skeptics or social constructionists or collectivist leftists but they may recognize that post modernist rhetorical strategies are effective for winning followers and supporters and gaining power and what about those over whom post modernist leaders and activists have influenced post modernist followers if you will some according to Hicks are genuinely compassionate people who find post modernist rhetoric about the oppression of victim groups credible and compelling others sometimes called virtue signalers go along in agreement with those modernists because they want to appear morally sensitive or do not want to appear morally insensitive you mentioned in particularly regards to language and how language is particularly a tool of power in that in their case and sort of like well they literally run it's it's the case of virtuous thing I think that that's me where it's boils down to sort of it's like the case of virtue signaling because no one wants to seem unvirtuous and everyone's the same though they have virtues so most people bend their back over in order to be able to and are basically complicit in this thing especially with the gods like big tech companies like you see things happening Google Facebook and like across different major corporations like even the UN so it's like at what point is it at what point is it going to sort of is it going to come to a head if it if it will I want to add to that if I can it's the same thing with the virtue signaling because somebody made the comment about Miele Milo Ian appleís much earlier and saying that he was I forgot the word that they used but basically pushed out both do you remember the word but really shunned shunned that was the word we use deep platformed and so on what he's saying is that these corporations are actually like Facebook they're deep platforming that that Alex Jones and the Milo they were they weren't shunned they were deep platformed unfairly so they are they are really attempting to manipulate the whole conversation and at what point do people push back so I think there's a genuine like this hello when they do that to you it's like having a piece of your humanity removed from whether you agree or disagree with positions is irrelevant now as a human being you at least I think we believe in generally speaking that you know speech and ideas and so forth or or part of your humanity so yeah you're stripping people with that yeah yeah I think that's right I think the virtual signaling is always important but a secondary phenomenon because if your virtue signaling there's always an insincere element but what you're operating from is the perspective that you think some people have the moral high ground and you accept their terms for what counts as the moral high ground but you want to be part of the group so you signal whatever they tell you the signal so that they will accept you but then that pushes it back to well what is this alleged moral high-ground and how to become the moral ground and that's where you have to get to the serious thinkers and the serious activists now I don't think that the serious post modernists by the time they become post modernists believe that they have the moral high ground anymore I think in many cases they do start off believing they propose we take we're against poverty we're against racism we're against sexism when you're a young person I think that can start off as genuine you go off to university you absorb a certain amount of theory though that radicalizes you on one view about poverty racism and sexism and that makes you then I think increasingly jaded but to the extent that you become increasingly jaded you might have a personal affection for anti racism anti-sexism and so forth but it becomes more importantly that your allegiances to the theory to enter those initial causes so one evidence of that is that I don't think you will find any postmodern theorists celebrating the fact that so many millions and billions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the last generation even though they know that that is a fact they will just ignore that fact because they know if they recognize that fact then they have to say maybe we were wrong and we have to give some moral props to our hated enemy that then tells me they're more committed to the theory than to the evidence but also their commitment to solving the problem of poverty that's not the most important thing for them right now I think the same thing there's a variation of that in in in in in various forms of hyphenated feminism as we know I can't keep track with all of them so I just know that you have to have feminism of this sort and it seems like the real action is being driven by the adjective that gets put in front of the of the of the feminism that when they were young women appalled by various kinds of sexism and you read about the history and there's lots of bad I think a lot that it can be genuine but then you go to university and you learn some to my view jaded and cynical theories about sexism and and how it occurred and the those theories become more important to you than the actual battle against sexism and you cannot as a matter of theoretical principle say Wow women really have made great strides and isn't it awesome that that has happened and I think another piece of evidence on that one is that many of these hyphenated feminists are willing to turn a blind eye to the abuse of girls all up and down parts of Africa and the Middle East and then on the divorced wearing of certain clothing and the second-class citizen and that finally Saudi Arabia is letting women drive well where have the hyphenated feminists been for so long and they're not willing to do the kinds of things that you would think real feminists would do if they're genuinely interested so I think their commitment to the theory is more important than that initial cause right now I think a lot of it is that this ties in I can't remember which person it was I think it was someone who is sitting here that's in many respects not an intellectual movement anymore because what you have post-modernism when you take it seriously it says really the intellect doesn't matter it's really just all about activism and so if you really believe that will you stop doing intellectual stuff and you just do you just do activism and it really is about power for you and it really is about your values and you do have your your hated groups and however much you might say that you're against write hate speech or the way you're crafting the policies is to give you licensed to do express your hate on those groups but to take the hate speech retaliation away from from from the other group some of the ugly things that are coming out of evergreen college for example this seem leo the students who were the ringleaders and they the first-hand reports were that they just loved you can see it on their faces we that the being able to take their professors who are just kind of nice liberal women and just reduce them to tears and that's a power play yeah when you you know you've got tools and power and moral high-ground that you can use as a weapon against this person to humiliate this person and humiliate this professor in the eyes of the other students there as well so they know who the real boss is and then of course they're intimidated and so that's a power play there is coming out of economic theory the the formal name of it is called public choice James Buchanan is the most famous Nobel Prize winner associated with this but one of the sub phenomena is they call it the bootleggers and Baptists a coalition that the best way to understand how movements work particularly in democratic politics where you have to build coalitions is the theory of strange bedfellows and I have a half-written article that post-modern is activism is a bootleggers and Baptists phenomenon now the labeling comes if you go back to the era of prohibition the question is are we going to make alcohol illegal and if you're a Baptist well what do you think about alcohol well you think alcohol is evil wicked it's it's the demon rum and on high moral principle you want to have alcohol made illegal because you want to save people from from themselves but at the same time who else wants alcohol to be illegal organized crime and then want organized crime to be illegal because they're willing to do illegal things right to run the illegal stills in to smuggle things in from Canada one of our family lures is since our family property is right on Lake Ontario very short boat run to upstate New York is that my grandfather got a start when he was a young man just loading up boats and learning legal Canadian whisky across to to New York State selling it on a moonlit Shore and then said that I don't know if that's apocryphal or not that it is part of the family story but if you're Al Capone for example you have no problem with alcohol being made illegal and in fact that would be great because then if alcohol is made illegal then the FBI and the police they're gonna put all your competitors out of business and keep them out of business awesome so if you're a strategic gangster and if you're a strategic Baptist you recognize that even though the Baptist's think the gangsters are evil and the gangsters think the Baptist's are you know pretty moralistic types they're going to work together but those two together form a powerful coalition and they can get prohibition passed now what you then have is the gangsters will finance it and they'll provide the muscle and many of the infrastructure but the Baptist's provide the moral high ground and what those two put together it's hard to to do so so if we're interested then and this is a thesis that still hypothetical for birdie to be worked out that if you are interested in power politics from a theoretical perspective and most of the postmoderns will say it's all about power we're just Nietzsche and power politicians Foucault at one point said I really just see myself as a niche Ian and as we know Nietzsche reduces everything to will to power it's kind of non normative striving so if you really just want to be a power and get and so well how do you do that well you form with groups that have moralistic grievances that have some traction and you use them and so there you're oh look at these poor victims of this that and the other thing and you know everybody's defensive and everybody's willing to bend over backwards but when people are defensive and bending over backwards that's when you can make your move see if the two groups that bootleggers in the Baptist's and within years using evergreens example have the bootleggers would be the true post modernists kind of take this cynical the the cynical perspective but most people are the Baptist's who are just kind of I don't want to say manipulated by them but are using your language bedfellows with them just out of just I mean they're liberals who have kind of a strong perspective it can be those who have strong anti racism strong anti says but they really believe that those are real phenomena and that they are objectively right but they agree say with the the postmodern or doesn't have to be the postmodern theory that says no current society with its structures is deeply racist or deeply sexist so they can be genuine true believers of that but they can also be working with the other faction who are the virtru signalers who want to be part of the club and we know how to play both of you in order to advance our agenda and I do think there's a type there is a type of people who goes into politics some of us who are very normative in our thinker and don't recognize how many people are that but they just like to be running things and whatever system they are in they're not particularly ideological they will just learn how to play that system in order to get the power and so if anti racism anti-sexism is the game then we'll just play that game very well I think whatever it mean those students look like I think they didn't really have any higher ground any higher moral ground and Taylor who are operating under it was taking advantage yeah completely yeah they recognized the hole yeah you see in many of the Evergreen students that they did not have higher aspirations they were just drunk on the power and being able to get away with doing certain things and I think that's that's right now again this is stepping outside of professional expertise but there is the psychological phenomenon of people and how they become bullies you know in the literature's if you are personally disempowered and you grow up thinking of yourself as weak and is victimized that does go against the grain of your normal human being healthiness of just wanting to be a real human being but if that's bottled up for a long time and you finally have you know the beautiful people and the powerful people or the rich people and you've got some tool of leverage over them now and they've been making you feel bad that people they do lose control and they go into full bully mode because just feel so liberating finally to be able to do to feel powerful no just gonna add to that children do that you don't even have to wait until dole code or children do that if parents are too liberal in their and their parenting and they have no restraints children can get drunk on that power too and totally get spoiled and take control yeah it doesn't have to get much further yeah well he go the other way as well and now we're starting to sound Aristotelian about golden means and all of that so that's too liberal but also children who are raised into authoritarian and atmosphere we see this more in the males when the males grow up and they for first time realized they can take their dad in a fight and some males who are in some borderline abusive or outright abusive it goes badly for the dad at that point so yeah the young male can't control himself it seems he's drunk on the power well no yeah that would be a different dynamic yeah and finally during hits a visit we spent a fair amount of time discussing the origins of the Enlightenment during his presentation hits ran through some of the modern Western thinkers institutions and events that most contributed to the development of Enlightenment principles so I want to go back to the earlier set of earthquake like revolutions that occurred in the early modern period focused on issues of free speech and censorship which was as now one of the big battles within an overall intellectual battle and so we could I don't know if you've heard of Giordano Bruno it was a martyr brilliant guy kind of a wild and crazy guy like to argue about just about everything had all sorts of heretical beliefs traveled all over Europe seeking other smart people have engagements with you made the mistake of going back to Italy during a more conservative phase was immediately arrested by the Inquisition thrown into prison trial lasted seven years he was found guilty and then burned at the stake for believing a wide variety of heresies right from the time one of those heresies was the Copernican belief that the Sun not the earth is at the center of the solar system now he's a martyr and other than historical interest we don't really take his views that seriously but he was important to someone who was a younger contemporary please next slide and you've all heard of him a towering figure not only in the sciences and deservedly so but also in philosophy of science and in philosophy in particular and Galileo at this point when Bruno was killed was mid-career scientist and he took this very seriously how what should I think about this Copernican hypothesis he done some studying himself thought it made a certain amount of sense but didn't want to rock too many boats at that point but so turned his attention to other matters in physics and mathematics and philosophy of science until about 15 years later after Kepler had published his monumental works and after Galileo himself had ground a microscope or sorry a telescope and looked up at the heavens saw many of the imperfections of the Moon saw the the moons of Jupiter discovered them for himself did his own empirical studies did his own mathematical calculations relied on the genius of empirical scientists like Tycho Brahe Hey and Johannes Kepler and came to realize there has to be something about this Copernican hypothesis but more importantly there's a philosophical issue here that we have to be able to talk about this even if it seems like blasphemy even if it seems like it undermines fundamental things that deeply religious people and institutional powerhouses like the church want us to believe and so he pens this open letter in 1615 arguing not for the truth of the Copernican hypothesis but arguing that the way we come to know things is not by reliance upon all texts uncritically even though they might have truths in them but by using evidence using observation using reason and all of the tools of that including logic mathematics and so forth a heartfelt plea for some space please stop torturing us burning us at the stake let us sort this out as rational human beings by appeals to evidence appeals to argument now immediately the church responds in the next year yes please with a speech code proposition to be forbidden that the Sun is immovable at the centre of the heaven etc etc and that the earth goes around with his mm Oh spinning that's forbidden you can't say that Galileo shuts up for a while but over the course of the 20s 16 20s now he starts to write dialogues in which the argument goes back and forth and he doesn't come out explicitly and say what he thinks is true he's trying to model how the debate should go that's too much he's called down to Rome shown the instruments of torture by the Inquisition and told these will be used on you even though you are the most famous scientist in Europe at the time unless you shut up Galileo actually did not just shut up you also have to publicly say that you don't advocate the Copernican theory so he decided not to go to the Giordano Bruno root he decided to publicly declare any interesting Copernicanism and then he was not allowed to publish for the rest of his life so it didn't work out so good for him but we do have an epistemological battle that is being joined if we really are interested in truth if we want to know reality how do we get there and it's not enough to appeal to revelations to pre scientific people thousands of years ago and if we're going to or that route we should be able to argue about the legitimacy of that route appeals to faith right that you happen to have been born into a tradition that's not going to be good enough what are the chances that you happen to be born in the right religious tradition it's got all of the truths what we need to do is be able to use our minds reason is competent if used well to figure out the important truths about reality and in this context it's put religiously God gave us a mind he wants us to use it so in fact the people who are being sacrilegious and blasphemous are the people who are uncritically accepting on faith whatever they happened to have been born into God wants you to think and think hard because the truth matters now at the same time things are shifting north intellectually Galileo is being shut down the silencing there that sends signals and so bright minds start to go other places where they can pursue the truth as they see fit freely and it's going to be Northern Europe we're the great scientists and the great philosophers and other intellectuals are increasingly going to be doing their work an indication of this is the work of Francis Bacon whom I'm in a very minority tradition here I think he really should be seen as the founder of modern philosophy not Descartes right lots of credit to Descartes but that's a scientist who here precisely for his emphasis on empirical methods and early development of a more sophisticated scientific method but what Bacon is arguing is yes reason is important reason is competent but it's not easy and each of us in the training of our own minds runs into various biases and things that are very tempting for in various sorts of intellectual shortcuts and so if we are going to be serious it's not just enough to say that reasoning is easy and so forth it's very difficult and the biggest battles that we're all going to face are actually with ourselves overcoming our desire for shortcuts for letting other smarter people do our thinking for us going along with the crowd taking our immediate circumstances as likely indicative of broader truths and so forth so we have to get past the biases and train our minds to overcome what seem to be various shortcuts because again reality is what it is reason is important but only if we train it properly and self education and how to use your mind efficiently absolutely fundamental now a third part of the modern development than in this revolution comes a couple of generations later and John Locke is to say if we're going to take what Galileo and bacon have said seriously that means we're going to have to be very tolerant of other people taking on this project of figuring out this very complicated thing we call reality and the expectation is going to be that since it's so complicated lots of people are going to have very different takes on how to put all of the evidence together and what follows and what does not follow and people are going to come up with hypotheses and beliefs that are deeply offensive two things that we think are true important and valuable and so if this progress is going to work not only do you require a certain amount of social tolerance so that you can do freely the thinking that you need in your life but you also are going to have to extend that to lots and lots of other people who are going to challenge you and make an advocate value positions political positions and particularly in his context religious positions that you think are deeply false and offensive so toleration in addition to working on your own mind all governed by the commitment to it's important to get the world right rationally according to the evidence so jump ahead a little bit John Stuart Mill and Sayid stole a little bit of my thunder here but that's okay it's your show so you can go ahead and do so the next slide actually as well got a couple of longer quotations here the one that Syed already read to us but mil I think adds an important component to this as much as this is a commitment to reason and evidence that has started to take over in the modern world and as important then as an educational project working on our own minds and developing the intellectual virtues to be able to use our minds importantly and then this ethical commitment to tolerating widespread opinions and so forth with respect to other people socially mil goes a step further and says it's really not enough just to tolerate and put up with what other people do that in a fundamental way you should see other people's disagreeing with you as helpful to you because it's very unlikely particularly when we are younger and forgive for me when we're older that any one of us has all of it worked out in a completely perfect fashion it's very difficult to do so and chances are good that lots of other people who are well-meaning even if they disagree with us on lots of things that they have some elements of the truth in there position and the only way you're going to find out is by engaging in argument sometimes heated vigorous unpleasant argument with them so they can point out the weaknesses in your position and what you should be able to do at that point to say thank you thank you for pointing out the error in my views and for you to be able to say ah you have a formulation or something in your views even if I don't think the overall package is correct that I'd none besides that's that's a truth that's an important element and I'm going to then incorporate that into my view so stronger than tolerance tolerance is important but actually seeing this debating argument criticizing process as mutually beneficial something that you want to embrace because you really are in the truth so this line at the back can't remember did you quote this one here teachers and learners go to sleep at their posts it's again kind of a martial metaphor here as soon as there's no enemy in the field so we need other people to challenge us on a regular basis to keep us intellectually sharp and to push us be to be better now this is a very quick overview of what I think are four of the fundamental pillars of liberal education as it came to be developed in the modern world that respect for evidence and reason is fundamental that this requires that we each commit profoundly to a project of the development of intellectual virtue no shortcuts that socially we be willing to tolerate and extending lis wide variety of views on all of the important issues and that even better we see the clash of opinion as a mutually beneficial set of tools and devices that we are going to engage in and that then became the foundation of modern liberal education as institutions like Lafayette College and my own University Rockford is not as old as Lafayette it was only founded in 1847 so we're relatively newcomers but pretty old by Western standards but that was the kind of attitude that was fundamental to the modern liberal arts education project staying on the theme of enlightenment origins during the Q&A Hicks speculated on why the Enlightenment largely occurred in Britain if we then say that the Enlightenment first started in England and we start citing figures like bacon and Locke and and others what's what's special about the English now there are a couple of answers I think we're good I'm not a scholar on this but I do have some working hypotheses one of them is an entrepreneurial hypothesis that then is to say if you look at the map of Europe and the map of the known world around 1500 or so there's Columbus crossing the ocean for the first time but ignore the Americas for now what you have is all of the powers are the Continental powers and the Italian city states are still prominent Hanseatic League and the Baltic States they're small butts but but France is a power Spain is a power and maybe the German states and the power but from the English perspective accurately we're kind of this third-rate European power way out in the boondocks we're way out in the hinterland and so when you have aspirations but you don't seem to have access to the current roots of power and you seem to be smaller in a lot of ways you start to think more creatively and when you start to think more creatively then certain Katzen will be out of the bag now this is parallel to an entrepreneurial hypothesis about why was it the Portuguese and the Spanish we're the first as far as we know to sail across the Atlantic as stable establish consistent trade routes to try to get around Africa to the Far East and so forth and again if you look in the late 1300s fourteen hundreds context from their perspective all of the powers are in the central part of the Mediterranean and further east and a little bit to the north and again they're way out in the boonies in the boondocks and there's no way that they're going to be able to get where they want to get to the Far East by playing the traditional game so they have to start being entrepreneurial and considering different routes and and that worked out for them so what were then boondocks powers and relatively insignificant I mean of course they could have just languished in obscurity as many boondocks nations do languish in insecurity forever so it's not going to be a thorough explanation but maybe there is something to that there was a book I'm not sure of the guy's names he was an English historian but he it goes the route that you started to formulate in the second half of that maybe there's something unique about the English cultural inheritance and as opposed to as you go further east you get into the you know the the Danes and then the Germans and then the Prussians and and so on all the way over to the Russians that maybe there was something unique to them and I don't want anyone to say you know the magna carta story and and decentralization but he there's this guy I think his name is Ian MacFarlane and he wants to say something like it's the origins of English liberalism and he does make a thesis like this that when you look at English feudalism it does have a feudal structure but it does have a number of unique feudal provisions that you don't find in any other feudalism in France and and other European models one of them is and you mentioned the communalism the the for example when a father died I'm sorry when if father gets old if he realizes he's not able to work the land anymore and so it leaves his land to the son the son then owns that land free and clear and has no legal obligations to the father not even to support the father whereas all other feudalism have this more communal family thing that the father can pass the and off to the Sun but has obligations to keep the father on the land and to to maintain them so there is that a kind of proto individualism and a more clear set of property rights that the Sun now has in England also with respect to women one of the arguments that he made was that in English customary law if the husband died it was in English feudalism possible for much easier for his wife his widow now to inherit his property free and clear the English for whatever reason became more tolerant of say the woman running the business that her because it was her livelihood depended upon it whereas in other feudalism the the rules were explicitly that if the husband dies the property can't go to his wife it has to go to the next born son or it jumps over to his brother or has to stay in in the male line so what that then is going to suggest is that you're going to have women who are a little more business savvy and again this is proto but this book was very interesting if we follow up in email I can send you the link and you know it identifies have a dozen ways in which English feudalism was distinctive going back to I'm not sure of the dates 1100 1200 s and so you can see seeds where other things coming to England can work with those and then you get a full English enlightenment so again fascinating stories to be told there and continuing with the theme of enlightenment origins it's addressed at length the relative importance of the greco-roman and judeo-christian traditions and producing the Enlightenment the big divide though is between those who want you to give equal credit to the judeo-christian tradition and to the greco-roman tradition and what we find I think in people who are more culturally conservative and politically conservative is that they will say yes we have the greco-roman tradition that's absolutely important to us you know it's it's not accidental that Plato and Aristotle and sinica Seneca and Cicero are cited and that all of our political architecture is greco-roman and that we we do our theater a certain way and we all know what the Hippocratic oath is and we know who Euclid and Archimedes are so yeah absolutely but they will also say equally important is the judeo-christian tradition that there are strongly positive contributions that come out of the judeo-christian tradition and that what makes united a modern Western civilization unique is that it is this hybrid of those two very deep traditions and I don't agree with that position but I don't think that's a stupid position I think that could be a very sophisticated position with a lot of good arguments that can be can be made for it the other position gives says that yes the judeo-christian tradition obviously has been important the Greek Oh Roman tradition has been important but if we're trying to explain the positive achievements of the Enlightenment the greco-roman tradition is more important and that's the view that I take now the kind of evidence that I make here is that if you look at Europe the Christians basically had Europe all to themselves for about a thousand years and what did they do with it well they started to then say this is actually an article I'm working on writing right now it's to say well you have to talk about scholasticism and the development of universities and this and that and the other invention and so on I think all of that is true but if you start putting dates to all of those things that's 1300s that's 1400s and all of that is after the Greek and Roman texts are rediscovered and being reintroduced into into Europe so what I think is that that's a lot of now people who are strong fans of the judeo-christian tradition making their peace with the modern world but wanting to get some of the credit for it themselves so my view is that it's not to say that everything in Judaism and Christianity is wrong but as a matter of historical development that they have been more of an obstacle than an assist in in the development so what had to happen was a brilliant mind like Thomas Aquinas in the 12 hundreds was exposed to the writings of Aristotle that had been recently rediscovered and his teacher Albert Albert the Great and with his intellectual integrity and his intellectual honesty as was saying I think the judeo-christian tradition is absolutely right but I also am very impressed with that the Greeks and Romans did and what this Aristotle guy has come up with and so let's try for a synthesis and that's a unique individual that comes along but it is also important to note that Aquinas was almost excommunicated for trying to do that and it took a lot of student activism right for our students who say no more Aristotle more Aristotle in the curriculum imagined that for the authorities to relent and so the cat was out of a bag so I see the judeo-christian as fighting I have a rearguard and then coming to accommodations with increasing inroads of humanism full-blown Renaissance and so forth I do give the Reformation some credit but I see it as unintended consequences the early reformers they were they hate Aristotle you read what Martin Luther has to say about Aristotle's my goodness hate speech absolutely but he had a very rich vocabulary actually shall we say and the same thing for for for Calvin for swingley right and all of the others and what they are very much interested is going back to a purified fundamentalist form of of Christianity from their perspective now in the 1500s the church has sold out to Aristotelian ISM it started to become more worldly that's a corruption of Christianity and we have to get back to to true Christianity but to their credit right what the Protestants did say is we think the Catholic Church is corrupt in this theological way but the important thing is for each individual to have a direct relationship with God and not to have to go through this institution right that God talks to God who talks to the Cardinals and so on or and/or is captured in Scripture but Scripture is only available in Latin and the vast majority of people can't read their own language let alone Latin so what the Protestants said the important thing is for the individual to get a direct relationship with God and the only way for an individual to do that is to know God's Word and that means we need to start teaching people to read and to get the Bible translated into all of the vernacular languages now their purpose was not to cause the Enlightenment but once you start teaching people to read and you start giving them books in their native language then people start to read the Bible and they start to try to interpret it and you and I and our Bible studies have different interpretations and so we serve to have arguments about it and I get better at argument you get better at argument and so we started to get more more rational and once people started to get rational and think that evidence and argumentation that becomes important that starts to fit into a certain kind of epistemology that's developing in the early modern world so the cats out of the bag and the Protestants did to some extent let the cat out of the bag now fortunately what we then have is the Protestants are making that contribution the Catholics did make their accommodations with Aristotelian ISM and to this day they say faith and reason are equally important revelation is important but also Aristotle is very important so both of them are indirectly contributing so I do think we can't say positively that the judeo-christian tradition did add some things as well but by a large margin the most important traditions are coming from the Greeks and the Romans as they are reintroduced in in humanism and the Renaissance one quick follow-up Jordan Peterson and also the author of the book inventing the individual whose name I can't remember yeah both argue I think that Christianity and perhaps Judaism as well played an important role in spreading the idea that individuals are divine fragments that they are made in the image of god and that notions of the sanctity of the individual yes which would lead to the political liberalism prong yes that's right and be attributed to some extent think that is a stupid argument or a bad argument I think that's an argument that can be very well made but I don't find it very convincing because again for a thousand years the sanctity of the individual right rested very easily with serfdom with slavery in many parts of Europe with the second-class status of women and if you think you take seriously what it says in the Bible I don't know if there's anything in the Bible that says anything condemned natori of slavery at all so one mark of the importance of a commitment to the sanctity of individuality does seem to be a kind of repugnance against slavery in other forms of institutionalization the other thing I would say is you can say the importance of individuality but that also has to be interpreted the way a strong judeo-christian person would interpret it that what makes you importantly an individual is your soul it's not your body your body really is not that important in the strong versions of course so what happens to your body doesn't matter and that means all kinds of subjugation Kendra so as long as your soul is free but then even if we are interested in the importance and the sanctity of the soul that is complicit in the very long tradition of Christians Jews are off the hook on this one as far as I know Christians being willing to torture people for extended periods in order to try to convert the and the argument is precisely the sanctity of the individual soul argument if you really care about saving people's souls that it's so important what that means is that they have to get the right beliefs about Christianity and so when you have people who have the wrong beliefs about Christianity and they are close to dying if they die believing the wrong things what's going to happen is they are going to burn and you're out of Christian love therefore you should torture their body and be willing to torture their body because that's the only way apparently you can get them to listen and maybe it's not that successful but you might get people's attention enough and get a certain number of people on their deathbed under torture to to to to to convert and therefore you have saved their soul so that individual sanctity that is an important principle but the Christian record on it and how its interpreted I think is subject to lots of writers both textual and historical so I would I would de-emphasize that now that's not then to say that the Greek and the Roman record is any better so I think there are some original editions that the humanists are coming up with because as we know the Greeks and Romans they were fine with with the Greeks especially with a certain measure of slavery second-class status of women the Romans I think were a little bit better on on both of those things but you know the record is not perfect there what I think you find is the the germ of those ideas more seriously taken in the in the in the Greek in the Roman tradition and then what the the achievement of many of the Renaissance thinkers the Renaissance humanists is to say wow the the the Greeks in the Romans had these ideas and not to discounted the judeo-christian importance of the individual soul either but then they're taking that and elevating it into a much more universal principle and then we get to the Enlightenment now as late as the 1670s and 1680 it's really taking John Locke and others of that generation finally to write a letter concerning toleration and for the first Pole serious political acts of toleration to be put in place the Dutch more informally had put toleration in place in the earlier part of the 1600s less on philosophical reasons that strikes me in the Dutch case it was more pragmatic you're just get sick of all of the religious wars and let's just say okay fine let's get stop all the fighting and get down to business and and so forth but that's late 1600s in in Christian Europe just to follow up a little bit on Brandon's question about the individual sanctity individual the conversation that we were having was regarding my opinion on on how the Greeks for the first time in the history of humanity represent in art the human being as beautiful hmm and and that specifically is is the individual as a divine being I think the concept of the best of the best or what we might call God or the logos or which the Greeks I mean which the Christians then pick up the concept of the logos that gets started with the Greeks is is this in in infinitely complex wonder that we're observing and is staring us in the face that it could be represented in mankind in art and it's it's that that when the Christians have the the seed of power and they have they destroy that mmm and it's what's picked up again in the Renaissance and when the Christians are actually losing power that they use realism as a point of propaganda the trying and it's that thing again that that that sorry who's using realism is a point of propaganda the Christian Catholic Church now excuse me at what time or any sense oh okay good right so the day and it's it's that it's specifically that well not it those are one of the elements that the Protestants turn away from north and so then you have a difference in the Northern Renaissance and the southern Renaissance so this was our conversation about it now and and so we do the history of intellectual life through art history which is a beautiful way to do it so the the first point yes is about the significance of Greek art and the statuary that has come down to us and it is important that what you have in the portrayal of humans is humans as godlike but also the portrayals of the gods as human-like so you don't have this radically other conception or the idea that humans should cower and fall to their knees and press their face to the dirt in the presence of something that is immeasurably greater than they we can stand straight there's a Jordan Peterson referencing right I guess I gotta have my shoulders back that we can aspire to godlike status and that the gods and goddesses are often portrayed as they're just superior human beings more like so and I'm talking with my students about this more like the way when you're a thirteen-year-old how you look up to your brother or your sister who's 16 or 17 and they are Wow right and there are power but you also have a sense that you with some efforts and some growing you could be there as well and that is quite unique in in art history so that yeah that valorisation and idealization of what is possible for human beings and it is striking that early Christianity is it's some of the more radical sex we have to be a little more nuanced here for sure clearly reacting to that and that they in a negative fashion because their view is that the human being is you know to use st. Paul's words here sold into slavery to sin we are worthless smut he grubby we understand what's good and we but we're not willing to do so and so your proper attitude should be one of self-loathing and so any sort of Greek and Roman idealization is just going to be a slap in the face and you're going to want to destroy it and so there was widespread destruction and then as you mentioned that was picked up again in the 1500s when the Romans take over because by then the Catholic Christians had made their compromises and they're starting to do beautiful cathedrals and decorate and paintings and so on and then to allow all of that one of the things that Protestants do is they go through and they you know they whitewash all of the frescoes and they destroy a lot of the statuary in an effort to go back to do pure or to pure Christianity and there is in addition to just that humanistic point there is a kind of a metaphysical theological point that should also be emphasized here if we're going to talk about art and that is that point about graven images that it does seem to be a commandment that thou shalt not make graven images and on the basis of that whole fields of art then become metaphysically suspect and the argument then is if you are trying to take something that is ineffable spiritual supernatural and capture it in physical istic form well that's a that's a sacrilege that's a that's a blasphemy because you can't take something that is so wonderful and special and and and and defile it by representing it in in physical form and certainly it wouldn't then be than be in the human form so I think that's in part why there are not graphic traditions or sculptural traditions and painting traditions and some some of the sex of the the major or the major Western religions Judaism has a strong literary tradition but not much of a painterly or sculptural tradition because they take that commandment seriously the Christians took it seriously for a thousand years it was a huge debate in the 1100s about whether when we're building these great new Gothic cathedrals we should allow the these emerging artists inspired by the Greeks and Romans to start putting Bible stories on the walls well because then these are Saints these are demigods whatever status the various heroes have but again we have this shalt not make graven images and and and that seemed a little bit sacrilegious and the argument that seemed to prevail from my reading of the history of the time is to say well we do have all of these you know to put it bluntly illiterate people who are getting bored in the third hour of the priest droning on in Latin and they're just looking around we might as well make good use of that time so maybe we can compromise and and have some illustrations of Bible stories give them something uplifting to look at while they're in church so then they can absorb some of the messages but that was seen as a compromise on the on the theological point and it's precisely that compromise on that theological point that the Protestants are going to react to and reject a few years laters in trying to get back to the purified form so yeah really interesting questions

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Length: 204min 46sec (12286 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 19 2018