The Intellectual Roots of Wokeness with James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian (Ep.15)

[Music] huh [Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman a few announcements before today's guests i've updated my website to include several new requested functions supporters can now change update and cancel payments more easily there's now a donate page so you can donate any amount on a one-time basis all podcasts will have transcripts and soon they'll be translated into spanish by popular demand we now have podcast merchandise that you can buy and you can now become a member on youtube in addition to the website updates i'd like to announce a speaking event i'm hosting on september 29th at 2 p.m eastern time the event will be exclusively for high school and university students if you're associated with a high school or university you can register for this event to have your students or classmates listen to me speak and then engage with me again that's september 29th and visit colemanhughes.org for more details okay today my guests are james lindsey and peter bogosian james lindsey is a mathematician writer and founder of new discourses and the author of a new book called cynical theories how activist scholarship made everything about race gender and identity peter belgozian is a philosopher a professor at portland state university and author of a manual for creating atheists and how to have impossible conversations we talk about critical theory post-modernism critical race theory and how these conspire to build the foundation of social justice ideology as we know it today we talk about the ways in which social justice has departed from its parent ideologies and much more i really enjoyed this one and i hope you do too so without further ado james lindsey and peter bogosian okay thank you james and peter for coming on my podcast pleasure thanks for having us yeah i'm glad to be here absolutely uh so let's i think a lot of people will have heard of you either through the so-called squared hoax from a few years back uh from being on rogan uh related to that hoax or from you know both of you have several books um about you know you're you're you have a math background james and you have a philosophy background peter so i want uh can can you tell me how you guys met and how you guys sort of started uh collaborating and how you got in the same circle twitter really yeah it turns out we met on twitter what i mean i don't know the exact how much how much influence this had but i know when i started following peter is that i was was complaining about my my favorite hobby horse in philosophy to complain about on twitter which is moral philosophy and then even in getting into um some aspects of of ontology i know we don't have to get too deep into any of this and somebody came to me i think this would have been like 2013 as a long time ago and said if you uh don't like philosophers that dawdle around in ontology you need to follow peterborough he's probably the leading philosopher who's not into the whole metaphysics thing and so i followed peter and peter follows like 10 people on twitter so he didn't follow me back for a long time and then um he finally ended up reading something uh i think that i'd written about sam harris uh either either i responded to some of sam's arguments but i also defended sam against weird accusations which tap into this woke stuff to some degree uh and peter was impressed with my writing and sent me a note of appreciation and followed me i got the the infamous peterborough goshen tweet followed and and so that was i think in 2013 um and then we started to talk a little bit and uh he wanted me to read yeah and i i had a i had a a question from my book and then i called you on the phone and i'm like dude what you know help me out with this equation it was the drake equation yeah oh is that right that's where it was right yeah yeah yeah and that's just go ahead i didn't expect to start here but i'm curious what what were your objections to ontology and metaphysics and because i feel like i might kind of share them having just finished my philosophy degree and having taken peter's yeah peter's phrase at the time and i think he would still stand by it we'll let him confirm was metaphysics just say no um but it's that it's that if you're coming at philosophy from a from a perspective where empiricism means anything metaphysics is right outside of that realm and so what often happens is that you end up with philosophers if you want my particular critique of it who get bogged down and arguing about the ontology of various ideas they want to say oh do mathematical objects exist in what way do they exist what does that existence mean and our friend daniel dennett wrote a very important i think but not well-read uh peace and philosophy about something he called chmess like chess with an m added into it to indicate that people like to kind of play in these other worlds um that don't really connect to reality and his point was that that's interesting but it produces work of no abiding significance and so we were you know we're very i have a very kind of complicated view of metaphysics and what metaphysics role should be but i don't particularly find those questions to be interesting beyond an academic level and it's it gets annoying for example uh you know i was speaking with with the president of the southern baptist convention earlier today on a podcast and he wanted to know how i ground my morals objectively as somebody who is an atheist and i've been asked many times like well if you're an atheist how do you have logic if you can't ground the idea of logic in the logos and in you know the body of christ or whatever and it's like what are you talking about just what are you talking about how is this helping anything and so uh it feels to me that it generates a lot of very tangential um conversations that are not particularly necessary it does by the way relate to what we i think will talk about if we talk about wokeness uh because they have their own metaphysic that people have not yet really cleanly pinned down and i'm working on that now uh to try to understand what it is but i think it's like it it's a way it's intellectual masturbation for the most part it's vaguely interesting but a distraction from more meaningful and important questions especially in philosophy which should be guiding us into how to live a reflective thoughtful informed life yeah and part of the problem coleman is that i see people have over scribed subscribe certainty and they've made these i don't know apodicted pronouncements about what they consider to be vertical propositions oh my god that sounded so academic i didn't mean to sound like that but uh so basically they've over ascribed certainty to propositions about the world and the way to know and understand those things is not through abstract speculation it's to science to evidence you can't reason your way to certain empirical propositions i mean you do people try it in theoretical physics and then they look for empirical confirmation of that i had a great conversation with my friend lawrence cross about how that's accomplished but the the concern that that i had was that we're teaching people things you know what is the ultimate nature of the the universe or what have you well i i don't know maybe it's just a bad question just putting a question word in front of a bunch of other words doesn't make it a legitimate question and and jim was absolutely correct one of the most underappreciated pieces in all of philosophy is daniel be great if you could uh link that in the youtube section and jim and i have published something in russell blackwood the problem of philosophy and i think that's a very important idea that you you want to pursue philosophy ought to pursue questions of abiding significance and too many people just trying to think of a less vulgar way to say it i can't but just intellectually masturbate around ideas that are completely untethered to reality and the answers it's like it's like what gilbert ryall calls a category mistake people are looking at philosophy to solve questions that is best solved through science people have done it through relig through religion too but it's in a sense it's less excusable in philosophy yes as you will probably have noticed unfortunately i've had this two plus two math debacle all summer and somebody just on twitter to kind of put a punctuation mark on this i don't know if this person's significant they're probably a grad student in philosophy or something it's usually what they work out to be but he said that i don't even know if one plus one can equal two because i don't know if there are any identical objects in the world that you could possibly act together and it's like all you're doing is confusing yourself at that point you're just like what you know this apple and that apple aren't identical no but the category apple is so um sorry it works and in fact you can get into the physics of things but certain elementary particles are in fact all identical so his claim isn't even true but he's confused himself by digging into the ontology of the mathematical object one uh and it's it's not imagine and jim just imagine a whole there are whole disciplines like that that have hoodwinked people just imagine that how crazy is that we've institutionalized these disciplines fields of study they have bogus scholarship people are pointing to those when you ask them how they know something they're grossly over inflating their confidence in propositions about the world but that's buttressed by bogus fields of study so that's our problem with ontology yeah no i i remember distinctly feeling that when i took my metaphysics class probably junior year that there was something very fun and very trivial about the whole thing like i felt like i was doing mind puzzles that were you know interesting as like a kind of logic game i would play with my friends to to just as a joke it sort of reminded me of that youtube video where this guy asks is water wet and just goes through all the arguments and counter arguments and it's it's really fun and it got like millions of views but a lot of the questions we were dealing with in metaphysics and ontology had that character where it seems like there's really nowhere to stand where there's an objectively true answer here and it's all trivial and it's really unlike symbolic logic or or ethics or or any of the other classes i took in that in that vein so i got to check out that dennit essay but that's not where i wanted to start or that's not the main thing i hope to discuss here really what i want to talk to you guys about is basically your your book james uh which which you wrote with helen pluck rose and you know peter you've been talking about you know all these same themes so i i almost feel like you're somehow a third author on the book even though you're technically not so that just just a quick comment on that if i may so that that book is cynical theories and i i think it's uh not only is it a masterpiece it's really a rosetta stone to help people understand things and it i'll let jim speak to the details but jim and i wrote another book together at the same time we were doing the grievance studies how to have impossible conversations and that is a solution we're not claiming it's the solution to the current moral panic and quagmire so i think that those books go very well together james and helen's book and my book with james because one one offers well the cynical theories offers a solution based in liberalism uh and how to have impossible conversations goes back to those values of how to speak to people how to engage conversations and ideas yeah uh so where i want to start is with post-modernism and critical theory what do these two terms mean and how do they differ okay so they are two distinct or mostly distinct schools of thought they both can be traced to having roots in marxist thought but it would be incorrect to call either of them marxist as they were both um extraordinarily critical of marxism in particular uh they're also quite different from one another it's a useful kind of earmark to say that the critical theory is is is neo-marxist meaning that it changed marxism to some new form whereas uh post-modernism is post-marxist where it had kind of abandoned all hope and marxism and so there's that gives you a sense immediately of their flavors so critical theory arose in the 1920s going into the 1930s when it was outlined by a number of communist thinkers who noticed that the communist revolutions that had been predicted were not taking place they were particularly not taking place in uh the places where you would expect them to which given karl marx you would expect them to be um germany you would expect them to be london which was the most industrialized city in the world at the time and neither place was anywhere close to having a communist revolution and they just weren't the whole idea is they weren't sticking and so this school of thought arose to try to explain why that wasn't happening and so it started to draw off of the new fields of sociology and psychology particularly max weber and sigmund freud and tried to with sigma freud actually they explicitly intended to try to figure out how to take freudian psychoanalysis and import it into marxian theory to explain inside people's heads why the they were not having a class consciousness and would not overturn um the the capitalist society and initiate the process toward the communist utopia and what they concluded was that the elites in society whether the bourgeoisie or the the capitalists more specifically within um they were creating an ideology of how society should be in particular following the one communist thinker the italian thinker antonio gramsci he pointed out that the the kind of institutions that produce culture in society are responsible for making people content with their lives so critical theory became a way to try to understand how the correct place of analysis that marx missed was not economics but rather culture and so they started to look at how the elites and society produce culture they produce mass culture they produce popular culture they they produce a middle class that tries to keep people happy and out of that consciousness that would lead them to want to overthrow they're happy with their lives and they shouldn't be more or less and they so they aren't going to overthrow society so they separated the world into two classes of of thought traditional theories that seek to understand the world this of course follows marx's one of his most famous pronouncements traditional theories that seek to understand the world and critical theories that seek to change it and uh the the point of a critical theory has has three characteristics according to max horkheimer who wrote it down at first in 1937 uh a critical theory must understand how the current system falls short um it must have an overarching uh normative value system against which it compares and it must advocate for social activism in uh in those terms so that's what a critical theory is a critical theory is in other words a way to bring problematizing saying that uh ideas might be true but their truth creates problems in society and so we have to now rethink them post-modernism is a much more pessimistic reaction to the failures of marxism that arose in the 1960s uh going into the 1970s and its big picture idea is that all of knowledge is socially constructed uh everything we know is tied up in language and that language is decided upon the you the proper uses of language i should say and of what we claim to be true and false and knowledge and not knowledge are tied up in the powerful groups and interests in society who get to decide that and part of the way that they do so is with their bias and part of the way that they do so is with the intention of excluding other ways of knowing that would threaten their cultural hegemony and so these two schools of thought were running in parallel uh by the time that post-modernism started to to flare up academically in the 60s and 70s critical theory was flaring up in violent protests in the 1960s across europe in the united states especially in 1968 being the most famous obviously which followed directly i think is a fair thing to say from the agitations of the the neo-marxist thinker herbert marcusa who um had written at that point repressive tolerance in 1965 and had written one dimensional man in which he directly said we need to bring together the outsiders the racial minorities and the leftist radical intelligentsia to form a movement and in fact the outsiders referred to um radicals who wanted to do the same kinds of things we're seeing in 2020 on the streets um exactly that's the two schools of thought post-modernism is objective truth is not possible and all claims upon it are politics critical theory is the world is split into oppressor versus oppressed and the people who are on the right side of history are seeking liberation from that systemic oppression that's maintained by hegemony of culture by the powerful in society yeah so on their face those two seem to be intention because postmodernism rejects the idea that any meta-narrative is true and an example of a meta-narrative would be something like christianity or marxism or liberalism any of these sort of big systems of understanding the world where critical theory at least seems to be itself a kind of meta-narrative and you talk about in the book sort of how that gets reconciled because ultimately you know people you know people want to act and insofar as they have some post-modernist baggage they have to reconcile their desire to act with the post-modernist skepticism of everything so can you talk a little bit about how that gets reconciled yeah it's very important to understand that critical theory in the formal sense the so-called frankfurt school um which would be all of these names that i mentioned you know we have we don't have to name them all again um they they definitely were in the modernist frame they were definitely concerned with truth they were definitely concerned with falsity they were just saying that those aren't enough we need to add another layer of analysis that adds in liberation as a concept and they were very clear that emancipation and liberation and liberation were the ideas that and what you're being emancipated or liberated from is these systems of oppression that are created by the hegemonic cultural powers in society and so the post-modernist would have generally rejected this and there is a tension there but what happened is in the 1980s and we could draw the lines from people like herbert marcus if we wanted through angela davis one of his mentees i think uc davis you see something anyway um angela davis is obviously even active today she's very prominent she's being profiled and popular publications like vanity fair and things i think i saw just the other day with her and she was one of marcus's marcus's students she said that marcus radicalized her as a matter of fact and she went on to inform much of what was happening in black feminism meanwhile feminism in general was picking up post-modernism so they could break down the idea of gender as a social construct and so all of a sudden you have these two ideas kind of in the same area and in the 80s mostly getting toward the late 80s you started to have these discussions from a variety of different people mary poovey within feminism for example uh bell hooks and kimberly crenshaw within the kind of black feminism going into critical race theory analysis and what they were saying is that postmodern tools are very useful for breaking down to just deconstruct in fact there was the fundamentals of systemic power which was that critical objective but they go too far and i think the key observation is that at some point these black feminists hit upon the idea and i want to stress for everybody if they don't know black feminism is a school of thought i'm not referring to feminists who happen to be black it's a different thing it is a particular school of thought they hit upon the idea that you when you have the experience of systemic oppression say by racism you could only possibly deconstruct a concept like race that's a site of systemic oppression if you have the privilege to think that that doesn't matter and so all of a sudden the original post-modernists became privileged white guys uh and that was you know why they were blind to this level of this critical level of analysis and they kind of shoehorn the things together by saying the one thing that cannot be deconstructed and in some sense then the one thing that's objectively real is this oppressor versus oppressed paradigm wherein various types of identity uh create or are sites of systemic oppression that must be set aside from deconstruction and then what deconstruction is properly used for is to deconstruct the roots of the systemic power to take apart the systems of power themselves but not everything um and that's where you end up getting this fusion that in the book we call applied post-modernism yeah and that that's a really important point that i want to highlight because you talk about how the i guess you could call them classical or high postmodernist the the people who were recast as privileged white men i'm thinking of someone like foucault he explicitly yeah yeah like had a kind of ironic distance from everything as a as a mode of engaging with ideas everything was just a construct whiteness blackness you know all not that he used these words but the the crucial difference between someone like him and someone who inherited parts of his philosophy and critical race theory is that blackness becomes becomes something very real and concrete and not liable to the kind of cynical distance that you use to deconstruct what is viewed as uh you know the the people on top of the system that's right yeah and you know what i have an analogy in my head that i think encapsulates what what post-modernism tries to do and i want to know if you think this is accurate i remember being a kid and first learning you know hearing people speak different you know speak english and sound different and learning the word accent as something that meant oh well you know my aunt has a puerto rican accent right and i i didn't yet realize that i also had an accent and i i just spoke and everyone else had an accent so there was a kind of an other and othering you you could say and then at some point i had the aha moment that actually there is no objective center from which to view other people as having an accent an accent is just a word for how you speak and it equally applies to someone like me who i think of having a mainstream american accent as it does to to to anyone else so that aha moment i think is what post-modernism tries to replicate in every sphere of life even i would argue in places where it doesn't belong does that make sense to you as an analogy not only does it make sense i would say that um that's exactly what it does and it is exactly the thing that it does wrong when you say that it takes that and applies it in places where it doesn't apply it tries to find that aha moment and apply it to literally everything uh including um knowledge for example uh so the view that knowledge then becomes like an accent it's just something that people with certain cultural values value is knowledge uh i'll add to that i'll add to that and say not just knowledge but epistemology and epistemological processes yeah everything the whole thing they see it all as a political process can you define that for people epistemology epistemology is just how you know the nature of knowledge and study of knowledge and the idea that there are different ways of knowing and we can talk about standpoint epistemology if you want but that the scientific method is on this view just a way of knowledge we haven't talked about relativism yet but we should probably get into that epistemological relativism epistemology so um there is no god's eye view no view outside the system of one way of knowing everything is situated and everything is linked individuals and cultural situations yeah um i remember so so i remember you know being in a gender studies class i'm sorry when i was uh a sophomore a friend of mine convinced me to do it and i'm glad i did in retrospect but it was it was quite bad um and we read we read foucault i think history of sexuality and this was one of those classrooms where you know it was actually the strangest classroom i was ever in at columbia because no one would almost ever ask the professor questions there would maybe be one or two questions per class and and we were dealing with some heavy ideas regardless of whether you agreed or not right like whereas in all my other philosophy classes there would always be you know pesky students like myself trying to bring up objections and like lively discussion but this one it was it was dead it was a dead classroom and we read foucault and you know i i remember bringing up the point because i think i had recently read thomas nagle's uh book you're from nowhere the last the last word actually um where he one of the points he makes is that you know post-modern skepticism of objective truth inevitably bites its own tail because if nothing is objectively true then how do you know how do you know post-modernism itself is objectively true and i brought up this point uh first i want to know is that a good critique of post-modernism do you think and i just remember that the professor giving some very hand-waving answer oh foucault sorts that stuff out well it depends is it good it depends on who you ask uh and not in a cheeky way because if you ask a post-modernist they would say that it misses the point entirely um and the post-modernism deals with this simply by by acknowledging that it doesn't believe that it's objectively true it believes that nothing's objectively true and so right must be self skeptical radically self skeptical also and that's where you see it you know kind of devolving into derrida's play and and exactly on like that which of course later generations discovered wasn't that useful for activism um you can't really do anything with with something that i mean even judith butler wrote that it would be she didn't consider herself a postmodernist because it would be inappropriate even to to to take that label or even to give that label meaning it would be anti-post-modern to define post-modernism and so uh but if you ask somebody from outside of it um yeah it's a pretty pretty good criticism of it so let me let me jump in there and and that was habermas's habermas the german foster's critique and derrida and that it's a performative contradiction you're using rationality to undermine the tools of rasha rationality that idea has a an ancient pedigree in the literature you see that in in the platonic aisle you see that in well littered throughout the history of western intellectual thought but it's an old old idea but it doesn't seem to bother the people if you don't subscribe to the rules of reason and logic then the criticism that you don't subscribe to the rules of reason and logic only works if you subscribe to the rules of reason and logic so i think jim's absolutely correct they just they just hand wave it off and so that actually by the way highlights the tension in case any of your listeners don't realize habermas is the last really of the critical theorists he was the last member really of the frankfurt school in any significant way and of course this is post marcusa post the riots of the 1960s post marcus going on television in the 1970s and yelling about how anti-intellectual his movement had become uh and so he had a much you know more tempered and reasonable view of um the critical approach but more importantly as you see he had this rather vigorous or vicious critique of derrida which indicates that there was in fact tension between the critical theory approach which was ultimately modernist and the post-modernist approach as you as you pointed out so i wanna if it's okay coleman i wanna linger on that for a minute i think it's important for listeners to understand one of the objectives and i've just finished kendri's book and i've i'm i see this scattered throughout the literature is to remove the tools by which one makes discerning judgments about things this comes up a little bit in cynical theories but when you remove the tools scientific rationality epistemic adequacy consistency then it becomes impossible to make to kind of step outside of a system and adjudicate competing claims it becomes impossible to do that and this is really the overarching goal is to remove the ability to make judgments particularly epistemological and moral moral judgments and it's utterly terrifying consequences of that yeah so i want to talk about the relationship between post-modernism and what i guess is variously called social social justice locism um you know whatever far leftism whatever it's known as that's either pejorative or just descriptive depending on where you're situated how is what we like what i encountered and have spoken about on this podcast a lot at columbia you know tied to the ideas of postmodernism and critical theory and in what ways is it different sure so the thing that we refer to maybe as the social justice movement now or critical social justice if we follow robyn d'angelo's very clear exposition of it in her her book that she co-authored with those from sensoy called is everyone really equal what we see is actually the fusion of three lines of thought three schools of thought post-modernism and critical theory we've already discussed to some degree so we know what they are the third is the social justice idea which can be expressed in a number of contexts that arose from jesuit priests so it arose in a religious context it was actually probably most thoroughly developed in the earliest part of the 1900s by um walter rauschenbouch who is a baptist minister a baptist minister who happened to also be the grandfather of richard rorty the american half post-modern philosopher roshan bouche came up he was in hell's kitchen in new york city and was very interested in social welfare issues and he came up with six principles um it's arguable that he found those principles when he went to london for a year or two and studied with the fabian society there which is a socialist think tank of a kind or society is the right word i don't think they really had think tanks operating you know in the late 1800s early 1900s but anyway he spent a couple of years with the fabian society came back and then wrote down this idea called the social gospel many of the ideas of social justice were already embedded within the the broad idea of liberalism the statement at the very beginning of the constitution the very beginning of the um declaration of independence i'll point to that that there's this liberalizing equalizing notion of bringing people to uh levels of equality you see it when in particular i love i loved it on the fourth of july this year they promoted um frederick douglass douglass's wonderful speech i think from 1852 or three uh obviously slavery was still going on and he talks about very clearly living up to the the vision of the founders of of the country very clearly living up to the constitution and then the hypocrisy and failures of our nation to do that by that point um which was instrumental i think in the ensuing 10 years into into achieving abolition so there's this principle of social justice built into our the fabric of liberal societies as well uh which painfully and slowly seems to to bear fruit um not always in in comfortable or pretty ways unfortunately although i think it's arguable that we're getting better at it as time has gone on for example if you consider how difficult the civil rights movement was for for black americans in the 1960s against how not to say it was all easy but if you compare that against the the gay movement of the 1990s it was a much smoother ride uh the second time around we have a better sense of social justice clearly this was developed by liberal philosophers like john rawls with his veil of ignorance thought experiment and so we have this whole line of thought about making society more fair and more just that can be analyzed in a number of ways one of those ways is through critical theory so the liberationist paradigm we saw this very clearly in the civil rights movement in the 60s where you had the black power aspect up against the i guess martin luther king or universal liberal aspect in tension with one another um as the uh state representative from memphis went viral on the the twitter yesterday for his speech he was talking about being involved in the memphis civil rights movement as a child and when the riots would break out he said his father would grab him by the arm and walk him away and this is not our movement this is not how we're going to be we're about peace we're about equality we're about uh what did he say civility and dignity and class he kept saying class we're classy or classy it's a very different thing than this very critical radical um you have your power we have our power you know conflict theory approach but you can approach the concept of social justice which is increasing fairness and equality and decreasing discrimination and disenfranchisement in society through critical means if you want so there's a critical theory school of social justice that has taken up these ideas and then what happened so that's where you see the fusion of those two and then what happened is in the the 90s they picked up those post-modern tools as a means of deconstructing uh the systems of power and the foundations of that which exactly produces maintains and legitimizes power so that's how they came together to form the present social justice movement that you would have experienced at columbia which we originally had just called applied post-modernism but in cynical theories we outlined had actually reified itself by around 2010 into something very very metanarrative based very um very rigid and doctrinal very uh almost dogmatic if not religious and that we call it reified post-modernism which is a nerdy way to put it but a simpler way to put it would be woke which means generally being aware that society is constructed out of systems of power and that those are somehow maintained by language and representation and symbology and art and that the means of cultural production in those those domains have to be challenged disrupt dismantled taken over replaced uh by different means and so exactly this is really what we see happening here yeah and when one grocks that that's the most cogent explanation for what we see happening now that's the grounding for what we see happening and playing out all around us right now if you want a kind of concrete example you can look at the origin of critical race theory specifically with derek bell at harvard law uh give he's credited with being the founder of critical race theory along with his student kimberly crenshaw so they together are the founders of critical race theory now derek bell if you read derek bell and creme berry crenshaw if you read kimberly crenshaw have very distinct styles and approaches and the difference is actually post-modernism they're both very critical of liberalism they're both i think very pessimistic in their analysis of liberalism if not cynical but nevertheless derek bell was a materialist in his approach he's very clearly interested in law he's very clearly interested in institutions and the direct effects of law and obviously kimberly crenshaw talks about law as well with her intersectionality you know she's talking about this coming out of these cases i think general motors and it's possible to discriminate against black women while not discriminating against blacks or women as broader categories and this is a legitimate i mean i think it's one of the most interesting and powerful and important discoveries in discrimination law period but unfortunately she went on site it was and then a couple of years later she writes this other paper mapping the margins and decides to recast the entire thing in terms of a modified version of post-modernism that takes up with black liberationist politics which she explicitly says this that's what the margins are black liberationism pushes black women to the margins radical feminism which is a white feminist approach pushes black women to the margins and so the intersectional black feminism needs to be raised up out of the margins and mapped out mapping the margins as the title yeah and so when she's discussing the failure of post-modernism she she talks about specifically that it deconstructs the idea of race and it misses the idea that that's a very important concept and she has a very very clear paragraph where she says there's a fundamental difference between i am black and i'm a person who happens to be black and her criticism of i am a person who happens to be black is that it forwards person in a universal sense instead of the identity group and then she says that intersectionality is a provisional concept linking um contemporary politics meaning identity politics radical identity politics to post-modern theory right that's like almost a direct quote right that is yeah i got floored by that quote actually i had never seen that before yeah i mean i i remember reading the paper the first time while we were doing the grievance studies affair and i thought you know what the heck is this i'm reading it and i got to that sentence and i was like whoa something here changed in cynical theories you know there's this line where we say this little insight was about to change the world in fact i don't i wish i could remember how i wrote the sentence the first time because we had this huge helen and i had this huge argument about whether or not i was way too mean about it because i really was i was really sassy about it and we we turned it down to something you know understated and plain but it really did this combination of those ideas social justice uh infused critical theory combined with post-modern tools in that particular way that forwards identity and removes the the view of universal humanity and even individualism was a very profound shift in thinking and of course it caught fire like crazy uh within all the relevant corners of the world because um meaning all these radical academics because now they have tools to problem which i problematize each other which is like this thing they're afraid of most is being problematized and so all the feminists are like ah we're racists now and all of the the the black liberation scholars are like ah we're sexist now and then all everybody hates queer people and uh you know they're all melting down attacking each other which is like their favorite thing to do and it just consumed the entire kind of uh intelligentsia radical left as marcus raised it in a very short period of time to where by two thousand two three four you're seeing papers like we a last offense of materialist feminism we still need this um you know and uh papers coming coming out saying um there's been a shift everybody's just saying that this is just how we think about this stuff now we think about this stuff intersectionally now you have papers coming out that's as early as the early 2000s you're saying yeah by 2004 i think it was the nail was in the coffin yeah the last one and this is at a time when if you're not in academia there's probably a zero percent chance you've heard the word intersectionality right correct whereas today in the culture if you're just if you're online enough you don't have to be anywhere near a university to to hear this word and to be influenced by it right that's right and in fact kimberly crenshaw has herself complained about that she we put this in cynical theories is that she feels like it escaped her original intentions it is memified and has taken on a life of its own but she still pushes it just as hard and um i don't think she even works very hard to reclaim its true commitments uh if as she saw them which is a very odd thing to say that it's now gotten out of her control but she's not really going to do anything about it um but yeah it's taken on a life of its own and memified and is now to the point where the intersections are are just bizarre and every conceivable level and people obsess about their positionality so that means obsessing about their identity and its relationship to power to the point where i mean the naval gazing for a young person in particular could be astonishing like you could spend just days and days and days and days you go on tumblr discover this stuff and all of a sudden spend days and days and days trying to think of every unique identity you have and how it it's like dungeons and dragons you know world building but around your own identity all of a sudden yeah this is one of those things where i think if i hadn't experienced it firsthand in high school which is to say i was one of those people on tumblr you know at 15 with my friends seeing these ideas for the first time being you know a mixture of uh fascinated by them and skeptical of them and you know just just um you know and if i hadn't seen people and hadn't myself done the thing that you just described which is noting that i'm a man but i'm black so you know in some sense this cancels out on in my position on the intersectional sort of hierarchy and you know it would seem if i didn't have that firsthand experience that you're just sort of making it up you know like if you're away from this stuff it sounds too crazy to be true yeah but i can just you know especially having gone to colombia and especially barnard intersectionality is more than an ideology in fact you know uh probably most people who are deeply embedded in the intersectional subculture i would call it at this point i don't couldn't necessarily tell you about kimberly crenshaw's initial paper and what she really meant by it but it's become a a social subculture that's right yeah kimberly crenshaw actually describes it from the beginning as a practice not a theory not uh as a practice and so as a practice it can def come to define a subculture that engages in that practice and defines themselves by their engagement with their practice i want to throw you a curveball real quick though since you were on tumblr and we're talking about deconstructing our identities because this happened to me because i wasn't on tumblr but my kids were and then i was like gotta go find out what this is and so then all of a sudden i i remember do you remember maybe you maybe this is about to be your moment but i bet you it's not did you have a moment where you discovered other kin for the first time do you know what other kin are yeah like like people who call themselves animals yeah i don't i can't say i recall discovering other kin on tumblr man i did i remember when i found that and that was like days of my whole my whole life like for days i could do nothing but think about the fact that some people define themselves as dragons and like dress up as wolves and go out and act and they say they run in packs i was like what the heck is this and the truth is is it's like the ultimate expression of the deconstructive mentality where it interfaces with the internet is what i finally figured out because on the internet you're your avatar right you're not really you you're your avatar and so people go on i was like holy crap people are going on a tumblr i didn't have this language yet in fact this came from our friend mike nena um but they go on on these social media outlets especially tumblr was really bad for it and they deconstruct themselves and then put it together in some pretend way and that sort of defines what's going on with so much of the non-scholarly side of queer theory um and it was just shocking so i was really curious since you said tumblr i'm like oh man i bet he has a story but when he found out about other kin and like maybe you got a dragon you know i don't know i don't want to put you on the spot no well i would say the the thrust of what i remember from and you know to be completely honest i got a tumblr because girls i liked had tumblrs right so you know 15 years old but being exposed to the the the main thing i remember from tumblr culture with you know now having some years of distance from it is that it was a lot of talk about mental health that's right but some of which was very healthy but there was it was also ironically a kind of perverse celebration of self-harm it was like there was a there was a sense in which talking about how much you've self-harmed gave you a kind of social status that's right but it was all couched in caring about mental health and giving mental health advice to tell people not to do all these things but admitting to doing them gave you points and credibility and in a kind of strange way right and it was all married to politics as well and the politics was a straightforward you know just straightforward intersectionality um and it was unhealthy in many ways it was very insular and i think we sort of seen that exported to the culture i think frankly i think a lot of people encountered all of these ideas on tumblr first and i know jesse single has spoken about this and um katie who am i thinking of katie herzog herzog has is really interesting on this topic too yeah yeah it's um it's a very interesting world and i think you're right that um what if i were to try to put a map to it i would guess that certain activists who took probably classes like gender studies classes which were a small percentage of people um but also probably struggled with mental health issues ended up finding community on these these social media platforms and then they were the ones who had the explanations that then legions of teenagers would connect to um if i had to guess i i seriously think that that's how a significant part of how if you want to use the the metaphor of the year how the virus escaped the lab um on at least one level there are other levels like the fact that it owns most of our colleges of education so our teachers are just teaching it but um there's people if yeah and if your listeners want to learn more about that the work of lyle asher is fantastic where he talks about how this is metastasized in college of education and pre-service college of education where they they teach teachers this this dangerous toxic nonsense yeah so i think you're right though i think that the the social media culture my guess is that people who are getting informed in these classes by these you know fancy pants professors uh we're then taking those ideas and they can be very self-indulgent ideas and then feeding them to communities of young people who would have you know gobbled them up and then they mutated very quickly in a social media environment much quicker than academic research and then they spilled out of the academy which is where we are now right right so now you can see richard karanza in charge of new york public schools saying that things like perfectionism and good grammar are actually manifestations of white supremacy culture like what what you thought were these neutral markers being on time yeah right which you thought were these neutral markers of a kid doing well are actually racism in disguise this is you know straight out of post-modernism and critical race theory right that's right that's right so it's already sort of in government i don't want to be too alarmist but it's you know the the the the arrow is going in one direction only at this moment that's right that's right and i am actually quite concerned about carranza in specific um we don't have to dwell on him but he is uh definitely definitely it's dangerous for what for what's going on with the new york city school systems and his agendas are and that's the most important point derived directly from the critical race theory school of thought about how things work and are in the world which is i don't think the best way to diagnose things and one of the worst ways to prescribe solutions for things that have come across as far as race goes so i want to speak to that just just for a minute without naming individuals you know one one thing that jim has spoken very eloquently about in helen as well is aubrey lord you can't use the master's tools to disable the master's house you can't use reasons and scientific method epistemic adequacy etc to overthrow systems of race and racism and in uh jimin helen's book cynical theories they have just a just a lovely line and they say that the problem is not the master's tools the problem is that historically people haven't been given access to the master's house and we need to open we need to make those things more accessible in socrates and the symposium throws the women and the slaves out of the room before he begins the dialogue and indeed that principle of not letting certain people into the into the house it's you know what i think was churchill was asked about capitalism it's a terrible system but it's the best war system we have that's not true with the master's house that's not true with enlightenment values that's not true with liberalism it's truly the pinnacle of human reason rationality and science that we can use to lead us to flourishing but right now what's happening is that those ideals are are being vandalized by critical race theory by the implementation of non-scientific ideas that are untethered to reality and again you see this manifest throughout the society yeah i actually i remember that line it really struck me you know the the master's house actually is a good house it's it's a well-built house the problem is we haven't been letting people in it yeah and and there are people who want to just as you say in the book you know reduce the house to rubble so that we can all equally live in rubble that's right yeah that's exactly correct yeah the that's where you know the the phrase audrey lord's phrase directly was the master suitables will never dismantle the master's house and so the question is why do we want to dismantle it and so that's where this somebody sent it to me on twitter the other day so i happen to recall that it's on page 20. um that's where this came from helen and i were had a discussion about it and helen actually wrote that part i won't take credit for it that's her phrasing she did a very good job with but it's you know we thought well no the master's house is good historically and even to the to this day there are still issues with it we've had a problem with generating fair access to the house but why in the world would you want to tear it down if if it's a good place and we haven't let everybody in properly why would you tear it down as a result of that doesn't make any sense what would be what would be the alternative well it we we say it's equal access to to a pile of rubble is not a worthy goal that's that's helen's sentence that i'm just so struck by it like yeah yeah it's and it's true um the easiest equity to achieve is nothing for everybody that's like when you're when your mom at least i don't know my mom got pissed off i was a pain a precocious child um but i don't know if your mom ever like when you're growing up like you you and your brothers or sisters your friends or whatever squabbling over who's going to get however much of the cake or the pie or the dinner or whatever it is and your mom finally flips out and it's like nobody gets any and it's like gone right it's in the trash or something i think my mom lost it we were fighting over a pie one time and the whole thing she likes threw it out in the yard and was like there you go nobody gets any and um it can go to the birds i guess and it's just like that's the easiest path to equity nobody gets anything just tear it all down and then everybody's equal and that's really scary because it's really hard to build something that's good and to then find ways that are fair to divvy it up especially when fairness is interpreted differently if we get into kind of the moral psychology of john height we see that fairness is interpreted differently by conservatives and by people he describes as liberals uh they have a different concept underlying concept of fairness it's very difficult to determine what is fair uh and and then that's a very hard problem so if you're trying to solve a very very hard problem and you're just frustrated with the problem the easy thing to do is just throw it away and that's a that's a catastrophe and and the other thing is we've done the intellectual labor we've already figured these things out jim mentioned john rawls before you know rawls has figured this out about to extend the pie metaphor make it as if your enemy defines your social place so when i was growing up when some people i knew may have smoked marijuana i may have heard of somebody who knew somebody who smoked marijuana and the way that these scandalous individuals would divide their marijuana was one one would uh you know divide it and the other one would choose and there's something intrinsically fair about that system so we we have really a a long history of having thought about these things and what we see now is that jim's right that we see people wanting to bring us back to the stone age right we see people wanting to destroy systems we we know that are not perfect but it's the we've used the most robust tools from the best thinkers we've tried to falsify notions we have a a a um an infrastructure that we've built around these concepts and then we have a bunch of people who happen to have platforms or social media and they're trying to rip down and destroy everything and that itself is again rooted in what jim was talking about is deconstruction and critical theory problematizing yeah there there's another line that jumped out at me from the book that i want to talk about and that's it's not the big black butts part the end of chapter three is it no it's not because that that makes helen really embarrassed and it's good to talk about it as often as possible i think you probably have to say more when you have helen on you have to ask her about that okay that's a teaser for later but but the part i'm thinking about is you talk about the political principle of of post-modernism can you summarize that for me yeah so it's easier if i start actually with both if i do both principles at once because you have to understand the knowledge principle to understand the political principle so we separate we we try to summarize themes and principles of post-modernism so you can see consistently how through different eras in its application it's consistent it's still there right because a lot of philosophers like to argue that post-modernism died and our argument is no it didn't it changed but to do that you have to say here are the core ideas core principles core themes those are mostly maintained with some modification or no modification from one stage to the next so we we outline these two principles the post-modernism the knowledge principle and the political principle and the post-modern knowledge principle is that there's no access to objective truth everything is in fact radically subjective if we were to put that as foucault would have it's that to look at a truth claim as though it matters whether it's true or false in reality as if it corresponds to reality let's say is to miss the point that the authentication of a truth claim as true or denial as false as a political process so we should interrogate the politics that rose uh in that circumstance rather than worry about if the thing's actually true or not can i pause you jim yes i think people misunderstand what jim said coleman as meaning there's no objective reality right that's not what that means that's not what they mean it means they don't care about objective reality the rorty put it actually that reality may be out there but the truth isn't out there um the truth is a social construct that human beings that's the knowledge principle but you can already see where the political principle comes in if we're going to interrogate that politics the political principle is that we have to understand knowledge intrinsically as being political it's it is the it is the fruit of a political process that then needs to be interrogated so interrogating the politics that lead to a language or knowledge system is the political principle and it generally follows that the view was that the powerful in society whatever that means are the ones who get to set the stage for the discourse they get to decide which statements are true they are the authenticators of truth as foucault would put it and therefore we have to be very skeptical of anything that maintains the dominant view of the world as again foucault would put it in order that we might expand the potentialities of being or the potentialities of living and so the postmodern political principle is this radical skepticism of the politics that are believed or the power systems that are believed to be at the root of the construction of knowledge yeah and the the line that i thought was so so clarifying and that i'm going to steal from you if you don't mind or whether or not you mind is that the view of of systems of oppression systemic racism being a clear and probably the most often used example the notion the distinction between systemic racism rather than the old-fashioned individual racism that most people think they understand the meaning of what makes it systemic is that you know no one in the system is actually has to be a racist in order for the system to produce racist outcomes now if you linger on that and actually think about it deeply it's a very puzzling idea because it suggests that the criminal justice system even if there were not a single racist policeman judge or prosecutor could yield or explicitly racist law could yield a racist outcome and you you you call this a conspiracy theory without the conspirators which i think is is a brilliant way of characterizing it because that's really what it is there's an abstract sense that a system is conspiring to produce the outcomes that we see today but the burden is never on the person proposing this conspiracy theory to say exactly who is you know perpetrating it to locate the racial bias that's sort of the notion of systemic racism at least you know how it's often construed right right yeah so i actually i talked about this a little bit on joe rogan's podcast and i wrote an essay on new discourses about it the way that this is it helps to step out of something so uncomfortable as um racism to and as far as discussion can go to really get a sense of how not helpful the systemic this jump to systemic thinking is um i mean we could talk very concretely and say in the usual or the older view or the proper view of racism racism is an action or a belief or an intention which means you can intervene with an individual or an institution and get them to change those things and do differently whereas if it's a system it's very vague and there's nowhere to stick the finger but this is this analogy i thought of when i was out walking with my wife one one night on the sidewalk by the road and a car whizzed by you know a little faster than it should enough to catch my attention and suddenly it hit me i said imagine that you and i were walking i was talking to my wife um down this street right now that car had just roared by and for whatever bad coincidence set of reasons there's say a broken bottle laying on the sidewalk the end of it sticking up at an awkward angle and i step on it and i trip and my shoulder runs into you and knocks you into the street and you get hit by the car and you die okay who's who's to blame for this where where's the fault and you know we could start trying to look at different contributors to the situation and one of them of course would be whoever threw the bottle and broke it on on the the sidewalk one would be the person speeding up the road in the car one would be that i hadn't taken enough care in my own walking one could be that we chose to walk at the time that we did now we're starting to get very vague or that we chose to there's a there's a cultural bias toward walking during evening hours which really isn't nobody wants to walk in the bright sun because it'll burn you and nobody wants to walk in the the dark because it's dark but you know very few people i know you young young people like to go out in the night but uh when you get older you're like hey i'm going to bed um so you know there's all these different things we could say but we could go with the systemic thinking and we could just focus on the bottle in the car and we could say well there's an entire culture that believes in drinking that derives value from drinking that benefits from the fact that people buy and consume alcohol there's an entire economy built around this and this led to that bottle being broken on the sidewalk through whatever vague system of of actions that led to somebody drinking and throwing a liquor bottle they out their car window and breaking on the sidewalk however it happened but if there was no desire by anybody if nobody desired to drink nobody would be drinking liquor nobody would there would be no liquor there would be no reason to drink there would be no bottle on the sidewalk or if we lived in a society where nobody wanted to drive cars that car could there would be no cars nobody would have been ripping up the road in the car at that particular time and so in a sense because we are all contributing to an economy where there's liquor and a value system where people drink and enjoy themselves that way and we all participate in an economy in a world that's structured around driving cars everybody's complicit in that death because we all support that we all buy cars we all think driving cars is normal we all think drinking is is a thing that happens we all understand we apologize for the young person who threw the bottle oh they're young and stupid they just got wild a little bit you know it's unfortunate youth is wasted on the young bubble you know we have all these these excuses to justify that behavior and excuse that behavior but it's this entire system a whole culture that supports liquor and driving and all these things that led to this death and you can see immediately when you take take it into a situation like that just how poor a way to analyze a problem that is and um maybe that's a bad analogy but i haven't figured out why it's a bad analogy yet but this is this is the nature of the systemic thinking when you read books like being white being good by by um barbara applebaum and i may have got that backwards might be being good being white i get it mixed up sometimes uh but either way it's 2010 book you can go read it barbara applebaum is correct and she talks about white complicity that's the point that's actually the argument she gives for why all white people are always complicit in racism is that they benefit from the system just like we all benefit from a society that there's where there's cars or where that we can enjoy uh the freedom to have liquor and and have parties or whatever whatever it is and there's an economy built around that we all benefit from the capitalist economy this is a very bad analysis of moral responsibility and any time someone says well wait a second or has a questioning then then another phrase is used privilege preserving epistemic pushback so there's a an infrastructure in place to um a a very well thought out infrastructure to keep these ideas in play right so when we now switch back to racism you start to see things like with ibrahim kendy candy's very um people aren't catching on to dr kennedy um he very specifically says that the reason he always talks about policy right we're gonna talk about racist policy and how do you know if a policy is racist well if i have outcomes that are different for certain races rather than others and we can get all ugly and say which races count which races don't and start raising questions about what's going on with that analysis but we don't need to he even openly says that he's using the word policy in place of the word systemic the way that it's usually used because he finds that people get confused by systemic and they understand policy so he still gives the example of housing yeah he gives a bunch of examples but he very explicitly even says that if we find the anti-discrimination say like the civil rights act anti-discrimination produces inequitable outcomes and that's racist policy and needs to be changed but if discrimination would produce more equitable obviously selective discrimination would produce more equitable outcomes and that would be anti-racist policy and so you see what happens when you zoom out i don't even think it's zooming out i think it's looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope um it's like you're looking and you turn the thing around and it's all backwards and you can't see anything and it's all blurry and small um and we look at the problem of of racism say or sexism or patriarchy or misogyny or you know homophobia heteronormativity you name it we look at these problems in a way where all we do is say is there is or is there ain't different outcomes you know it's kind of a very hillbilly sort of way to look at it you can't solve the problem you're not looking at causes you're not looking at potential solutions and it's a it's it's again i just said it earlier it's very bad at describing it's the problems it talks about it's just not a helpful way and then it offers horrendous proposals to fix the problem like candy wanting to set up a constitutional amendment and then three letter government agency that basically scrutinizes all policy and changes everything that doesn't have uh as he calls them equitable outcomes yeah so i want to pivot a little bit and talk about how to have conversations with people about all these topics you know people with whom you disagree this is one of the most common questions i get from listeners to this podcast is people are trying to talk about the news or about the ideas that survive the news cycle with their friends and their family members and they're afraid of losing friendships of um you know breaking relationships and i have enormous empathy for them and they often ask you know my advice and of course and of course coleman your advice is to read james lindsey and peterborough's book how to have impossible conversation right that is invariably what i say verbatim excellent that's the right answer so i do want to i want to talk about that book it's called how to have impossible conversations and it strikes me that james your book from i think five years ago which is called everyone's wrong about god right it's kind of similar thematically because it it deals with what atheists and believers you know how they're miscommunicating when they use the word god differently right so it strikes me it's you you guys have kind of kind of been dealing with this problem for a while um so i'll ask the annoying question can you can you summarize your book for me in a few paragraphs so you can you want to take that or me me okay no it's all you okay uh the how to have impossible conversations breaks down 36 techniques that anybody can use to speak across gulfs moral gulfs physiological gulfs they can speak to fanatics they can speak to benign believers about things that that they're uncomfortable with it's a it's really a book of self-empowerment it empowers people and gives them the tools to have conversations that they wouldn't ordinarily be able to have that's the one sentence thing but a little deeper on that it draws from multiple domains of thought hostage negotiation cult exiting applied epistemology everything you you could think of um and we took the best available literature and we summarized those into individual discrete techniques that that people can use right yeah so what you were speaking to just a second ago coleman um the introductory parts of the book but the book is is is sequentially written so that there are kind of easier beginner level techniques going up through intermediate expert and advanced master and all of this and uh so the techniques get more difficult in some sense or another as you go not necessarily difficult to apply but it's often difficult to apply it to the principles within yourself like anger management is one of the techniques we talk about further on in the book it's very difficult sometimes when you talk about touchy issues or emotional issues not to become upset or to get overwhelmed with emotion but the beginning part of the book talks about you know much more basic techniques listening to one another learning establishing rapport setting goals for the conversation and making sure you keep coming back to those to avoid getting off in um unproductive or damaging tangents to understand the dynamics of conversation uh but the end of the book is where this talking past each other and being able to not being able to understand one another really comes up um and that's where i drew off of my my readings of moral psychology and it talked about and everybody's wrong about god a few years ago so that part is very important if we want to try to talk with people about social justice or woke issues if we want to call them that um because not only are they speaking a different literal language in the sense that they use the words in english differently but they are also coming at those words everything's morally imbued there's always like hidden connotation or extra meaning to the words uh that makes it very difficult for people to understand so you have to be able to get on each other's same page with regard to values in order to have a conversation about these issues and we use jonathan heights the righteous mind we we've used the really cutting-edge techniques and ideas in psychology in the literature to spell out to people okay you know there are templates in the book someone says this he says that you say this someone says this um and it draws from my first book uh yeah that's right that's fine on manual forget you remember that a manual see when that happens at 20 you think it's brain bull or what happens at 54 you think oh my god i'm getting alzheimer's um [Laughter] um so emmanuel for creating atheists and one of the things that that did was it drew from conversations with with prison inmates in conversations with the faithful to help people be more reflective about the the means that they used to come to knowledge but really i think to relate that to cynical theories what we see happening now is and again this comes from judith butler's what's it the uh uh community parodies of destruct disruption or something like politics of parody yeah politics a party thank you we want to always disrupt we want to um there is no and this is what i was thinking coleman when you said that you had a professor and that there wasn't a lot of questions that's because in general dialogue isn't valued in these places and as much as they you know paulo ferrari has this book he was a brazilian educator pedagogy of the oppressed as much as these folks draw from that the idea that they want to develop a critical consciousness and this is talked about in cynical theories as well they don't really value discourse dialogue debate and when you don't value that you don't see that modeled for you in a classroom and so the consequence of that is when you hear an idea that runs counter to your own beliefs you might think it is odious you might other the the people but you don't know how to engage the idea so what jim and i wanted to do and how to have possible conversations is we wanted to give people a tool and we don't think it's the solution to anything but we wanted to give them a tool to empower them to speak across divides so when you see a protester when you see or anyone you okay if we first order business to figure out what these people believe you know when we sketch it out okay why do they believe this and it's basically very gentle it's asking questions and it's seeing if you can it's drawing from socratic techniques the socratic method it's seeing it's asking them to ask themselves if the beliefs that they hold can stand up to scrutiny so you're not telling anybody anything yeah so i think this is really interesting um i've definitely you know i've had conversations that just go completely horribly where i feel like i did everything right and then i i feel like there's been conversations that went all right where i was you know a bit more of a dick than i would want to be in in retrospect you know i've had the full i mean so much of it comes down to just the two people and the moods that you're in um but there are definitely ways of improving your likelihood of having conversations not go horribly and some of your recommendations i think will be maybe counterintuitive to people so one of your recommendations is to not cite facts unless it's until it's a last resort so can you talk about why that makes sense as a way to improve conversations i mean sure guys is going to give you an example what happened with the shooter in kenosha the other night you don't have to actually answer you just have to get uncomfortable what i what i know is that there are there are two narratives that different ones of my friends will are completely probably you know convinced are right that's right share that overlap like venn diagrams but are totally different at their core exactly so one of the reasons you don't want to bring facts in is because um when you actually have people most people don't think and very rigorous factual based ways they tend to think in terms of um what those facts imply what stories those facts tell how they fit into broader narratives of meaning how they fit into broader narratives of consequence and so what you find in practice is that each side has its own facts and so you present facts and they say you have the facts wrong these are the facts and then your um shotguns across the table as they say so they have their facts you have your facts and then it's like even i was on when i was on joe rogan we started talking about the michael brown shooting in 2014 and i presented what i thought was a fact and he's like yeah but is that really what happened and it's like well i don't know crap you know so now it's just nobody's moved the ball anywhere at all instead what what tends to produce effect is to try to find ways to better understand each other where you're coming from and the values underlying the discussion so that you can match one another in those regards and in that kind of a space you actually can start to bring out facts and you can start to ask questions like which facts are relevant to having formed your belief on this and you don't have to then challenge that it's just a matter of getting them to kind of list the facts that they think are relevant so that you can better understand their beliefs and to piggyback off of that you shouldn't expect reciprocity right right right you shouldn't expect that they grant you the same courtesies um the the bottom line so so in the discussions about faith and religion from my writings and first book etc and the app atheists that we did this is an incredibly counter-intuitive idea you're correct and it's the one idea i think that's run throughout all of my work that it's almost impossible if not impossible to get people to do because everybody just thinks oh if someone just had one fact if they just had one piece of information that changed their mind but the moment that you get in that mindset as we as we talk in the book you're delivering a message and the moment that you're delivering a message you're no longer having a conversation so you've gone out of conversation space and then any opportunity you had to help them be more reflective as as increasingly vanishing yeah i guess the context in which your advice makes sense is that you distinguish between a conversation and a debate and you know frequently the moment we talk about politics even with a friend we're debating without realizing it there's a there's a part of you that is instantly concerned with saving face with not being made to contradict yourself with appearing smarter and you know better informed right and all of this just you know you just have this mode you switch into and i your book it's basically advice about how to not get into that mode that you're almost inevitably going to want to get into when you talk about anything that feels important to you so that's why some of the advice i think is going to feel counterintuitive to people but i do think a lot of it is good advice if you if you're with people that you deeply disagree with about stuff but you want to maintain those relationships because you know you can't just you know if you lose half your friends over politics you know it's actually harder to make new great friends you know than than it might seem i think yeah that's really that's really interesting to me i think that's a manifestation of the sickness of our age i really do when i was a kid my parents had friends from all different political communities and commitments and jim has often said to me he thinks one of the most if not the most important thing in that book is let friends be wrong and i'm always struck by and and i have lost three very very close friends now because of the stances that i've taken two two have been directly over the grievance studies affair and one has been directly over positions that i've taken on issues in the last subsequent to that and those were hard for me and i i i understand that there are some things that are just deal breakers like i got that and we all have to make our own make up our own mind as to what those deal breakers are like i can't be friends with someone if they believe this someone just said to me if they they're a trump supporter okay you everybody has to make up their own mind for what that is but as a general rule i think we're only made better by having friends who have different opinions and if your friends only have the same political opinions as you i would suggest getting an additional group of friends yeah um a really good piece of advice that you touched on coleman but there's an old saying for it is that you can't make old friends um and it wouldn't you know i don't know i was probably about your age not to play that you know old wise guy thing pete's here so we can't do it anyway i'm just going to do that to you jen yeah well it's true though you can't make old friends and when it really sinks in for you like the first time in your life that that idea really hits you you're like oh crap friends that you've had say from childhood friends that you've maybe had since college i know that's newer for you coleman but for me as over 20 years ago now and for pete i think it's close to a thousand um it's uh you you can't make up for that i talk about it with my wife a lot is that you know she and i have been been together for 16 years and so if something terrible were to happen and she were to die or we had some massive stupid fight and we were to get divorced i could not possibly in 16 years i might have somebody who i've been with for 16 years again but i won't have somebody i've been with for 32 and you can't make old friends as a very profound thing and so it's really tragic when you start to see belief sets um canceling out friendships and so letting friends be wrong and and trying to maintain that rapport and uh fearing ideological movements genuinely fearing ideological movements that drive people to want to split from their their valued relationships is is really in mindsets even like i'm just going to push the unfollow button is a mindset befriend on facebook you know and you want to move away from that yeah you know what's amazing to me that i find i wouldn't say unique to this cultural moment but almost enshrined in this cultural moment is the lack of kindness that i see on the part of many social justice advocates they're just these are just not kind people and kindness doesn't play a role in your movement i i suggest you may want to reflect on the movement within a circle of people that are nominated for that yes that that's right that's right outside of that circle yeah parochial altruism is what they call that in the literature um yeah so i've had a very peter and i both have had a very bizarre life and i'm sure you have now coleman in the past year or so but especially the last maybe six months or four months and there's been a lot of uh crossing of the streams as you might say you know peter and i are now peter writes a book a manual for creating atheists as a whole like christian evangelical christian like war waged on him where they're writing books about how he's a lunatic and all of this literally uh and then now we're we're friends and and speak frequently with and spend time frequently with with profoundly significant members of the southern baptist convention um and in other religious groups and you know there's this new friends with conservatives i'm friends with liberals and friends of progressives and friends across you know the spectrum except the woke don't like me very much and what i find is and they talk about this in the social justice literature as well is that there is a thing in the social justice literature referred to as relationship allyship a form of allyship born and having a friendly relationship so what i found is when i talk with my friends say that are religious because we're friends they're much more willing to listen to my perspective to consider where i've come from exactly and when i was antagonistic with them uh as an atheist in fact i'm more likely to move the needle now as a if i were an atheist activist trying to move the needle which i have no interest in doing really um by having friends in there who want to in religious circles who want to listen to me who want to understand my perspective as clearly as they can rather than us just call each other names and fights right and that's a that's an uh uh an old idea in religious literature it's come from a branch called relationship evangelism right and i will point out that relationship allyship is deeply problematized it's considered the worst form of allyship and not not a true form of allyship it's not not the way you're supposed to do it because it required you to have a personal relationship to change your mind so you change your mind for um impure id or impure reasons um you should have just known better all right well thank you both so much this has been a a pleasure for me i think people will really enjoy this episode and you've given me uh you know 101 reasons to get helen on for a podcast as well she's so good um she's amazing and before we before you let us go i want to say something to you okay i am truly impressed about how you've read our books you knew about jim's past book you knew about stuff we've written and done i mean you have truly done your homework for this interview seriously we get a lot of people who've never read anything i will say i've been i've been in places where people are interviewing me and they haven't done their homework and it's really annoying it's really i think that's what gets me to do it well we want to thank you very much for having really taken the time to to read over our material and comment on that in a significant and substantive way so i appreciate that luckily you made it very easy because the material's good so it was it was not a chore it was um it was a pleasure well let's cancel pete i'm a victim and i can claim victim status then i'll no you can't only the republicans will take you up i know that's the problem yeah so can you tell people what your twitter handles are and remind them of of the website you run yeah my twitter handle is at conceptual james um i'm a bit rough and tumble so it'll be fun i have the website newdiscourses.com that tries to provide resources to better understand this ideology hopefully this ideology will become less powerful and it'll help understand other ideologies later that was the original intention but this one's kind of out of control now uh so you can go to newdiscourses.com and check out lots of different things including my social justice encyclopedia to help you understand these words if you want cynical theories it's out already you can easily find it wherever but you can also get it on cynicaltheories.com i bought the url so make it easy to find and made a little page for it cool my uh i'm at peterborough goshen b-o-g-h-o-s-s-i-n my book with uh jim is how to have impossible conversations and trying to think what else uh we have i don't know writings i think it's my pin twitter of the stuff that we've done together and that we've done helen and i basically never worked together i think we'd kill each other jim is always i am at the vertex of an uncomfortable v between these two they're oil and water honey it would be a mostly peaceful working arrangement fiery but mostly peaceful working arrangement if peter and ellen worked directly together for too long but all right well thank you guys so much and hopefully have you back another time right on appreciate it you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 158,984

Keywords: woke, wokeism, critical race theory, philosophy, feminism, post modernism, race

Id: 2CMaxEqaccM

Length: 92min 30sec (5550 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/palsh7]

Submission Statement: Coleman Hughes, interviewed previously by Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein, interviews James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. James is a mathematician, writer, and founder of New Discourses. He is the author of a new book called Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity. Peter is a philosopher, a professor at Portland State University, and the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists and How to Have Impossible Conversations (with James).

During this episode, they talk about critical theory, postmodernism, and how these conspired to build the foundation of social justice ideology as we know it today. They talk about the ways in which social justice has departed from its parent ideologies, and much more. Sam Harris is brought up at the beginning, because the two men met on Twitter after one of them wrote a piece defending Sam Harris.

[u/fleeced-artichoke]

I’m gonna have to push back on this. The grievance studies people misrepresent and misunderstand critical theory, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. They shouldn’t be taken as authorities on these subjects unless you want to be misled or are looking to confirm your own biases. Linday, Boghossian and Pluckrose frequently make the rounds at r/badphilosophy and “Cynical Theories” has been torn apart by someone actually knowledgeable about philosophy: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-cynical-theorists-behind-cynical-theories/