The seeds of woke culture | Dangerous Thoughts podcast with Stephen Hicks

so um a lot of you uh a lot of us i think were blindsided by the recent and rapid rise of local culture um by which i mean a now mainstream set of disjointed and incompatible ideas and and practices i guess whose unifying aim is to basically destroy western civilization um and part of what i've argued both here and elsewhere is that in order to combat uh this ideology we need to understand the roots uh the philosophical roots uh and the premises that underlie this this kind of woke ideology and i've mentioned casually before that philosophy has been broken for 200 years uh i've spoken occasionally about the critical theorists from the frankfurt school and and then marcusa and that kind of stuff i've only vaguely really talked about post-modernism we haven't really dug into the history of this stuff very much um partially that's because the history of philosophy here is so rife to me i'll speak for myself it's so ripe with confusing theories and perplexing claims that uh it can kind of seem overwhelming to trace the the thin interwoven strands of locism back through history to their origins so i'm very excited today to be able to start that journey with a man whom i think is the foremost expert on this very subject maybe he'll disagree but i think he's hands down the expert here um that man is dr stephen hicks he's a professor of philosophy at rockford university illinois he's also the executive director for of the center for ethics and entrepreneurship and senior scholar at the atlas society he's the author of six books including his forthcoming book eight philosophies of education and including a book that i think is a must read for anyone interested in unraveling the philosophical roots of modern leftism that's this book here explaining postmodernism skepticism and socialism from rousseau to foco he's published in several academic journals including business ethic business ethics quarterly teaching philosophy and review of metaphysics as as well as a bunch of uh mainstream publications uh he's also the host of the open college podcast there's a lot more i could say about him but i'll just point you to his website stevenhix.org you can check it out yourself dr hicks welcome so much uh thank you so much for joining welcome to dangerous thoughts on unsafe space yeah i appreciate the invitation carter i'm i'm super excited about this i'm just gonna we're gonna jump in i'm just gonna ask you the big question um which is as a philosopher how do you describe the woke cultural phenomenon and how did the west get to this point all right well uh so that's two hard questions right off the bat bundled into one you're up to it you're up to it i know yes okay so woke culture i i'm gonna emphasize the the culture part first to say that primarily that we're not talking about a politics which would be ill liberal and authoritarian in various strains so what we're interested in is this widespreadness that even without political enforcement mechanisms it's not the police coming to your door it's not the military uh threatening you and so forth it's what some people are doing to other people voluntarily in the private sector and what what culture's best contrast would then would be to a kind of liberal ethos using liberal in the philosophical sense here uh that has a a lot of elements uh so if we start off by saying what goes into being a member of uh kind of the open liberal tolerant rights respecting civilization what's our ethos going to be how am i going to conduct myself in public space how am i going to expect other people to conduct myself there now there the the assumptions that have governed western culture and then increasingly global culture as many of the elements of western culture spread with uh with globalism was the idea that we're going to respect the individual and that's a that's a bottom line it's not just to say that you're going to respect everything the individual says and does but you start with individuals and you take the notion seriously that they have their own life they have their own mind their own values and i needs to in a bottom line way not infringe upon that and i'm going to take also seriously for myself that i'm an individual with my life my my own goals right and so forth now when we are social and a lot of what we do that's wonderful stuff is social stuff that's got to be folded in so i have to have a bottom line respect for you your right to enter into relationships and exit relationships and that the relationship should be mutually beneficial that i'm not going to try to enforce my agenda on you totally against your will and i'm not going to allow you to do the same sort of thing with me at the same time because we're individuals and life is complicated and the world is is very complicated and we have limited time to think about all sorts of things uh we should expect that people are going to have uh different opinions on lots of complicated things and they're going to have different value priorities uh they're not always going to be on the same age so the virtue of tolerance is going to come to the fore that uh i can't expect that everybody's going to agree with me about what's true or what's important so we're going to discuss things and try to get our data sets lined up and check each other's logic but we're going to do it in a in a civil discussion sort of sort of way and ultimately there's a kind of optimism we live in the same world ultimately we're both rational if we talk about things we should be able to come to an agreement but of course if things are complicated and time runs out then we'll just have to agree to disagree for a while but we're going to make progress but even if we find we can't make any progress whatsoever we're just going to then walk away from it and say okay i'm not going to be friends with you or we're just not going to do going to do business now all of those are elements of um of modern liberal culture as i'm defining it now woke culture then is going to be the opposite of every single one of those elements all of the way down the most in your face part is the cancel part where if you say the wrong thing and it's a very hair trigger sense that you get you have to walk on eggshells you have to get the right thing at the right time with the right nuance out otherwise you are out in in fairly harsh fashion and you are condemned kind of all the way down and even minor infractions bring out the very heavy guns and so the emphasis seems to be on totally destroying this person their livelihood their reputation and and so on so all of that tolerance and the idea that we're going to give people the benefit of the goat and have civil discussion all of that is out and so that's the thing that is most obnoxious to people raised in a liberal ethos right off the bat you are under attack you feel that you can't say what you really think uh and if you do say the wrong thing you are you're going to be gone there is an expectation of uniformity uh that is permeating work culture everybody has to be on the same page and if you are not on the same page on whatever the issue of the day is then you are not only wrong and you're going to be drummed out but you are a bad person and you will be treated as a bad person or as a as a as a as a non-person and so you get the sense right off the bat that if you're going to be a member of the club the member of the group or whatever is you have to come in knowing what the approved opinions are and you kind of have to sign on to those opinions and any sort of deviation is going to be very harshly harshly public so all of this is soft power in the cultural space it's a kind of cultural authoritarianism a kind of cultural intolerance and the other element is that the the kind of the anti-individual that comes in in a couple of forms it's not that we're going to respect that you are your own person and you have your own values and your own perhaps weird opinions about things that everybody has to be on the same page and it sometimes comes in a more authoritarian form a top-down form you have to conform to what we the leaders in this woke subculture have decided the truth is you have to subordinate your judgment and subordinate your values to this hierarchical imposition in in whatever subculture it is sometimes it comes out in a more collectivized group form that people aren't seen as individuals you are seen as representatives of a group and the expectation is because of your race or your gender or your sex or your your your your ethnic background but in some sense all members of those groups should be speaking with the same voice and have the same values and so we don't need to get to know you as an individual we just expect that you are going to conform not as an individual but to being a kind of avatar of a certain sort of group membership now that's a number of elements so these are multi-dimensional characterizations uh and so what culture then is the opposite of a kind of liberal ethos there's a lot man there's a lot there yeah so let's so let's let's talk about some it strikes me that there's some uh underlying assumptions about non-world culture then that that come to mind one of them is if if we can communicate to one another there's this assumption that there's an objective reality that there is a reality that we are both members of and the reason there's optimism is uh there's also an epistemological assumption that uh two reasoning beings given the same information will eventually reach the same conclusion about this objective reality and so any disagreement we might have is is presumed to be a lack of information or errors that can be sussed out with enough work um so that there's that's very well said yes exactly right so immediately we're talking about a cultural phenomenon with some political overtones but you're quite right to say that uh that rests on a certain set of metaphysical assumptions and epistemological assumptions and the just as the liberal ethos rested on some epistemological and and metaphysical assumptions so yes what's the nature of reality are we all living in the same reality uh and that then epistemologically we have the cognitive uh capacities that if they're exercised appropriately can tap into that reality and by and large get it right and that your cognitive apparatus and my cognitive apparatus are the same sorts of things and we're living in the same apparatus so ultimately even however different our starting points are we should be able to point out the data and use the same logic and reach the same sorts of conclusions so the deepest philosophical roots of woke culture then are going to be the rejections of those metaphysical and epistemological assumptions so if you go down a long philosophical road and that starts from the assumption that or the argued conclusion that reality is not knowable or that reality is just something that we all make up in some sense so you get some deep skepticism or some deep subjectivism then that's going to play out in the ideal there is no common frame of reference and there is no common set of cognitive tools that we should be using uh so that when we come together socially if you are really in a different reality because you've subjectively created it or your cognitive apparatus actually we probably shouldn't be calling it cognitive apparatus anymore whatever it is that you do with your disease or whatever your whatever you do with your mind really is very different from what i do with my mind there's no common uh common way of resolute revolving rather any differences so the idea of civil discussion the idea of rational discussion just goes out the window and all we are left with is two individuals to keep the case simple who have different realities or only partial overlapping realities and conflicting interpretations conflicting values and no way to resolve those battles other than by force other than by yes non-rational non-liberal rational means and so that's where the the nastiness the uh the quick attack uh is going to come out the substitution of any sort of data-driven argument or logically driven argument and immediate attacks on the person uh you know you're just saying that because you're a certain kind of person and that is meant to be a dismissal because you just have a different subjectivity and your subjectivity is wrong by lights of our subjectivity because i don't believe in universal truth except for that i'm right so all right so i want to rewind now because you're you're you touched on this a little bit and i want to pick your brain here let's rewind a couple hundred years and talk about the enlightenment and the the counter-enlightenment attack on reason so let's just first talk about how do you what for you what's an enlightenment thinker and and are they all universally got it right and they're good or were there errors in the enlightenment that we should be aware of as we kind of think about you know a lot of people are looking at back at the enlightenment now going hey what's going on there's an attack on it yeah so all right i'm glad that more people are looking back at the enlightenment yes uh let's say well some of them are saying let's throw it away and so that's why i'm concerned right yeah at least we know what we're talking about but yes no your point is right the roots are deep and it's a matter of uh uh battles fought and won on lots of different philosophical and cultural fronts a couple of hundred years ago but these things move slowly and uh counter attacks develop slowly as well so but yes we do have to think in terms of generations and centuries when we when we're talking about the deepest the deepest assumptions so enlightenment uh uh as a historical period typically we're talking about 1700s or the some people will push things back to the middle part of the 1600s and and bring things into the early 1800s and i think of it as the intellectual maturity of the early modern era and it is a school of thinkers and a school of activists uh and you can't expect total uniformity there's lots of sub debates and disagreements uh but what they have in common is is a set of assumptions we'll call them philosophical assumptions even though there are there are arguments for them that we do live in the natural world that the natural world is cause and effect uh that it can be studied by our cognitive apparatus our senses our conceptual faculties that we can develop tools of logic and mathematics and then more broadly scientific method in increasing sophistication to figure out the way the world really works that human beings have a have a certain identity that can be known that we are creatures of the natural world of course we also have a have a soul or a spirit or a mind that's pretty impressive exactly what that is we don't quite know yet but nonetheless it is uh a glorious thing to be a human being and to have this very powerful brain that if trained well can bring a huge amount of knowledge and everybody has this capacity so everybody can learn to read and write and become a self-governing human being who can live responsibly in a free society economically politically and so on uh and that then applies to market orientations that people should be self-governing individuals who are able to run their own lives economically to participate in the political process that it also includes people from all over the world by the time we get into the 1700s it's been a couple of hundred years since columbus crossed the across the ocean and came back and all of these explorations and yeah people are different all over the place and we can learn what's good from them but also what's bad from them but we can also be critically self-reflective on our own culture and realize that we've got a lot of things that we're doing pretty well but some things we're doing pretty badly and we should reform ourselves uh that we should be more open to other people being fully human even though initially they seem to be quite different and all of these capacities uh the capacity for enlightenment is universal to the species and that therefore uh racism and slavery and seeing women as second or third class citizens all of this starts to become more suspect and so we should start thinking in terms of equal liberties and equal rights universally for all human beings and then all of the political manifestations of that everybody should be free right should be universal uh uh and that anybody in principle has the capacity using their their their brain to figure out the way the world works even if we don't become scientists we can all become scientifically literate and interested in in the best things in art and becoming a cultured person and so on so it was an age of enlightenment it was an age of extraordinary optimism that finally we have figured out the key to some very important things what has kept human beings ignorant and stupid and poor and living short lives for so many centuries well it was a wrong set of attitudes but now we know we can figure out the natural world we can do science we can be rational individuals we can free human beings and progress is the natural birthright of human beings so that's the age of enlightenment in a in a couple of minutes that that was excellent so i guess we can put aside some errors that rousseau or other people may have have made or some contradictions but but you talk about um in explaining post-modernism you talk about uh this counter-enlightenment attack on reason because there were definitely thinkers that saw the what you've just described as a threat to the status quo or to some uh either their religion or frankly i think it's personally i i view it as their own psychological need um that they view it as a threat to um can you talk about what that counter-enlightenment attack was because this is where we really see i think the seed of what will eventually manifest itself as mocha culture 200 years later yes i'm glad you mentioned rousseau and the the phrase the counter enlightenment all of those uh theses that were put out about what the enlightenment stood for i think we probably went through a dozen or so in in very quick time all of them are controversial all of them need lots of argumentation and all of them are subject to to counter attack a certain number of people in the in the 1700s their count for enlightenment but in a more reactionary sense it's just they are in favor of the old order traditional politics traditional religion traditional social mores about the status of women and the status of uh of people of other uh of other ethnicities and races and so on and so they just see the enlightenment as this uh progressive reforming we're going to rebuild society uh sunny skies future as a threat to the established order and so they're mounting a a rear guard action but there's another i just wanted sorry i want to interrupt are you talking about like royalists or edmond loyalists would be an example you have people who are in favor of old-time religion would be an example people who just in the in the household uh you know if i'm just an old-fashioned sexist i don't want my wife to have her own bank account for goodness sake right that sort of thing and i'm not particularly uh um you know political or or even necessarily religious so uh the enlightenment is uh is uh putting all of the elements of culture and all of the elements of the the prevailing intellectual framework under the microscope some of them we're going to keep but we're willing to jettison the ones that we don't think are going to work so the counter enlightenment people i think who lead into post-modernism are not just reactionaries instead what they are are going to be people who say this old pre-modern traditionalism i think that has failed and perhaps now that the genie is out of the bottle uh we can't stuff it back in and so we're not going to be able to go back to the old way of doing things nonetheless we are disquieted at the direction the modern world is going uh and it might be that the disquiet is to say that we want to maintain a lot of the old ways of doing things but just in a much more slow gradual reformist way or it might be that we think the direction the enlightenment is going is wrong-headed and while we are going to be modernist we want to take the the modern world in a very different direction so a kind of politics as a if if we use that as a working example you might say old-fashioned pre-modern politics is very hierarchical you know captured in royalism and aristocracy and codified in in feudal hierarchy and so there your organizing principle socially and politically is the better people are at the top and then the pretty good people and then the so-so people and then the lowest run of people and so on and that's the way things should go now by the time we get into the modern world modern politics is blowing up all of the old feudal hierarchies it's it's leveling in one sense and freeing everybody is going to be free and everybody is going to have equal rights but now there's a follow-up question then is supposing we're not going to go back to feudalism what exactly is this mixture of freedom and equality that we're going to work out in the modern world and one of the bifurcations as we know is those people who want to say there's not really a dualism between freedom and equality because you know people should all be equally free and those should be universal rights and there are those by contrast who want to say there is a duality there that if we give people freedom there's going to be too much inequality particularly in in economic dimension some people will become rich some people will remain poor or go bankrupt so we need to prioritize equality and have at most nested freedoms and limited freedoms within an overall equalitarian type of framework and that's going to take your politics in the in a very different direction uh and so what we have then is both of them are modern and both of them are rejecting the traditional pre-modern structures but they're going to have a knock-down debate over uh uh or what direction the modern world should come now the counter-enlightenment thinkers uh and i would put rousseau in the first rank of counter-enlightenment figures and uh thank you for showing the image of my book i appreciate the uh the the little advertisement there but my one of my subtitles or the subtitle is from rousseau to foucault so i do see him even though he's living smack dab in the middle of the 1700s and sometimes just for historical dating people will put him as an enlightenment thinker but i think that's a that's a philosophical mistake that rather than people just living in a certain era you have to look at what they actually said and rousseau is one of these guys who says every element of the enlightenment that i went through the individualism the tolerance kind of the the liberalism and so on russo's against all of that uh that that science is a progressive uh liberating force he thinks that science is a corrupting force that people should be as individuals free to pursue their own self-interest he doesn't believe in any of that he thinks we should have a collective general will that's manifested in state representatives the idea of separating church and state uh and then letting people go their own direction on religious matters he's opposed to the separation of church and state to the extent of uh you know uh agreeing with the uh the death penalty for people who go against the approved of state religion the idea of uh all of the modern liberals saying we need to have free speech and uh and freedom of the press and so on rousseau is against that and he's in favor of censorship and so on so he's not an old-fashioned pre-modernist he doesn't think we're go away he hates the monarchy he hates the aristocracy but he also hates this liberal individualism it seems to be going in a more pro-science more pro-capitalism direction as well so there is the beginnings of a counter-enlightenment that goes off in a very different direction and and so i guess do we jump then from rousseau to kant like who's the first major philosophical figure there that that arms arms some of these post-modernists yeah again um uh you know calling rousso a counter enlightenment guys a little bit controversial but not i think that controversial uh the place of kant is much more hotly contested in this in this genealogy and many mainstream and uh histories of the enlightenment and many uh very good you know smart people who do philosophy are convinced that kant is a is a respecter of reason and that he's an advocate of a certain kind of kind of enlightenment vision and my view of khan is that on many secondary and tertiary issues you can find indeed pro-reason and pro-enlightenment things in kant but that on the most fundamental issues in philosophy con represents a rejection of of core pro-reason principles pro-enlightenment principles as well so this takes us into some deep epistemological territory it takes us deep into some territory in meta ethics and some deep territory about human nature uh but i do think that kant uh with what he calls his copernican revolution marks a very fundamental shift away from objectivity as the ruling standard that philosophers and by extension all of us should strive for to a kind of collectivity or sorry subjectivity and he's quite explicit about that uh in some ways you can read content and see that he is in favor of uh saving some sort of religion even though religion traditional religion is going to have to be modified in some ways he is reactionary in the sense that he sees all of this emphasis on naturalism and science and giving arguments for everything that that's going to lead people in the direction of agnosticism that the arguments for the existence of god don't work very well and the counter arguments are pretty strong and so if we go too far down this road and say reason can answer every question about the nature of the universe there's not going to be any room left for religion and so he has this very pregnant line in his most important book where he says i'm going to place limits on on on knowledge i'm going to deny knowledge of certain important things in order to retain a certain kind of faith in place uh this idea that people should be uh free to pursue their happiness uh and the idea of you know the the the birthright of human beings as the pursuit of happiness as a principle that was fairly widespread in in the enlightenment obviously in the american context it made its way into the declaration of independence kant is not in favor of happiness as a fundamental ethical principle he's much more in favor of uh obligation and duty as being more fundamental happiness is is is quite derivative now all of those points are interpretive points and we'd have to talk about uh those in in fuller detail uh and with recognition that there is interpretive controversy on all of them about about kant but i do think that khan is extraordinarily important uh schopenhauer my interpretation of kant really is just to throw some other big names out there schopenhauer's interpretation of khan and nietzsche's interpretation of khan and john dewey's interpretation of khan and iran's interpretation of kant there is a a main line here that sees khan as marking a fundamentally destructive turn uh on enlightenment values and uh uh on some secondary things he was still on board with the uh aspirations of the enlightenment but he represents an undercutting kind of a sawing off of the branch that you are that you are sitting on now other people will want to argue that kant is not so much the bad guy that someone like david hume uh with his epistemological skepticism is more important i'm open to that argument uh uh i have reasons why i think kant is a little more important than hume uh at the same time hume is extraordinarily important uh as well so the point just is that by the time we get to the latter part of the 1700s uh the the what is typically seen as the golden days of the enlightenment there is the beginnings of a counter enlightenment people like russo and hume and kant who are starting to be more skeptical about the aspirations of the enlightenment and in some cases outright hostile to the underlying premises that make the enlightenment project possible now something that you've talked about and correct me i i i don't know if this is controversial about kant because i'm not i don't go to the whatever cocktail parties you philosophers go to i'm not invited so i don't know if this is controversial but uh a lot of i'm disinvited from too so fair enough fair enough um my my understanding is that he is one of the first to uh divorce uh reason from correspondence to reality um and and that's really the the the move that you're talking about that yes and kind of be leveraged later on by future philosophers is that is that controversial or is that just accepted well some people want to argue that the divorce is not as final or the divorce is not as strong as those in my interpretive camp want to make it uh and also some will argue and here i think there's a confusion that uh they will say that kant said we divorced reason from reality and they're on board with that but nonetheless khan argued that we all have the same cognitive apparatus that it works the same way and so what we're all doing is subjectively constructing a subjective reality but it's the same subjective reality that we are all constructing so we can all still have the same language the same logic and we can still talk uh uh um with each other we can still do a certain kind of science and so on so it works in the phenomenal world then we can just ignore this numeral thing that's right that's right and then whether the numeral matter world matters or not is then the important point of contention okay so uh so then what they want to argue is if we have universal subjectivity we're still okay and we're still going to have the same rules of language the same rules of logic and so you can't just make up your own rules and then so forth and so there's going to be a kind of reason game that we still have to play and they're fine with that now the point on the other side is to say well universality is not the most fundamental point here the the most important thing is is my mind in contact with reality and can i come to know reality and if your point is that i can't know reality then uh the rest doesn't really matter so you know just to take a kind of analogy we might say that we're all agreeing that we are going to play the rules of chess and so everybody is going to play chess and so that means yes we can agree what the rules are we can enforce the rules we're all going to be able to play the game and we can have some wonderful chess encounters and build up a magnificent chess playing culture but if your question is what's the relationship between chess and the real world uh and the point just is that we have made up these rules we have no idea if the rules of chess really map onto the way the real world is then i'm bothered by that because i don't want necessarily to play an artificial game i want to play in the real world and so this issue of whether our cognitive faculties are in contact with reality is the most important one now there on my reading kant is very clear very explicit repeatedly about the way reality really is and not just this phenomenal reality that we have constructed subjectively we have no clue we we a couple of points he wants to say maybe we can suggest there are some regulative principles out there but he backs away from that uh and he wants to say you know whether god really exists or not we have no clue whether the world is deterministic or not we have no clue and we can't answer that question whether there's an ultimate teleology uh that the world is going in a certain direction we have no clue whether the world is eternal infinite all of these metaphysical questions about the underlying structure of reality you also say those are just closed off to us we can't speak meaningfully at all about the real nature of reality and for my way of doing philosophy that's the most important question for for a philosopher and so con amounts a significant turn well i mean i guess without really taking a position on that we can just look at what future philosophers uh made of kant i mean we can jump to hegel who's one of my least favorites um and see what see what he did he did can we can we maybe i know we don't have a lot of time but can we maybe briefly just say okay let's trace from like i i don't know hegel schopenhauer or heidegger up through critical theory bam we're at postmodern i mean i don't know that's a big ask but like is there a is there is there a quick trace that we can do that's like here's how this stuff manifests because no one today is saying i'm saying that there are infinite number of sexes and biology is not a thing because of the manual cons no one's saying right no no you're absolutely right and and there you know people will start talking about uh family lineage trace of teams that's a very useful thing to make but you know you know even though you you will scare share some genetic things with your great grandfather and that might say some things about you unless you have a bunch of other great grandfathers and grandmothers in the mix and there are some evolutionary things that happen over the generations so uh this is the point about kant is just a very general turning to say we're going to be doing philosophy in a very different way but there are still lots of options uh about how in particular that's going to be worked out depending on what the philosophers and the subsequent generations decide decide to do so uh i don't know maybe we can go in 20 or 40-year chunks just to get some of the some of the big names so yes uh so if we take someone like schopenhauer who's in the next generation and schopenhauer wants to say yeah if kant basically nailed it on on epistemological issues but then his twist is going to be to say what kant showed these are going to be very potted uh things that will drive the scholars wild but uh what kant has shown is that our cognitive faculties of our senses and reason and logic and mathematics and so forth cannot come to know reality uh and what someone like schopenhauer then is going to say well all kant then has shown is that if we try to use these pro-reason faculties to try to get to reality we're not going to be able to do it but human beings are not these creatures of pure sensibility or pure reason we also have emotions and passions and so maybe what we need to do to try to get to reality is turn off our reason and strive for a kind of emotionalist connection or intuit our deepest non-rational drives and on the basis of that we might be able to feel some sort of connection to to reality so uh for example schopenhauer will say if you take the experience of listening to instrumental music where there's no words no lyrics and so on and you'll notice that some of you know things start to happen to you you get riled up and your your mind is trying to grope for images and to try to put a plot structure on what's going on that's just the wrong way to do things right instead what you need to do is let the music take you to a certain place and it's all chaotic and passionate and driving but in some sense you are getting more of an intuition about the nature of of true reality so one of the legacies of kant is to say if reason can't know reality then to try to strive to connect with reality we have to be non-rational or irrational and explore all sorts of irrationalist methods of trying to get there maybe through the arts or taking drugs or music or or some sort of some sort of method so there is the rise of lots of irrationalist schools of philosophy uh in the post-kantian generation and as you're suggesting earlier a lot of them will say we've read our kant and that's why we're doing what we are doing now now others will try to take things in a more uh religious direction so if you think of someone like kierkegaard a generation later trying to say yeah kant is exactly right if we try to uh try to prove the existence of god then reason is just going to either show the futility of all of the traditional arguments and it's going to make us skeptics and agnostics and god forbid into atheists and it's going to totally destroy the meaning of life but then again i am a kind of person where i feel a commitment to a certain kind of religious heritage that any sense of meaning and significance in the world subjectively is it comes from my my religious commitment and kant has shown that i can't get there rationally so what i need to do is even though i know my religion is irrational and contradictory and says all of these things about miracles and blah blah blah i'm going to make an irrational subjective commitment to it and it's only through that that anybody can find some sort of meaning in their life and so on and so already you know we're into the middle part of the 1850s and we've got a couple of different strands of irrationalist philosophy going on now i don't want to belabor the point because there's lots of variations kant uh sorry uh hegel is one uh nietzsche by the time we get to the end of the 1800's heidegger on into the early part of the 20th century and that's going to start setting us up for the school uh the frankfurt school types of thinkers and critical theory and i know you want to say a few things about that and all of the post-modernists who are paying very close attention and learning about kant and nietzsche and heidegger and so on some of them german some of them french and so we're uh the story is just going to get darker and more and more irrationalist as time goes on uh yeah so i i one thing i i learned from reading you which i didn't realize was i've always thought of i've always thought of marcus and their critical theorists as kind of distinct from the post-modernist but it makes sense that they both have the same parents basically um yes i think both of those things you said are right they are distinct but they're also related um so they're kind of like first cousins and if we want to stick with their with the family true metaphor but they share some this is why they share some fundamental philosophic beliefs right and which is why i mentioned heidegger earlier i'm wondering if you can tease out for people like what does it mean what are the what is different from critical theorists versus postmodernist because a lot of there seems to be a debate right now thaddeus russell is is a guy who's blaming the critical theorists for everything about woke and then you have someone like uh james lindsay maybe who's who's blames the post-modernists um what's the difference between those two for just for lay people uh okay well the yeah we haven't defined post-modernism yet uh true i guess we should do that also yes that's right and we have to talk about critical theory right as well so uh how do we do this in in in short i think the post-modernists are a later and more skeptical development than the critical theorists so what i would say about the critical theorists is they are people who have read their cont and they have read their hegel and they have read their marks and those are going to be the three most important thinkers for for them so what they want to argue is that uh there is a kind of evolutionary development to society we're not so much talking about real reality anymore but nonetheless human beings have a certain psychological makeup and due to the nature of that psychological makeup and all the experiments that we tried there is a logic to how society goes marxism is one of the attempts to do a social science of how that how that development goes now what happens though if uh and i'm assuming we know something about what marxism is you know class conflict and ultimately there's going to be a revolution and and capitalism will go by the by and we'll have a dictatorship of the proletariat and then bring about a kind of a kind of socialism uh so there is this dialectical evolutionary development that's given a marxist turn and almost all of the critical theorists are well trained in philosophy they're writing dissertations on kant they're writing dissertations on hegel and they're writing hit dissertations on karl marx what we find by the time we get to the early part of the 20th century is some problems for the marxist framework so the marxist framework had said for example that uh you know the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer just to take uh you know one important uh a slogan that comes out of the marxist tradition so what do you do when you get to the 20th century and it seems like the rich are getting poorer but also the poor are getting poorer right so that social science prediction doesn't seem to be working out marx had said the middle class is going to be squeezed out by the brutal capitalist competition some of them will claw their way and become extraordinarily rich capitalists but the most of the middle class is going to be forced down into the poorer proletariat and so what do you do when you start to realize that actually the middle class is getting bigger and bigger so there's more rich people there's more middle class people and there's fewer and fewer poorer people and all of these seem to be the opposite of marx's predictions but in your heart of hearts you think there's something to this marxist framework that there is a kind of dialectical evolution uh uh and you hate capitalism uh and so you are people they all like that but you're also very smart and you are very philosophically trained now typically what the uh the critical theorists are doing and so these are the first generation frankfurt school people and so uh uh you know someone like max horkheimer and theodore adorno and a little bit later herbert marcusa and others are going to do is to say that basically this hegelian marxist framework is right but our social psychology has been too simplistic that we thought perhaps as good marxists that this materialistic clashing economic interest story was the only story that we needed to tell but it turns out that social dynamics and social psychology is a lot more complicated that it's not only economic clashes it's also religious clashes it's also ethnic clashes it's also man and woman clashes across sex and gender lines as well and the ideas of uh of developing class consciousness that the the way reality is is supposed to be slapping poor people in the face with how alienated and exploited they are uh should be so apparent that their their consciousness is going to be raised the forces of oppression and psychological repression are a lot stronger than we thought in in the first couple of generations of marx so what they will do then is turn to someone like sigmund freud and sigmund freud becomes very important so freud had published his first big book the interpretation of dreams uh uh in 1900 i think actually it was published in 1899 but 1900 probably looked sexier for the publisher so uh the official date is 1900 uh and then we have this new freudian psychology that takes the intellectual world by by storm and in some ways freudian psychology seems to be the opposite of marxist psychology you know so marxist psychology is very tabular rasa right we're born into a society we're born into a class everything that's in our minds is just totally conditioned into us by our class membership and so the different classes will be in conflict with each other and and the conflict will become apparent to one side and the revolution will happen and so on so what we find though with freud is a uh kind of a in part a darwin inspired partly a nietzsche inspired idea that the human psyche is much more instinctually driven and so if we take the kind of darwinian story or a pop darwinian story i don't think this is the right the right way to read darwin but it's to say that we are not in fact tabula rasa creatures born into a social as a society instead we are biological creatures and our consciousness is this very johnny come lately faculty that has been developed but it's overlaying what has been a series of instincts programmed into us by biological survival necessities across eons right we're not talking centuries or millennia we're talking eons hundreds of thousands of years and before we were humans we were animals uh non-rational animals for for a lot longer and then we take the pop darwin story and say well how do uh how do individuals and species survive well they survive by killing each other and eating eating and incorporating the other one and so the ones that are the most successful predators uh if we just talk about that side of the divide the most aggressive the the fastest the swiftest and so on and the ones that you know uh i have the strongest drive to be predators those are the ones that are going to survive the ones that are a little bit nicer and hey guys can't we get along with each other those are the ones that lose and they get eaten so to speak and then the other thing is reproduction so it's going to be the strongest that eat but also the strongest that are able to provide and be attractive to to the other sex and so they're going to have more sex they're going to have more offspring and they're going to be selected for and then so we're then going to pass on our genes so and it's going to be the ones that have the strongest sex drive also and to act on it that are going to leave the most offspring so what we then have is this very biologically instinctually driven driven narrative that says really it's aggression and sex that is driving uh uh biological survival and we human beings that's that's what we are and so the freudians and will then say look if you're just honest with yourself you know basically you're you're a seething bundle of drives right you want to uh you know anybody who disagrees with you you just want to beat that person up and humiliate them and if you could kill people and get away with it and have that unlimited power you would like to do that and you just want to have sex as often as possible with anybody you want and so on and so yes in the modern world we've told ourselves this nice story about being civilized human beings and so forth and to some extent that works but really it doesn't change the fact that you are a sex and aggression machine it just means that you've pushed underground and you've tried to train those instincts in socially acceptable ways uh if you've had certain kinds of training and so on but they're still there so this potted version of a freudian story uh uh we don't then want to say well why aren't we acting on our sex drive all the time why aren't we all just punching each other and stabbing each other all the time well because our capacities for repressing our instinctual drives are in fact pretty strong and so uh we do have to explain human behavior largely in terms of these drives wanting to manifest themselves but also civilization's ability to restrain them and redirect them in various ways is part of the of the human story and that means that the human psychological story has to become more complicated and the human psychological story has to become a lot more uh complicated as well so what we find then in the first generation of frankfurt school these are the guys now writing you know basically getting their phds in the 1920s and so everybody's reading freud and everybody's asking themselves the question how did we turn into such beastly animals in world war one and and doing all those nasty things in the in the trenches to each other and maybe there's something to this freudian story and so if we're going to understand even if we are marxist and we think that there's a lot of alienation and exploitation out there we think that the class warfare is probably right and we do want some sort of socialist society in the future nonetheless we're going to have to take into account what freud can teach us about psychology and social psychology about how all of that alienation and exploitation that's there in modern so-called enlightenment capitalist society is really there but it's being repressed and redirected and re-channeled in various ways and so we the critical thinkers are going to have to be like the psychoanalyst where on the surface things seem to be civilized and nice and people have their manners but if we with our trained critical eye tear off the the surface we can see the seething irrationality and what's really going underneath this is the surface of apparently peaceful civil society and that's what uh uh kind of the philosophical origin of frankfurt school so it's a marriage of some freud with some marks and then behind them some kind of kantian hegelian themes and and this is done on a collective basis right because you are the member of your group so when they peel back something what they see is is those passions as as you are this avatar of this group with these passions or are they still individualist at this point a little bit no no they're very thoroughly uh collectivistic although what collectivities you're talking about is going to vary quite quite dramatically so there are going to be those who are going to emphasize the marxist element more and say it's your economic class memberships that matter more those who want to emphasize a freudian kind of a pure freudianism are going to say the biological differences between males and females is perhaps a more important force you know that that females uh they uh are the ones who give birth you know you you can't be an aggressive predator when you're pregnant and you have to look after the uh the children and so there is going to be a psychologically different developmental direction to the female compared to the male and that's going to be more important than economic class memberships for the more freudian emphasizing ones there are those who are going to emphasize uh linguistics and language and they're going to say that the important group is that we are talking about psychology and social psychology but it is true that human beings are a language-using animal and then they're going to say that naturally we are born into different language groups and each of those languages has say a different fundamental grammar and if that grammar gets into your mind and shapes your mind at a very early age then you are going to conceptualize the world in a very different way and so if we have a kind of kantian grammar understanding of of of of of language then we're going to have different language call activities that are going to be conceptualizing the world in very different ways with different theories and different value frameworks and so on and that might be more important than cl economic classes and it might be more important than sex and gender differences as well so it might be language that feeds into ethnicity so which member of the frankfurt school emphasizing which elements in the mix there are going to be differences among them what the frankfurt school has in common though is the idea that we do need to have a much more mixed complicated understanding of psychology uh uh and social reality than marx envisioned um and it's not going to be any sort of liberal individualistic capitalistic uh framework that comes out ultimately now i want to say a couple of things to contrast them with the with the post-modernist because the post-modernist i think are going to be a more skeptical evolution a little bit later this story that we're telling about frankfurt school thinkers is to say well we still think there is such a thing as human psychology and that it works a certain way and there are certain social realities and that there is a kind of logic even if it's a kind of dialectic logic and we can do a kind of social science and if we're just uh working out the more complicated theory well enough we should be able to predict where the where the where the leverage points are going to be for making the revolution uh in the future so they're still functioning as kinds of social scientists with a quasi-realistic understanding cause and effect understanding of the way social reality and individual psychology reality works the postmoderns are going to be skeptical about all of those fundamental claims so things are going to become a lot more uh i don't know what the right word would be anarchistic and anti-realistic than the frankfurt school now i just want to point out though one thing that's weird to me is i always think of politics as something that is that relies upon a metaphysical and ethical framework first um and and a an epistemological framework before you can kind of get into what politics how how how people should relate to one another with respect to a government but it seems like all of these philosophers that you're talking about and i notice it you know with the frankfurt school basically on because this is true for most post-modernists with a few exceptions the marxism aspect or at least neo-marxism isn't really questioned um that the politics is kind of like oh obviously we want revolution but it didn't work this way so we just predicted it wrong now we have to adjust our philosophy do they ever go back and say maybe marxism is wrong in the first place uh i well marxism again and the history of marxism is a is a big tent and i think there are some there there are lots of people over the course of the 20th century even late 19th century who were marxist when they were young and they thought that marxism was a kind of scientific approach to socialism and so they did have a respect for science and then when the evidence uh came against them they changed their minds now some of them went in neo-marxist direction some of them just became middle of the road politically and some of them became conservative some of them and so on but i think that's a that's a small minority i think your your your point about the the priority of politics relative to metaphysics epistemology and other philosophical issues i think the the best way to characterize that is to say if you are going to maintain a healthy politics you do also have to get the rest of it correct so if you are going to say for example we're going to have a a free market economy and one of your assumptions there is that individuals are going to be free to run their own economic lives as producers traders consumers and and so on but one of the assumptions there is you think that people are competent to do that right because if you think that people are you know whiny babies and incompetent that need to be looked after you're not going to advocate free market economics right you're going to advocate some sort of let's look after everybody uh paternalistically kind of kind of politics but on what is this competence for individuals base well the idea is that you know people are are pretty smart you know they can figure out what their genuine needs are their their actual circumstances and do experiments and and and learn from their mistakes that's to say you have to think of people as pretty rational and in order to be able to do so and that's an epistemological epistemological commitment now to make that kind of a point though about the the dependence of healthy politics on underlying philosophy is not to say that everybody is going to do that and we do know that lots of people can make faith commitments to any sort of philosophical position however irrational it is and then rationalize the rest or just ignore the rest the extent that it conflicts rather with their their whatever it is that they want to do they want to maintain so it can be that you can be a relatively healthy person epistemologically thinking that you're living in the in the natural world but as a young person when you're 17 years old you read some marxism and it's just overpoweringly attractive to you and you make this wholehearted commitment to to to marxism and so you make a political commitment and then at that point you know you're going to bump up against people who disagree with you and throw counter data and argument with you but at that point you are so committed to it it becomes a kind of faith for you and you will then find ways to reject the arguments reject the data even to the point of undercutting your own rational epistemology order to maintain your political commitments so uh psychologically the order in which positions are held is not necessarily the healthy order that's going to generate a proper politics that makes that makes sense that makes sense so let's i know we're already i'm keeping you longer than we planned so i i don't want to miss post-modernists though so let's let's get into the post let's let's do one more uh yeah we're having fun here but i do need to uh to make a trend yeah no i i appreciate it and so i i know i'm i'm uh i want to be somewhat respected of your time so let's just do the post modernists and and we can claim we got there what a hilarious formulation let's just do the post-modernists and yeah and then move on wasn't well thought out okay uh no i think what uh what we find in the in the post-modernist will be and this is in the next generation when frankfurt school it's being formed in the 20s 30s there's a bit of a pause and obviously in the 1940s during the war and so on but the the post-modernists start coming online in the late 1950s uh sorry in the late 1940s and on into the into the into the 1950s so uh so there the the big names are going to be people like michelle foucault jacques derrida jean-francois leotard richard rorty and they're all getting their phds in the late 1940s and on into the into the 1950s so they are not quite a generation later and many of them will have read frankfurt school uh all of them have read their history of marxism but all of them also are phd's in philosophy and they are doing uh uh work in epistemology dairy daw is doing a lot of work in epistemology and the philosophy of language the same thing is true of foucault he's also getting advanced work in psychology uh richard rorty is getting a first-rate uh education in any epistemological work uh and and hardcore analytic uh uh anglo-american philosophy uh jean-francois leotard also uh in some ways i think he's almost the deepest philosophically of all of the postmodernists uh very well read in kant in hegel uh and thinks of himself as a kind of marxism as well i think what they are doing though is they are on the epistemological and metaphysical issues more skeptical than the frankfurt school thinkers they they they recognize in i think a deeper way the ultimate implications of kantian's subjectivity that gets them played out in hegel schopenhauer kierkegaard nietzsche heidegger and so forth and everything gets a little bit more and more skeptical all the way down until ultimately you realize that the kinds of arguments that kant is making in principle can be applied in all of these domains and all of these specific issues and nothing can withstand the corrosive effect of that pattern of argument and at that point then all of your beliefs about any sort of reality have to go out the window including this idea that somehow subjectively all human beings are constructing reality in the same way well how on earth would we possibly know that i can't get inside your head uh uh to see if you're constructing reality in the same way that i'm doing i'm struck in my so there's a dramatic uh subjectivity that goes on uh on there or sorry a dramatic subjectivity that comes out in a radical skepticism by the time we get to the 50s and the the the 20 major issues that philosophers work out you know about the nature of perception and the nature of evidence and logic and scientific method and mathematics and statistics and conceptualization and the differences between narratives and factual theories and so on all of those issues we have to be skeptical on all of them and so nothing survives right so uh that also then applies to the value framework any value that we want to say is an objective value or a universal value including marxist values that there is some sort of socialist egalitarian utopia that we can strive for we can't know that that value is a is a true value much less a universal value for all human beings instead all we are left with from their perspective is people are subjective and they seem to be formed into various groups with dramatically different understandings of the way reality works with dramatically different values and it's only an ongoing power struggle so that power seems to be the only constant in this skeptical subjectivist flux but then even to say that power used a certain way is better than power being used in other ways we can't even say that we're just left with a moral power so i mean it you know to get to get close to wrapping it up here because i'm keeping you longer than i said i would it it seems like the post-modernists have completely destroyed any cognitive ability that we would have to reason with each other get along communicate with each other point that something and agree that it's there like and it if if that's what we're left with it makes sense that we have devolved to grunting and screaming at each other about what we feel yes absolutely right yeah that that's the implication so if we can't reason um if reason is at best rationalization for subjective drives then what are we left with and it is you know if i'm going to use my mouth and i am going to use my words as a rhetorical power play i'm not trying to make arguments i'm trying to manipulate people if i'm going to use my body then it's going to have to come out in physicalistic form if i recognize that the big guns the more powerful institutions are that are out there uh then i'm just going to try to use those and their power on behalf of my subjective interests against your subjective interests so it has to become a nasty politics power play all the way down and no one can tell you you're wrong no no i'm not wrong i'm the only one who has my value framework and you have your value framework and it's just going to be a kind of civil war or an uncertain war all right okay so what one one final one i just i got a question because as a layperson i know people in chat right now are watching this and people listening to this are thinking to themselves this sounds insane on its surface you've got to be kidding me that this is the the this is the state of academia and has been for generations and this is really what our finest institutions this is the state of thought at our finest institutions that's where we are in sub some sub-sectors of our finest institutions and a vast majority of other institutions as well now i think overall many of our universities are are just fine many of the professional schools are wonderful doing great work the sciences much of the social sciences and so on but in the most philosophically uh charged parts of the humanities and some of the social sciences there has been a skeptical uh hollowings out and it's being replaced with a very cynical collectivized form of power play politics so internal to the university there is a battle for the soul of the university that's going to go on are we going to go in an enlightenment liberal education direction or are we going to go in a kind of locust or just a moral power play direction so uh the battle was first joined in the universities so i think that's where not necessarily in the universities but at least in in in philosophical circles the people who come up with the best arguments can we come up with a better understanding of objectivity and scientific method and logic and rationality and make that compelling then we can mount a a successful counter-attack and reform the universities and all of the other epistemologically informed institutions that really matter that that makes sense and i'm i i hate to say we have to leave it there but i'm going to try and figure out a way to entice you to come back and and and dive into some of this stuff at some point because uh i'm i'm just fascinated with it i've got like you've i literally i have so many book like so many marks in this book okay stuff like oh gotta go read this and now i gotta go read this guy i gotta go you know all right well let's plan to talk carter it's been great uh unfortunately i do have to transition out no no it's cool but uh yeah a pleasure and you have great questions and let's talk about doing it again all right thank you dr hicks i'll see you next time okay bye for now bye

Channel: CEE Video Channel

Views: 4,913

Keywords: stephen hicks, carter laren, unsafe spcae, dangerous thoughts, woke culture, immanuel kant, arthur schopenhauer, soren kierkegaard, herbert marcuse, critical theory, critical theorists, postmodernists, postmodernism, jean jacques rousseau, counter-enlightenment

Id: UY8sdLOnf6Y

Length: 71min 35sec (4295 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022